graces that specially belong to heaven. Try hard to be humble, to be
free from all conceit, to question your own opinions, to give up your
own way, to put simplicity first among all excellences of character, to
be ready to think yourself in the wrong, to prefer others to yourself;
for this character is nearest to God's heart, and to babes who are of
this sort does God reveal His most secret mysteries."
Bishop TEMPLE.
The Spectrum of Love
May 10
"The spectrum of Love has nine ingredients:--
_Patience_--'Love suffereth long.'
_Kindness_--'And is kind.'
_Generosity_--'Love envieth not.'
_Humility_--'Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.'
_Courtesy_--'Doth not behave itself unseemly.'
_Unselfishness_--'Seeketh not her own.'
_Good Temper_--'Is not easily provoked.'
_Guilelessness_--'Thinketh no evil.'
_Sincerity_--'Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in
the truth.'
Patience; kindness; generosity; humility; courtesy; unselfishness; good
temper; guilelessness; sincerity--these make up the supreme gift, the
stature of the perfect man. You will observe that all are in relation to
men, in relation to life, in relation to the known to-day and the near
to-morrow, and not to the unknown eternity. We hear much of love to God;
Christ spoke much of love to man. We make a great deal of peace with
heaven; Christ made much of peace on earth. Religion is not a strange or
added thing, but the inspiration of the secular life, the breathing of
an eternal spirit through this temporal world. The supreme thing, in
short, is not a thing at all, but the giving of a further finish to the
multitudinous words and acts which make up the sum of every common day."
_The Greatest Thing in the World_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
"My Duty to my Neighbour"
MAY 11
"There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their
neighbours good. One person I have to make good: myself. But my duty to
my neighbour is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make
him happy--if I may."
_Across the Plains_, R. L. STEVENSON.
"Of all the weapons we wield against wrong, there is none more effective
than pure and burning joy."
_The Gospel of Joy_, STOPFORD BROOKE.
"There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behaviour, like the
wish to scatter joy and not pain around us."
EMERSON.
Duty of giving Happiness
MAY 12
"It is astonishing how large a part of Christ's precepts is devoted
solely to the inculcation of happiness. How much of His life, too, was
spent simply in making people happy! There was no word more often on His
lips than 'blessed,' and it is recognised by Him as a distinct end in
life, _the_ end for this life, to secure the happiness of others. This
simple grace, too, needs little equipment. Christ had little. One need
scarcely even be happy one's self. Holiness, of course, is a greater
word, but we cannot produce that in others. That is reserved for God
Himself, but what is put in our power is happiness, and for that each
man is his brother's keeper. Now society is an arrangement for producing
and sustaining human happiness, and temper is an agent for thwarting and
destroying it. Look at the parable of the Prodigal Son for a moment, and
see how the elder brother's wretched pettiness, explosion of temper,
churlishness, spoiled the happiness of a whole circle. First, it
certainly spoiled his own. How ashamed of himself he must have been when
the fit was over, one can well guess. Yet these things are never so
quickly over as they seem. Self-disgust and humiliation may come at
once, but a good deal else within has to wait till the spirit is tuned
again. For instance, prayer must wait. A man cannot pray till the
sourness is out of his soul. He must first forgive his brother who
trespassed against him before he can go to God to have his own
trespasses forgiven."
_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
Duty of giving Happiness
MAY 13
"The function of culture is not merely to train the powers of enjoyment,
but first and supremely for helpful service."
Bishop POTTER.
"It was often in George Eliot's mind and on her lips that the only
worthy end of all learning, of all science, of all life, in fact, is
that human beings should love one another better. Culture merely for
culture's sake can never be anything but a sapless root, capable of
producing at best a shrivelled branch.... She was cheered by the hope
and by the belief in gradual improvement of the mass; for in her view
each individual must find the better part of happiness in helping
another. She often thought it wisest not to raise too ambitious an
ideal, especially in young people, but to impress on ordinary natures
the immense possibilities of making a small circle brighter and better.
Few are born to do the great work of the world, but all are born to
this. And to the natures capable of the larger effort the field of
usefulness will constantly widen."
_The Life of George Eliot_, J. W. CROSS.
"Blessed are the Happiness Makers"
MAY 14
"Have you ever noticed how much of Christ's life was spent in doing kind
things--in _merely_ doing kind things? Run over it with that in view,
and you will find that He spent a great proportion of His time simply in
making people happy, in doing good turns to people."
_The Greatest Thing in the World_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
"Take life all through, its adversity as well as its prosperity, its
sickness as well as its health, its loss of its rights as well as its
enjoyment of them, and we shall find that no natural sweetness of
temper, much less any acquired philosophical equanimity, is equal to the
support of a uniform habit of kindness. Nevertheless, with the help of
grace, the habit of saying kind words is very quickly formed, and when
once formed it is not speedily lost. Sharpness, bitterness, sarcasm,
acute observation, divination of motives--all these things disappear
when a man is earnestly conforming himself to the image of Christ Jesus.
The very attempt to be like our dearest Lord is already a wellspring of
sweetness within us, flowing with an easy grace over all who come within
our reach."
F. W. FABER.
"Blessed are the Happiness Makers. Blessed are they who know how to
shine on one's gloom with their cheer."
HENRY WARD BEECHER.
Character--The Right Atmosphere
MAY 15
"Character cannot be formed without action. Through it strength comes.
But every action must have its reaction upon the nature of the one who
puts it forth. If it does not, it fails of that which is its highest
result; for the finest expression of a man's nature is not to be found
in action, but in that very intangible thing which we call his
atmosphere. There are a great many people who are alert, energetic, and
decisive, but who give forth very little of this rare effluence--this
quality which seems to issue out of the very recesses of one's nature.
It is, however, through this quality that the most constant influence is
exercised; that influence which is not only put forth most steadily, but
which penetrates and affects others in the most searching way. The air
we breathe has much to do with health; in a relaxing atmosphere it is
difficult to work; in an atmosphere of vitality it is easy to work. We
never meet some people without going away from them with our ideals a
little blurred, or our faith in them a little disturbed. We can never
part from others without a sense of increased hope. There are those who
invigorate us by simple contact; something escapes from them of which
they are not aware and which we cannot analyse, which makes us believe
more deeply in ourselves and our kind.
"So far as charm is concerned, there is no quality which contributes so
much to it as the subtle thing we call atmosphere. There are some people
who do not need to speak in order not only to awaken our respect, but to
give us a sense of something rare and fine. In such an influence, all
that is most individual and characteristic flows together, and the woman
reveals herself without being conscious that she is making herself
known. Such an atmosphere in a home creates a sentiment and organises a
life which would not be possible if one should attempt to fashion these
things by intention. The finest things, like happiness, must be sought
by indirection and are the results of character, rather than objects of
immediate pursuit."
"It is always good to know, if only in passing, charming human beings.
It refreshes one like flowers, and woods, and clear brooks."
GEORGE ELIOT.
Character--Child-like-ness
MAY 16
"Jesus afterwards focussed the new type of character in a lovely
illustration which is not always appreciated at its full value, because
we deny it perspective. Every reader of the Gospels has marked the
sympathy of Jesus with children. How He watched their games! How angry
He was with His disciples for belittling them! How He used to warn men,
whatever they did, never to hurt a little child! How grateful were
children's praises when all others had turned against Him! One is apt to
admire the beautiful sentiment, and to forget that children were more to
Jesus than helpless gentle creatures to be loved and protected. They
were His chief parable of the Kingdom of Heaven. As a type of character
the Kingdom was like unto a little child, and the greatest in the
Kingdom would be the most child-like. According to Jesus, a
well-conditioned child illustrates better than anything else on earth
the distinctive features of Christian character. Because he does not
assert nor aggrandise himself. Because he has no memory for injuries,
and no room in his heart for a grudge. Because he has no previous
opinions, and is not ashamed to confess his ignorance. Because he can
imagine, and has the key of another world, entering in through the ivory
gate and living amid the things unseen and eternal. The new society of
Jesus was a magnificent imagination, and he who entered it must lay
aside the world standards and ideals of character, and become as a
little child."
_The Mind of the Master_, Dr. JOHN WATSON.
Character--Negative Virtues
MAY 17
"Some people seem to be here in the world just on their guard all the
while, always so afraid of doing wrong that they never do anything
really right. They do not add to the world's moral force; as the man,
who, by constant watchfulness over his own health, just keeps himself
from dying, contributes nothing to the world's vitality. All merely
negative purity has something of the taint of the impurity that it
resists. The effort not to be frivolous is frivolous itself. The effort
not to be selfish is very apt to be only another form of selfishness."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
"Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues. It
is good to abstain and teach others to abstain, from all that is sinful
and hurtful. But making a business of it leads to emaciation of
character, unless one feeds largely also on the more nutritious diet of
active sympathetic benevolence."
O. W. HOLMES.
"The seductions of life are strong in every age and station; we make
idols of our affections, idols of our customary virtues; we are content
to avoid the inconvenient wrong, and to forego the inconvenient right
with almost equal self-approval, until at last we make a home for our
conscience among the negative virtues and the cowardly vices."
_The Life of R. L. Stevenson_, GRAHAM BALFOUR.
Character
MAY 18
"The moments of our most important decisions are often precisely those
in which nothing seems to have been decided; and only long afterwards,
when we perceive with astonishment that the Rubicon has been crossed, do
we realise that in that half-forgotten instant of hesitation as to some
apparently unimportant side issue, in that unconscious movement which
betrayed a feeling of which we were not aware, our choice was made. The
crises of life come, like the Kingdom of Heaven, without observation.
Our characters, and not our deliberate actions, decide for us; and even
when the moment of crisis is apprehended at the time by the troubling of
the water, action is generally a little late. Character, as a rule,
steps down first."
_Diana Tempest_, MARY CHOLMONDELEY.
"Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards--they simply unveil them
to the eyes of men. Silently and imperceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we
grow and wax strong, or we grow and wax weak, and at last some crisis
shows us what we have become."
Bishop WESTCOTT.
Character--"Our Echoes roll from Soul to Soul"
MAY 19
"One of the main seats of our weakness lies in this very notion, that
what we do at the moment cannot matter much; for that we shall be able
to alter and mend and patch it just as we like by-and-by."
HARE.
"We sleep, but the loom of life never stops; and the pattern which was
weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up to-morrow."
BEECHER.
"Let every soul
Heed what it doth to-day, because to-morrow
The same thing it shall find gone forward there
To meet and make and judge it."
_The Light of Asia_, E. ARNOLD.
"Our echoes roll from soul to soul, And grow for ever and for ever."
TENNYSON.
Habit
MAY 20
"Like flakes of snow that fall unperceived upon the earth, the seemingly
unimportant events of life succeed one another. As the snow gathers
together, so are our habits formed: no single flake that is added to the
pile produces a sensible change; no single flake creates, however it may
exhibit, a man's character; but as the tempest hurls the avalanche down
the mountain, and overwhelms the inhabitant and his habitation, so
passion, acting upon the elements of mischief, which pernicious habits
have brought together by imperceptible accumulation, may overwhelm the
edifice of truth and virtue."
JEREMY BENTHAM.
"In the conduct of life, habits count for more than maxims, because
habit is a living maxim, become flesh and instinct. To reform one's
maxims is nothing: it is but to change the title of the book. To learn
new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life
is but a tissue of habits."
_Amiel's Journal._
Habit
MAY 21
"The Hell to be endured hereafter which theology tells, is no worse than
the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning
our characters the wrong way. Could the young realise how soon they will
become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to
their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates,
good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or
of vice leaves its never-so-little scar."
_Psychology_, Professor WILLIAM JAMES.
"Routine is a terrible master, but she is a servant whom we can hardly
do without. Routine as a law is deadly. Routine as a resource in the
temporary exhaustion of impulse and suggestion is often our salvation."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
"It is just as easy to form a good habit as it is a bad one. And it is
just as hard to break a good habit as a bad one. So get the good ones
and keep them."
MCKINLEY.
Sin has its Pedigree
MAY 22
"One false note will spoil the finest piece of music, and one little
sin, as we deem it, may ruin the most promising character, involving it
in a network of unforeseen consequences out of which there may be no
escape."
_Life Here and Hereafter_, Canon MACCOLL.
"There is a physical demonstration of sin as well as a religious; and no
sin can come in among the delicate faculties of the mind, or among the
coarser fibres of the body, without leaving a stain, either as a
positive injury to the life, or, what is equally fatal, as a
predisposition to commit the same sin again. This predisposition is
always one of the most real and appalling accompaniments of the stain of
sin. There is scarcely such a thing as an isolated sin in a man's life.
Most sins can be accounted for by what has gone before. Every sin, so to
speak, has its own pedigree, and is the result of the accumulated force,
which means the accumulated stain of many a preparatory sin."
_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
Temptation
MAY 23
"Two things a genuine Christian never does. He never makes light of any
known sin, and he never admits it to be invincible."
Canon LIDDON.
"We always meet the temptation which is to expose us when we least
expect it."
_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
"It is of the essence of temptation that it should come on us unawares."
_Pastor Pastorum_, HENRY LATHAM.
"If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let
us at least resist our temptations."
EMERSON.
Sin
MAY 24
"We judge of sins, as we judge of most things, by their outward form. We
arrange the vices of our neighbours according to a scale which society
has tacitly adopted, placing the more gross and public at the foot, the
slightly less gross higher up, and then by some strange process the
scale becomes obliterated. Finally it vanishes into space, leaving
lengths of itself unexplored, its sins unnamed, unheeded, and unshunned.
But we have no balance to weigh sins. Coarser and finer are but words of
our own. The chances are, if anything, that the finer are the lower. The
very fact that the world sees the coarser sins so well is against the
belief that they are the worst. The subtle and unseen sin, that sin in
the part of the nature most near to the spiritual, ought to be more
degrading than any other. Yet for many of the finer forms of sin society
has yet no brand."
_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
"Tried by final tests, and reduced to its essential elements, sin is the
preference of self to God, and the assertion of the human will against
the Will of God. With Jesus, from first to last, sin is selfishness."
_The Mind of the Master_, Dr. JOHN WATSON.
Sin
MAY 25-26
"We deceive ourselves in another way, namely, by seeking for all manner
of excuses and palliations. The strength of the temptation, or the
suddenness of it, or the length of it; our own weakness, our natural
tendency to that particular sort of sin; our wishes to be better, the
excellence of our feelings, the excellence of our desires; the
peculiarity of our circumstances, the special disadvantages which make
us worse off than others; all these we put before our minds as excuses
for having done wrong, and persuade ourselves too often that wrong is
not really wrong, and that though the deed was sinful the doer of it was
not. I do not mean that these palliations are never worth anything, nor
do I mean that in every case the same deed is the same sin. There are no
doubt infinite varieties of guilt in what appears outwardly the same
deed, and God will distinguish between them and will judge justly. But
the habit of mind which leads us to palliate our sins and find good
excuses for them, has this dangerous tendency, that it blinds us to the
evil of evil. We slip into the delusion that we are better than we
seem, that our faults look worse than they are, that inside we have good
dispositions, and good desires, and warm feelings, and religious
emotions, and that it is only the outside that is marked by those evil
stains. This _is_ a delusion and a grievous delusion. You cannot _be_
good and _do_ wrong. You cannot _be_ righteous and _do_ unrighteousness.
Granted that you may slip once into a sin which notwithstanding is not
really a part of your nature. Still, this cannot happen several times
over. Make no mistake. If you _do_ wrong the deed is a real part of your
life, and cannot be removed out of it by any fancy of yours that it is
on your circumstances, your temptations, your peculiar disadvantages
that the blame can be cast, still less by any wishes or emotions or
feelings even of the most religious kind."
Bishop TEMPLE.
"The strength of a man's virtue is not to be measured by the efforts he
makes under pressure, but by his ordinary conduct."
PASCAL.
Sins of the Spirit
MAY 27
"We must remember that it is by the mercy of Christ that we are saved
from being what we might have been. 'There goes John Bradford, but for
the grace of God,' said a good man when he saw a criminal being led to
execution. We are too apt to take the credit to ourselves for our
circumstances. Imagine that you were born of poor parents out of work in
Whitechapel, and had to pick up your living in the docks, or that you
were a working girl in Bethnal Green, trying to keep your poor parents
or nurse a sick brother out of making match-boxes at 2-1/4d. a gross,
and then thank God you were spared the temptation to a bad life, which
they have to undergo. So, again, we must remember that sins of the
spirit are quite as bad in the eyes of Christ as sins of the flesh; He
never spoke a hard word of the publican and sinner, but He lashed with
His scorn the 'Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.' The sins that we
respectable people commit lightly every day, of pride and indolence and
indifference to the sufferings of the poor, may be worse in His sight
than the most flagrant sins of those who know no better."
_Friends of the Master_, Bishop WINNINGTON INGRAM.
Sin
MAY 28
"I have often observed in the course of my experience of human life,
that every man, even the worst, has something good about him; though
often nothing else than a happy temperament of constitution, inclining
him to this or that virtue. For this reason, no man can say in what
degree any other person besides himself can be, with strict justice,
called wicked. Let any one with the strictest character for regularity
of conduct among us, examine impartially how many vices he has never
been guilty of, not from any care or vigilance, but for want of
opportunity, or some accidental circumstances intervening; how many of
the weaknesses of mankind he has escaped because he was out of the line
of such temptation; and--what often, if not always, weighs more than all
the rest--how much he is indebted to the world's good opinion because
the world does not know all: I say, any man who can thus think will scan
the failings, nay, the faults and crimes of mankind with a brother's
eye."
BURNS.
"Very late in life, and only after many experiences, does a man learn,
at the sight of a fellow-creature's real failing or weakness, to
sympathise with him, and help him without a secret self-congratulation
at his own virtue and strength, but on the contrary, with every humility
and comprehension of the naturalness, almost the inevitableness of sin."
_An Unhappy Girl_, IVAN TURGENEV.
Sin
MAY 29
"Remove from us the protection, the encompassing safeguards and shelters
we enjoy; withdraw the influences for good that are daily and weekly
dropped on us like gentle dew from heaven, and have dropped ever since
we had any being; deprive us of the comforts and interests, the innocent
substitutes for forbidden pleasures; expose us to the loneliness, the
vacancy, the dreary monotony, the hopeless struggle, the despair in
which the majority of the men and women who fall find themselves
immersed; and bring before us, thus exposed and bereft, what temptation
you will--uncleanness, intemperance, theft, lying, blasphemy--and not
one in ten of ordinary Christian people, I believe, would stand before
it."
R. W. BARBOUR.
"Looking within myself, I note how thin
A plank of station, chance, or prosperous fate,
Doth fence me from the clutching waves of sin;--
In my own heart I find the worst man's mate,
And see not dimly the smooth-hinged gate
That opes to those abysses
Where ye grope darkly,--ye who never knew
On your young hearts love's consecrating dew
Or felt a mother's kisses,
Or home's restraining tendrils round you curled;
Ah, side by side with heart's-ease in this world,
The fatal night-shade grows and bitter rue!"
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
Conscience
MAY 30
"Conscience is harder than our enemies,
Knows more, accuses with more nicety,
Nor needs to question Rumour if we fall
Below the perfect model of our thought."
GEORGE ELIOT.
"If a man has nothing to reproach himself with, he can bear anything."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
"Character is the ground of trust and the guarantee for good living, and
that character only is sound which rests upon a good conscience and a
clean heart and a strong will."
Dr. JOHN WATSON.
Repentance
MAY 31
"What is true contrition? Sorrow for sin in itself, not for sin's
consequences."
_The Guided Life_, Canon BODY.
"Remorse and repentance are two very different things. Repentance leads
back to life; but remorse ends often in the painless apathy and fatal
mortification of despair."
Dean FARRAR.
"Penitence is like the dawn.... It is the breaking of the light in the
soul,--dark enough sometimes no doubt, but a darkness giving place
steadily to the growing light."
Bishop WALSHAM HOW.