1. One said, “The greatest help I ever had in life was that we were
taught in our Training School always to raise our hearts to God the
first thing on waking in the morning.”
Now it need hardly be said that we cannot make a rule for this; a rule
will not teach this, any more than making a rule that the chimney shall
not smoke will make the smoke go up the chimney.
If we occupy ourselves the last thing at night with rushing about,
gossiping in one another’s rooms; if our last thoughts at night are of
some slight against ourselves, or spite against another, or about each
other’s tempers, it is needless to say that our first thoughts in the
morning will not be of God.
Perhaps there may even have been some quarrel; and if those who pretend
to be educated women indulge in these irreligious uneducated disputes,
what a scandal before those less educated, to whom an example, not a
stone of offence, should be set!
“A thousand irreligious cursed hours” (as some poet says), have not
seldom, in the lives of all but a few whom we may truly call Saints upon
earth, been spent on some feeling of ill-will. And can we expect to be
really able to lift up our hearts the first thing in the morning to the
God of “good will towards men” if we do this?