JUNE 1
"The father says of his profligate son whom he has never done one wise
or vigorous thing to make a noble and pure-minded man: 'I cannot tell
how it has come. It has not been my fault. I put him into the world and
this came out.' The father whose faith has been mean and selfish says
the same of his boy who is a sceptic. Everywhere there is this cowardly
casting off of responsibilities upon the dead circumstances around us.
It is a very hard treatment of the poor, dumb, helpless world which
cannot answer to defend itself. It takes us as we give ourselves to it.
It is our minister fulfilling our commissions for us upon our own souls.
If we say to it, 'Make us noble,' it does make us noble. If we say to
it, 'Make us mean,' it does make us mean. And then we take the nobility
and say, 'Behold, how noble I have made myself.' And we take the
meanness and say, 'See how mean the world has made me.'"
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
"Speaking of ancestors--'What right have I to question them, or judge
them, or bring them forward in my life as being responsible for my
nature? If I roll back the responsibility to them, had they not fathers?
and had not their fathers fathers? and if a man rolls back his deeds
upon those who are his past, then where will responsibility be found at
all, and of what poor cowardly stuff is each of us?"
_The Mettle of the Pasture_, JAMES LANE ALLEN.
Heredity
JUNE 2
"This tracing of the sin to its root now suggests this further
topic--its cure. Christianity professes to cure anything. The process
may be slow, the discipline may be severe, but it can be done. But is
not temper a constitutional thing? Is it not hereditary, a family
failing, a matter of temperament, and can _that_ be cured? Yes, if there
is anything in Christianity. If there is no provision for that, then
Christianity stands convicted of being unequal to human need. What
course then did the father take, in the case before us, to pacify the
angry passions of his ill-natured son? Mark that he made no attempt in
the first instance to reason with him! To do so is a common mistake, and
utterly useless both with ourselves and others. We are perfectly
convinced of the puerility of it all, but that does not help us in the
least to mend it. The malady has its seat in the affections, and
therefore the father went there at once. Reason came in its place, and
the son was supplied with valid arguments--stated in the last verse of
the chapter--against his conduct, but he was first plied with love."
_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
Heredity
JUNE 3
"Any insistence on heredity would have depreciated responsibility, and
Jesus held every man to his own sin. Science and theology have joined
hands in magnifying heredity and lowering individuality, till a man
comes to be little more than the resultant of certain forces, a
projectile shot forth from the past, and describing a calculated course.
Jesus made a brave stand for each man as the possessor of will-power,
and master of his life. He sadly admitted that a human will might be
weakened by evil habits of thought, He declared gladly that the Divine
Grace reinforced the halting will: but, with every qualification,
decision still rested in the last issue with the man. 'If Thou wilt,
Thou canst make me clean,' as if his cure hinged on the Divine Will. Of
course, I am willing, said Jesus, and referred the man back to his
inalienable human rights. Jesus never diverged into metaphysics, even to
reconcile the freedom of the human will with the sovereignty of the
Divine. His function was not academic debate, it was the solution of an
actual situation. Logically, men might be puppets; consciously, they
were self-determinating, and Jesus said with emphasis, 'Wilt thou?'"
_The Mind of the Master_, Dr. JOHN WATSON.
"Even natural disposition, of which we make so much when we speak of
heredity, is only a tendency till habit takes it and sets it and hardens
it and drives it to a settled goal."
HUGH BLACK.
Bearing Criticism
JUNE 4
"When people detect in us what are actually imperfections and faults, it
is clear that they do us no wrong, since it is not they who cause them;
and it is clear, too, that they do us a service, inasmuch as they help
us to free ourselves from an evil, namely, the ignorance of these
defects. We should not be angry because they know them and despise us,
for it is right that they should know us for what we are, and that they
should despise us if we are despicable.
"Such are the feelings which would rise in a heart filled with equity
and justice. What then should we say of our own heart when we see in it
a quite contrary frame of mind? For is it not a fact that we hate the
truth and those who tell it us, that we love those who deceive
themselves in our favour, and that we wish to be esteemed by them as
other than we really are?"
PASCAL.
"A man should never be ashamed to say he has been in the wrong, which is
but saying, in other words, that he is wiser to-day than he was
yesterday."
POPE.
Faults
JUNE 5
"Too many take the ready course to deceive themselves; for they look
with both eyes on the failings and defects of others, and scarcely give
their good qualities half an eye: on the contrary, in themselves they
study to the full their own advantages, while their weaknesses and
defects (as one says) they skip over, as children do the hard words in
their lessons that are troublesome to read; and making this uneven
parallel, what wonder if the result be a gross mistake of themselves."
Archbishop LEIGHTON.
"To hide a fault with a lie is to replace a blot by a hole."
"It is a great folly not to part with your own faults, which is
possible, but to try instead to escape from other people's faults, which
is impossible."
MARCUS AURELIUS.
"The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none."
CARLYLE.
Obstinacy
JUNE 6
"Obstinacy is will asserting itself without being able to justify
itself. It is persistence without a plausible motive. It is the tenacity
of self-love substituted for the tenacity of reason or conscience."
_Amiel's Journal._
"If any man is able to convince me and show me that I do not think or
act right, I will gladly change; for I seek the truth by which no man
was ever injured. But he is injured who abides in his error and
ignorance."
MARCUS AURELIUS.
"It is never too late to give up our prejudices."
THOREAU.
"When one's character is naturally firm, it is well to be able to yield
upon reflection."
VAUVENARGUES.
Calumny
JUNE 7
"Any man of many transactions can hardly expect to go through life
without being subject to one or two very severe calumnies. Amongst these
many transactions, some few will be with very ill-conditioned people,
with very ignorant people, or, perhaps, with monomaniacs; and he cannot
expect, therefore, but that some narrative of a calumnious kind will
have its origin in one of these transactions. It may be fanned by any
accidental breeze of malice or ill-fortune, and become a very serious
element of mischief to him. Such a thing is to be looked upon as pure
misfortune coming in the ordinary course of events; and the way to treat
it is to deal with it as calmly and philosophically as with any other
misfortune. As some one has said, the mud will rub off when it is dry,
and not before. The drying will not always come in the calumniated man's
time, unless in favourable seasons, which he cannot command."
HELPS.
"If any one tells you such a one has spoken ill of you, do not refute
them in that particular; but answer, had he known all my vices, he had
not spoken only of that one."
EPICTETUS.
Calumny
JUNE 8
"I am beholden to calumny that she hath so endeavoured and taken pains
to belie me. It shall make me set a surer guard on myself, and keep a
better watch upon my actions."
BEN JONSON.
"As to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that,
any more than the old church-steeple minds the rooks cawing about it."
GEORGE ELIOT.
"The power men possess to annoy me I give them."
EMERSON.
"Assailed by scandal and the tongue of strife, His only answer was--a
blameless life."
COWPER.
Flattery
JUNE 9
"Flattery is a false coinage which would have no currency but for our
vanity."
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.
"If we did not flatter ourselves, the flattery of others could do us no
harm."
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.
"Self-love is the greatest Flatterer in the World."
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.
"The Devil has no stauncher ally than want of perception."
PHILIP H. WICKSTEAD.
Pride
JUNE 10
"There are two states or conditions of pride. The first is one of
self-approval, the second one of self-contempt. Pride is seen probably
at its purest in the last."
_Amiel's Journal._
"The foundation of pride is the wish to respect one's self, whatever
others may think; the mainspring of vanity is the craving for the
admiration of others, no matter at what cost to one's self-respect."
_The Heart of Rome_, F. MARION CRAWFORD.
"Any revelation of greatness overwhelms petty thoughts.... The presence
of death turns enemies into friends. In the same way the petty feelings
of pride and vanity would lose much of their power if people had the
overwhelming feeling which comes from the contemplation of Almightiness,
All-goodness, and All-love. There would be a marked change in all human
relations if men turned from the presence of the Thrice Holy to face one
another; if thoughts of self and for self were driven out of their minds
by worship."
_The Service of God_, Canon BARNETT.
Conceit
JUNE 11
"It is indeed a desirable thing to be well descended, but the glory
belongs to our ancestors."
PLUTARCH.
"Conceit spoils many an excellency. Some persons are so proud of their
goodness, or of their attainments, or of their position, or of their
character, or of their family, that they become offensive to many who
would otherwise be won by their merit. Pride mars, blights, and withers
whatever it touches. It begets assumptions that are very belittling as
well as hard to bear. A man weakens his influence and retards his
personal and public interests by giving it full control. Its exhibition
may be natural; but noble manhood, high moral character, regard to the
feelings of others and Christianity all demand its suppression."
Humility
JUNE 12
"What hypocrites we seem to be, whenever we talk of ourselves! Our words
sound so humble, while our hearts are so proud."
_Guesses at Truth_, edited by Archdeacon HARE.
"By despising himself too much a man comes to be worthy of his own
contempt."
_Amiel's Journal._
"Just as criticism alone ministers to pride and then to death, so
creation, even of the smallest kind, ministers to humility. And that
stands to reason: the slightest act of shaping instantly opens before
you an ever-expanding sea, and the vision of the infinite is the death
of vanity and pride."
_The Gospel of Joy_, STOPFORD BROOKE.
"Humility is the hall-mark of wisdom."
JEREMY COLLIER.
Egotism
JUNE 13
"We ought to have this measure of charity for egotistical people--a
willingness to suppose that they actually believe themselves to be what
they assume to be. It is quite possible for a person to be in such a fog
of misapprehension that everything about him--his little world, his
personal interest--will loom abnormally large. When the fog is
dispelled, he will see things as they are, and estimate them and himself
accordingly.
"Egotism of this kind is pardonable; and there is a great deal of it
which is peculiar to the mists and strange refractions of youth. When
the sun of a clearer and larger knowledge chases away the fog, a
right-minded young person emerges from this egotistical, too
self-conscious period of his life, and finds a new adjustment for
himself in the great and serious world."
"He who is always enquiring what people will say, will never give them
opportunity to say anything great about him."
"Reputation is in itself only a farthing candle, of wavering and
uncertain flame, and easily blown out; but it is the light by which the
world looks for and finds merit."
LOWELL.
The Code of Society
JUNE 14
"'Freedom' is not the power to do what we like, but to be what we ought
to be."
CHARLES GORE.
"There is no commoner danger than that of accepting the code of the
society in which you live as the rule of right."
Bishop TEMPLE.
"Strive all your life to free men from the bondage of custom and self,
the two great elements of the world that lieth in wickedness."
CHARLES KINGSLEY.
"What I _must_ do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.
This rule ... is harder, because you will always find those who think
they know what is your duty better than _you_ know it."
EMERSON.
Public Opinion
JUNE 15
"It is not the many who reform the world; but the few who rise superior
to that Public Opinion which crucified our Lord many years ago."
CHARLES KINGSLEY.
"We are tempted to measure ourselves by others, to acquiesce in an
average standard and an average attainment. We forget that while we are
not required to judge our neighbours, we are required to judge
ourselves."
Bishop WESTCOTT.
"Moral courage is obeying one's conscience, and doing what one believes
to be right in face of a hostile majority; and moral cowardice is
stifling one's conscience, and doing what is less than right to win
other people's favour."
Dr. JOHN WATSON.
Public Opinion
JUNE 16
"Opinion has its value and even its power: to have it against us is
painful when we are among friends, and harmful in the case of the outer
world. We should neither flatter opinion nor court it; but it is better,
if we can help it, not to throw it on to a false scent. The first error
is a meanness; the second an imprudence.... Be careful of your
reputation, not through vanity, but that you may not harm your life's
work, and out of love for truth. There is still something of
self-seeking in the refined disinterestedness which will not justify
itself, that it may feel itself superior to opinion. It requires ability
to make what we seem agree with what we are,--and humility to feel that
we are no great things."
_Amiel's Journal._
"Suppose any man shall despise me. Let him look to that himself. But I
will look to this, that I be not discovered doing or saying anything
deserving of contempt."
MARCUS AURELIUS.
Spiritual Balance and Proportion
JUNE 17
"A well-governed mind learns in time to find pleasure in nothing but the
true and the just."
_Amiel's Journal._
"Not only does sympathy lead us to see the opinions of others in a truer
light, it enables us to form a sounder judgment on our own; for as long
as a man looks only 'on his own things,' he fails to see them in true
proportion."
LUCY SOULSBY.
"If we can live in Christ and have His life in us, shall not the
spiritual balance and proportion which were His become ours too? If He
were really our Master and our Saviour, could it be that we should get
so eager and excited over little things? If we were His, could we
possibly be wretched over the losing of a little money which we do not
need, or be exalted at the sound of a little praise which we know that
we only half deserve and that the praisers only half intend? A moment's
disappointment, a moment's gratification, and then the ocean would be
calm again and quite forgetful of the ripple which disturbed its bosom."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
Temperance
JUNE 18
"(Of Training...) its aim must be to bring into human character more of
that unity, consistency, harmony, proportion, upon which the Greek
philosophers were never weary of insisting as the essence of virtue."
_The Making of Character_, Professor MACCUNN.
"_Temperance._--The original term describes that sovereign self-mastery,
that perfect self-control, in which the mysterious will of man holds in
harmonious subjection all the passions and faculties of his nature.
"Self-will is to mind what self-indulgence is to sense, the usurpation
by a part of that which belongs to the whole.
"_In Knowledge temperance._--The Apostle counsels temperance, the just
and proportionate use of every faculty and gift, and not the abolition
or abandonment of any.
"It is easier in many cases to pluck out the right eye or to cut off the
right hand than to discipline and employ them."
Bishop WESTCOTT.
Balance
JUNE 19
"Temperance is reason's girdle and passion's bridle."
JEREMY TAYLOR.
"Be wary and keep cool. A cool head is as necessary as a warm heart. In
any negotiations, steadiness and coolness are invaluable; while they
will often carry you in safety through times of danger and difficulty."
Lord AVEBURY.
"Place a guard over your strong points! Thrift may run into
niggardliness, generosity into prodigality or shiftlessness. Gentleness
may become pusillanimity, tact become insincerity, power become
oppression. Characters need sentries at their points of weakness, true
enough, but often the points of greatest strength are, paradoxically,
really points of weakness."
Balance
JUNE 20
"Culture implies all which gives a mind possession of its powers."
EMERSON.
"There are very, very few from whom we get that higher, deeper, broader
help which it is the prerogative of true excellence in judgment to
bestow: help to discern, through the haste and insistence of the
present, what is its real meaning and its just demand; help to give due
weight to what is reasonable, however unreasonably it may be stated or
defended; help to reverence alike the sacredness of a great cause and
the sacredness of each individual life, to adjust the claims of general
rules and special equity; help to carry with one conscientiously, on the
journey towards decision, all the various thoughts that ought to tell
upon the issue; help to keep consistency from hardening to obstinacy,
and common sense from sinking into time-serving; help to think out one's
duty as in a still, pure air, sensitive to all true signs and voices of
this world, and yet unshaken by its storms."
_Studies in the Christian Character_, Bishop PAGET.
Sound Judgment
JUNE 21
"We are all inclined to judge of others as we find them. Our estimate of
a character always depends much on the manner in which the character
affects our own interests and passions. We find it difficult to think
well of those by whom we are thwarted or depressed, and we are ready to
admit every excuse for the vices of those who are useful or agreeable to
us."
MACAULAY.
"To judge is to see clearly, to care for what is just, and therefore to
be impartial,--more exactly, to be disinterested,--more exactly still,
to be impersonal."
_Amiel's Journal._
"Of all human faculties there is none which more enriches our lives than
a sound moral judgment. Genius is rarer and more wonderful. But this
surpasses even genius in the fact that it is not only in itself a
virtue, but the fruitful mother of virtues. It is as Aristotle said,
'Given a sound judgment and all the virtues will follow in its train.'
* * * * *
"If the moral judgment is to be sound it must presuppose character,
faculty to deliberate, and enlightenment."
_The Making of Character_, Professor MACCUNN.
Sound Judgment
JUNE 22
"That is a penetrating sarcasm of George Eliot's in 'Amos Barton': 'It
is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the
particular shade of brown, blue, or green to which it really belongs. It
is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for
nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you
to modify that opinion.' Everybody needs the suggestion that is embodied
in the above remark. Our judgments of men are always more or less
defective. But it is the man who prides himself on his outspokenness,
the man who thinks it would be cowardice to withhold an opinion of men
and things, particularly if he is charged with the duty of public
utterance, that needs to learn that blue or brown or green is not black,
and that in nothing is so much discrimination needed as in the diagnosis
of character."
"Never does a man portray his own character more vividly than in his
manner of portraying another."
RICHTER.
Sound Judgment
JUNE 23
"It hardly can seem strange that excellence in judgment is thus rare if
we go on to think of the manifold discipline that it needs.
"For we cannot deny that even physical conditions tend at least to tell
on it; and most of us may have to own that there are days on which we
know that we had better distrust the view we take of things. It is good
counsel that a man should, if he has the chance, reconsider after his
holiday any important decision that he was inclined to make just before
it; that he should appeal from his tired to his refreshed self; and men
need to deal strictly with the body, and to bring it into subjection,
not only lest its appetites grow riotous, but also lest it trouble, with
moods and miseries of its own, the exercise of judgment.
"And then, with the calmness of sound health, or the control that a
strong and vigilant will can sometimes gain over the encroachments of
health that is not sound, there must also be the insight and
resourcefulness of learning; that power to recognise, and weigh, and
measure, and forecast, which comes of long watching how things move; the
power that grows by constant thoughtfulness in study or in life; the
distinctive ability of those who, in Hooker's phrase, are 'diligent
observers of circumstances, the loose regard whereof is the nurse of
vulgar folly.'"
_Studies in the Christian Character_, Bishop PAGET.
Harsh Judgment
JUNE 24
"How often we judge unjustly when we judge harshly. The fret and temper
we despise may have its rise in the agony of some great unsuspected
self-sacrifice, or in the endurance of unavowed, almost intolerable
pain. Whoso judges harshly is sure to judge amiss."
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI.
"We meet and mingle, we mark men's speech;
We judge by a word or a fancied slight;
We give our fellows a mere glance each,
Then brand them for ever black or white.
"Meanwhile God's patience is o'er us all,
He probes for motives, He waits for years;
No moment with Him is mean or small,
And His scales are turned by the weight of tears."
Judging
JUNE 25
"Perhaps it were better for most of us to complain less of being
misunderstood, and to take more care that we do not misunderstand other
people. It ought to give us pause at a time to remember that each one
has a stock of cut-and-dry judgments on his neighbours, and that the
chances are that most of them are quite erroneous. What our neighbour
really is we may never know, but we may be pretty certain that he is not
what we have imagined, and that many things we have thought of him are
quite beside the mark. What he does we have seen, but we have no idea
what may have been his thoughts and intentions. The mere surface of his
character may be exposed, but of the complexity within we have not the
faintest idea. People crammed with self-consciousness and self-conceit
are often praised as humble, while shy and reserved people are judged to
be proud. Some whose whole life is one subtle studied selfishness get
the name of self-sacrifice, and other silent heroic souls are condemned
for want of humanity."
_The Potter's Wheel_, Dr. JOHN WATSON.
"To weigh other minds by our own is the false scale by which the greater
number of us miscalculate all human actions and most human characters."
JOHN OLIVER HOBBES.
Biassed Judgments
JUNE 26
"How difficult it is to submit anything to the opinion of another person
without perverting his judgment by the way in which we put the matter to
him. If one says, 'For my part I think it beautiful,' or 'I think it
obscure,' or the like, one inclines the hearer's imagination to that
opinion, or incites it to take the contrary view."
PASCAL.
"Human speech conveys different meanings to differently biassed minds."
_Pastor Pastorum_, HENRY LATHAM.
"We judge of others by what we see in them: and, what is more perilous
still, we are tempted to judge of ourselves by what others can see in
us."
Bishop WESTCOTT.
Judging
JUNE 27
"The sinner's own fault? So it was.
If every own fault found us out,
Dogged us and hedged us round about,
What comfort should we take because
Not half our due we thus wrung out?
"Clearly his own fault. Yet I think
My fault in part, who did not pray
But lagged and would not lead the way.
I, haply, proved his missing link.
God help us both to mind and pray."
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.