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_ SAINTS' DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS. Since we gave up at the Reformation the superstitious practice of praying to the saints, Saints' Days have sunk--and, indeed, sunk too much--into neglect. We forget too often still, that though praying to any saint or angel, or other created being, is contrary both to reason and Scripture, yet it is according to reason and to Scripture to commemorate them. That is, to remember them, to study their characters, and to thank God for them,--both for the virtues He bestowed on them, and the example which He has given us in them. _MS. Sermon_.
On this day the Lord Jesus was first shown to the Gentiles. The word Epiphany means "showing." The Wise Men were worshippers of the true God, though in a dim confused way; and they had learnt enough of what true faith, true greatness was, not to be staggered and fall into unbelief when they saw the King of the Jews laid, not in a palace, but in a manger, tended by a poor village maiden. And therefore God bestowed on them the great honour that they first of all--Gentiles--should see the glory and the love of God in the face of Jesus Christ. God grant that they may not rise up against us in the Day of Judgment and condemn us! They had but a small spark, a dim ray, of the Light which lighteth every man who cometh into the world; but they were more faithful to that little than many of us, who live in the full sunshine of the Gospel, with Christ's Spirit, Christ's Sacraments, Christ's Churches,--means of grace and hopes of glory of which they never dreamed. _Town and Country Sermons_.
How did St. Paul look on his past life? There is no sentimental melancholy in him. He is saved, and he knows it. He is an Apostle, and he stands boldly on his dignity. He is cheerful, hopeful, joyful. And yet, when he speaks of the past, it is with noble shame and sorrow that he calls himself the chief of sinners, not worthy to be called an Apostle, because he persecuted the Church of Christ. What he is, he will not deny; what he was, he will not forget; lest he should forget that in him, that is, in his flesh--his natural character--dwelleth no good thing; lest he should forget that the good which he does, _he_ does not, but Christ which dwelleth in him; lest he should grow careless, puffed up, self-indulgent; lest he should neglect to subdue his evil passions; and so, after preaching to others, himself become a castaway. _Town and Country Sermons_.
. . . Every winter, _Saint's Tragedy_, Act iii. Scene i. Out of the morning land, _The Longbeard's Saga_. 1852.
The first and last business of every human being, whatever his station, party, creed, capacities, tastes, duties, is morality; virtue, virtue, always virtue. Nothing that man will ever invent will absolve him from the universal necessity of being good as God is good, righteous as God is righteous, holy as God is holy. _Sermons on David_. 1866.
God has not only made things beautiful; He has made things happy; whatever misery there is in the world there is no denying that. Misery is the exception; happiness is the rule. No rational man ever heard a bird sing without feeling that the bird was happy, and that if God made that bird He made it to be happy, and He takes pleasure in its happiness, though no human ear should ever hear its song, no human heart should ever share in its joy. _All Saints' Day Sermons_. 1871.
God grant that the day may come when in front of the dwellings of the poor we may see real fountains--not like the drinking-fountains, useful as they are, which you see here and there about the streets, with a tiny dribble of water to a great deal of expensive stone, but real fountains, which shall leap, and sparkle, and plash, and gurgle, and fill the place with life and light and coolness; and sing in the people's ears the sweetest of all earthly songs--save the song of a mother over her child--the song of "The Laughing Water." _The Air Mothers_. 1872.
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. _MS. Letter_. l842.
_Saint's Tragedy_, Act i. Scene ii.
There comes a time when we must _narrow_ our sphere of thought much, that we may _truly enlarge_ it! we must, _artificialised_ as we _have_ been, return to the rudiments of life, to children's pleasures, that we may find easily, through their transparent simplicity, spiritual laws which we may apply to the more intricate spheres of art and science. _MS. Letter_. 1842.
The Lord's Prayer teaches that we are members of a family, when He tells us to pray not "_My_ Father" but "Our Father;" not "_my_ soul be saved," but "Thy kingdom come;" not "give _me_" but "give _us_ our daily bread;" not "forgive me," but "forgive _us_ our trespasses," and that only as we forgive others; not "lead _me_ not," but "lead _us_ not into temptation;" not "deliver _me_," but "deliver _us_ from evil." After _that_ manner our Lord tells us to pray, and in proportion as we pray in that manner, just so far, and no farther, will God hear our prayers. _National Sermons_. 1850.
All the deep things of God are bright, for God is Light. God's arbitrary will and almighty power may seem dark by themselves though deep, but that is because they do not involve His moral character. Join them with the fact that He is a God of mercy as well as justice; remember that His essence is love, and the thunder-cloud will blaze with dewy gold, full of soft rain and pure light. _MS. Letter_. 1844.
Science is, I verily believe, like virtue, its own exceeding great reward. I can conceive few human states more enviable than that of the man to whom--panting in the foul laboratory, or watching for his life in the tropic forest--Isis shall for a moment lift her sacred veil and show him, once and for ever, the thing he dreamed not of, some law, or even mere hint of a law, explaining one fact: but explaining with it a thousand more, connecting them all with each other and with the mighty whole, till order and meaning shoots through some old chaos of scattered observations. Is not that a joy, a prize, which wealth cannot give nor poverty take away? What it may lead to he knows not. Of what use it may be he knows not. But this he knows, that somewhere it must lead, of some use it will be. For it is a truth. _Lectures on Science and Superstition_.
All Science One. February 9. Physical and spiritual science seem to the world to be distinct. One sight of God as we shall some day see Him will show us that they are indissolubly and eternally the same. _MS._
Passion and reason in a healthy mind ought to be inseparable. We need not be passionless because we reason correctly. Strange to say, one's feelings will often sharpen one's knowledge of the truth, as they do one's powers of action. _MS._ 1843.
. . . People smile at the "enthusiasm of youth"--that enthusiasm which they themselves secretly look back at with a sigh, perhaps unconscious that it is partly their own fault that they ever lost it. . . . Do not fear being considered an enthusiast. What matter? But pray for _tact_, the true tact which love alone can give, to prevent scandalising a weak brother.
_Letters and Memories_. 1842. Be earnest, earnest, earnest; mad, if thou wilt: _Saint's Tragedy_, Act ii. Scene viii. 1847.
"God hath showed thee what is good," . . . what is good in itself, and of itself--the one very eternal and absolute good, which was with God and in God and from God, before all worlds, and will be for ever, without changing, or growing less or greater, eternally the same good--the good which would be just as good and just and right and lovely and glorious if there were no world, no men, no angels, no heaven, no hell, and God were alone in His own abyss. _Sermons for the Times_. 1855.
A difference in words is a very awful and important difference; a difference in words is a difference in things. Words are very awful and wonderful things, for they come from the most awful and wonderful of all beings, Jesus Christ, THE WORD. He puts words into men's minds. He made all things, and He made words to express those things. And woe to those who use the wrong words about anything. _Village Sermons_. 1848.
What wisdom she had she did not pick off the hedge, like blackberries. God is too kind to give away wisdom after that useless fashion. So she had to earn her wisdom, and to work hard, and suffer much ere she attained it. And in attaining she endured strange adventures and great sorrows; and yet they would not have given her the wisdom had she not had something in herself which gave her wit to understand her lessons, and skill and courage to do what they taught her. There had been many names for that something before she was born, there have been many names for it since, but her father and mother called it the Grace of God. _Unfinished Novel_. 1869.
The older we grow, the more we understand our own lives and histories, the more we shall see that the spirit of wisdom is the spirit of love; that the true way to gain influence over our fellow-men is to have charity towards them. That is a hard lesson to learn; and all those who learn it generally learn it late; almost--God forgive us--too late. _Westminster Sermons_.
The Ascetic Painters. February 16. We owe much (notwithstanding their partial and Manichean idea of beauty) to the early ascetic painters. Their works are a possession for ever. No future school of religious art will be able to rise to eminence without learning from them their secret. They taught artists, and priests, and laymen, too, that beauty is only worthy of admiration when it is the outward sacrament of the beauty of the soul within; they helped to deliver men from that idolatry to merely animal strength and loveliness into which they were in danger of falling in ferocious ages, and among the relics of Roman luxury. _Miscellanies_. 1849.
Reveries. February 17. Beware of giving way to reveries. Have always some employment in your hands. Look forward to the future with hope. Build castles if you will, but only bright ones, and _not too many_. _Letters and Memories_. 1842.
Woman's Mission. February 18. It is the glory of woman that she was sent into the world to live for others rather than for herself; and therefore, I should say, let her smallest rights be respected, her smallest wrongs redressed; but let her never be persuaded to forget that she is sent into the world to teach man--what I believe she has been teaching him all along, even in the savage state, namely, that there is something more necessary than the claiming of rights, and that is, the performing of duties; to teach him specially, in these so-called intellectual days, that there is something more than intellect, and that is--purity and virtue. _Lecture on Thrift_. 1869.
The Heroic Life. February 19. Provided we attain at last to the truly heroic and divine life, which is the life of virtue, it will matter little to us by what wild and weary ways, or through what painful and humiliating processes, we have arrived thither. If God has loved us, if God will receive us, then let us submit loyally and humbly to His law--"whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth." _All Saints' Day Sermons_.
The Wages of Sin. February 20. It is sometimes said, "The greater the sinner the greater the saint." I do not believe it. I do not see it. It stands to reason--if a man loses his way and finds it again, he is so much the less forward on his way, surely, by all the time he has spent in getting back into the way. And if any of you fancy you can sin without being punished, remember that the prodigal son is punished most severely. He does not get off freely the moment he chooses to repent, as false preachers will tell you. Even after he does repent and resolves to go back to his father's house he has a long journey home in poverty and misery, footsore, hungry, and all but despairing. But when he does get home; when he shows he has learnt the bitter lesson; when all he dares to ask is, "Make me as one of thy hired servants,"--he is received as freely as the rest. _Water of Life Sermons_. 1864.
Silent Depths. February 21. Our mightiest feelings are always those which remain most unspoken. The most intense lovers and the greatest poets have generally, I think, written very little personal love-poetry, while they have shown in fictitious characters a knowledge of the passion too painfully intimate to be spoken of in the first person. _MS._ 1843.
True Justification. February 22. God grant us to be among those who wish to be really justified by faith, by being made just persons by faith,--who cannot satisfy either their conscience or their reason by fancying that God looks on them as right when they know themselves to be wrong; and who cannot help trusting that union with Christ must be something real and substantial, and not merely a metaphor and a flower of rhetoric. _MS._ 1854.
"Ay," he muttered, "sing awa', . . . wi' pretty fancies and gran' words, and gang to hell for it." "To hell, Mr. Mackaye?" "Ay, to a verra real hell, Alton Locke, laddie--a warse ane than any fiend's kitchen or subterranean Smithfield that ye'll hear o' in the pulpits--the hell on earth o' being a flunkey, and a humbug, and a useless peacock, wasting God's gifts on your ain lusts and pleasures--and kenning it--and not being able to get oot o' it for the chains of vanity and self-indulgence." _Alton Locke_, chap. viii. 1849.
Eternity does not mean merely some future endless duration, but that ever- present _moral_ world, governed by ever-living and absolutely necessary laws, in which we and all spirits are now; and in which we should be equally, whether time and space, extension and duration, and the whole material universe to which they belong, became nothing this moment, or lasted endlessly. _Theologica Germanica_. 1854.
Christ's Life. February 25. What was Christ's life? Not one of deep speculations, quiet thoughts, and bright visions, but a life of fighting against evil; earnest, awful prayers and struggles within, continued labour of body and mind without; insult, and danger, and confusion, and violent exertion, and bitter sorrow. This was Christ's life. This was St. Peter's, and St. James's, and St. John's life afterwards. _Village Sermons_. 1849.
In teaching women we must try to make our deepest lessons bear on the great purpose of unfolding Woman's own calling in all ages--her especial calling in this one. We must incite them to realise the chivalrous belief of our old forefathers among their Saxon forests, that something Divine dwelt in the counsels of woman: but, on the other hand, we must continually remind them that they will attain that divine instinct, not by renouncing their sex, but by fulfilling it; by becoming true women, and not bad imitations of men; by educating their heads for the sake of their hearts, not their hearts for the sake of their heads; by claiming woman's divine vocation as the priestess of purity, of beauty, and of love. _Introductory Lecture_, _Queen's College_.
God's Kingdom. February 27. Philamon had gone forth to see the world, and he had seen it; and he had learnt that God's kingdom was not a kingdom of fanatics yelling for a doctrine, but of willing, loving, obedient hearts. _Hypatia_, chap. xxiii. 1852.
Sowing and Reaping. February 28. So it is, that by every crime, folly, even neglect of theirs, men drive a thorn into their own flesh, which will trouble them for years to come, it may be to their dying day-- as those who neglect their fellow-creatures will discover, by the most patent, undeniable proofs, in that last great day, when the rich and poor shall meet together, and then, at last, discover too that the Lord is the Maker of them all. _All Saints' Day Sermons_. 1871.
The Church Catechism. February 29. Did it ever strike you that the simple, noble, old Church Catechism, without one word about rewards and punishments, heaven or hell, begins to talk to the child, like a true English Catechism as it is, about that glorious old English key-word Duty? It calls on the child to confess its own duty, and teaches it that its duty is something most human, simple, everyday--commonplace, if you will call it so. And I rejoice in the thought that the Church Catechism teaches that the child's duty is commonplace. I rejoice that in what it says about our duty to God and our neighbour, it says not one word about counsels of perfection, or those frames and feelings which depend, believe me, principally on the state of people's bodily health, on the constitution of their nerves, and the temper of their brain; but that it requires nothing except what a little child can do as well as a grown person, a labouring man as well as a divine, a plain farmer as well as the most refined, devout, imaginative lady. _Sermons for the Times_. 1855.
FEBRUARY 2. Little children may think of Christ as a child now and always. For to them He is always the Babe of Bethlehem. Let them not say to themselves, "Christ is grown up long ago." He is, and yet He is not. His life is eternal in the heavens, above all change of time and space. . . . Such is the sacred heart of Jesus--all things to all. To the strong He can be strongest, to the weak weakest of all. With the aged and dying He goes down for ever to the grave; and yet with you children Christ lies for ever on His mother's bosom, and looks up for ever into His mother's face, full of young life and happiness and innocence, the Everlasting Christ- child, in whom you must believe, whom you must love, to whom you must offer up your childish prayers.
Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord. They rest from their labours--all their struggles, failures, past and over for ever. But their works follow them. The good which they did on earth--_that_ is not past and over. It cannot die. It lives and grows for ever, following on in their path long after they are dead, and bearing fruit unto everlasting life, not only in them, but in men whom they never saw, and in generations yet unborn. _Sermons_ (_Good News of God_).
Ash Wednesday. There is a repentance too deep for words--too deep for all confessionals, penances, and emotions or acts of contrition; the repentance, not of the excitable, theatric Southern, unstable as water even in his most violent remorse, but of the still, deep-hearted Northern, whose pride breaks slowly and silently, but breaks once for all; who tells to God what he will never tell to man, and having told it, is a new creature from that day forth for ever. _Two Years Ago_, chap. xviii.
The True Fast. The _rationale_ of Fasting is to give up habitual indulgences for a time, lest they become our masters--artificial _necessities_. _MS._
Early in the Springtime, on raw and windy mornings, Late in the Autumn, on still and cloudless evenings, _The Starlings_.
Knowledge and Love. March 1. Knowledge and Love are reciprocal. He who loves knows. He who knows loves. Saint John is the example of the first; Saint Paul of the second. _Letters and Memories_. 1842.
A Charm of Birds. March 2. Little do most people know how much there is to learn--what variety of character, as well as variety of motion, may be distinguished by the practised ear in a "charm of birds"--from the wild cry of the missel-thrush, ringing from afar in the first bright days of March a passage of one or two bars repeated three or four times, and then another and another, clear and sweet and yet defiant--for the great "storm-cock" loves to sing when rain and wind is coming on, and faces the elements as boldly as he faces hawk and crow--down to the delicate warble of the wren, who slips out of his hole in the brown bank where he has huddled through the frost with wife and children, all folded in each other's arms like human beings. Yet even he, sitting at his house-door in the low sunlight, says grace for all mercies in a song so rapid, so shrill, so loud, and yet so delicately modulated, that you wonder at the amount of soul within that tiny body; and then stops suddenly, like a child that has said its lesson or got to the end of a sermon, gives a self-satisfied flirt of his tail, and goes in again to sleep. _Prose Idylls_. 1866.
Tact of the Heart. March 3. Random shots are dangerous and cruel, likely to hit the wrong person and hurt his feelings unnecessarily. It is very easy to say a hard thing, but not so easy to say it to the right person at the right time. _MS._
Special Providences. March 4. I believe not only in "special providences," but in the whole universe as one infinite complexity of special providences. _Letters and Memories_.
The grain of dust is a thought of God; God's power made it; God's wisdom gave it whatsoever properties or qualities it may possess. God's providence has put it in the place where it is now, and has ordained that it should be in that place at that moment, by a train of causes and effects which reaches back to the very creation of the universe. The grain of dust can no more go from God's presence or flee from God's Spirit than you or I can. _Town Geology_. 1871.
Strive daily and hourly to be calm; to stop yourself forcibly and recall your mind to a sense of what you are, where you are going, and whither you ought to be tending. This is most painful discipline, but most wholesome. _MS. Letter_. 1842.
What a strange mystery is that of mutual self-sacrifice! to exist for one moment for another! the perfection of human bliss! And does not love teach us two things? First, that self-sacrifice, the living for others, is the law of our perfect being, and next, that by and in self-sacrifice alone can we attain to the perfect apprehension of ourselves, our own personality, our own duty, our own bliss. So that the mystics are utterly wrong when they fancy that self-sacrifice can be attained by self- annihilation. Self-sacrifice, instead of destroying the sense of personality, perfects it. _MS. Letter_. 1843.
Follow your Star. March 7. I believe with Dante, "_se tu segui la tua Stella_," that He who ordained my star will not lead me _into_ temptation but _through_ it. Without Him all places and methods of life are equally dangerous, with Him all equally safe. _Letters and Memories_. 1848.
This is the age of _books_. And we should reverence books. Consider! except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book--a message to us from the dead, from human souls whom we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away, and yet in those little sheets of paper speak to us, amuse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers! We ought to reverence books, to look at them as awful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion or politics, trade or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the Maker of all things, the Teacher of all truth, which He has put into the heart of some men to speak. And at the last day, be sure of it, we shall have to render an account--a strict account--of the books which we have read, and of the way in which we have obeyed what we read, just as if we had had so many prophets or angels sent to us. _Village Sermons_. 1849.
The Unknown Future. March 9. As for the things which God has prepared for those who love Him, the Bible tells me that no man can conceive them, and therefore I believe that I cannot conceive them. God has conceived them; God has prepared them; God is our Father. That is enough. _Sermons for the Times_. 1855.
I grudge the epithet of "_secular_" to any matter whatsoever. But more; I deny it to anything which God has made, even to the tiniest of insects, the most insignificant grain of dust. To those who believe in God, and try to see all things in God, the most minute natural phenomenon cannot be secular. It must be divine, I say deliberately, divine, and I can use no less lofty word. _Town Geology_. 1871.
Content or Happy? March 11. My friends, whether you will be the happier for any knowledge of physical science, or for any other knowledge whatsoever, I cannot tell. That lies in the decision of a higher Power than I; and, indeed, to speak honestly, I do not think that any branch of physical science is likely, at first at least, to make you happy. Neither is the study of your fellow-men. Neither is religion itself. We were not sent into the world to be happy, but to be right--at least, poor creatures that we are--as right as we can be, and we must be content with being right, and not happy. . . . And we shall be made truly wise if we be made content; content, too, not only with what we can understand, but content with what we do not understand--the habit of mind which theologians call (and rightly) faith in God, true and solid faith, which comes often out of sadness and out of doubt. _Lecture on Bio-geology_. 1869.
Each man can learn something from his neighbour; at least he can learn this--to have patience with his neighbour, to live and let live. Peace! peace! Anything which is not _wrong_ for the sake of heaven-born Peace! _Town and Country Sermons_. 1861.
A blessed thing it is for any man or woman to have a friend, one human soul whom we can trust utterly, who knows the best and worst of us, and who loves us in spite of all our faults; who will speak the honest truth to us, while the world flatters us to our face, and laughs at us behind our back; who will give us counsel and reproof in the days of prosperity and self-conceit; but who, again, will comfort and encourage us in the day of difficulty and sorrow, when the world leaves us alone to fight our battle as we can. It is only the great-hearted who can be true friends: the mean and cowardly can never know what true friendship means. _Sermons on David_. 1866.
True Heroines. March 14. What is the commonest, and yet the least remembered form of heroism? The heroism of an average mother. Ah! when I think of that broad fact I gather hope again for poor humanity, and this dark world looks bright, this diseased world looks wholesome to me once more, because, whatever else it is or is not full of, it is at least full of mothers. _Lecture on Heroism_. 1873.
Secret Atheism. March 15. There is little hope that we shall learn the lessons God is for ever teaching us in the events of life till we get rid of our secret Atheism, till we give up the notion that God only visits now and then to disorder and destroy His own handiwork, and take back the old scriptural notion that God is visiting all day long for ever, to give order and life to His own work, to set it right where it goes wrong, and re-create it whenever it decays. _Water of Life Sermons_. 1866.
Tolerance. March 16. If we really love God and long to do good and work for God, if we really love our neighbours and wish to help them, we shall have no heart to quarrel about _how_ the good is to be done, provided _it is_ done. "Master," said St. John, "we saw one casting out devils in Thy name, and he followeth not us; wilt Thou that we forbid him? And Jesus said, Forbid him not." _Sermons_.
The Hopes of Old Age. March 17. Christianity alone deprives old age of its bitterness, making it the gate of heaven. Our bodies will fade and grow weak and shapeless, just when we shall not want them, being ready and in close expectation of that resurrection of the flesh which is the great promise of Christianity (no miserable fancies about "pure souls" escaped from matter, but)--of bodies, _our_ bodies, beloved, beautiful, ministers to us in all our joys, sufferers with us in all our sorrows--yea, our very own selves raised up again to live and love in a manner inconceivable from its perfection.
_Santa Maura_. 1852.
Man is _not_, as the poet said, "the noblest study of mankind." God is the noblest study of man, and Him we can study in three ways. 1st. From His image as developed in Christ the Ideal, and in all good men--great good men. 2dly. From His works. 3dly. From His dealings in history; this is the real philosophy of history. _Letters and Memories_. 1842.
An eclectic, if it mean anything, means this--one who in any branch of art or science refuses to acknowledge Bacon's great law, that "Nature is only conquered by obeying her;" who will not take a full and reverent view of the whole mass of facts with which he has to deal, and from them deducing the fundamental laws of his subject, obey them whithersoever they may lead; but who picks and chooses out of them just so many as may be pleasant to his private taste, and then constructs a partial system which differs from the essential ideas of Nature in proportion to the number of facts which he has determined to discard. _Miscellanies_. 1849.
Duty. March 20. Duty, be it in a small matter or a great, is duty still; the command of Heaven; the eldest voice of God. And it is only they who are faithful in a few things who will be faithful over many things; only they who do their duty in everyday and trivial matters who will fulfil them on great occasions. _Sermons for the Times_. 1855.
The Great Unknown. March 21. "Brother," said the abbot, "make ready for me the divine elements, that I may consecrate them." And he asking the reason therefor, the saint replied, "That I may partake thereof with all my brethren before I depart hence. For know assuredly that within the seventh day I shall migrate to the celestial mansions. For this night stood by me in a dream those two women whom I love, and for whom I pray, the one clothed in a white, the other in a ruby-coloured garment, and holding each other by the hand, who said to me, '_That life after death is not such a one as you fancy_: come, therefore, and behold what it is like.'" _Hypatia_, chap. xxx. 1852.
Loss nor Gain, March 22. Nothing is more expensive than penuriousness; nothing more anxious than carelessness; and every duty which is bidden to wait returns with seven fresh duties at its back. _Sermons for the Times_. 1855.
Ancient Greek Education, March 23. We talk of education now. Are we more educated than were the ancient Greeks? Do we know anything about education, physical, intellectual, aesthetic (religious education in our sense of the word of course they had none), of which they have not taught us at least the rudiments? Are there not some branches of education which they perfected once and for ever, leaving us northern barbarians to follow or not to follow their example? To produce health, that is, harmony and sympathy, proportion and grace, in every faculty of mind and body--that was their notion of education. Ah! the waste of health and strength in the young! The waste, too, of anxiety and misery in those who love and tend them! How much of it might be saved by a little rational education in those laws of nature which are the will of God about the welfare of our bodies, and which, therefore, we are as much bound to know and to obey as we are bound to know and to obey the spiritual laws whereon depend the welfare of our souls. _Lecture on Thrift_. 1869.
Body and Soul. March 24. Exalt me with Thee, O Lord, to know the mystery of life, that I may use the earthly as the appointed expression and type of the heavenly, and, by using to Thy glory the natural body, may be fit to be exalted to the use of the spiritual body. Amen. _MS._ 1842.
Moderation. March 25. Let us pray for that great--I had almost said that crowning grace and virtue of Moderation, what St. Paul calls sobriety and a sound mind. Let us pray for moderate appetites, moderate passions, moderate honours, moderate gains, moderate joys; and if sorrows be needed to chasten us, moderate sorrows. Let us not long violently after, or wish too eagerly to rise in life. _Water of Life Sermons_. 1869.
Poetry in the Slums. March 26. "True poetry, like true charity, my laddie, begins at home. . . . Hech! is there no the heaven above them there, and the hell beneath them? and God frowning, and the devil grinning? No poetry there! Is no the verra idea of the classic tragedy defined to be man conquered by circumstance? canna ye see it there? And the verra idea of the modern tragedy, man conquering circumstance? and I'll show ye that too--in many a garret where no eye but the good God's enters to see the patience, and the fortitude, and the self-sacrifice, and the love stronger than death, that's shining in those dark places of the earth." "Ah, poetry's grand--but fact is grander; God and Satan are grander. All around ye, in every gin-shop and costermonger's cellar, are God and Satan at death-grips; every garret is a haill Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained." _Alton Locke_, chap. viii. 1849.
. . . Our life's floor _Saint's Tragedy_, Act iii. Scene ii.
Work. March 28. Yes. Life is meant for work, and not for ease; to labour in danger and in dread, to do a little good ere the night comes when no man can work, instead of trying to realise for oneself a paradise; not even Bunyan's shepherd-paradise, much less Fourier's casino-paradise, and perhaps, least of all, because most selfish and isolated of all, our own art-paradise, the apotheosis of loafing, as Claude calls it. _Prose Idylls_. 1849.
Teaching of Pictures. March 29. Pictures raise blessed thoughts in me. Why not in you, my toiling brother? Those landscapes painted by loving, wise, old Claude two hundred years ago, are still as fresh as ever. How still the meadows are! How pure and free that vault of deep blue sky! No wonder that thy worn heart, as thou lookest, sighs aloud, "Oh, that I had wings as a dove, then would I flee away and be at rest." Ah! but gayer meadows and bluer skies await thee _in the world to come_--that fairyland made real--"the new heavens and the new earth" which God hath prepared for the pure and the loving, the just, and the brave, who have conquered in this sore fight of life. _True Words for Brave Men_. 1849.
Voluntary Heroism. March 30. Any man or woman, in any age and under any circumstances, who _will_, _can_ live the heroic life and exercise heroic influences. It is of the essence of self-sacrifice, and therefore of heroism, that it should be voluntary; a work of supererogation, at least, towards society and man; an act to which the hero or heroine is not bound by duty, but which is above though not against duty. _Lecture on Heroism_. 1872.
The Ideal Holy One. March 31. Have you never cried in your hearts with longing, almost with impatience, "Surely, surely, there is an ideal Holy One somewhere--or else, how could have arisen in my mind the conception, however faint, of an ideal holiness? But where? oh, where? Not in the world around strewn with unholiness. Not in myself, unholy too, without and within. Is there a Holy One, whom I may contemplate with utter delight? and if so, where is He? Oh, that I might behold, if but for a moment, His perfect beauty, even though, as in the fable of Semele of old, 'the lightning of His glance were death.'" . . . And then, oh, then--has there not come that for which our spirit was athirst--the very breath of pure air, the very gleam of pure light, the very strain of pure music--for it is the very music of the spheres--in those words, "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come"? Yes, whatever else is unholy, there is a Holy One--spotless and undefiled, serene and self-contained. Whatever else I cannot trust, there is One whom I can trust utterly. Whatever else I am dissatisfied with, there is One whom I can contemplate with utter satisfaction, and bathe my stained soul in that eternal fount of purity. And who is He? Who, save the Cause and Maker and Ruler of all things past, present, and to come? _Sermon on All Saints' Day_. 1874. _ |
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