July 16

“It was Wednesday evening, and Merle walked down through the fields to preach, burning with one thought – the worth of a man.
“What Tom’s one year of Christian life had done! And all around were lives as precious – not all as gifted, but everyone as capable of being filled with the spirit of God – sinking to the low level of a careless, tippling life – drifting up to the great cities, where we call them ‘redundant masses’, and wonder how to endure the pressure of so great a multitude – and each unit might be a temple of the Holy Ghost. For Tom himself might have sunk with all the rest, into the slough, had no hand arrested him. And Christians can live to dress and dine, and think it much to spend an hour a week in surface labour, while this tremendous ruin of the most precious thing created is going on.”

E. B. BAYLY

There is work which everyone of us ought to be doing at our very doors. You have a fellowship, everyone of you, in this solidarity of evil. You cannot wipe off from your souls, as with a wet cloth, as though it were no concern of yours, the stains left by the sins of others. From each one of you radiates invisibly an interminable web work, of which the implicated consequences, if summed together, are incalculable. But if it be so in evil. . . . so is it also, thank God! with any good you do; it may put on white robes, and go forth as an angel to bless the world. Oh, if we could all, everyone of us, be made to feel how awful is our common responsibility for the general evil, how urgent is our individual duty to labour for the common good, we should see in a regenerated world the fulfilment of the olden prophecy. . . . “

Archdeacon FARRAR

July 14

“Oh, dark is the background to the sunny landscape of our comfortable lives. Behind our rich houses and costly comforts are bleak rooms and worn clothes, through which the wintry wind drives its dagger, where starvation creeps into the bed with mother and child and eats into blood and bone, where, at the best, life is a long and weary strife against the force of laws which pitilessly inflict their worst sentence upon the innocent and weak. This is a ghastly burden, and it lies heavy upon millions in this country.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

“I have just been looking over a newspaper, one of the most painful and solemn studies in the world, if it be read thoughtfully. So much of sin and so much of suffering in the world are there displayed, and no one seems able to remedy either. And then the thought of my own private life, so full of comforts, is very startling when I contrast it to the lot of millions whose portion is so full of distress or trouble. May I be kept humble and zealous, and may God give me grace to labour in my generation for the good of my brethren, and for His glory!”

Dr ARNOLD

July 11

“Man has rights by nature. . . . They may all be comprised in the right which belongs to every rational being, to exercise his powers for the promotion of his own and others’ Happiness and Virtue. These are the great purposes of his existence. For these his powers were given, and to these he is bound to devote them. He is bound to make himself and others better and happier, according to his ability. His ability for this work is a sacred trust from God, the greatest of all trusts. He must answer for the waste or abuse of it.”

W. E. CHANNING

“If there is anything which brings still more sadness to the heart than the degradation of the ignorant, it is surely the thought of those called by their own hearts, by education and the needs of others, to some noble purpose, who are yet content to dream away their lives, indifferent spectators of the sorrows, sins, and wrongs of men, when they might have been leaders in the battle against evil. The age of heroic deeds is not gone by. It cannot be but that a ready answer will be given to the voice as of a trumpet call – ‘Et nos vincamus aliquid!’ ‘Let us, too, conquer something!’”

From Life of C. Lowder

July 10

“’We know not what we do’, some cry; but they ought to know. They ought to think that more evils are wrought by want of thought than by want of heart, and that thoughtlessness when encouraged or unchecked, or long protracted after warnings given, becomes want of heart. The impulse of pity is checked by selfishness, the desire of helping by vanity and love of show, by disinclination to break in upon an easy-going life; and the practice of love being troublesome, divine charity dies at last.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

“What, my soul, was thy errand here?
Was it mirth or ease,
Or heaping up dust from year to year?
‘Nay, none of these.’

“What hast thou wrought for Right and Truth,
For God and man,
From the golden hours of bright-eyed youth,
To life’s mid span?”

WHITTIER