but for Thy great mercies. O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive; O Lord,
hearken and do.'--Dan. ix. 18, 19.
"Every true prayer has its background and its foreground. The foreground
of prayer is the intense, immediate desire for a certain blessing which
seems to be absolutely necessary for the soul to have; the background of
prayer is the quiet earnest desire that the will of God, whatever it may
be, should be done. What a picture is the perfect prayer of Jesus in
Gethsemane! In front burns the strong desire to escape death and to
live; but, behind, there stands, calm and strong, the craving of the
whole life for the doing of the will of God.... Leave out the
foreground--let there be no expression of the wish of him who prays--and
there is left a pure submission which is almost fatalism. Leave out the
background--let there be no acceptance of the will of God--and the
prayer is only an expression of self-will, a petulant claiming of the
uncorrected choice of him who prays. Only when the two, foreground and
background, are there together,--the special desire resting on the
universal submission, the universal submission opening into the special
desire,--only then is the picture perfect and the prayer complete!"
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
Prayer
OCTOBER 9
"About prayer he said: 'The reason why men find it hard to regard prayer
in the same light in which it was formerly regarded is that _we_ seem to
know more of the unchangeableness of Law. But I believe that God reveals
Himself in each individual soul. Prayer is, to take a mundane simile,
like opening a sluice between the great ocean and our little channels
when the great sea gathers itself together and flows in at full tide.'
'Prayer on our part is the highest aspiration of the soul.'"
"A Breath that fleets beyond this iron world
And touches Him who made it."
"Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet--
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet."
And
"More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of."
_Tennyson--a Memoir_, by his Son.
Prayer
OCTOBER 10
"There can be no objection to praying for certain special things. God
forbid! I cannot help doing it, any more than a child in the dark can
help calling for its mother. Only it seems to me that when we pray,
'Grant this day that we run into no kind of danger,' we ought to lay our
stress on the 'run' rather than on the 'danger,' to ask God not to take
away the danger by altering the course of nature, but to give us light
and guidance whereby to avoid it."
CHARLES KINGSLEY.
"Special prayer is based upon a fundamental instinct of our nature. And
in the fellowship which is established in prayer between man and God, we
are brought into personal union with Him in Whom all things have their
being.
"In this lies the possibility of boundless power; for when the
connection is once formed, who can lay down the limits of what man can
do in virtue of the communion of his spirit with the Infinite Spirit?"
Bishop WESTCOTT.
Prayer
October 11
"It is abundantly clear that answered prayer encourages faith and
personal relations in a way which broad principles only cannot effect.
As the _Spectator_ put it many years ago, much that would be positively
bad for us if given without prayer, is good if sent in answer. We feel
(do we not?) that all the evil of the world springs from mistrust of
God. Nothing can recover us from this state of alienated unrest like
answered prayer."
_Life of F. W. Crossley_, RENDEL HARRIS.
"Prayer will in time make the human countenance its own divinest altar;
years upon years of true thoughts, like ceaseless music shut up within,
will vibrate along the nerves of expression until the lines of the
living instrument are drawn into correspondence, and the harmony of
visible form matches the unheard harmonies of the mind."
_The Choir Invisible_, JAMES LANE ALLEN.
Prayer
OCTOBER 12
"Pray, till prayer makes you forget your own wish, and leave it or merge
it in God's will. The divine wisdom has given us prayer, not as a means
whereby to obtain the good things of earth, but as a means by which we
learn to do without them; not as a means whereby we escape evil, but as
a means whereby we become strong to meet it. 'There appeared an angel
unto Him from heaven, strengthening Him.' This was the true reply to the
prayer of Christ."
F. W. ROBERTSON.
"Never let us get into the common trick of calling
unbelief--resignation; of asking, and then because we have not faith to
believe, putting in a 'Thy will be done' at the end. Let us make God's
Will our will, and so say 'Thy will be done.'"
CHARLES KINGSLEY.
Prayer
OCTOBER 13
"Accustom yourself gradually to let your mental prayer spread over all
your daily external occupations. Speak, act, work quietly, as though you
were praying, as indeed you ought to be.
"Do everything without excitement, simply in the spirit of grace. So
soon as you perceive natural activity gliding in, recall yourself
quietly into the Presence of God. Hearken to what the leadings of grace
prompt, and say and do nothing but what God's Holy Spirit teaches. You
will find yourself infinitely more quiet, your words will be fewer and
more effectual, and while doing less, what you do will be more
profitable. It is not a question of a hopeless mental activity, but a
question of acquiring a quietude and peace in which you readily advise
with your Beloved as to all you have to do."
FENELON.
"A blessing such as this our hearts might reap,
The freshness of the garden they might share,
Through the long day an heavenly freshness keep,
If, knowing how the day and the day's glare
Must beat upon them, we would largely steep
And water them betimes with dews of Prayer."
TRENCH.
Self-examination
OCTOBER 14
"It is my custom every night to run all over the words and actions of
the past day; for why should I fear the sight of my errors when I can
admonish and forgive myself? I was a little too hot in such a dispute:
my opinion might have been as well spared, for it gave offence, and did
no good at all. The thing was true; but all truths are not to be spoken
at all times."
SENECA.
RESOLVES.
"To try to be thoroughly poor in spirit, meek, and to be ready to be
silent when others speak.
"To learn from every one.
"To try to feel my own insignificance.
"To believe in myself and the powers with which I am entrusted.
"To try to make conversation more useful, and therefore to store my mind
with facts, but to guard against a wish to shine.
"To try to despise the principle of the day 'every man his own
trumpeter,' and to feel it a degradation to speak of my own doings, as a
poor braggart.
"To speak less of self and to think less.
"To contend one by one against evil thoughts.
"To try to fix my thoughts in prayer without distraction.
"To watch over a growing habit of uncharitable judgment."
_F. W. Robertson's Life._
Confession of Sin
OCTOBER 15
"An immense quantity of modern confession of sin, even when honest, is
merely a sickly egotism which will rather gloat over its own evil than
lose the centralisation of its interest in itself."
_Ethics of the Dust_, JOHN RUSKIN.
"The fit of low spirits which comes to us when we find ourselves
overtaken in a fault, though we flatter ourselves to reckon it a certain
sign of penitence, and a set-off to the sin itself which God will surely
take into account, is often nothing more than vexation and annoyance
with ourselves, that, after all our good resolutions and attempts at
reformation, we have broken down again."
_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
"And be you sure that sorrow without resolute effort at amendment is one
of the most contemptible of all human frailties; deserving to be
despised by men, and certain to be rejected by God."
Bishop TEMPLE.
Morbid Introspectiveness
OCTOBER 16
"Plainly there is one danger in all self-discipline which has to be most
carefully watched and guarded against, that, namely, of valuing the
means at the expense of the end, and so falling into either
self-righteousness or formalism, and very probably into uncharitableness
also. If we esteem our obedience to rule, and self-imposed restraints,
for their own sake, we effectually destroy their power to train and
elevate. I suppose this is the real mistake of a false asceticism, which
sees the merit rather in the amount of discipline undergone than in the
character and self-conquest to be gained by it."
Bishop WALSHAM HOW.
"... It is a clear view of higher motives, which at once reveals and
defeats our meaner impulses; which assists the discipline of _proper_
self-searching, by making it healthy and hopeful; and resists any habit
of morbid introspectiveness with its fatal tendency to paralyse activity
of character."
Canon KNOX LITTLE.
Introspection
OCTOBER 17
"Beware of despairing about yourself."
ST. AUGUSTINE.
"Any man who is good for anything, if he is always thinking about
himself, will come to think himself good for nothing very soon. It is
only a fop or a fool who can bear to look at himself all day long,
without disgust. And so the first thing for a man to do, who wants to
use his best powers at their best, is to get rid of self-consciousness,
to stop thinking about himself and how he is working, altogether."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
"On somehow. To go back
Were to lose all."
TENNYSON.
Our True Selves and Our Traditional Selves
OCTOBER 18
"I have sometimes thought that this facility of men in believing that
they are still what they once meant to be--this undisturbed
appropriation of a traditional character which is often but a melancholy
relic of early resolutions, like the worn and soiled testimonial to
soberness and honesty carried in the pocket of a tippler whom the need
of a dram has driven into peculation--may sometimes diminish the
turpitude of what seems a flat, barefaced falsehood. It is notorious
that a man may go on uttering false assertions about his own acts till
he at last believes in them: is it not possible that sometimes in the
very first utterance there may be a shade of creed-reciting belief, a
reproduction of a traditional self which is clung to against all
evidence? There is no knowing all the disguises of the lying serpent.
"When we come to examine in detail what is the sane mind in the sane
body, the final test of completeness seems to be a security of
distinction between what we have professed and what we have done; what
we have aimed at and what we have achieved; what we have invented and
what we have witnessed or had evidenced to us; what we think and feel in
the present and what we thought and felt in the past."
GEORGE ELIOT.
Un-self-consciousness
OCTOBER 19
"An unconscious, easy, selfish person shocks less and is more easily
loved than one who is laboriously and egotistically unselfish. There is
at least no fuss about the first; but the other parades his sacrifices,
and so sells his favours too dear. Selfishness is calm, a force of
nature: you might say the trees are selfish. But egoism is a piece of
vanity; it must always take you into its confidence; it is uneasy,
troublesome, searching; it can do good, but not handsomely; it is
uglier, because less dignified, than selfishness itself."
"If a man has self-surrender pressed incessantly upon him, this keeps
the idea of self ever before his view. Christ does not cry down _self_,
but He puts it out of a man's sight by giving him something better to
care for, something which shall take full and rightful possession of his
soul. The Apostles, without ever having any consciousness of sacrificing
self, were brought into a habit of self-sacrifice by merging all
thoughts for themselves in devotion to a Master and a cause, and in
thinking what they could do to serve it themselves."
_Pastor Pastorum_, HENRY LATHAM.
Un-self-consciousness
OCTOBER 20
"Think as little as possible about any good in yourself; turn your eyes
resolutely from any view of your acquirement, your influence, your plan,
your success, your following: above all, speak as little as possible
about yourself. The inordinateness of our self-love makes speech about
ourselves like the putting of the lighted torch to the dried wood which
has been laid in order for the burning. Nothing but duty should open our
lips upon this dangerous theme, except it be in humble confession of our
sinfulness before our God. Again, be specially upon the watch against
those little tricks by which the vain man seeks to bring round the
conversation to himself, and gain the praise or notice which the thirsty
ears drink in so greedily; and even if praise comes unsought, it is
well, whilst men are uttering it, to guard yourself by thinking of some
secret cause for humbling yourself inwardly to God; thinking into what
these pleasant accents would be changed if all that is known to God, and
even to yourself, stood suddenly revealed to man."
Bishop WILBERFORCE.
"Those who have never sought to attain true humility ... have yet to
learn how it lies at the root of all our dear Lord's teaching.... The
first step towards the inner life is to attain a childlike spirit in
Heavenly things.... It is solely God's gift."
GROU.
Love the Destroyer of Sin
OCTOBER 21
"It is quite idle, by force of will, to seek to empty the angry passions
out of our life. Who has not made a thousand resolutions in this
direction, only and with unutterable mortification to behold them dashed
to pieces with the first temptation? The soul is to be made sweet not by
taking the acidulous fluids out, but by putting something in--a great
love, God's great love. This is to work a chemical change upon them, to
renovate and regenerate them, to dissolve them in its own rich fragrant
substance. If a man let this into his life, his cure is complete; if
not, it is hopeless."
_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
"The secret of success consists not in the habit of making numerous
resolutions about various faults and sins, but in one great, absorbing,
controlling purpose to serve God and do His will! If this be the
controlling motive of life, all other motives will be swept into the
force of its mighty current and guided aright."
Love the Destroyer of Sin
OCTOBER 22
"For the most of us the more hopeful plan is to overcome our passions by
thinking of something else. This something else need by no means be a
serious thing. For it happens sometimes that ideas that do not soar
above trivialities may nevertheless have sent down such roots into a
man's life, and become so fruitful of suggestion, that they prove more
effective allies than more imposing and pretentious resources. Whence it
comes that a sport, or a pastime, have before now weaned many from cares
and sorrows which seemed proof against even the consolations of
religion. Be it granted that, severely construed, this is a proof of the
frivolity of human nature. But it is none the less an illustration of
the expulsive power of ideas."
_The Making of Character_, Professor MACCUNN.
"He proposed to make sin impossible by replacing it with love. If sin be
an act of self-will, each person making himself the centre, then Love is
the destruction of sin, because Love connects instead of isolating. No
one can be envious, avaricious, hard-hearted; no one can be gross,
sensual, unclean, if he loves. Love is the death of all bitter and
unholy moods of the soul, because Love lifts the man out of himself and
teaches him to live in another."
_The Mind of the Master_, Dr. JOHN WATSON.
Mental Hygiene
OCTOBER 23
"It is poor strategy to wage against evil feelings or propulsions a war
of mere repression. We have seen that this is so in educational control
of others. It is not less so in control of ourselves. If we would really
oust our evil proclivities, we must cultivate others that are positively
good. It is not enough to hate our failings or our vices with a perfect
hatred. We must love something else. In other words, we must contrive to
open mind and heart to tenants in whose presence unwelcome intruders,
unable to find a home, will torment us only for a season and at last
take their departure. 'There is a mental just as much as a bodily
hygiene.'"
_The Making of Character_, Professor MACCUNN.
"Moses said, 'Do this or do that.' Jesus refrained from regulations--He
proposed that we should love. Jesus, while hardly mentioning the word,
planted the idea in His disciples' minds, that Love was Law. For three
years He exhibited and enforced Love as the principle of life, until,
before He died, they understood that all duty to God and man was summed
up in Love. Progress in the moral world is ever from complexity to
simplicity. First one hundred duties; afterwards they are gathered into
ten commandments; then they are reduced to two: love of God and love of
man; and, finally, Jesus says His last word: 'This is My commandment,
that ye love one another, as I have loved you.'"
_The Mind of the Master_, Dr. JOHN WATSON.
"As Night Enters, Darkness Departs"
OCTOBER 24
"If sin be a principle in a man's life, then it is evident that it
cannot be affected by the most pathetic act in history exhibited from
without; it must be met by an opposite principle working from within. If
sin be selfishness, as Jesus taught, then it can only be overcome by the
introduction of a spirit of self-renunciation. Jesus did not denounce
sin: negative religion is always impotent. He replaced sin by virtue,
which is a silent revolution. As the light enters, the darkness departs,
and as soon as one renounced himself, he had ceased from sin."
_The Mind of the Master_, Dr. JOHN WATSON.
"'Why could not we cast him out?'
"Let His love fill you with love, and then the conquering of your sins
by His help shall be in its course one long enthusiasm and at the end a
glorious success. That is your hope; and that hope, if you will, you may
seize to-day."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
Stepping-stones
OCTOBER 25
"The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak,
becomes a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong."
CARLYLE.
"Out of difficulties grow miracles."
"I hold it truth with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping stones
Of their dead selves to higher things."
TENNYSON.
"Why wilt thou defer thy good purpose from day to day? Arise and begin
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 A KEMPIS.
Never Lose a Battle
OCTOBER 26
"A fourth maxim is 'never if possible to lose a battle.' And none can be
sounder. For it is always to be remembered that a single lapse involves
here something worse than a simple failure. The alternative is not
between good habit or no habit, but between good habit and bad. For, as
Professor Bain points out, the characteristic difficulty here lies in
the fact that in the moral life rival tendencies are in constant
competition for mastery over us. The loss of a battle here is therefore
worse than a defeat. It strengthens the enemy, whether this enemy be
some powerful passion, or nothing more than the allurements of an easy
life. It has worse effects still. For if by persistence in well-doing we
all of us create a moral tradition for our individual selves, so do we
by every failure hang in the memory a humiliating and paralysing record
of defeat."
_The Making of Character_, Professor MACCUNN.
"If one surrender himself to Jesus, and is crucified on His cross, there
is no sin he will not overcome, no service he will not render, no virtue
to which he will not attain."
_The Mind of the Master_, Dr. JOHN WATSON.
Living in the Present
OCTOBER 27
"Be not anxious about to-morrow. Do to-day's duty, fight to-day's
temptation, and do not weaken and distract yourself by looking forward
to things which you cannot see, and could not understand, if you saw
them."
CHARLES KINGSLEY.
"Do not disturb thyself by thinking of the whole of thy life. Let not
thy thoughts at once embrace all the various troubles which thou mayest
expect to befall thee: but on every occasion ask thyself, What is there
in this which is intolerable and past bearing? for thou wilt be ashamed
to confess. In the next place remember that neither the future nor the
past pains thee, but only the present. But this is reduced to a very
little, if thou only circumscribest it, and chidest thy mind, if it is
unable to hold out against even this."
MARCUS AURELIUS.
"Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as
you can. To-morrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too
high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day is all
that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the yesterdays."
EMERSON.
Day by Day
OCTOBER 28
"By trying to take in the idea of life as a whole we only give ourselves
mental indigestion; a day at a time is as much as a man can healthily
swallow."
EDNA LYALL.
"Think that this day will never dawn again.
The heavens are calling you and wheel around you,
Displaying to you their eternal beauties,
And still your eye is looking on the ground."
_The Divine Comedy_, DANTE.
"To-Day is a king in disguise: let us unmask the king as he passes."
EMERSON.
Day by Day
OCTOBER 29
"Lo, here hath been dawning
Another blue day;
Think, wilt thou let it
Slip useless away!"
CARLYLE.
"The perfection of moral character consists in this, in passing every
day as the last, and in being neither violently excited, nor torpid, nor
playing the hypocrite."
MARCUS AURELIUS.
"When night comes, list thy deeds; make plain the way
'Twixt heaven and thee; block it not with delays:
But perfect all before thou sleep'st; then say,
'There's one Sun more strung on my Bead of days.'
What's good store up for Joy, the bad, well scann'd,
Wash off with tears, and get thy Master's hand."
HENRY VAUGHAN.
Gaining or Losing Ground
OCTOBER 30
"Gaining or losing all the time is our condition, morally and
spiritually. We cannot stand utterly still. If we are not improving we
are losing ground. Outside forces compel that, in addition to the forces
that are working within. We are pressing forward and being helped in
that direction, or we are being pressed backward and are yielding to
that pressure. Let us not deceive ourselves with the idea that even
though we are making no progress we are at least holding our own. We can
no more stand still than time can."
"Whose high endeavours are an inward light,
That makes the path before him always bright.
"And through the heat of conflict, keeps the law
In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw.
"Who, not content that former worth stand fast,
Looks forward persevering to the last,
From well to better, daily self-surpassed."
_The Happy Warrior_, WORDSWORTH.
Pressing Forward
OCTOBER 31
"Plutarch records that when Simonides offered to teach Themistocles the
art of memory the latter said: 'Teach me rather the art of forgetting.'
How much the world needs to learn that art. Paul spoke of forgetting the
things that are behind. We should forget our mistakes and failures, so
far as these cause discouragement. We should forget our successes if
they cause pride or preoccupy the mind. We should forget the slights
that have been put upon us or the insults that have been given us. To
remember these is to be weak and miserable, if not worse. He who says he
can forgive but he cannot forget is deceived by the sound of words.
Forgiveness that is genuine involves forgetfulness of the injury. True
forgiveness means a putting away of the wrong behind the back and
remembering it no more. That is what God does when He forgives, and that
is what we all must do if we truly forgive."