November 3

“However perplexed you may at any hour become about some question of truth, one refuge and resource is always at hand; you can do something for someone besides yourself. When your own burden is heaviest, you can always lighten a little some other burden. At the times when you cannot see God, there is still open to you this sacred possibility, to show God; for it is the love and kindness of human hearts through which the divine reality comes home to men, whether they name it or not. Let this thought, then, stay with you: there may be times when you cannot find help, but there is no time when you cannot give help.”

GEORGE S. MERRIAM

“Who has not sometimes seemed to see it all as clear as daylight, that not by the sharpening of the intellect to supernatural acuteness, but by the submission of the nature to its true authority, man was at last to conquer truth; that not by agonising struggles over the contradictory evidence, but by the harmony with Him in whom the answers to all our doubts are folded, a harmony with Him brought by obedience to Him, our doubts must be enlightened?”

PHILLIPS BROOKS

November 2

“Men are for ever seeking after demonstrations of the truth of Christianity, and there shall no demonstration be given. Many stand outside the pale and ask for a reasoned philosophy and irrefragable proofs that Christianity is true, and say that when this has been vouchsafed they will enter the sacred precinct, and take the yoke upon them, but not till then. Such persons ask for that which neither our Lord nor his apostles, nor any of the old prophets, ever promised – for that which, according to their teaching, was, in the nature of things, impossible. ‘If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine’, - this was their language. . . . One touch of sympathy with the mind of the Divine Teacher makes many things plain which before seemed hard sayings and unbelievable.”

Principal J. C. SHAIRP

“Therefore be strong, be strong,
Ye that remain, nor fruitlessly resolve,
Darkling, the riddles which ye cannot solve,
But do the works that unto you belong;
Believing that for every mystery,
For all the death, the darkness and the curse
Of this dim universe,
Needs a solution full of love must be;
And that the way whereby ye may attain
Nearest to this, is not through broodings vain,
And half-rebellious questionings of God,
But by a patient seeking to fulfil
The purpose of his everlasting Will;
Treading the path which lowly men have trod.”

TRENCH

November 1

“I think that to assure everyone, and especially those we most love, that He is love, and that they are simply to repose in that thought without troubling themselves about their belief or realisation of it or anything else, is our great business. God is seeking us, and not we Him; and it is an infinite comfort to know this when we are fevered and restless with the thought of our own impotent struggles and great laziness.
“’In quietness and confidence ‘is our’ strength’, but not in thinking of quietness and confidence, or grieving that we have so little of either, but in simply assuring ourselves of the ground that we have to believe that God is our friend now and ever, and that He can be nothing else, and that the forgetfulness of this and nothing else has been our sin and shame.”

F. D. MAURICE

“To know that God does not depend upon our feelings, but our feelings upon God, to know that we must claim a certain spiritual position as our right before we can realise it in our apprehensions, to be assured that we have the spirit of God within us, and that He is distinct from all the emotions, energies, affections, sympathies, in our minds, the only Source and Inspirer of them all, this is most necessary for us, the peculiar necessity, if I am not mistaken, of this age.”

F. D. MAURICE

October 31

“Blest, too, is he who can divine
Where real right doth lie,
And dares to take the side that seems
Wrong to man’s blindfold eye.

“Then learn to scorn the praise of men,
And learn to lose with God;
For Jesus won the world through shame,
And beckons thee His road.”

FABER

“Is true Freedom but to break
Fetters for our own dear sake,
And, with leathern hearts, forget
That we owe mankind a debt?
No! True Freedom is to share
All the chains our brothers wear,
And, with heart and hand, to be
Earnest to make others free!
They are slaves who fear to speak
For the fallen and the weak;
They are slaves who will not choose
Hatred, scoffing and abuse,
Rather than in silence shrink
From the truth they needs must think;
They are slaves who dare not be
In the right with two or three.”

LOWELL

October 30

“How I long to be telling myself, and telling everyone, that the Hell we have to fly is ignorance of the perfect goodness, and separation from it; and the Heaven we have to seek is the knowledge of it; and participation in it. Then I have no fear of the message of the gospel and the church all manifesting itself to men in due time. But while that kind of notion of Christianity, which Christians seem to have taken up at one time, haunts the air, I do not see what we can expect but constant alternations of gloomy faith and gloomier unbelief. Punishment and reward to ourselves, instead of spiritual death from ignorance of God and sinking into self, and eternal life from knowing Him and deliverance from self.”

F. D. MAURICE

“O restless spirit, wherefore strain
Beyond thy sphere?
Heaven and hell, with their joy and pain,
Are now and here.

“Back to thyself is measured well,
All thou hast given,
Thy neighbour’s wrong is thy present hell,
His bliss, thy heaven.

“The Present, the Present is all thou hast,
For thy sure possessing;
Like the patriarch’s angel, hold it fast,
Till it gives its blessing.”

WHITTIER

October 29

“So, to the calmly gathered thought
The innermost of truth is taught,
The mystery dimly understood,
That love of God is love of good,
And, chiefly, its divinest trace
In Him of Nazareth’s holy face;
That to be saved is only this –
Salvation from our selfishness,
From more than elemental fire,
The soul’s unsanctified desire,
From sin itself, and not the pain
That warns us of its chafing chain;
That worship’s deeper meaning lies
In mercy, and not sacrifice,
Not proud humilities of sense
And posturing of penitence,
But Love’s unforced obedience;
That Book and Church and Day are given
For man, not God – for earth, not heaven –
The blessed means to holiest ends,
Not masters, but benignant friends;
That the dear Christ dwells not afar,
The king of some remoter star,
Listening, at times, with flattered ear
To homage wrung from selfish fear –
But here, amidst the poor and blind,
The bound and suffering of our kind,
In works we do, in prayer we pray,
Life of our life, He lives today.”

WHITTIER

October 28

“Who knows if love and its beatitude, clear manifestation as it is of the universal harmony of things, is not the best demonstration of a fatherly and understanding God, just as it is the shortest road by which to reach Him? Love is a faith, and one faith leads to another. And this faith is happiness, light, and force. Only by it does a man enter into the series of the living, the awakened, the happy, the redeemed, - of those true men who know the value of existence and who labour for the glory of God and of the Truth. Till then we are but babblers and chatterers, spendthrifts of our time, our faculties and our gifts, without aim, without real joy – weak, infirm, and useless beings, of no account in the scheme of things.”

From Amiel’s Journal

“What thing thou lovest most, thou mak’st its nature thine;
Earthly, if that be earth, - if that be God, divine.”

R. C. TRENCH