October 24

“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

“’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 21

“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

“’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

“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 17

“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

“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