NOVEMBER 28
"Gird up the loins of your mind, be sober."
1 PETER i. 13.
"A merry heart doeth good like a medicine."
PROV. xvii. 22.
"Gravity ... I mean simply that grave and serious way of looking at life
which, while it never repels the true light-heartedness of pure and
trustful hearts, welcomes into a manifest sympathy the souls of men who
are oppressed and burdened, anxious and full of questions which for the
time at least have banished all laughter from their faces.... Gravity
has a delicate power of discrimination. It attracts all that it can
help, and it repels all that could harm it or be harmed by it. It admits
the earnest and simple with a cordial welcome. It shuts out the
impertinent and insincere inexorably.
"The gravity of which I speak is not inconsistent with the keenest
perception of the ludicrous side of things. It is more than consistent
with--it is even necessary to--humour. Humour involves the perception of
the true proportions of life.... It has softened the bitterness of
controversy a thousand times. You cannot encourage it too much. You
cannot grow too familiar with the books of all ages which have in them
the truest humour, for the truest humour is the bloom of the highest
life. Read George Eliot and Thackeray, and, above all, Shakespeare. They
will help you to keep from extravagances without fading into insipidity.
They will preserve your gravity while they save you from pompous
solemnity."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
Beauties of Nature
NOVEMBER 29
"There are few of us that are not rather ashamed of our sins and follies
as we look out on the blessed morning sunlight, which comes to us like a
bright-winged angel beckoning us to quit the old path of vanity that
stretches its dreary length behind us."
GEORGE ELIOT.
"That man is blessed who every day is permitted to behold anything so
pure and serene as the western sky at sunset, while revolutions vex the
world."
THOREAU.
"So then believe that every bird that sings,
And every flower that stars the elastic sod,
And every thought the happy summer brings
To the pure spirit is a word of God."
COLERIDGE.
Sense of the Beautiful
NOVEMBER 30
"No man receives the true culture of a man in whom the sensibility to
the beautiful is not cherished; and I know of no condition in life from
which it should be excluded. Of all luxuries this is cheapest and the
most to hand; and it seems to me to be the most important to those
conditions where coarse labour tends to give a grossness to the mind.
From the diffusion of the sense of beauty in ancient Greece, and of the
taste for music in modern Germany, we learn that the people at large may
partake of refined gratifications which have hitherto been thought to be
necessarily restricted to a few."
CHANNING.
"Music--there is something very wonderful in music. Words are wonderful
enough, but music is more wonderful. It speaks not to our thoughts as
words do, it speaks straight to our hearts and spirits, to the very core
and root of our souls. Music soothes us, stirs us up; it puts noble
feelings into us; it melts us to tears, we know not how; it is a
language by itself, just as perfect, in its way, as speech, as words;
just as divine, just as blessed. Music has been called the speech of
angels; I will go farther, and call it the speech of God Himself.
"The old Greeks, the wisest of all the heathen, made a point of teaching
their children music, because, they said, it taught them not to be
self-willed and fanciful, but to see the beauty of order, the usefulness
of rule, the divineness of law."
_Good News of God Sermons_, CHARLES KINGSLEY.
The Gospel of Beauty
DECEMBER 1
"Beauty is far too much neglected. It never belongs to criticism; it
ought by right to be always bound up with creation. What it is, is hard
to define; but, whenever anything in nature or in the thoughts and
doings of man awakens a noble desire of seeing more of it; kindles pure
love of it; seems to open out before us an infinite of it which allures
us into an endless pursuit; stimulates reverence, and makes the heart
leap with joy--there is beauty, and with it always is imagination, the
shaping power.
"The capacity for seeing beauty with the heart is one of the first
necessities for such a life in a living world as I now urge upon you.
When you see it, you always see more and more of it. And the more you
see it, the more love and reverence you will feel in your heart; and the
less you will care to criticise, and the more you will care to create.
The world needs it now, and the glory of it, more almost than anything
else, for nearly all the world has lost the power of seeing it. The
monied men want it; the scientific men want it; the artists themselves
have of late betrayed it; the business men want it. The middle-class and
the aristocracy are almost destitute of it; the working men abide in
conditions in which its outward forms are absent. To give them the power
to see all that is lovely in nature, in human thought, in art, and in
the noble acts of men--that is a great part of your work, and you should
realise it, and shape it day by day."
_The Gospel of Joy_, STOPFORD BROOKE.
Nature
DECEMBER 2
"To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or
company, nature is medicinal, and restores their tone. The tradesman,
the attorney, comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the
sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds
himself."
EMERSON.
"Nature is loved by what is best in us."
EMERSON.
"Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees
on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the
clouds float across the sky, is by no means waste of time."
Lord AVEBURY.
Nature
DECEMBER 3
"The unobtrusive influences of earth, sea, and sky do their work. They
pass imperceptibly and unsought into the soul."
"... Outdoor sights
Sweep gradual gospels in."
"Bid me work, but may no tie
Keep me from the open sky" (Barnes).
_The Making of Character_, Professor MACCUNN.
"The cheerfulness of heart which springs up in us from the survey of
Nature's works, is an admirable preparation for gratitude. The mind has
gone a great way towards praise and thanksgiving that is filled with
such a secret gladness: a grateful reflection on the Supreme Cause who
produces it, sanctifies the soul, and gives it its proper value. Such an
habitual disposition of mind consecrates every field and wood, turns an
ordinary walk into a morning or evening sacrifice, and will improve
those transient gleams of joy, which naturally brighten up and refresh
the soul on such occasions, into an inviolable and perpetual state of
bliss and happiness."
ADDISON.
Holidays
DECEMBER 4
"There are only two rules for a successful holiday; the first is to earn
it, the second is to have just enough holiday to make the prospect of
work pleasant. Periods of rest we all need, but labour and not rest is
the synonym of life. From these periods of rest we should return with a
new appetite for the duties of common life. If we return dissatisfied,
enervated, without heart for work, we may be sure our holiday has been a
failure. If we return with the feeling that it is good to plunge into
the mid-stream of life again, we may know by this sign that we are
morally braced and strengthened by our exodus. The wise man will never
allow his holiday to be a time of mere idleness. He will turn again to
the books that interest him, he will touch the fringe of some science
for which his holiday gives him opportunity, or he will plunge into
physical recreation, and shake off the evil humours of the body in
active exercise. The failure of holidays lies very much in the fact that
nothing of this sort is attempted. The holiday is simply a series of
aimless days, and the natural result is _ennui_. The supreme purpose of
a holiday should be to regain possession of ourselves. He who does this
comes back from his holiday as from a sanctuary."
W. J. DAWSON.
Books
DECEMBER 5
"But what strange art, what magic can dispose
The troubled mind to change its native woes?
Or lead us willing from ourselves, to see
Others more wretched, more undone than we?
This, Books can do;--nor this alone, they give
New views to life, and teach us how to live;
They soothe the grieved, the stubborn they chastise,
Fools they admonish, and confirm the wise:
Their aid they yield to all: they never shun
The man of sorrow, nor the wretch undone:
Unlike the hard, the selfish and the proud,
They fly not sullen from the suppliant crowd;
Nor tell to various people various things,
But show to subjects, what they show to kings."
_The Library_, CRABBE.
Books
DECEMBER 6
"Narrowness may be met by recourse to the larger life revealed in
Literature. There is no stronger plea for Biography, Drama, or Romance,
or for any imaginative expansion of interests, than that founded upon
the need for them as counteractives of the pitiable contractedness of
outlook begotten of Division of Labour."
_The Making of Character_, Professor MACCUNN.
"When I consider what some books have done for the world, and what they
are doing, how they keep up our hope, awaken new courage and faith,
soothe pain, give an ideal life to those whose hours are cold and hard,
bind together distant ages and foreign lands, create new worlds of
beauty, bring down truth from heaven; I give eternal blessings for this
gift, and thank God for books."
JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE.
Reading
DECEMBER 7
"Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is
thinking makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it
is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless
we chew them over again they will not give us strength and nourishment."
LOCKE.
"In the course of our reading we should lay up in our minds a store of
goodly thoughts in well-wrought words, which should be a living treasure
of knowledge always with us, and from which, at various times, and
amidst all the shifting of circumstances, we might be sure of drawing
some comfort, guidance, and sympathy."
HELPS.
The Object of Education
DECEMBER 8
"We shall be agreed, I assume, that the object of Education is to train
for life, and not for a special occupation; to train the whole man for
all life, for life seen and unseen, for the unseen through the seen and
in the seen; to train _men_ in a word and not _craftsmen_, to train
citizens for the Kingdom of God. As we believe in God and the world to
come, these must be master thoughts.
"We shall be agreed further that with this object in view, education
must be so ordered as to awaken, to call into play, to develop, to
direct, to strengthen powers of sense and intellect and spirit, not of
one but of all: to give alertness and accuracy to observation: to supply
fulness and precision to language: to arouse intelligent sympathy with
every form of study and occupation: to set the many parts and aspects of
the world before the growing scholar in their unity: to open the eyes of
the heart to the eternal of which the temporal is the transitory sign.
"We shall be agreed again that the elements of restraint alike and of
personal development which enter into education will be used to
harmonise the social and individual instincts, and to inspire the young,
when impressions are most easy and most enduring, with the sense of
fellowship and the passion for service.
"We shall be agreed once more that the noblest fruit of education is
character, and not acquirements: character which makes the simplest life
rich and beneficent, character which for a Christian is determined by a
true vision of God, _of whom, through whom, unto whom, are all things_."
_Christian Social Union Addresses_, Bishop WESTCOTT.
The Object of Education
DECEMBER 9
"The entire object of true education is to make people not merely _do_
the right things, but enjoy the right things--not merely industrious,
but to love industry--not merely learned, but to love knowledge--not
merely pure, but to love purity--not merely just, but to hunger and
thirst after justice."
_The Crown of Wild Olive_, JOHN RUSKIN.
"Our great mistake in education is, as it seems to me, the worship of
book-learning--the confusion of instruction and education. We strain the
memory instead of cultivating the mind.... The important thing is not so
much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be
given the wish to learn.... If we succeed in giving the love of
learning, the learning itself is sure to follow."
Lord AVEBURY.
A Happy Childhood
DECEMBER 10
"A happy childhood is one of the best gifts that parents have it in
their power to bestow; second only to implanting the habit of obedience
which puts the child in training for the habit of obeying himself, later
on."
_Diana Tempest_, MARY CHOLMONDELEY.
"The main duty of those who care for the young is to secure their
wholesome, their entire growth; for health is just the development of
the whole nature in its due sequences and proportions: first the
blade--then the ear--then, and not till then, the full corn in the ear;
and thus, as Dr. Temple wisely says, 'not to forget wisdom in teaching
knowledge.' If the blade be forced, and usurp the capital it inherits;
if it be robbed by you, its guardian, of its birthright, or squandered
like a spendthrift, then there is not any ear, much less any corn; if
the blade be blasted or dwarfed in our haste and greed for the full
shock and its price, we spoil all three. It is not easy to keep this
always before one's mind, that the young 'idea' is in a young body, and
that healthy growth and harmless passing of the time are more to be
cared for than what is vainly called accomplishment."
Dr. JOHN BROWN.
Moral Education
December 11
"Remember that the aim of your discipline should be to produce a
_self-governing_ being, not to produce a being to be _governed by
others_. Were your children fated to pass their lives as slaves, you
could not too much accustom them to slavery during their childhood; but
as they are by-and-by to be free men, with no one to control their daily
conduct, you cannot too much accustom them to self-control while they
are still under your eye. This is it which makes the system of
discipline by natural consequences so especially appropriate to the
social state which we in England have now reached. In feudal times, when
one of the chief evils the citizen had to fear was the anger of his
superiors, it was well that during childhood parental vengeance should
be a chief means of government. But now that the citizen has little to
fear from any one--now that the good or evil which he experiences is
mainly that which in the order of things results from his own conduct,
he should from his first years begin to learn, experimentally, the good
or evil consequences which naturally follow this or that conduct. Aim,
therefore, to diminish the parental government, as fast as you can
substitute for it in your child's mind that self-government arising from
a foresight of results....
"All transitions are dangerous; and the most dangerous is the transition
from the restraint of the family circle to the non-restraint of the
world. Hence the importance of pursuing the policy we advocate, which,
by cultivating a boy's faculty of self-restraint, by continually
increasing the degree in which he is left to his self-restraint, and by
so bringing him, step by step, to a state of unaided self-restraint,
obliterates the ordinary sudden and hazardous change from
externally-governed youth to internally-governed maturity. Let the
history of your domestic rule typify, in little, the history of our
political rule. At the outset, autocratic control, where control is
really needful; by-and-by an incipient constitutionalism, in which the
liberty of the subject gains some express recognition; successive
extensions of this liberty of the subject, gradually ending in parental
abdication."
_Education_, HERBERT SPENCER.
Moral Education
DECEMBER 12
"Self-government with tenderness,--here you have the condition of all
authority over children. The child must discover in us no passion, no
weakness of which he can make use; he must feel himself powerless to
deceive or to trouble us; then he will recognise in us his natural
superiors, and he will attach a special value to our kindness, because
he will respect it. The child who can rouse in us anger, or impatience,
or excitement, feels himself stronger than we, and a child only respects
strength. The mother should consider herself as her child's sun, a
changeless and ever radiant world, whither the small restless creature,
quick at tears and laughter, light, fickle, passionate, full of storms,
may come for fresh stores of light, warmth and electricity, of calm and
of courage. The mother represents goodness, providence, law; that is to
say, the divinity under that form of it which is accessible to
childhood. If she is herself passionate, she will inculcate on her child
a capricious and despotic God, or even several discordant gods. The
religion of a child depends on what its mother and its father are, and
not on what they say. The inner and unconscious ideal which guides their
life is precisely what touches the child; their words, their
remonstrances, their punishments, their bursts of feeling, even, are for
him merely thunder and comedy; what they worship--this it is which his
instinct divines and reflects.
"The child sees what we are, behind what we wish to be. Hence his
reputation as a physiognomist. He extends his power as far as he can
with each of us; he is the most subtle of diplomatists. Unconsciously he
passes under the influence of each person about him, and reflects it
while transforming it after his own nature. He is a magnifying mirror.
This is why the first principle of education is: train yourself; and the
first rule to follow if you wish to possess yourself of a child's will
is: master your own."
_Amiel's Journal._
Moral Education
DECEMBER 13
"All wise teachers, I believe, recognise now that the best way of
dealing with naughty children is to absorb their whole attention with
some _interest_, which will not only leave no energy to spare for
naughtiness, but will of itself tend to organise their minds, to
subordinate mental elements to a _purpose_, and so to develop
character."
_The Standard of Life_, Mrs. BERNARD BOSANQUET.
"Discipline, like the bridle in the hand of a good rider, should
exercise its influence without appearing to do so, should be ever
active, both as a support and as a restraint, yet seem to lie easily in
hand. It must be always ready to check or to pull up, as occasion may
require; and only when the horse is a runaway, should the action of the
curb be perceptible."
_Guesses at Truth_, edited by Archdeacon HARE.
"If 'Pas trop gouverner' is the best rule in politics, it is equally
true of discipline."
_Children's Rights_, KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN.
Punishment
DECEMBER 14
"Punishments, then, must in the first place be proportionate to the
offence, lest, by an undiscriminating severity or an undiscriminating
leniency, distinctions of moral desert be blurred or effaced.
"_Secondly_, they must be analogous to the offence. The greedy must be
starved, the insolent humbled, the idle compelled to work. Otherwise the
imposition will not effectually go home to the offender.
"_Thirdly_, punishments ought to be exemplary. Since they needs must
come, it is not enough that they should simply open the eyes of the
culprit, by giving him his deserts. They must be utilised as
object-lessons for the behoof of that large class, the culprits in
potentiality.
"_Fourthly_, they ought to be economical. 'It is good that they should
suffer,' we sometimes say; and so it is, so long as suffering, in itself
always an evil, do not exceed the quantum that is lamentably needful,
needful, that is, to vindicate authority, to stigmatise the offence, and
to impress the offender.
"_Fifthly_, punishments ought to be reformatory. Not only must they
never, by vindictiveness in him who gives, and degradation in him who
receives, impair the instincts and resolves for a better life; they must
be devised in the belief, or at least in the hope, that these instincts
and resolves exist, though they may be inhibited by the evil
proclivities which punishment is meant to crush. The killing of what is
bad must always look to the liberation of what is good.
"_Finally_, punishments ought to insist upon, and to define indemnity,
so that the wrong-doer, in things small or great, may be forced to
repair, so far as this is possible, the irreparable mischief which
offence implies."
_The Making of Character_, Professor MACCUNN.
Rebuking
DECEMBER 15
"The gentleness of our Lord in rebuking, has an effect which gentleness
often has, it awakens compunctions in those to whom it is shown. A
child, who by severity is set on its defence or drawn into falsehood, is
often melted into full confession by being loved and trusted more than
it deserves."
_Pastor Pastorum_, HENRY LATHAM.
"Our Lord's reply is again gentle; to be hard on a fault that was
confessed would have dried up that confidence which flowed so freely."
_Pastor Pastorum_, HENRY LATHAM.
"Better make penitents by gentleness than hypocrites by severity."
S. FRANCIS DE SALES.
Example
DECEMBER 16
"Children have more need of models than of critics."
JOUBERT.
"It is by imitation, far more than by precept, that we learn everything;
and what we learn thus we acquire not only more effectually, but more
pleasantly. This forms our manners, our opinions, our lives."
BURKE.
"Meanwhile there is much that we can do. It need not be said that home
is the most effective school of character. On the duties of home I
cannot dwell now. But there is a more general influence of common tone
and habits of which serious account ought to be taken. We are at all
times unconsciously educating others by our own example. Our standard of
duty in the discharge of business and in the use of leisure necessarily
influences the desires and the actions of those who look to us for
guidance. The young are quick-eyed critics, and the sight of quiet
devotion to work, of pleasure sought in common things--and all truly
precious things are common--will enforce surely and silently some great
lessons of school. We do not, as far as I can judge, rate highly enough
our responsibility for the customary practices of society. Not
infrequently we neutralise our teaching through want of imagination by
failing to follow out the consequences of some traditional custom. We
seem to be inconsiderate when we are only ignorant."
Bishop WESTCOTT.
Wealth
DECEMBER 17
"Christ did not denounce wealth any more than He denounced pauperism. He
did not abhor money; He used it. He did not abhor the company of rich
men; He sought it. He did not invariably scorn or even resent a certain
profuseness of expenditure. With a fine discrimination, He, while
habitually discouraging it, yet recognised that, here and there, there
was place for it. What he denounced was the _love_ of, the _lust_ of
riches; the vulgar snobbishness that chose exclusively the fellowship or
the ways of rich men; the habit of extravagance; in one word, greed and
luxury and self-indulgence. He taught men, first of all and last of all,
that they were stewards, that in the final analysis of men and things
neither they nor theirs were their own.
* * * * *
We must not only affirm the brotherhood of man: we must live it. For
then the State, and in the State, the home, the Church, and the
individual shall become the incarnation of a regenerated humanity, and
earth, this earth, our earth, here and to-day, the vestibule of heaven!"
_The Citizen in Relation to the Industrial Situation_,
Bishop POTTER.
The Limit of Luxury
DECEMBER 18