“Again and again men try to produce spiritual life in themselves and others by, as it were, compulsion from without. They fast a little, they go early to morning prayer, they practice small austerities; and then, refreshed by these exercises, and satisfied with their consciences, they join with tenfold vigour in all the excitements of the season, and rejoice that they can so easily make God and the world go hand in hand. What is the result? The imposed observances do not belong to the inner life, have no natural harmony with it, and the entire want of adaptation between the two makes itself felt. . . . In Christ’s pregnant words, ‘The rent is made worse.’ No! that will not do. There must be life before there is useful or lasting form. Religious observances of every kind must be the natural expression of the heart, or else, being untrue, they produce habitual hypocrisy.”
STOPFORD BROOKE
"It takes a soul to move a body – it takes a high-souled man
To move the masses even to a cleaner stye.
It takes the ideal to blow an inch inside
The dust of the actual; and your Fouriers failed
Because not poets enough to understand
That life develops from within.”
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
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