Being and Doing

December 16

2012-01-12T07:01:00.000-08:00

“We cannot kindle when we will
The fire which in the heart resides;
The spirit bloweth and is still,
In mystery our soul abides.
But tasks in hours of insight willed
Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.

“With aching hands and bleeding feet,
We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;
We bear the burden and the heat
Of the long day, and wish ‘twere done.
Not till the hours of light return,
All we have built do we discern.”

MATTHEW ARNOLD

“Great works are performed, not by strength, but by perseverance.”

JOHNSON

December 15

2011-02-07T05:14:00.000-08:00

“You should make a special point of asking God every morning to give you, before all else, that true spirit of meekness which He would have His children possess. You must also make a firm resolution to practise yourself in this virtue, especially in your dealings with those persons to whom you chiefly owe it. You must make it your main object to conquer yourself in this matter; call it to mind a hundred times during the day, commending your efforts to God. It seems to me that no more than this is needed in order to subject your soul entirely to His will, and then you will become more gentle day by day, trusting wholly in His goodness. You will be very happy, my dearest child, if you can do this, for God will dwell in your heart; and where He reigns all is peace. But if you should fail, and commit some of your old faults, do not be disheartened, but rise up and go on again as though you had not fallen.”

ST. FRANCIS DE SALES

“We have only to be patient, to pray, and to do His will, according to our present light and strength, and the growth of the soul will go on. The plant grows in the mist and under clouds as truly as under sunshine. So does the heavenly principle within.”

CHANNING

December 14

2011-02-07T05:13:00.000-08:00

. . . “Let us resolve to be satisfied with our own past doings, when at the time of doing we used all the light God gave us, and did all in our power.
“The backward action of ideality is often full as tormenting as its forward and prospective movements. The moment a thing is done and over, one would think that good sense would lead us to drop it like a stone into the ocean; but the morbid idealist cannot cut loose from the past. ‘Was that after all the best thing? Would it not have been better so, or so?’ And the self-tormented individual lies wakeful during weary night-hours, revolving a thousand possibilities, and conjuring up a thousand vague perhapses. ‘If only I had done so, now, perhaps this result would have followed, or that would not’; and as there is never any saying but that so it might have turned out, the labyrinth and the discontent are alike endless.
“Now there is grand good sense in the Apostle’s direction: - ‘Forgetting the things that are behind, press forward.’ The idealist should charge himself, as with an oath of God, to let the past alone as an accomplished fact, solely concerning himself with the enquiry, ‘Did I not do the best I then knew how?’
“The maxim of the quietists is, that when we have acted according to the best light we have, we have expressed the will of God under those circumstances – since, had it been otherwise, more and different light would have been given us; and with the will of God done by ourselves, as by Himself it is our duty to be content.”

H. B. STOWE

December 13

2011-02-07T05:11:00.000-08:00

“Let us not be weary in well doing; for in due course we shall reap, if we faint not.”

GALATIANS vi, 9

“Say not, the struggle naught availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.

“If hopes weer dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers;
And, but for you, possess the field.

“For while the tired waves, vainly breakening,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

“And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light.
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.”

A. H. CLOUGH

December 12

2011-02-07T05:10:00.000-08:00

“Do not hope you are to gain the victory in a day. It may take months, it may take years. Inch by inch, and step by step the battle must be fought. Over and over again you will be worsted and give ground, but do not therefore yield. Resolve never to be driven back quite so far as you have advanced.”

WHYTE-MELVILLE

“Did you ever hear of a person who had striven all his life faithfully and singly toward an object and in no measure obtained it? If someone constantly aspires, is he not elevated? Did anyone ever try heroism, magnanimity, truth, sincerity, and find that there was no advantage in them, - that it was a vain endeavour?”

THOREAU

“A great effort may be made in a moment of excitement; but continual little efforts can only be made on principle.”

GOULBURN

December 11

2011-02-07T05:08:00.000-08:00

“It is the one inspiring element of Christianity that it throws us in boundless hope upon the future, and forbids us to dwell in the poisonous shadows of the past. A new and better growth is before us, a fresher, a diviner, a more enthusiastic life awaits us. We are to wake up satisfied in the likeness of Christ, the ever-young Humanity. Therefore, ‘forgetting those things which are behind’, let us ‘press forward to the mark of our high calling in Christ Jesus’.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

“Whosoever may
Discern true ends here – shall grow pure enough
To love them, brave enough to strive for them,
And strong enough to reach them, though the roads be rough.”

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

“The past is a story told,
The future may be writ in gold.”

December 10

2011-02-07T05:06:00.000-08:00

“Standing still. . . . I mean being content with yourself; content to struggle no more against the evil within you; content with the poor victory you have already gained, and making no effort to lift yourself higher and higher, nearer and nearer to the pattern of Christ. This is a sin, and you may not plead that you have done much; for much is not enough if you could do more. While there is left in you a trace of ill-temper, or of vanity, or of pride, or of selfishness; while there is left in you a single sin or germ of sin, you must not rest from the battle. God does not require from you to be sinless when you come before Him, but He does require you to be unceasing in your perseverance. He does not require that you shall never have fallen, but He does require unwearied efforts. He does not require you to win, but He does require you to fight. . . . In return for the love which brought the Son of Man down from heaven, in return for the love which led Him to die for us upon the cross, we cannot give Him holy lives, for our lives are not holy; we cannot give Him pure souls, for our souls are not pure; but this one thing we can give, and this is what He asks, hearts that shall never cease, from this day forward till we reach the grave, to strive to be more like Him; to come nearer to Him; to root out from within us the sin that keeps us from Him.”

Bishop TEMPLE

“Do not stand still, even for a moment; for to stand still in the way of holiness and perfection is, not to take breath or courage, but, to fall back and become weaker than before.”

SCUPOLI

December 9

2011-01-08T20:02:00.000-08:00

“We make our victory a great deal more difficult than it ought to be by want of courage. There are many faults and many weaknesses which require nothing more than a decisive effort, a determined push to overcome them at once and for ever. If you want to live a Christian life, do not dally with your purpose; do not fancy that you will find it easier to win your way by degrees, and that by a gradual change you may attain to the same end with less pain than you fear will be given by a sudden wrench. Nothing can be a greater mistake. Press into the enemy’s citadel at once; do not wait outside till he has had time to shoot you down.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
“Be assured that God will help you. Be assured that Christ will give you strength.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
“I know you will meet with many failures between this and the grave; but I am sure that you will meet with fewer failures in proportion to your courage, for this kind of courage is but another form of faith, and faith can work any miracle whatever, even the greatest miracle of all, bringing your soul to God.”

Bishop TEMPLE

“Fallen threads I will not search for – I will weave.”

G. MACDONALD

December 8

2011-01-08T20:01:00.000-08:00

“The most cowardly of all temptations is that of discouragement. When the enemy has made us lose courage for making progress in goodness, he has easy work with us, and soon pushes us towards the precipice of evil.

“Have patience with everybody, but especially with yourself. Do not trouble yourself about your imperfections, but always have the courage to rise out of them. It is right that you should begin again every day. There is no better way to finish the spiritual life than to be ever beginning it over again, and never to think you have done enough.”

ST FRANCIS DE SALES

“Never let mistakes or wrong directions, of which every man, in his studies and elsewhere falls into many, discourage you. There is precious instruction to be got by finding we were wrong. Let a man try faithfully, manfully to be right; he will grow daily more and more right.”

CARLYLE

December 7

2011-01-08T20:00:00.000-08:00

“Do not be discouraged at your faults; bear with yourself in correcting them, as you would with your neighbour. Lay aside this ardour of mind, which exhausts your body, and leads you to commit errors. Accustom yourself gradually to carry prayer into all your daily occupations. Speak, move, work in peace, as if you were in prayer, as indeed you ought to be. Do everything without excitement, by the spirit of grace. As soon as you perceive your natural impetuosity gliding in, retire quietly within, where is the Kingdom of God. Listen to the leadings of grace, then say and do nothing but what the Holy Spirit will put in your heart. You will find that you will become more tranquil, that your words will be fewer and more effectual, and that, with less effort, you will accomplish more good.”

FÉNÉLON

“Discouragement is an inclination to give up all attempts after the devout life, in consequence of the difficulties by which it is beset, and our already numerous failures in it. We lose heart; and partly in ill-temper, partly in real doubt of our own ability to persevere, we first grow querulous and peevish with God, and then relax in our efforts to mortify ourselves and please Him. It is a sort of shadow of despair, and will lead us into numberless venial sins the first half-hour we give way to it.”

F. W. FABER

December 6

2011-01-08T19:59:00.000-08:00

“The true act of moral culture is to balance extravagant tendencies by quickening those that are languid. Growth is a safer means of producing harmony in character than repression. . . . The lower is subdued not by repression, but by making it simply an instrument of the higher. No fasting, for instance, will make the soul pure, but a noble attachment will keep all baser feelings in check and ennoble them.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

“The great way of resisting evil is by allowing the Holy Spirit to pour into your heart the love of your true Lord. Inordinate love of the creature, or love of what is evil in itself, cannot be effectually resisted by particular and direct antagonism. The love of evil is to be expelled by the love of that which is good. The way to overcome evil is to trust to ‘the expulsive power of a new affection’, the love of Christ your Lord.”

Bishop WEBB

December 5

2011-01-08T19:58:00.000-08:00

“Infinite toil would not enable you to sweep away a mist, but by ascending a little, you may afterwards look over it altogether. So it is with our moral improvements; we wrestle fiercely with a vicious habit which would have no hold upon us if we ascended into a higher moral atmosphere. It is by adding to our good purposes and nourishing the affections which are rightly placed, that we shall be able to combat the bad ones.”

A. HELPS

“If we wish to overcome evil, we must overcome it by good. There are doubtless many ways of overcoming the evil in our own hearts, but the simplest, easiest, most universal, is to overcome it by active occupation in some good word or work. The best antidote against evil of all kinds, against the evil thoughts which haunt the soul, against the needless perplexities which distract the conscience, is to keep hold of the good we have. Impure thoughts will not stand against pure words, and prayers, and deeds. Little doubts will not avail against great certainties. Fix your affections on things above, and then you will be less and less troubled by the cares, the temptations, the troubles of things on earth.”

A. P. STANLEY

December 4

2011-01-08T19:57:00.000-08:00

“If you wish not to be of an angry temper, do not feed the habit, throw nothing on it which will increase it; at first, keep quiet, and count the days on which you have not been angry. I used to be in a passion every day; now every second day; then every third; then every fourth. But if you have intermitted thirty days, make a sacrifice to God. For the habit at first begins to be weakened, and then is completely destroyed. When you can say, ‘I have not been vexed today, nor the day before, nor yet on any succeeding day during two or three months; but I took care when some exciting things happened,’ be assured that you are in a good way.”

EPICTETUS

“The difficult part of good temper consists in forbearance, and accommodation to the ill-humour of others.”

EMPSON

“He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that rules his spirit, better than he that takes a city.”

PROVERBS 16, 32

December 3

2011-01-08T19:55:00.000-08:00

“Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be slow to speak, slow to wrath; for the wrath of man works not the righteousness of God.”

St. JAMES i, 20

“The Christian will have to remember that one of the very first duties he owes to his neighbour is the thorough subjugation of his own temper. The sins of the temper produce the worst results at once in our neighbour and in ourselves. They have a peculiar power of thwarting and injuring God’s work in the world, and of giving pain to our fellow-creatures. They hurt more than anything the right working of the body of Christ.”

“Anger is not to be suppressed but by something as inward as itself, and more habitual.”

“Resolved: - When I am most conscious of provocation to ill-nature and anger, that I will strive most to feel and act good-naturedly.”
“Resolved: - Never to suffer the least motions of anger towards irrational beings.”

JON. EDWARDS

December 2

2011-01-08T19:54:00.000-08:00

“Time is spent in lamenting past sins, which ought to be spent in attending to present duties; the heart is given up to fears which ought to be given up to God; weak regret takes the place of vigorous resolution; longings for a sense of God’s presence, or for a sense of our own love, fill up our souls when we ought to be proving our love by the proof which He has named, that is, keeping His commandments.”

Bishop TEMPLE

“The full employment of all powers, physical, mental, and spiritual, is the true secret of happiness, so that no time may be left for morbid self-analysis.”

TOM HUGHES

“To watch one’s soul all the time, seeking for moral disease, is as bad as to watch one’s body all the time, seeking for physical disease. Do not look within to see whether your feelings are right; but look without to see what you are doing for others; what you are saying; what your temper and spirits are to those about you. Look up, also, for higher light and more life.”

J. F. CLARKE

December 1

2010-11-10T02:35:00.000-08:00

“When you are examining yourself, never call yourself a ‘sinner’, that is very cheap abuse and utterly useless. Call yourself a liar, a coward, a sluggard, a glutton, and so on, if you indeed find yourself to be in any wise any of these. Take steady means to check yourself in whatever fault you have ascertained and justly accused yourself of. And as soon as you are in active way of mending, you will be no more inclined to moan over an undefined corruption. For the rest, you will find it less easy to uproot faults than to choke them by gaining virtues. Do not think of your faults, still less of other people's faults; in every person who comes near you, look for what is good and strong; honour that; rejoice in it; and as you can, try to imitate it; and your faults will drop off like dead leaves when their time comes.”

RUSKIN

“We are wrong always when we think too much
Of what we think or are.”

E. B. BROWNING

November 30

2010-11-10T02:34:00.000-08:00

“Self-examination at certain times, fixed and earnest, is a very needful spiritual discipline, but it is not penitence.”

KNOX LITTLE

“To all true modesty the necessary business is not in-look, but out-look, and especially up-look. . . . It is quite easy to peep and potter about one’s own deficiencies, in a quite im-modest discontent; but modesty is so pleased with other people’s doings, that she has no leisure to lament her own.”

RUSKIN

“The dignity is the dignity of a simple purpose, of a mind too lost in other thoughts to have room for thoughts of self.”

Bishop TEMPLE

November 29

2010-11-10T02:32:00.000-08:00

“The Pharisees wanted not to serve God and man, but to gratify the petty pride of having done exactly what they had to do; a pardonable feeling in mere trifles, a mischievous feeling when it goes beyond trifles, and downright ruin when it takes possession of the whole life. Something of the same sort is very possible still. And the only way to avoid it is always to press the gaze of our consciences towards God and God’s will, rather than toward ourselves.”

Bishop TEMPLE

“History and experience are not without examples of a hard self-obliteration in most things, which makes a soul as cruel to others as it is to itself. Rigid in observation of rule, such souls fail utterly in the cultivation of the spirit and the temper, which alone is valuable. It may be the outcome of an obstinate nature, it may be the sad result of narrowness of mind, it may be a form of subtle self-pleasing. . . . but it has the deathly pallor of fanaticism, not the clear complexion of the religion of Christ.”

KNOX LITTLE

November 28

2010-11-10T02:31:00.000-08:00

“To a young girl who had just left school, she wrote – ‘I think this is such an important year of your life, and such a difficult one; the getting into regular employment when you have to plan it for yourself. I used always to be getting more to do than I could manage; there is great fret and worry running after work, it is not good, spiritually or intellectually. I wish I could help you; but I am so often in this state myself that I hardly know how. I think I find most help in trying to look on all interruptions and hindrances, to work that one has planned out for oneself, as discipline, trials sent by God to help one against getting selfish over one’s work. One’s work for God consists in doing some trifling, haphazard thing that has been thrown into one’s day. It is not waste of time, as one is tempted to think. It is the most important part of the work of the day – the part one can best offer to God. After such a hindrance do not rush after planned work, trust that the time to finish it well will be given some time, and keep a quiet heart above it.’”

ANNIE KEARY

“Perhaps there is nothing so irritating to others as a morbid passion for order. Dis-ordered order is the most active cause of disorder. Over-restless activity is the parent of a despairing in-activity in others.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

November 27

2010-11-10T02:30:00.000-08:00

“Any strictness which sours our temper, which makes us dislike our fellow-creatures, which shuts us up in ourselves; or, again, any which interferes with our duties, and oppresses us with little fidgety difficulties, instead of carrying us along in obeying the laws of our state of life, is almost certain to be a morbid strictness. The object of all strictness is to fence duties round, so as to make their performance more sure, and to fence our hearts round, so as to make the feeling more human and so more heavenly; and if our strictness do not give us these results, we must look to it that we are not making some great blunder.”

Bishop TEMPLE

“Take care not to lay upon yourselves unnecessary burdens. Do not attempt more prayers than your time and strength allow. . . . Beware of a fidgety, fussy kind of religion. Do not be over anxious. A great saint was once asked, ‘How can I live the higher life?’ and he answered, ‘My child, go and live the lower life, and God will teach you the higher.’”

Bishop WILKINSON

November 26

2010-11-10T02:28:00.000-08:00

“Rules of holy living may be a snare, and prove burdensome and entangling rather than helpful, if, in administering them to ourselves, we do not continually keep our eye fixed on the spirit and principle of them. ‘The end of the commandment is love’, a growing and ever deepening recognition of God as our tender Father through Christ, and of men as our brethren.”

GOULBURN

“Love is higher than duty, just as it is more excellent to worship God than to hold fast by a rule, however excellent that rule may be. But the reason is that love in reality contains duty in itself. Love without a sense of duty is a mere delusion from which we cannot too soon set ourselves free. Love is duty and something more. Love is a noble tree of which duty is the trunk. Love is a beautiful plant, with a beautiful flower, of which duty is the stalk.”

Bishop TEMPLE

“He said . . . . ‘It was not well to be so wedded even to the mopst pious observances . . . as never to break through them, lest under the garb of faithful adherence to rule self-love should creep in. And moreover’, he added, ‘consideration for others is the offspring of love, and worth more than strictness.’”

From Life of St Francis de Sales

November 25

2010-11-10T02:26:00.001-08:00

“No soul can preserve the bloom and delicacy of its existence without lonely musing and silent prayer; and the greatness of this necessity is in proportion to the greatness of the soul. There were many times during our Lord’s ministry when, even from the loneliness of desert places, He dismissed His most faithful and most beloved, that He might be yet more alone.”

Archdeacon FARRAR

“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence comes my help. My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.”

PSALM 121

“He prayeth well who loveth well,
Both man and bird and beast.

"He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.”

COLERIDGE

November 24

2010-11-10T02:25:00.000-08:00

“Prayer is not only – perhaps in some of the holiest souls is not even chiefly – a petition for something that we want and do not possess. In the larger sense of the word, as the spiritual language of the soul, prayer is intercourse with God, often seeking no end beyond the pleasure of such intercourse. It is praise. . . . When we seek the company of our friends . . . it is a pleasure to be with them, to be talking to them at all about anything; to be in possession of their sympathies and to be showing our delight at it; to be assuring them of their place in our hearts and thoughts. So it is with the soul, when dealing with the Friend of friends – with God.”

Canon LIDDON

“Frequent intercourse even with an earthly friend, if he be of a strong, marked character, quickly makes itself seen in its influence upon us. We grow more and more like those with whom we associate, and especially if we admire and look up to them we unconsciously imitate them. It is no less so with our intercourse with God. The more time we spend in His presence, seeking His face and communing with Him in prayer, the more surely will godly graces and tempers spring up within us and bear fruit in our lives.”

Bishop WALSHAM HOW

November 23

2010-11-10T02:24:00.000-08:00

“We all want quiet; we all want beauty for the refreshment of our souls. Sometimes we think of it as a luxury, but when God made the world, He made it very beautiful, and meant that we should live amongst its beauties, and that they should speak peace to us in our daily lives.”

OCTAVIA HILL

“Thou who hast given me eyes to see
And love this sight so fair,
Give me a heart to find out Thee,
And read Thee everywhere.”

KEBLE

“All my works praise You, O Lord; and Your saints give thanks unto You.”

PSALM 145, 10

November 22

2010-11-10T02:22:00.000-08:00

“Every moment of deepening communion with His Father has its corresponding moment of sympathy with His brother-men. . . . Everywhere the solitary completes itself in the social. Solitude shapes and colours the precious forms of character which then the furnace of society burns to solidity, and brilliance, and permanence.”

PHILLIPS BROOKS

“Lord, what a change within us one short hour
Spent in thy presence will prevail to make,
What heavy burdens from our bosoms take.
What parchèd grounds refresh as with a shower!
We kneel, and all around us seems to lower;
We rise, and all, the distant and the near,
Stands forth in sunny outline brave and clear;
We kneel – how weak! We rise – how full of power!
Why therefore should we do ourselves this wrong,
Or others – that we are not always strong,
That we are ever overborne with care,
That we should ever weak or thoughtless be,
Anxious or troubled, when with us is prayer,
And joy, and strength, and courage are with Thee?”

TRENCH

November 21

2010-11-10T02:20:00.000-08:00

“And then let us abandon ourselves entirely to the will of God, and, without losing courage, let us wait in patience the return of His consolations, following the path of prayer and of good works. Let us offer our heart to God, dry as it is; it will be as well-pleasing to Him as if it were melting with love, if only it is sincerely determined to love God. It is a mistake to think that to serve God without feeling any pleasure in it is not pleasing Him; fresh roses are the most beautiful, but they have the most strength and fragrance when they are dry; so though what we do for God is more agreeable to us when it is done with a lively tenderness of heart, because we judge of the pleasure that we feel, yet the fragrance of our actions is greater before God when they are done in a state of spiritual dryness. For then our will gives itself to the service of God in spite of all the repugnances which it has to overcome, and consequently it must have more strength and constancy than in a time of deeply felt devotion.”

St FRANCIS DE SALES

“Let it make no difference to you whether you are cold or warm, if you are doing your duty.”

MARCUS AURELIUS

November 20

2010-09-23T06:43:00.000-07:00

“Where you cannot pray as you would, pray as you can.”

GOULBURN

“Nor is it in this only that your progress in spiritual life consists, that you have the grace of comfort; but rather that with humility, self-denial, and patience, you endure the withdrawing thereof; provided you do not then become listless in the exercise of prayer, nor suffer the rest of your accustomed duties to be at all neglected.
“Rather do you cheerfully perform what lies in you, according to the best of your power and understanding; and do not wholly neglect yourself because of the dryness or anxiety of mind which you feel.”

THOMAS à KEMPIS

“Our prayers must centre, not in self, but in God. When we look for sensations of fervour, and peace, and joy in prayer, we are seeking self, not God. . . .
“It is necessary that we should pray; it is not necessary that we should feel happy in praying.
“Our prayers are not heard for their fervour but for Christ’s sake.”

Bishop WALSHAM HOW

November 19

2010-09-23T06:42:00.000-07:00

“And when the petty troubles of life, the small difficulties that sting like gnats, the intrusions, the quarrels, the slight derangements of health, have disturbed our temper, and we are in danger of being =false to that divine charity which is the dew of life, one prayer will sweep us back to Palestine, and standing among the circle of the Apostles we shall listen to His voice: ‘Love one another as I have loved you.’ ‘Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you.’ Prayer, continually lived in, makes the Presence of a holy and loving God the air which life breathes.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

“If we with earnest effort could succeed
To make our life one long connected prayer,
As lives of some perhaps have been and are,
If, never leaving Thee, we had no need
Our wandering spirits back again to lead
Into Thy presence, but continued there,
Like angels standing on the highest stair
Of the sapphire throne, this were to pray indeed.
But if distractions manifold prevail,
And if in this we must confess we fail,
Grant us to keep at least a prompt desire,
Continual readiness for prayer and praise,
An altar heaped and waiting to take fire
With the least spark, and leap into a blaze.”

TRENCH

November 18

2010-09-23T06:39:00.000-07:00

“Prayer, . . . not the continual invocation of God in words, but the perpetual and acknowledged recognition in our practice of His wishes, His ways, and His thoughts.”

GEORGE DAWSON

“Think not that my graces slumber
While I toil throughout the day
For all honest work is worship,
And to labour is to pray.”

W. A. BUTLER

“’What a blessed thing active prayer is,’ he said once to a friend. . . . ‘I mean by active prayer, doing everything in God’s presence and for His service.’”

From Life of S. Francis de Sales

November 17

2010-09-23T06:36:00.000-07:00

“Prayer is surely not asking God to love people and do them good because we love them better than He does; but offering ourselves as sacrifices to Him, that He may fill us with His love, and send us on His errands.”

F. D. MAURICE

“Perfect prayer consists not in the multitude of words, but in the strength of the desire which raises the soul towards God. Every Christian ought to contribute towards the salvation of souls, according as they are inspired by a holy desire. Everything which is said and done for the salvation of humanity is a continual prayer, but a prayer which does not exempt us from the use of mental and vocal prayer at certain times. All that is done for the love of God and our neighbour, all, it may be added, which is done for ourselves also, with a just and right aim, may be called prayer, for those never cease to pray who never cease to do good. Love for our fellow-creatures is a constant prayer.”

From Life of Catherine of Siena

November 16

2010-09-23T06:35:00.000-07:00

“Your intention should be to unite your will to the Will of God, and not to draw God’s Will to yours.”

SCUPOLI

“Our resignation to the Will of God may be said to be perfect when our will is lost and resolved up in His; when we rest in His will as our end, as being itself most just, right and good. And where is the impossibility of such an affection to what is just and right and good, - such a loyalty of heart to the Governor of the Universe as shall prevail over all sinister desires of our own.”

BUTLER

“When you say ‘Lead us not into temptation’, you must in good earnest mean to avoid in your daily conduct those temptations which you have already suffered from. When you say, ‘Deliver us from evil’, you must mean to struggle against that evil in your hearts which you are conscious of and which you pray to be forgiven.”

J. H. NEWMAN

November 15

2010-09-23T06:34:00.000-07:00

“Importunity is the essence of successful prayer . . . and importunity means, not dreaminess, but sustained work. It is through prayer especially that ‘the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force’.
“It was a saying of the late Bishop Hamilton, of Salisbury, that ‘No-one was likely to do much good in prayer who did not begin by looking upon it in the light of a work, to be prepared for and persevered in with all the earnestness which we bring to bear upon subjects which are, in our opinions, at once most interesting and most necessary.’”

Canon LIDDON

“I would, with much solicitude, urge the habit of stated prayer. The heart is so apt to slide from under its intentions, if not compacted by the regularity of habit, that it is hardly safe to trust them; every hour brings its hindrances, and so often in the shpe of all but needful business, that ‘the path to the bush’ will, in most cases, be overgrown, if not trodden at the stated periods.”

ANN TAYLOR

November 14

2010-09-23T06:29:00.000-07:00

“Men ought always to pray and not to faint.”

LUKE xviii, I

“Be not afraid to pray – to pray is right.
Pray, if you can, with hope; but ever pray,
Though hope be weak, or sick with long delay;
Pray in the darkness, if there be no light.
Far is the time, remote from human sight,
When war and discord on the earth shall cease;
Yet every prayer for universal peace
Avails the blessed time to expedite,
Whatever is good to wish, that ask of Heaven,
Though it be that you can not hope to see;
Pray to be perfect, though material leaven
Forbid the spirit so on earth to be;
But if for any wish you dare not pray,
Then pray to God to cast that wish away.”

HARTLEY COLERIDGE

November 13

2010-08-03T03:54:00.000-07:00

“Prayer has the power of sanctifying life, because it brings God into life. Twice in the day it has been for ages the habit of the race to use this talisman, once for the sanctification of the day; once for the sanctification of the night. The morning prayer chimes in with the joy of the creation, with the quick world, as it awakes and sings. Such a prayer is the guard of life. It makes us conscious of our Father’s presence, so that we hear His voice in the hour of our folly and our sin. ‘My child, this morning you called Me to your side, do not drive Me away. Bridle that passionate temper, restrain that excitement which is sweeping you beyond the power of will; keep back that foolish word which will sting your neighbour’s heart; do not do that dishonesty; be not guilty of that cowardice. I am by your side.’”

STOPFORD BROOKE

“With the practice of prayer I should earnestly recommend the use of some book of devotion, like Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying – some book which will make us acquainted with the feelings, and reflections, and resolutions of good men, who have gone through the very self-same struggle with Adversity.”

Dr ARNOLD

November 12

2010-08-03T03:52:00.000-07:00

“We need to ‘watch unto prayer.’ Watching unto prayer implies that we are storing up matter for our prayers; so watching our steps and words, and thoughts, so taking account of our hours as they pass, so marking the defects and failures of our common life, as to know what to pray about, and what to pray for, and what to pray against, when the time comes.”

J. HAMPDEN GURNEY

“Is it not true that most people fail much in prayer, because they will not take the trouble to prepare for prayer? With a written list of the subjects we select for our prayers, a few collects or prayers from books of devotion carefully selected and marked, and a fixed time allotted to our prayers, we shall find we can do much better than we generally do now.”

Bishop WALSHAM HOW

November 11

2010-08-03T03:51:00.000-07:00

“Let there be many windows in your soul.
That all the glory of the universe
May beautify it. Not the narrow pane
Of one poor creed can catch the radiant rays
That shine from countless sources. Tear away
The blinds of superstition; let the light
Pour through fair windows broad as truth itself
And high as God.
Why should the spirit peer
Through some priest-curtained orifice, and grope
Along dim corridors of doubt, when all
The splendour from unfathomed seas of space
Might bathe it with their golden seas of love?
Sweep up the debris of decaying faiths,
Sweep down the cobwebs of worn-out beliefs,
And throw your soul wide open to the light
Of Reason and of Knowledge. Tune your ear
To all the wordless music of the stars,
And to the voice of nature, and your heart
Shall turn to truth and goodness as the plant
Turns to the sun. A thousand unseen hands
Reach down to help you from their peace-crowned heights,
And all the forces of the firmament
Shall fortify your strength. Be not afraid
To thrust aside half truths and grasp the whole.”

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

"Make truth lovely, and do not try to arm her – mankind will then be far less inclined to content with her.”

JOUBERT

November 10

2010-08-03T03:50:00.000-07:00

“Partial views grow perilous, not when they are held firmly, but when they are held as if they were universal.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
“Since the value of words must change with widened or contracted thought, no formula expressed in words can be exhaustive.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
“Words which at one time sum up earlier experience become at another time centres, as it were, round which new and foreign thoughts crystallise.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
“To claim completeness for our opinions is to abandon the encouragement of progress; and on the other hand, difficulties frankly met reveal new paths of truth.”

Bishop WESTCOTT

November 9

2010-08-03T03:49:00.000-07:00

“In spiritual Truth, whatever we know is infinitely precious, and we are bound at all costs to uphold the convictions which are borne in upon us.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
“At the same time, we are not bound by any equal obligation to force them upon others.”

Bishop WESTCOTT

“It is well for anyone to argue against opinions which he thinks false, to examine the grounds upon which they profess to rest, to endeavour to convert those who hold them to a different way of thinking. But all this in no way justifies the attempt to persuade anyone to go against their conscience as long as their conscience remains unconvinced. To convince someone that their conscientious convictions are not true is quite a different thing from persuading that person to disobey them while they still thinks them true. The fact is, that true Christian society and true Christian friendship cannot exist on any other basis than that of respecting each other’s consciences.”

Bishop TEMPLE

November 8

2010-08-03T03:48:00.000-07:00

“The more readily we admit the possibility of our own cherished convictions being mixed with error, the more vital and helpful whatever is right in them will become; and no error is so conclusively fatal as the idea that God will not allow us to err, though he has allowed all others to do so. . . .
“In every nation, they that fear God and work righteousness are accepted of Him. See that you understand what that righteousness means, and set hand to it stoutly; you will always measure your neighbour’s creed kindly in proportion to the substantial fruits of your own.”

RUSKIN

“We are quite right in regarding with suspicion, and in narrowly questioning and examining, all new-fangled views, whether social or religious. And yet there should be a readiness in us, though not to abandon for one moment the old truth, yet to recognise any new form in which it may be presented. . . . Truth is many-sided like a cube; and we should never be so tenacious of the aspect of it which is familiar to us, as not to be ready to come round and view it under another’s aspect.”

GOULBURN

November 7

2010-08-03T03:47:00.000-07:00

“It is true that the wickedness of persecuting people on account of their religious opinions is not now practised or defended in this country, but we have still amongst us some evils arising out of the same source – the mistaking of a false unity of form and opinion for the union of spirit and faith. There are many persons, for instance, in our own Church, who dwell much more on the differences of form and opinion which exist between them and good dissenters, than on the unity of spirit between all those who love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity. It is certainly natural and proper that one should feel more closely united towards those whose principles, and feelings, and opinions are quite like our own; if, indeed, such a marvellous agreement is anywhere to be found; and, therefore, one may feel more closely drawn towards a very good and enlightened dissenter. But the evil is that many persons feel more friendly disposed, I do not say to absolutely wicked, but to careless and unspiritual Churchmen, than to zealous and holy dissenters; and this is to undo Christ’s work, to put an earthly and unimportant bond of union in the place of that union of goodness and holiness which was to bind men to one another in Him and in His Father.”

Dr ARNOLD

“When a particular belief is fruitful in nobleness of character, we need trouble ourselves very little with scientific demonstrations that it is false.”

FROUDE

November 6

2010-08-03T03:45:00.000-07:00

“I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest – I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much than to condemn too much.”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]

“It seems to me a waste of time which we can ill afford, and a sort of ‘quarrel by the way’ which our Christian vow of enmity against moral evil makes utterly unreasonable, when Christians suspend their great business, and loosen the bond of their union with each other, by venting useless regrets and complaints against one another’s errors, instead of labouring to lessen one another’s sins.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
I have one great principle that I never lose sight of; to insist strongly on the difference between Christian and non-Christian, and to sink into nothing the difference between Christian and Christian.”

Dr ARNOLD

November 5

2010-08-03T03:44:00.000-07:00

“Christianity has abler advocates than in its professed defenders, in those many quiet and humble men and women who, in the light of it and strength of it, lead holy, beautiful, and self-denying lives.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
“Wherever there is genuine love for good and goodness, no speculative superstructure of opinion can be so extravagant as to forfeit those graces which are promised, not to clearness of intellect, but to purity of heart.”

FROUDE

“Good love, however ill-placed,
Is better for man’s soul in the end
Than if he loved ill, what deserves love well,
A Pagan, kissing for a step of Pan
The wild goat’s hoof-print on the loaming down,
Exceeds our modern thinker who turns back
The strata – granite, limestone, coal and clay,
Concluding coldly with, ‘Here’s law, where’s God?’”

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

“It is only the principles of Truth, Goodness, and Right, which are to last for ever. The forms in which these exhibit themselves will necessarily vary with the age and state of society.”

GOULBURN

November 4

2010-08-03T03:41:00.000-07:00

“Thy greatness makes us brave, as children are
When those they love are near.”

FABER

“A tender child of summers three
Seeking her little bed at night,
Paused on the dark stair timidly,
‘O mother, take my hand,’ said she,
‘And then the dark will all be light.’

“We older children grope our way
From dark behind to dark before,
And only when our hands we lay,
Dear Lord, in Thine, the night is day,
And there is darkness never more.

“Reach downwards to the sunless days
Wherein our guides are blind as we,
And faith is small, and hope delays,
Take Thou the hands of prayer we raise,
And let us feel the light of Thee!”

WHITTIER

“He that follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the Light of Life.”

S. JOHN viii 12

November 3

2010-07-15T20:00:00.000-07:00

“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

2010-07-15T19:58:00.000-07:00

“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

2010-07-15T19:57:00.000-07:00

“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

2010-07-15T19:56:00.000-07:00

“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

2010-07-15T19:55:00.000-07:00

“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

2010-07-15T19:53:00.000-07:00

“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

2010-07-15T19:51:00.000-07:00

“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

October 27

2010-05-25T05:05:00.000-07:00

“Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a great dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight of his room,
Making it rich and like a lily in bloom,
An Angel, writing in a book of gold.
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
So to the presence in the room he said:
‘What writest thou?’ the Vision raised his head,
And in a voice made all of sweet accord,
Answered: ‘The names of those that love the Lord!’
‘And is mine one?’ said Abou. ‘Nay not so,’
Replied the Angel. Abou spake more low
But cheerily still, and said, ‘I pray thee, then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow-men.’
The Angel wrote and vanished. The next night
He came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the souls whom love of God had blest,
And lo! – Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest!”

LEIGH HUNT

“Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God; and everyone that loves is born of God, and knows God.
“He that loves not, knows not God; for God is Love.”

I JOHN iv 7, 8

October 26

2010-05-25T05:03:00.000-07:00

“I have noticed that wherever there has been a faithful following of the Lord in a consecrated soul, several things have inevitably followed, sooner or later. Meekness and quietness of spirit become in time the characteristics of the daily life. A submissive acceptance of the will of God, as it comes in the hourly events of each day; pliability in the hands of God to do or to suffer all the good pleasure of His will; sweetness under provocation; calmness in the midst of turmoil and bustle; yieldingness to the wishes of others, and an insensibility to slights and affronts; absence of worry or anxiety; deliverance from care or fear, - all these, and many similar graces, are invariably found to be the natural outward development of that inward life which is hid with Christ in God.”

H. W. S.

“There cannot be a secret Christian. Grace is like ointment in the hand, it betrayeth itself. If you truly feel the sweetness of the Cross of Christ, you will feel constrained to confess Christ before men.”

Christian Life

October 25

2010-05-25T05:02:00.000-07:00

“To examine its evidence is not to try Christianity; to admire its martyrs is not to try Christianity; to compare and estimate its teachers is not to try Christianity; to attend its rites and services with more than Mahometan punctuality is not to try or know Christianity. But for one week, for one day, to have lived in the pure atmosphere of faith and love to God, of tenderness to man; to have beheld earth annihilated, and Heaven open to the prophetic gaze of hope; to have seen evermore revealed behind the complicated troubles of this strange, mysterious life, the unchanged smile of an Eternal Friend, and everything that is difficult to reason solved by that reposing trust which is higher and better than reason – to have known and felt this, I will not say for a life, but for a single blessed hour, that, indeed, is to have made experiment of Christianity.”

W. A. BUTLER

“Be ye doers of the Word, and not hearers only.”

S. James i, 22

October 24

2010-05-25T05:01:00.000-07:00

“Life should be the same as love. There is no life worth having which does not give as much as it receives, or rather, as much as it can receive. It is not wrong in youth to take pleasure, but to take it and not give it, that is base. . . . Brighten darkened lives, soften the rude, make a sunshine of peace in stormy places, cover the faults and follies of men with the flower of love. . . . That is the best religion, the life of Christ, the very life of God.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

“O brother man! Fold to thy heart thy brother;
Where pity dwells, the peace of God is there;
To worship rightly is to love each other,
Each smile, a hymn, each kindly deed, a prayer.

“Follow with reverent steps the great example
Of Him whose holy work was ‘doing good’;
So shall the wide earth seem our Father’s temple,
Each loving life a psalm of gratitude.”

WHITTIER

“The widest love, in other words, is personal; not an undefined sentiment, but the practical recognition of a real claim.”

Bishop WESTCOTT

October 23

2010-05-25T05:00:00.000-07:00

“’Coming nearer and nearer to Christ,’ we say; that does not mean creeping into refuge where we can be safe. It means becoming better and better men; repeating His character more and more in ours. The only true danger is sin, and so the only true safety is holiness.”

PHILLIPS BROOKS

“The smallest present victory over an evil temper, the slightest possible exertion in the cause of charity, the power to say no, on one actual occasion to the rising of a sinful desire, or to the indulgence of a dangerous inclination, is worth far more as a proof of the inworking of the Saviour’s love, than any amount of trustful hope, of touching tenderness, or rapt contemplation.”

Dr VAUGHAN

“The precepts of Jesus are the essential elements of His religion. Regard these as your rule of life, and you build your house upon a rock. Live them out in deed, and you have entered the kingdom of heaven – you even now enter it.”

CHANNING

October 22

2010-05-25T04:58:00.000-07:00

“The belief in a divine education, open to each man and to all men, takes up into itself all that is true in the end proposed by culture, supplements and perfects it. It is right that we should have an aim of our own, with something peculiar in it, determined by our individuality and our surroundings; but this may readily degenerate into exclusive narrowness, unless it has for a background the great thought, that there is a kingdom of God within us, around us, and above us, in which we with all our powers and aims are called to be conscious workers. Towards the forwarding of this silent, ever-advancing kingdom, our little work whatever it be, if good and true, may contribute something. And this thought lends to any calling, however lowly, a consecration which is wanting even to the loftiest self-chosen ideals. But even if our aim should be frustrated and our work come to naught, yet the failure of our most cherished plans may be more than compensated. In the thought that we are members of this kingdom, already begun, here and now, yet reaching forward through all time, we shall have a reserve of consolation better than any which success without this could give.”

Principal J. C. SHAIRP

“A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favourable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”

EMERSON

October 21

2010-05-25T04:56:00.000-07:00

“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

October 20

2010-05-09T22:34:00.000-07:00

“’Then you don’t consider that it is something of the nature of a solecism to introduce religious topics into ordinary social intercourse?’
“’Religious! What precisely is religion?’ asked the girl passionately. ‘Is it going to church on Sundays? Is it singing hymns? Is it even the scrupulous praying of one’s daily prayers? Is that all that it means for us – all that it can be made to mean? If so, keep it silent then, keep it straitly in its place. If it might be made to mean something less pathetically unhopeful, less unprofitably dreary – if, for instance, it might be made to mean a more carefully beautiful human life, with finer and higher sympathies and manners for everyday uses of life; if it might suggest a quicker and more keen-sighted compassion for unobtrusive sorrows, a less cruel contempt for uncomprehended failure and mistake, a less open and sickening worship of wealth for wealth’s sake, a stronger and more fervent desire to lessen but for one day, one hour, some small part of the great, crushing burden that we help to lay on the hapless shoulders of others – if religion might, but ever so remotely, mean these, or any of these, then, in God’s name, let us speak of it.’”

M. LINSKILL

“Religion consists, not in knowledge, but in a holy life.”

Bishop TAYLOR

October 19

2010-05-09T21:23:00.000-07:00

“Religion has been treated as if it were a special exercise of a special power, not as if it were the possible loftiness of everything that a man could think, or be, or do. The result has been that certain men, and certain parts of men, have stood forth as distinctively religious, and that the possible religiousness of all life has been but very imperfectly felt and acknowledged. This has made religion weak. Man’s strongest powers, man’s intensest passions, have been involved in the working out of his career, and in the development of his relations with his fellow-men. What has been left over from religion has been the weakest part of him, his sentiments and fears; and so religion, very often, has come to seem a thing of mystic mood and frightened superstitions.”

PHILLIPS BROOKS

“Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this. To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”

S. JAMES i 27

October 18

2010-05-09T21:22:00.000-07:00

“Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and show my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins. . . . Wherefore have we fasted, say they, and thou seest not? Wherefore have we afflicted our soul, and thou takest no knowledge? Behold, in the day of your fast ye find pleasure, and exact all your labours.
“Behold, ye fast for strife and debate, and to smite with the fist of wickedness; ye shall not fast as ye do this day, to make your voice to be heard on high.
“Is it such a fast that I have chosen? A day for a man to afflict his soul? Is it to bow down his head as a bulrush, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? Wilt thou call this a fast, and an acceptable day to the Lord?
“Is not this the fast that I have chosen? To loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?
“Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? When thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?
Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily; and thy righteousness shall go before thee; the glory of the Lord shall be thy reward.
“Then shalt thou call, and the Lord shall answer; thou shalt cry, and he shall say, Here I am. If thou take away from the midst of thee the yoke, the putting forth of the finger, and speaking vanity;
“And if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul; then shall thy light rise in obscurity, and thy darkness be as the noon day;
“And the Lord shall guide thee continually.”

ISAIAH lviii

October 17

2010-05-09T21:21:00.000-07:00

“It was thought in the old time that the best way of serving God was by the sacrifice of rams and lambs; but men grew gradually into the blessed belief that a lowly heart and a contrite spirit – these, and these only – are the sacrifices acceptable to God. From costly offerings, elaborate ritual, and useless ceremonial, men grew into the belief that the visitation of the orphan and the widow, and a charitable life, were the Ritual of true Religion.”

GEORGE DAWSON

“Religion does not consist in the performance of certain ceremonial acts at specified times, outside which acts and times it has no place; but consists in framing our whole life, and all our acts, upon a distinct view of our position as created beings, charged, by the fact of our creation, with duties both to our fellow creatures and to our Creator.”

EDWARD DENISON

“It must never be absent from the mind that Religion is not a set of opinions, but life in Jesus Christ.”

From Ecce Deus

October 16

2010-05-09T21:19:00.000-07:00

“O Lord and Master of us all;
Whate’er our name and sign,
We own Thy sway, we hear Thy call,
We test our lives by Thine.

“To The our full humanity,
Its joys and pains, belong;
The wrong of man to man on Thee
Inflicts a deeper wrong.

Who hates, hates Thee, who loves becomes
Therein to Thee allied;
All sweet accords of hearts and homes
In Thee are multiplied.

“Thy litanies, sweet offices
Of love and gratitude;
Thy sacramental liturgies,
The joy of doing good.

“The heart must ring Thy Christmas bells,
Thy inward altars raise;
Its faith and hope Thy canticles,
And its obedience praise.”

WHITTIER

October 15

2010-05-09T21:18:00.000-07:00

“We are apt to feel as if nothing we could do on earth bears a relation to what the good are doing in a higher world; but it is not so. Heaven and earth are not so far apart. Every disinterested act, every sacrifice to duty, every exertion for the good of ‘one of the least of Christ’s brethren’, every new insight into God’s works, every new impulse given to the love of truth and goodness, associates us with the departed, brings us nearer to them, and is truly heavenly as if we were acting, not on earth, but in Heaven. The spiritual tie between us and the departed is not felt as it should be. Our union with them daily grows stronger, if we make daily progress in what they are growing in.”

CHANNING

. . . “After Christ, work turns to privilege,
And henceforth one with our humanity
The six-day Worker, working still in us,
Has called us freely to work on with Him
In high companionship. So, happiest!
I count that Heaven itself is only work
To a surer issue. Let us work indeed.”

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

October 14

2010-04-26T22:25:00.000-07:00

“Let us, then, learn that we can never be lonely or forsaken in this life. Shall they forget us because they are ‘made perfect’? Shall they love us the less because they now have power to love us more? If we forget them not, shall they not remember us with God? No trial, then, can isolate us, no sorrow can cut us off from the Communion of Saints. Kneel down, and you are with them; lift up your eyes, and the heavenly world, high above all perturbation, hangs serenely overhead; only a thin veil, it may be, floats between. All whom we loved, and all who loved us, whom we still love no less, while they love us yet more, are ever near, because ever in His presence in whom we live and dwell.”

H. E. MANNING

“O blest communion! fellowship divine!
We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
Yet all are one in Thee, for all are Thine.
Alleluia!”

Bishop WALSHAM HOW

October 13

2010-04-26T22:23:00.000-07:00

“Let us learn from this communion of saints to live in hope. Those who are now at rest were once like ourselves. They were once weak, faulty, and sinful; they had their burdens and hindrances; their slumbering and weariness; their failures and their falls. But now they have overcome. Their life was once homely and commonplace. Their day ran as ours. Morning, and noon, and night came and went to them as to us. Their life, too, was as lonely and sad as yours. Little fretful circumstances, and frequent disturbing changes, wasted away their hours as yours. There is nothing in your life that was not in theirs; there was nothing in theirs but may be also in your own. They have overcome each one, and one by one; each in his turn, when the day came, and God called him to the trial. And so shall you likewise.”

H. E. MANNING

“O may thy soldiers, faithful, true, and bold,
Fight as the saints who nobly fought of old,
And win, with them, the victor’s crown of gold.
Alleluia.”

Bishop WALSHAM HOW

October 12

2010-04-23T00:41:00.000-07:00

“For the first sharp pangs there is no comfort; whatever goodness may surround us, darkness and silence still hang about our pain. But slowly, the clinging companionship with the dead is linked with our living affections and duties, and we begin to feel our sorrow as a solemn invitation, preparing us for that sense of loving, pitying fellowship with the fullest human lot, which, I must think, no one who has tasted it will deny to be the chief blessedness of our life. And especially to know what the last parting is, seems needful to give the utmost sanctity of tenderness to our relations with each other. . . . All the experience that makes my communion with your grief is summed up in a ‘God bless you,’ which represents the swelling of my heart now, as I write, thinking of you and your sense of what has been and is not.” GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans], writing to a friend who was feeling the first anguish of bereavement.

“And love lives on and hath a power to bless
When they who loved are hidden in the grave.”

LOWELL

October 11

2010-04-23T00:39:00.000-07:00

“The heart sometimes grows jealous of itself, and is fearful of being glad. We check the signs of returning joyfulness; we would keep about us the signs of woe, careful for the monument, not content with the grave in the heart. This must not be. After the storm can the blue break out too quickly? Every impulse towards returning happiness is of God. Back to the old work then, with as much of the old care and diligence as may be. In the words of the glorious old German, Richter, ‘The most beautiful wreath we can lay on the grave of our dead, is the fruit wreath of good deeds done to others.’”

GEORGE DAWSON

“How foolish it is not to enjoy with gratitude the consolations which God sends us after the afflictions He sometimes causes us to feel! There is, it seems to me, great wisdom in enduring storms with resignation, and in enjoying the calm when it pleases Him to restore it to us, for this is to follow the ordinance of Providence.”

Madame DE SÉVIGNÉ

October 10

2010-04-23T00:38:00.000-07:00

“Do not cheat thy heart and tell her
‘Grief will pass away,
Hope for fairer times in future,
And forget to-day.’
Tell her if you will that sorrow
Need not come in vain;
Tell her that the lesson taught her
Far outweighs the pain.

“Cheat her not with the old comfort
‘Soon she will forget.’
Bitter truth, alas, - but matter
Rather for regret;
Bid her not ‘Seek other pleasures,
Turn to other things’;
Rather nurse her caged sorrow
Till the captive sings.

“Rather bid her go forth bravely,
And the stranger greet;
Not as foe with spear and buckler,
But as dear friends meet;
Bid her with a strong clasp hold her
By her dusky wings,
Listening for the murmured blessing
Sorrow always brings.”

A. A. PROCTER

October 9

2010-04-23T00:37:00.000-07:00

“Adam Bede had not outlived his sorrow – had not felt it slip from him as a temporary burthen, and leave him the same man again. Do any of us? God forbid. It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling, if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it – if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of the Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy – the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love.”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]

“Surely it is not true blessedness to be free from sorrow, while there is sorrow and sin in the world; sorrow is then a part of love, and love does not seek to throw it off.”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]

“In a world like ours, the measure of our love will be the measure of our tribulation. Love cannot be content while any suffer, cannot rest while any sin.”

A. MACKENNAL

October 8

2010-04-05T07:38:00.000-07:00

“Our veiled and terrible guest (trouble) brings for us, if we accept it, the boon of fortitude, patience, self-control, wisdom, sympathy, faith. If we reject that, then we find in our hands the other gift, - cowardice, weakness, isolation, despair. If your trouble seems to have in it no other possibility of good, at least set yourself to bear it like a man. Let none of its weight come on other shoulders. Try to carry it so that no one shall even see it. Though your heart be sad within, let cheer go out from you to others. Meet them with a kindly presence, considerate words, helpful acts.”

G. S. MERRIAM

“I think that the retrospect of sorrow is, with most persons, not very sorrowful. They see that sorrow is the great chastener.”

Sir A. HELPS

“Sorrow seems sent for our instruction, as we darken the cages of birds when we would teach them to sing.”

RICHTER

October 7

2010-04-05T07:37:00.000-07:00

“There are no times in life when opportunity, the chance to be and do, gathers so richly about the soul as when it has to suffer. Then everything depends on whether the man turns to the lower or the higher helps. If he resorts to mere expedients and tricks, the opportunity is lost. He comes out no richer or greater; nay, he comes out harder, poorer, smaller for his pain. But if he turns to God, the hour of suffering is the truning hour of his life. Opportunity opens before him as the ocean opens before one who sails out of a river. Men have done the best and the worst, the noblest and the basest things the world has seen, under the pressure of excessive pain. Everything depended on whether they looked to the depths or the hills for help.”

PHILLIPS BROOKS

“Let us take heed in time
That God may now be glorified in us;
And while we suffer, let us set our souls
To suffer perfectly; since this alone,
The suffering which is this world’s special grace,
May here be perfected and left behind.”

E. H. KING

October 6

2010-04-05T07:36:00.000-07:00

“I beg you, my dear friend, whatever be your suffering, to learn first of all that not to take your sorrow off, is what God means, but to put strength into you that you may carry it. Be sure your sorrow is not giving you its best, unless it makes you a more thoughtful person than you have ever been before.”

PHILLIPS BROOKS

“Measure thy life by loss instead of gain.
Not by the wine drunk, but by the wine poured forth;
For love’s strength stands in loves sacrifice,
And whoso suffers most has most to give.
. . . . . . . . . . .
How poor were earth if all its martydoms,
If all its struggling sighs of sacrifice
Were swept away, and all were satiate-smooth;
. . . . . . . . . . .
What we win and hold is through some strife.”

E. H. KING

October 5

2010-04-05T07:35:00.000-07:00

“From every sorrow you receive in a spirit of Christian resignation, from every pain you bear patiently, from every great trial you bravely meet, there silently passes to those about you strength, and comfort, and encouragement.”

S. A. SMITH

“Oh, fear not in a world like this,
And thou shalt know ere long,
Know how sublime a thing it is
To suffer and be strong.”

LONGFELLOW

“There are in this world blessed souls whose sorrows spring up into joys for others; whose earthly hopes, laid in the grave with many tears, form the seed whence spring healing flowers and balm for the desolate and the afflicted.”

Mrs H. B. STOWE

October 4

2010-03-30T23:05:00.000-07:00

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love tee to the depth, and breadth, and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love the to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints – I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! And, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.”

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

“Love vaunteth not itself . . . seeketh not its own . . . beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. love never faileth.”

I Cor. xiii

October 3

2010-03-30T23:04:00.000-07:00

“There are two kinds of love, confused together both in man’s nature and in our judgment on it – the love that desires to love, and the love that desires to be loved. The first is always a debtor to the world, the second always finds the world a debtor to him, and complains bitterly that the debt is unpaid. There is no more uncompromising creditor than the creditor for love, there is no avarice more grasping than his avarice. . . . Love that feeds on being loved, and not on loving, cannot conquer death; it turns traitor at the last, confessing its own baseness, that it served for the sake of the reward.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

“It is not love that hurts men. The craving for love, the turning earhly and heavenly affection into merchandise, these hurt, and suffering hurts that we make our own; but the love that brings pain is itself painless. In the midst of longing, heart-hunger, and all the forms of selfishness that we dignify with such high-sounding names, there is one thing at peace. That is love. And about it the passions sweep, grudging, exacting, contending with each other for their gains; but the prayer of love is not to receive joy, nor to escape from pain, only that it may give more, and give for ever.”

MAY KENDALL

“To love – that is the true revelation – the lifting up of the veil. It is as different from simply being loved, as night is from day.”

Mrs OLIPHANT

October 2

2010-03-30T23:03:00.000-07:00

. . . “For fear of flattering, these dreadfully sincere people go on side by side with those they love and admire, giving them all the time, the impression of utter indifference. Parents are so afraid of exciting pride and vanity in their children, by the expression of their love and approbation, that a child sometimes goes sad and discouraged by their side, and learns with surprise, in some chance way, that they are proud and fond of him. There are times when the open expression of a father’s love would be worth more than church or sermon to a boy; and his father cannot utter it - will not show it.”

Mrs H. B. STOWE

“The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone. ‘She never knew how I loved her!’ ‘He never knew what he was to me!’ ‘I always meant to make more of our friendship!’ “I did not know what he was to me till he was gone!’ Such words are the poisoned arrows which cruel death shoots back at us from the door of the sepulchre.

“How much more we might make of our family life, of our friendships, if every secret thought of love blossomed into a deed! There are words, and looks, and little observances, thoughtfulnesses, watchful little attentions, which make it manifest, and there is scarce a family that might not be richer in heart-wealth for more of them.”

Mrs H. B. STOWE

October 1

2010-03-30T23:01:00.000-07:00

“The other thing that represses the utterances of love, is the characteristic shyness of the Anglo-Saxon blood. Oddly enough, a race born of two demonstrative, outspoken nations – the German and the French – has an habitual reserve which is like neither. There is a powerlessness of utterance in our blood that we should fight against, and struggle outwards towards expression. We can educate ourselves to it, if we know and feel the necessity; we can make it a Christian duty, not only to love, but to be loving – not only to be true friends, but to show ourselves friendly. We can make ourselves say the kind things that rise in our hearts and tremble on our lips – do the gentle and helpful deeds which we long to do and shrink back from; and, little by little, it will grow easier – the love spoken will bring back the answer of love – the kind deed will bring back a kind deed in return.”

Mrs H. B. STOWE

“A few more smiles of silent sympathy, a few more tender words, a little more restraint on temper, may make all the difference between happiness and half-happiness to those I live with.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

September 30

2010-03-30T23:00:00.000-07:00

“Oh, my dear friends, you who are letting miserable misunderstandings run on from year to year, meaning to clear them up some day; you who are keeping wretched quarrels alive because you cannot quite make up your mind that now is the day to sacrifice your pride and kill them; you who are passing men sullenly upon the street, not speaking to them out of some silly spite, and yet knowing that it would fill you with shame and remorse if you heard that one of those men were dead tomorrow morning; you who are letting your neighbour starve, till you hear that he is dying of starvation; or letting your friend’s heart ache for a word of appreciation or sympathy, which you mean to give him some day – if you only could know and see and feel, all of a sudden, that ‘the time is short’, how it would break the spell! How you would go instantly and do the thing which you might never have another chance to do.”

PHILLIPS BROOKS

“Why will you defer your good purpose from day to day? Arise and begin in this very instant, and say, Now is the time to be doing, now is the time to be striving, now is the fit time to amend myself.”

THOMAS à KEMPIS

September 29

2010-03-30T22:58:00.000-07:00

“Nothing is sweeter than Love, nothing more courageous, nothing higher, nothing wider, nothing more pleasant, nothing fuller nor better in heaven and earth, because love is born of God, and cannot rest but in God, above all created things.
“He that loves flies, runs and rejoices; he is free, and not bound. He gives all for all, and has all in all; because he rests in One highest above things, from whom all that is good flows and proceeds. Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility; for it thinks all things lawful for itself, and all things possible. It is therefore able to undertake all things, and it completes many things and brings them to a conclusion, where he who does not love faints and lies down. Love watches; and sleeping, slumbers not. Though weary, love is not tired; though pressed, it is not straitened; though alarmed, it is not confounded; but as a lively flame and burning torch, it forces its way upwards, and securely passes through all.”

THOMAS à KEMPIS

“And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”

I COR. xiii 13

September 26

2010-03-07T21:59:00.000-08:00

“By friendship I mean, the greatest love and the greatest usefulness, and the most open communication, and the noblest sufferings, and the most exemplary faithfulness, and the severest truth, and the heartiest counsel, and the greatest union of mind, of which brave men and women are capable.”

JEREMY TAYLOR

“I love to think that Christian friendships may be part of the business of eternity.”

Dr ARNOLD

“Beyond all wealth, honour, or even health, is the attachment we form to noble souls; because to become one with the good, generous, and true, is to become in a measure, good, generous, and true ourselves.”

Dr ARNOLD

September 25

2010-03-07T21:57:00.000-08:00

“But still higher in Him was that intense sensibility to human feeling which made Him by instinct know, without the necessity of speech, the feelings of those He met.
“This is the highest touch of beauty in a character. What is it that most charms us in a friend? It is that he can read the transient expression in our face, and modify himself to suit the feeling we are ourselves but half conscious of possessing; it is that he knows when to be silent and when to speak; it is that he never mistakes, but sees us true, when all the world is wrong about us; it is that he can distinguish the cynicism of tenderness from that of malice, and believe our love though we try to mask our heart. Such a friend has not only power of character, but beauty of character.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

“We are over-hasty to speak – as if God did not manifest Himself by our silent feeling, and make His love felt through ours.”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]

September 28

2010-03-07T21:56:00.000-08:00

“Then, in such hour of need
Of your fainting, dispirited race,
Ye, like angels, appear
Radiant with ardour divine!
Beacons of hope, ye appear!
Langour is not in your heart,
Weakness is not in your word,
Weariness not on your brow.
Ye alight in our van! at your voice
Panic, despair flee away.
Ye move through the ranks, recall
The stragglers, refresh the outworn,
Praise, re-inspire the brave!
Order, courage, return.
Eyes rekindling, and prayers,
Follow your steps as ye go.
Ye fill up the gaps in our files,
Strengthen the wavering line,
Stablish, continue our march,
On, to the bound of the waste,
On, to the City of God.”

MATTHEW ARNOLD

“There are no bounds to the help which spirit can give spirit in the intercourse of a noble life.”

Bishop TEMPLE

September 27

2010-03-07T21:55:00.000-08:00

“And so now and then in our lives, when we learn to love a sweet and noble character, we all feel happier and better for the goodness and charity which is not ours, and yet which seem to belong to us while we are near it. Just as some people and states of mind affect us uncomfortably, so we seem to be true to ourselves with a truthful person, generous-minded with a generous nature, the world seems less disappointing and self-seeking when we think of the just and sweet and unselfish spirits, moving untroubled among dinning and distracting influences. These are our friends in the best and noblest sense. We are happier for their existence – it is so much gain to us. They may have lived at some distant time, we may never have met face to face, or we may have known them and been blessed by their love; but in either case their light shines from afar; distant are their graves, green in some foreign land; their life is for us and with us – its generous example; their song is for our ears, and we hear it and love it still, though the singer may be lying dead.”

Miss THACKERAY

“Honour to those whose words or deeds
Thus help us in our daily needs –
And by their overflow
Raise us from what is low.”

LONGFELLOW

September 24

2010-01-17T23:57:00.000-08:00

“There is a certain unpleasantness in undiscriminating sympathy, which possesses nothing especial nor any moment of reserve. Such a character is without loneliness; we find no mystery in it to charm or lure; we have no sense of depth which we would like to penetrate; we know all, and having known all, pass on by an irresistible necessity, and leave that friend behind, he is superficial, in one word, he wants humanity. Plainly the sympathy of Christ did not want this beauty. He had in its fitting place, the Teutonic quality of reserve. He shrank from over-publicity. He kept His secret heart for those dearest to Him, though His love went over the world. He gave closer sympathy and affection to three among His disciples than to the others. He gave more tenderness to Mary than to Martha, without any favouritism. He still as a personal friend, individualised His affections. . . . Therefore remember that Christ has sanctified what is good in that quality we call reserve. Do not be too anxious to give yourself away, to wear your heart upon your sleeve. It is not only unwise, it is wrong to make your soul common property. For you bring the delicate things of the heart into contempt by exposing them to those who cannot understand them. Nor again, should you claim too much confidence as a duty due to you from your friends. Much of the charm of life is ruined by exacting demands of confidence. Respect the natural modesty of the soul; its more delicate flowers of feeling close their petals when they are touched too rudely. Wait, with curious love, with eager interest, for the time when, all being harmonious, the revelation will come of its own accord, undemanded.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

September 23

2010-01-17T23:56:00.000-08:00

“It is the wisdom of life to receive our friends as from the hand of God, and to give to the task of understanding them the same trouble that we give to the comprehension of the thoughts of God in nature; to work out the drama of our love and friendship, subject to the primary feeling in the mind of Christ, reverence for the human soul. Then, in the midst of the new enjoyment which they bring us, we shall find additional power of progress, and the delights of life will be as much an element of our evolution as its sorrows.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

“Each year to ancient friendships adds a ring,
As to an oak, and precious more and more,
Without deservingness, or help of ours
They grow, and, silent, wider spread each year
Their unbought ring of shelter or of shade.”

LOWELL

“’The theatre of all my actions is fallen’; said an antique personage when his chief friend was dead; and they are fortunate who get a theatre where the audience demands their best.”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]

September 22

2010-01-12T02:19:00.001-08:00

“There is as yet, no culture, no method of progress known to men, that is so rich and complete as that which is ministered by a truly great friendship.
“No natural appetite, no artificial taste, no rivalry of competition, no contagion of social activity, calls out such a large, healthy, symmetrical working of a human nature, as the constant half unconscious power of a friend’s presence whom we thoroughly respect and love. In a true friendship there is emulation without its jealousy; there is imitation without its servility. When one friend teaches another by his present life, there is none of that divorce of truth from feeling, and of feeling from truth, which in so many of the world’s teachings makes truth hard, and feeling weak; but truth is taught, and feeling is inspired, by the same action of one nature on the other, and they keep each other true and warm. Surely there is no more beautiful sight to see in all this world, full as it is of beautiful adjustments and mutual ministrations, than the growth of two friends’ natures who, as they grow old together, are always fathoming, with newer needs, deeper depths of each other’s life, and opening richer views of one another’s helpfulness. and this best culture of personal friendship is taken up and made, in its infinite completion, the gospel method of the progressive saving of the soul by Christ.”

PHILLIPS BROOKS

“A true friend is one who makes us do what we can.”

PHELPS

September 21

2010-01-12T02:17:00.000-08:00

“Life is measured by thought and action, not by time.”

Sir JOHN LUBBOCK

“We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
We should count time by heart throbs. He most lives
Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.”

P. J. BAILEY

“It is not growing like a tree
In bulk doth make men better be;
Or standing long an oak three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere.
A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May,
Although it fall and die that night;
It was the plant and flower of light.
In small proportions we just beauties see,
And in short measures life may perfect be.”

BEN JONSON

September 20

2010-01-05T01:35:00.000-08:00

“Little minds are in a hurry when the object proves (as it commonly does) too big for them; they run, they puzzle, confound and perplex themselves; they want to do everything at once, and never do it all. But a man of sense takes the time necessary for doing well the thing he is about; and his haste to despatch a business only appears by the continuity of his application to it; he pursues it with cool steadiness, and finishes it before he begins any other.”

Lord CHESTERFIELD

“Be methodical in your use of time. Make a scheme for its regular systematic use, even if it is often impossible to carry it out.
“Be scrupulously punctual. And make a careful use of your fragments of time. It is wonderful how much can be got through by these means. A great deal of study, or writing, or other work, can be done by a resolute will in odd quarters of hours, and very often we can get no more. Nothing is more commonly said than that if you want something done, you will have a much better chance of getting it done by a busy man than by an idle one, and this simply because the former has learnt the secret of economising his time.”

Bishop WALSHAM HOW

September 19

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“You need not suppose that I am in a constant hurry of business. Although my engagements have now so much increased that I scarcely know how to get through them, yet I have accustomed myself to preserve a certain quietness of mind among them all. I take up one thing in order after another. I try to fix my whole thoughts upon the one thing that lies before me, as if I had nothing else to attend to. In this way I get on very well; what is done is done systematically; my mind remains clear, and does not feel oppressed by a multitude of claims on its attention.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

“Let the duties that lie nearest you be always the most imperative; the members of your own home-circle will always have the first claim on your affection and usefulness. I lay this down as an unalterable rule.”

A. SIEVEKING

“In God’s designs there is no haste, no rest, no weariness, no discontinuity; all things are done by Him in the majesty of silence, and they are seen under a light that shineth quietly in the darkness, ‘showing all things in the slow history of their ripening’.”

Archdeacon FARRAR

September 18

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“It would be well if in the freshness of the morning hour we were to arrange our engagements, as far as possible, with a little forethought and discretion, and make up the plan of our day until bedtime. . . . This is consideration beforehand – thoughtfulness; but it is not the thoughtfulness which the Lord forbids, for it lies within the horizon of to-day. What he does forbid, and what unhappily it is very hard to check in oneself, is the previous contemplation and adjustment of difficulties which stretch into that unknown tomorrow, which belong not to the cycle of the present day.”

SEWELL

“Where persons are heavily engaged there is a certain feverish fidgetiness to take up several tasks at once, which greatly interferes with quietness and thoughtfulness of mind, and so with progress. Let the aim of such persons be to do the thing well rather than to get through it fast.”

GOULBURN

September 17

2010-01-01T01:07:00.000-08:00

“In studies, whatsoever a man commandeth upon himself, let him set houres for it, but whatever is agreeable to his nature, let him take no care for any set times.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

“I knew a man that had it for a by-word when he saw men hasten to a conclusion, ‘Stay a little that we may make an end the sooner.’ . . . To choose time is to save time.”

BACON

“It is astonishing how fruitful of improvement a short season becomes when eagerly seized and faithfully used. It has often been observed, that those who have the most time at their disposal profit by it the least. A single hour in the day, steadily given to the study of some interesting subject, brings unexpected accumulations of knowledge.”

CHANNING

“Well-arranged time is the surest mark of a well-arranged mind.”

PITMAN

September 16

2010-01-01T01:06:00.000-08:00

“Rise! For the day is passing,
And you lie dreaming on;
The others have buckled their armour,
And forth to the fight have gone.
A place in the ranks awaits you,
Each man has some part to play;
The Past and the Future are nothing,
In the face of the stern To-day.

“Rise from your dreams of the future
Of gaining some hard-fought field,
Of storming some airy fortress,
Or bidding some giant yield;
Your future has deeds of glory,
Of honour (God grant it may!)
But your arm will never be stronger,
Or the need so great as To-day.”

A. A. PROCTER

“Toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing,
Onward through life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night’s repose.”

LONGFELLOW

September 15

2010-01-01T01:05:00.000-08:00

“Have we found that anxiety about possible consequences increased the clearness of our judgment, made us wiser and braver in meeting the present, and arming ourselves for the future? . . . If we had prayed for this day’s bread, and left the next to itself, if we had not huddled our days together, not alloting to each its appointed task, but ever deferring that to the future, and drawing upon the future for its own troubles, which must be met when they come whether we have anticipated them or not, we should have found a simplicity and honesty in our lives, a capacity for work, an enjoyment in it, to which we are now, for the most part, strangers.”

F. D. MAURICE

“To shape the whole future is not our problem; but only to shape faithfully a small part of it, according to rules slready known. It is perhaps possible, for each of us, who will with due earnestness enquire, to ascertain clearly what he, for his own part, ought to do; this let him, with true heart, do, and continue doing. The general issue will, as it has always done, rest well with a Higher Intelligence, than ours. . . . This day thou knowest ten commanded duties, seest in thy mind ten things which should be done for one that thou doest! Do one of them, this of itself will show thee ten others which can and shall be done.”

CARLYLE

September 14

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“With his first waking consciousness, he can set himself to take a serious manly view of the day before him. He ought o know pretty well on what lines his difficulty is likely to come, whether in being irritable, or domineering, or sharp in his bargains, or self-absorbed, or whatever it be; and now, in this quiet hour, he can take a good, full look at his enemy, and make up his mind to beat him. It is a good time, too, for giving his thoughts a range quite beyond himself, - beyond even his own moral struggles, - a good time, there in the stillness, for goiug into the realm of other lives. His wife, - what needs has she for help, for sympathy, that he can meet? His children, - how can he make the day sweeter to them? This acquaintance, who is having a hard time; this friend, who dropped a word to you yesterday that you hardly noticed in your hurry, but that comes up to you now, revealing in him some finer trait, some deeper hunger, than you had guessed before, - now you can think these things over. so you get your day somewhat into right persepctive and proportion before you begin it.”

G. S. MERRIAM

“Earnestness of life is the only passport to the satisfaction of life.”

Christian Life

September 13

2009-12-21T23:00:00.000-08:00

“To take up the Cross of Christ is no great action done once for all; it consists in the continual practice of small duties which are distasteful to us.”

J. H. NEWMAN

“Every morning, receive thine own special cross from the hands of thy heavenly Father.”

SCUPOLI

“If thou bearest thy cross willingly, it will bear thee. If thou bearest it unwillingly, thou increasest thy load, and yet thou must bear it.”

THOMAS à KEMPIS

“Thou hast not always promised me rest from my burden, but Thou hast always offered me rest in my burden.”

MATHESON

September 12

2009-12-21T22:57:00.000-08:00

“I cannot mount to heaven beneath this ban;
Can Christian hope survive so far below
The level of the happiness of man?
Can angels’ wings in these dark waters grow?
A spirit voice replied, ‘From bearing right
Our sorest burthens, comes fresh strength to bear;
And so we rise again towards the light,
And quit the sunless depths for upper air.
Meek patience is as diver’s breath to all
Who sink in sorrow’s sea, and many a ray
Comes gleaming downward from the source of day,
To guide us re-ascending from our fall,
The rocks have bruised thee sore, but angels’ wings
Grow best from bruises, hope from anguish springs.’”

CHARLES TURNER

“We need as much the cross we bear
As air we breathe, as light we see;
It draws us to Thy side in prayer,
It binds us to our strength in Thee.”

A. L. WARING

September 11

2009-12-21T22:55:00.000-08:00

“Thou art my rock and my fortress; therefore for Thy name’s sake lead me, and guide me.”

PSALM xxxi 3

“Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on;
The night is dark, and I am far from home,
Lead Thou me on.
Keep Thou my feet, I do not ask to see
The distant scene, one step enough for me.”

J. H. NEWMAN

“The crosses which we make for ourselves by our over-anxiety as to the future are not heaven-sent crosses. We tempt God by our false wisdom, seeking to forestall His arrangements, and struggling to supplement His providence by our own provisions. The fruit of our wisdom is always bitter. God suffers it to be so that we may be discomfited when we forsake His fatherly guidance. The future is not ours; we may never have a future; or if it comes, it may be wholly different from all we foresaw.”

Fénélon

September 10

2009-12-15T06:14:00.001-08:00

“I sorrowed that the golden day was dead,
Its light no more the country-side adorning;
But whilst I grieved, behold the east grew red
With Morning.

“I sighed that merry Spring was forced to go,
And doff the wreaths that did so well become her;
But whilst I murmured at her absence – lo
‘Twas summer.

I mourned because the daffodils were killed
By burning skies that scorched my early posies;
But while for these I pined, my hands were filled

With roses.

“Half broken-hearted I bewailed the end
Of friendship, than which none had once seemed nearer;
But whilst I wept I found a closer friend
And dearer.

“Thus I learned old pleasures are estranged,
Only that something better may be given –
Until, at last, we find this earth exchanged
For Heaven.”

September 9

2009-12-15T06:13:00.000-08:00

“God brings good out of evil, and sometimes what we call evil is not so evil in reality as what we in our ignorance would put in its place. These perplexities cannot always be explained; but many of them can and are. Many times what we fancied was hurtful has been of the greatest service; what we flinched from has made us happier; what we dreaded has come and gone and left a blessing behind it. Many a time what we longed for has been denied us, and the denial has made us happier than if we had obtained it. He must be very short-sighted indeed who cannot see in his own life many instances of his having been led by paths that he did not know.”

Bishop TEMPLE

“I see the wrong that round me lies,
I feel the guilt within;
I hear with groan and travail-cries
The world confess its sin.

“Yet, in the maddening maze of things,
And tossed by storm and flood,
To one fixed stake my spirit clings,
I know that God is good.

“The wrong that pains my soul below
I dare not throne above;
I know not of His hate – I know
His goodness and His love.”

WHITTIER

September 8

2009-12-15T06:12:00.000-08:00

“Know well, my soul, God’s hand controls
Whate’er thou fearest;
Round him in calmest music rolls
Whate’er thou hearest.

“What to thee is shadow, to Him is day,
And the end He knoweth,
And not on a blind and aimless way
The spirit goeth.”

WHITTIER

“We are all of us like the weavers of the Gobelins, who, following out the pattern of a well-known artist, endeavour to match the threads of divers colours on the wrong side of the woof, and do not see the result of their labours. It is only when the texture is complete that they can admire at their ease those lovely flowers and figures, those splendid pictures, worthy of the palaces of kings. So it is with us. We work, we suffer, and we see neither the end nor the fruit. But God sees it, and when He releases us from our task, He will disclose to our wandering gaze what He, the great artist, everywhere present and invisible, has woven out of those toils that now seem so sterile, and He will then deign to hang up, in his palace of gold, the flimsy web that we have spun.”

FREDERIC OZONAN