UCSB
GOOD CHEER
FOR A YEAR
SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS OF THE
RT. REV. PHILLIPS BROOKS, D.D.
BY
W. M. L. JAY
All life which would not prow stale and monoto ious must feed itself upon
God. . . . All life which would make To-day the transmutation place
where Yesterday shall give its power to Forever, must be full of the felt
presence of Him in whom yesterday, to-day and forever are all one.- vi. 344.
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY
3 1 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET
1896
COPYRIGHT, 1896, BY
E. P. DUTTON & CO.
Press of J. J. Little & Co.
Astor Place, New York
PREFACE.
IT is too soon to let the ministry of Bishop
Brooks pass into the shadow of forgetfulness.
He "yet speaketh " in a multitude of works
which, in a remarkable degree, combine lofty
spirituality and plain practicalness with rare
human sympathy, and are therefore particu-
larly well adapted to the sustenance and guid-
ance of the daily Christian life. There are
those who are so fortunate as to be able to
study these works as a whole, but there are
also many busy people who are glad to have
one thought, suitable and sufficient unto the
day, ready to their hands in a convenient
form. To such a second year-book is offered,
not by the same hand as the first, but com-
piled on the same plan, for the excellent
reason that it cannot be bettered.
The labor of making the book has been
increased by the abundance of the material.
Many year-books might be quarried out of it
without exhausting its richness and variety,
or its wealth of helpful suggestion for those
who are trying to live the life of faith in uni-
iv PREFACE.
son with the life of action, to "round every
truth with its duty, and deepen every duty
into its truth." Inevitably the thought comes
that such a daily ministry to hearts thrilled and
elated with life's duties and joys, or sore and
weary with its burdens, must be deeply grat-
ifying to him with whose rich and abundant
life of faith and works it is impossible to asso-
ciate any thought of death. The monks of
Antioch were wont to say of a brother, not
" He is dead," but '" He is perfected."
For those who like to follow the Christian
Year, and who may wish to use the book
more than once, selections for the greater
movable fasts and feasts are appended to the
volume.
W. M. L. JAY.
SERMONS, IST SERIES, . ... . . I
SERMONS, 20 SERIES, II
SERMONS, 30 SERIES, Ill
SERMONS, 4 SERIES, IV
SERMONS, $TH SERIES, V
SERMONS, 6TH SERIES, VI
SERMONS FOR THE PRINCIPAL FESTIVALS AND
FASTS, VII
THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS, .... VIII
YALE LECTURES ON PREACHING, . . . IX
ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES, X
THE LIFE HERE AND THE LIFE HEREAFTER, . XI
THE GOOD WINE AT THE FEAST'S END, . . XII
[The Roman numerals at the end of the selections refer
to the above list of books ; the Arabic numerals to the
pages where the selections may be found.]
JANUARY i. i
Be strong and of a good courage, . . . for the
Lord thy God is ivith thee wherever thou goest.
JOSH. i. 9.
THE poetry of all growing life consists in
carrying an oldness into a newness, a past
into a future, always. So only can our days
possibly be " bound each to each by natural
piety." I would not for the world think that
twenty years hence I should have ceased to see
the things which I see now, and love them still.
It would make life wearisome beyond expres-
sion if I thought that twenty years hence I
should see them just as I see them now, and
love them with no deeper love because of other
visions of their lovableness. And so there
comes this deep and simple rule for any man
as he crosses the line dividing one period of
his life from another: Make it a time in which
you shall realize your faith, and also in which
you shall expect of your faith new and greater
things. Take what you believe and are and
hold it in your hand with new firmness as you
go forward; but as you go, holding it, look on
it with continual and confident expectation to
see it open into something greater and truer.
V. 296.
Go with the sun and the stars, and yet ever-
more in thy spirit
Say to thyself: It is good, yet there is better
than it:
This that I see is not all, and this that I do is
but little;
Nevertheless it is good, though there is better
than it. ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. '
2 JANUARY 2.
I think that nothing made is lost,
That not a moon has ever shone,
That not a cloud my eyes hath crossed,
But to my soul is gone;
That all the lost years garnered lie
In this Thy casket, my dim soul;
And Thou wilt, once, the key supply,
And show the shining whole.
GEORGE MACDONALD.
WHILE we leave everything behind in time,
it is no less true that nothing is wholly
left behind. All that we ever have been or
done is with us in some power and consequence
of it until the end. . . . The unity of life is
never lost. There must not be any waste.
How great and gracious is the economy of
life which it involves! Neither to dwell in
any experience always, nor to count any ex-
perience as if it had not been, but to leave
the forms of our experiences behind, and to
go forth from them clothed in their spiritual
power, which is infinitely free and capable of
new activities, this is what God is always
teaching us is possible, and tempting us to do.
To him who does it come the two great bless-
ings of a growing life, faithfulness and lib-
erty: faithfulness in each moment's task, and
liberty to enter through the gates beyond
which lies the larger future. " Well done,
good servant: thou hast been faithful over a
few things. Enter thou into the joy of thy
Lord."
VI. 57, 58.
JANUARY 3.
And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the
Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba,
Father. GAL. iv. 6.
WERE there ever verses that had a sub-
limer occupancy ? God is there, and
Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. And in the
midst of them all, as the being for whom they
all are working, there is man. As the win-
dows of these verses open, this is what we see:
all the prevalent influence of heaven gathered
around man, and by its united power bringing
him into the perfect sympathy of God. The
Father sees him and loves him; the Son comes
and seeks him; the Spirit spreads through his
heart the sense of all this love; and then he,
loved, redeemed, and quickened, reconciled to
God, is seen, at the last, lifting up his hands
and claiming God, crying, " Abba, Father."
What a vast chorus of sublimest life! How
the soul stands amazed and awed! Here are
all heaven and all that is capable of heavenli-
ness upon earth met together, and the end
of their meeting is complete accord. God is
pouring His life into man. Man is sending
back his tribute rendering his life to God.
It is the chorus of reconciled Divinity and
humanity. VII. 99.
O wonderful, oh, passing thought,
The love that God hath had for thee,
Spending on thee no less a sum
Than the undivided Trinity!
FABER.
4 JANUARY 4.
From glory to glory. 2 COR. iii. 18.
WHEN Saint Paul wants to depict the vast
variety of which the world is full, it
was distinctly as a variety of glory that he
conceived of it. Enough he knew of the vari-
ety of woe. Easily enough he might have de-
picted how man, the same man still, was tossed
from suffering to suffering and remained the
same identical miserable sufferer in all. It
would have been the same truth taught upon
its darker side. But Paul knew that the- true
side on which to teach it was its side of light.
The real variety of life is a variety of glories.
Such a choice of the side from which to draw
his illustration is a noble characteristic of
Saint Paul. It is a sign of how healthy he is.
Change from glory into glory, that was what
life seemed to him. Remember, it is no rap-
turous and untired boy who is talking; it is a
man all sore with sorrow, beaten and broken
with disappointment and distress. Is it not a
sign of what a true Christian he was that life
seemed to him still to be only a variety and
constant interchange of glories ? v. 62.
" From glory unto glory ! " What great
things He hath done! . . .
But sweeter than the Christmas chimes rings
out His promise clear
That " greater things," far greater, our long-
ing eyes shall see!
We can but wait and wonder what " greater
things" shall be.
FRANCES R. HAVERGAL.
JANUARY 5. 5
" Comest thou as friend ?
Comest thou as foe ? "
" Nay, 'tis thou wilt bend
Me to weal or woe.
As thou usest me,
Shall I be to thee
Friend or foe."
J. L. M. W.
THINGS are what they are used for. . . .
The artist uses a stone, and it is a statue;
the mason uses a stone, and it is a doorstep.
And beyond mere nature. See how we use
men. We are each other's raw material. I
make you up in some shape into my life, and
you in some way make me up into yours. But
what man is of so fixed a character that he
can be made up only into one invariable thing ?
Each man makes of his neighbor that for which
he uses him. . . .
So of all influences and motives. The same
educations wall and press upon two lives. One
rises on them into greatness, the other drags
them down upon it and is crushed beneath
them into ruin. . . . How is it that the Phari-
see and the Publican came down the same
temple steps, one cold, and proud, and bitter,
and the other with his heart full of tenderness,
and gratitude, and humblest charity ?
VI. 25, 26.
6 JANUARY 6.
Shine as lights in the ivorld ; Holding forth the
word of life. PHIL. ii. 15, 16.
A MAN'S place is made ready for him in
the mind of God; the man's life is set
here as a positive, clear fact; and what comes
next ? There is no doubt what ought to come.
That life must tell. It must go out beyond
itself. It must have influence. It must tes-
tify and supplement the mere fact of its exist-
ence by making other existences be something
which they would not be without it. This
seems so plain. This is so clearly set forth in
the great typical life of Jesus. . . . Can you
picture to yourself God coming into this world
and then living a perfectly self-contained life
one that recognized no relations with and
exercised no power over other lives about
Him ? No! The epiphany followed immedi-
ately on the advent and the nativity. . . .
He let His life go forth on other lives. He
let His great light shine before men. But how
many there are who realize their advent and
their nativity who have never conceived for
themselves of an epiphany! . . . never have
dreamed that they were put here where they
are, and made to be what they are, in order
that other men might be something else through
them.
VII. 8, 9.
All are needed by each one:
Nothing is fair or good alone.
EMERSON.
JANUARY 7. 7
The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto,
but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for
many. MARK x. 45.
THERE are theories of self-culture which
are printed in books, given as very gos-
pels to our children as they grow up, which
would be just exactly the same that they now
are if no such dream as a possible duty of use-
fulness and influence from that child to other
people had ever entered into the thought of God
or man. ... "Be strong, be rich, be wise,
be good." What for? "Why, so that you
may be wise and rich and strong and good."
The endless circle, with its bright monotonous
round! No wonder that so many young men
are asking in the bottom of their hearts ques-
tions of most terrible skepticism: "What is
the use ? Is it worth while to be wise and
strong and rich and good ? " Ah, you must
find the use outside yourself. You must let
your light shine before men, that they may
see your good works, and glorify your Father
which is in heaven. You must complete your
advent and nativity with an epiphany of your-
self. Then it will seem well worth while to
light your human light most brilliantly and
keep it trimmed most vigilantly.
Only shine toward your brethren's lives,
only be your best in their direction.
VII. 9 , 10.
What others claim from us is not our thirst and our
hunger, but our bread and our gourd.
AMIEL.
JANUARY 8.
He hath made everything beautiful in His time.
ECCLES. iii. ii.
FOR sin and holiness are not in things, but
in souls; and all things are beautiful in
the time when a soul uses them for holy uses
with a loving, humble, and obedient life. . . .
The human soul sits at the centre of every-
thing, and Christ sits at the centre of the hu-
man soul. If HE changes us, then everything
will be changed to us. " He that sitteth upon
the throne saith, Behold I make all things
new! " If the world is ugly and bitter and
cruel to you: if circumstances taunt and per-
secute you: if everything you touch is a strain
and a temptation, do not stand idly wishing
that the world were changed. The change
must be in you. To the new heart all things
shall be new. The new man shall see already
the new heaven and the new earth. If any
man be in Christ, he is a new creature; and
the new creature is immediately in the new
creation. Some of you know already by daily
experience what that means. And for all of
you, it waits to be revealed, if you will let
Christ do His work in you. iv. 261.
There is a rest that deeper grows
In midst of pain and strife;
A mighty, conscious, willed repose,
The heart of deepest life.
To have and hold the precious prize,
No need of jealous bars,
But windows open to the skies,
And skill to read the stars.
GEORGE MACDOXALD.
JANUARY 9. 9
^~ ^ e notnm g> nothing! " cries the
mystic singer in his revival hymn,
desiring to lose himself in God. " Nay, not
that; O, to be something, something," remon-
strates the unmystical man, longing for work,
ardent for personal life and character. Where
is the meeting of the two ? How shall self-
surrender meet that high self-value without
which no man can justify his living and honor
himself in his humanity ? Where can they meet
but in this truth ? Man must be something
that he may be nothing. The something which
he must be must consist in simple fitness to
utter the divine life which is the only original
power in the universe. And then man must
be nothing that he may be something. He
must submit himself in obedience to God, that
so God may use him, in some way in which
his special nature only could be used, to illu-
minate and help the world. Tell me, do not
the two cries meet in that one aspiration of
the Christian man to find his life by losing it
in God, to be himself by being not his own
but Christ's ? II. 18.
I could not choose a larger bliss
Than to be wholly Thine; and mine
A will whose highest joy is this,
To ceaselessly unclasp in Thine.
We are not losers thus; we share
The perfect gladness of the Son,
Not conquered, for, behold, we reign,
Conquered and Conqueror are one.
JEAN SOPHIA PIGOTT,
io JANUARY 10.
Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us ?
LUKE ii. 48.
WHO is there of us that is not aware that
his soul has had two educations ? . . .
Our own government of ourselves is most evi-
dent, is the one which we are most aware of,
so that sometimes for a few moments we for-
get that there is any other; but very soon our
plans for ourselves are so turned and altered
and hindered that we cannot ignore the other
greater, deeper force. We meant to do that,
and look! we have been led on to this. We
meant to be this, and lo! we are that. We
never meant to believe this, and lo! we hold it
with all our hearts. What does it mean ? It
is the everlasting discovery, the discovery
which each thoughtful man makes for himself
with almost as much surprise as if no other
man had ever made it for himself before, that
this soul, for which he is responsible, is not his
soul only, but is God's soul too. The revela-
tion which came of old to the Virgin Mother
about her child Not your child only, but
God's child too; yours, genuinely, really
yours, but behind yours, and over yours,
God's.
IV. 36.
Why ever make man's good distinct from
God's ?
Or, finding they are one, why dare mistrust ?
BROWNING.
JANUARY ii. ii
I AM often struck by seeing how the loftiness
of the life of Jesus altogether escaped the
perplexity of many of the questions with which
our lives are troubled, as the eagle flying
through the sky is not worried how to cross
the rivers. We debate whether self culture
or our brethren's service is the true purpose of
our life. We vacillate aimlessly. . . . We are
so apt to live two lives. But Jesus knows but
one. All culture of His soul is a part of our
salvation. All doing of His work is ripening
His nature. . . . And not until our brawling
ceases and the champion of each side of the
question rounds his truth with his adversary's
truth which he has been denouncing, not until
the apostle of self-culture knows that no man
can come to his best by selfishness, and the
apostle of usefulness knows that no man can
do much for other men who is not much him-
self, not until then shall men have fairly
started on the broad road to the completeness
of God their Father in the footsteps of the
Son of Man.
VIII. 109.
Let Christ be thy Life;
Let Him be thy Meditation and thy Discourse;
Let Him be thy Desire, thy Gain, thy whole
Hope, and thy Reward.
If thou seekest anything but God purely, thou
wilt suffer loss;
Thou shalt labor and shalt find no rest.
THOMAS A KEMPIS.
12 JANUARY 12.
Words divine, and prayers, and blessings,
Sorrows, sacraments, and alms,
Humble souls, with care o'erwearied,
Bended knees and folded palms,
These are working wondrous changes,
Unperceived, except by faith.
CAROLINE M. NOEL.
THINK how with the successive generations
of mankind, each leaving countless new
monuments of divine love and human possi-
bility upon the earth, the earth itself is grow-
ing richer every year. Every year some new
valley gets its consecration from some new
soul's struggle with sin. Every year some
new mountain-top burns with another soul's
rapture of salvation. We read of the prom-
ise of the new heavens and the new earth
wherein righteousness shall dwell. Are not
the heavens and the earth ever growing new,
newer, and more full of righteousness every
day ? When the time shall come that every
star in heaven and every stone on earth shall
be vocal with some word of God which it
has heard, and in their midst shall live the
race of men, no longer deaf and obstinate,
but quick-eared to hear and loving-hearted to
obey those words as they come crowding in,
making the air sacred on every side when
that shall come, shall not the promise then
have been fulfilled, and the " New Heavens
and the New Earth wherein dwelleth right-
eousness " be a sublime reality ?
VI. 275-
JANUARY 13. 13
Faith is the sun of life; and her countenance
shines like the Hebrew's,
For she has looked upon God.
LONGFELLOW.
GOD forbid that in trying to make faith
seem glorious, I should make it seem
impossible! But it is true of God's gifts al-
ways that the most complete of them are the
most possibly universal. . . . To be loved is
better than to be admired; and admiration is
the privilege of a few brilliant natures, while
love is within the reach of any pure and loving
heart. Art is the privilege of the few, but
nature opens her treasures wide. ... If this
be so, then how must it be with that blessing
which outgoes all others the blessing of faith,
the blessing of living under the perpetually
recognized lordship of Christ? The finest of
all gifts of God may we not look for it to be
the freest also ? Free as the air, which is the
most precious thing that the world contains,
and yet struggles as nothing else in all the
world struggles to give itself away.
VI. 104, 105.
At the devil's mart are all things sold,
Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold;
For a cap and bells our lives we pay:
Bubbles we earn with our whole soul's task-
ing;
'Tis only God that is given away,
'Tis only heaven may be had for the asking.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
i 4 JANUARY 14.
That ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ,
the Son of God ; and that believing ye might have
life through His name. JOHN xx. 31.
OUPPOSE that this divinity of Jesus be-
O comes part of a man's faith . . . suppose
that a man really believes that, entering into
our human life, God has been here upon earth.
What will that belief be to him that holds
it ? . . . The question answers itself. If to
believe in God is a glory and delight, the
nearer the God whom I believe in comes to me,
the more glorious and delightful grows my life.
To tread an earth which He has trodden, to
think thoughts and to feel emotions which, just
as I think and feel them, in their human shapes,
He the eternal God has thought and felt this
is assuredly a marvellous enrichment of my
living. I have gone out and up into a new
world with this new faith a new world, yet
the old world still; the old world teeming and
bursting with new meanings, radiant with new
light, sacred and beautiful all through with
the remembered presence of the Son of God.
Surely no man who has once known what it is
to live in that world can ever turn his back
upon its richness.
VII. 329, 330.
No longer is our life
A thing unused or vain;
To us, even here, to live is Christ,
To us to die is gain.
HORATIUS BONAR.
JANUARY 15. 15
The sun shall be no more thy light by day ;
neither for brightness shall the moon give light
unto thee ; but the Lord shall be to thee an ever-
lasting light. Is. Ix. 19.
'T'HE lives of men who have been always
1 growing are strewed along their whole
course with the things which they have learned
to do without. As the track of an army
marching deep into an enemy's country is
scattered all along with the equipage which
the men seemed to find necessary when they
started, but which they have learned to do
without as the exigencies of their march grew
greater, and they found that these provisions
and equipments were partly such as they did
not need at all, and partly such as they could
gather out of the land through which they
marched; so from the time when the child
casts his leading strings aside because his legs
are strong enough to carry him alone, the
growing man goes on forever leaving each help
for a higher, until at last, in that great change
to which Isaiah's words seem to apply, he can
do without sun and moon as he enters into the
immediate presence and essential life of God.
I. 283.
I say that man was made to grow, not stop;
That help, he needed once and needs no more,
Having grown but an inch by, is withdrawn;
For he hath new needs, and new helps to these.
This imports solely man should mount on each
New height in view : the help whereby he mounts,
The ladder-rung his foot hath left, may fall,
Since all things suffer change save God, the
Truth. BROWNING.
16 JANUARY 16.
HOLINESS does not make men monotonous.
The dimmer the light the more things
look alike. Increase the light and then you
see how different they are. Childhood with its
bright hopefulness, and manhood with its en-
terprise, and womanhood with its tenderness
each grows more specially itself at the touch
of grace. The old man and the young man,
the thinker, the artist, the worker, the mer-
chant, the doctor, and the lawyer out of each
comes up to the surface a profounder individu-
ality when they all begin to live to God. And
the subtler differences which distinguish man
from man and woman from woman, making
each being a separate thought of God, unlike
any other these become clearer as the idea of
God in the creation of each becomes more
fully realized. The pebbles lie dull and dead
and all gray alike in the dry bed of the brook
till with the spring freshet the water comes
pouring down and wets them all alike and
brings out their beautiful variety of color and
makes them all different.
VII. 40.
The sunlight takes the hue
Of whatsoever shade it shineth through,
Crimson or blue;
And thus we find
The One great Light, that lighteth all man-
kind,
Taketh a varied coloring from each mind.
ANNA E. HAMILTON.
JANUARY 17. 17
Whatever He saith unto you, do it.
JOHN ii. 5.
YOU make a friend, you read a book, you
take a journey, you buy a house, you
write a letter, and so full is the great world of
God, so is He waiting everywhere to make
Himself known and to give Himself away,
that through this act of yours, to men who are
looking and listening, there comes some reve-
lation of His nature and some working of His
power. . . . For acts have their true meanings
in the points of manifestation and operation
which they give to God. It was not because
she knew that somehow they would have wine
or something better, it was because her Son
would surely show Himself through their obe-
dience, if they obeyed Him, that Mary cared
what these servants did. It is strange to
think what a dignity and interest our own
actions might have for us if we constantly
recognize this capacity in them which they
have not now. We play with bits of glass,
finding great pleasure in their pleasant shapes,
but never knowing what glorious things they
would be if we held them up and let the sun
shine through them.
V. 346.
O Everlasting Light,
Shine graciously within!
Brightest of all on earth that's bright,
Come, shine away my sin!
HORATIUS BONAR.
i8 JANUARY 18.
Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord,
. . . because they came not to the help of the Lord
against the mighty. JUDG. v. 23.
THE sin for which Meroz is cursed is pure
inaction. There is no sign that its peo-
ple gave any aid or comfort to the enemy.
They merely did nothing. We hear so much
about the danger of wrong thinking and the
danger of wrong doing. There is the other
danger, of not doing right and not thinking
right, of not doing and not thinking at all. . . .
Whenever men hide behind their conscious
feebleness; whenever, because they can do so
little, they content themselves with doing
nothing; whenever the one-talented men stand
with their napkins in their hands along the
roadside of life, there is Meroz over again.
. . . Grant that you are as small as you think
you are, you are the average size of moral and
intellectual humanity. Let all the Merozes in
the land be humble like you, and where shall
be the army ? Only when men like you wake
up and shake the paralysis of their humility
away, shall we begin to see the dawn of that
glorious millennium for which we sigh; which
will consist not in the transformation of men
into angels, nor in the coming forth of a few
colossal men to be the patterns and the cham-
pions of life, but simply in each man, through
the length and breadth of the great world,
doing his best. II. 291, 298, 299.
When obstacles and trials seem
Like prison walls to be,
I do the little I can do,
And leave the rest to Thee. FABER.
JANUARY 19. 19
And they said . . . Let not God speak with us,
lest we die. Ex. xx. 19.
IS it not almost as if the fish cried, " Cast me
not into the water, lest I drown," or as if
the eagle said, " Let not the sun shine on me,
lest I be blind " ? It is man fearing his native
element. He was made to talk with God. . . .
We find a revelation of this in all the deepest
and highest moments of our lives. Have you
not often been surprised by seeing how men
who seemed to have no capacity for such ex-
periences passed into a sense of divine com-
panionship when anything disturbed their lives
with supreme joy or sorrow ? Once or twice,
at least, in his own life, almost every one of
us has found himself face to face with God,
and felt how natural it was to be there. Then
all interpreters and agencies of Him have
passed away. He has looked in on us di-
rectly; we have looked immediately upon
Him; and we have not died, we have su-
premely lived. We have known that we never
had so lived as then. We have been aware
how natural was that direct sympathy and
union and communication with God.
V. 82.
And blest are they
Who, in this fleshly world, the elect of Heaven,
Their strong eye darting through the deeds
of men,
Adore with steadfast, unpresuming gaze
Him, Nature's essence, mind, and energy.
S. T. COLERIDGE.
20 JANUARY 20.
Acquaint now thyself with Him, and be at
peace ; thereby good shall come unto thee.
JOB xxii. 21.
"T"HE more you come into communion with
^ God, catch His spirit, understand His
life; the more quick your eye becomes to de-
tect the spiritual life of other men though it
be hidden under the strangest forms, the more
broad your heart grows to embrace it. Com-
ing to love God is like climbing a high moun-
tain. It takes you out of the low valley of
formal life. It sets you upon the open sum-
mit of spiritual sympathy, close to the sun.
Thence you look out into unguessed regions
of noble thought and living, with which you
never dreamed that you had anything to do.
. . . There never was a man who really tried
to serve God who did not have his sympathy
with his fellow men widened thereby.
VII. 314.
ON THE MOUNTAIN TOP.
Dear world, I behold but your largeness; I
forget that aught evil or mean
Ever marred the vast sphere of your beauty,
over which as a lover I lean.
And n'ot by our flaws will God judge us; His
love keeps our noblest in sight:
Dear world, our low life sinks behind us; we
look up to His infinite height.
LUCY LARCOM.
JANUARY 21. 21
MEN talk as if because Christ is the same
loving, willing Christ for all of us, and
all of us are nothing and can have nothing but
Him, therefore the meagre, mercenary saint
ought to shine with the same lustre as the pure
spirit passionate for holiness, and ready for
all the completed will of God. As if one said
that because the sun is the same sun always,
and because there is no light except from him,
therefore the rose and the daisy ought to look
alike. No! He in His love outgoes our
prayers. He gives us more of what we ask
than we know how to ask for; more beauty to
the seeker after beauty, more wisdom to the
student, more safety to the poor culprit asking
forgiveness. And He is always trying to make
the self which asks a larger self, that He may
give it other things of higher kinds. But yet
the truth remains, that at each moment He
can give Himself to us only as at that mo-
ment we give ourselves to Him.
III. 285.
Higher, purer, deeper, surer,
Be my thought, O Christ, of Thee!
Stretch the narrow bounds that limit
All my earth-born, sin-bound spirit
To the breadth of Thy divine.
Be the image purely Thine,
Not my thought, but Thy creation;
Deep within my spirit's shrine
Make the secret revelation;
Reproduce Thy life in mine!
MRS. MERRILL E. GATES.
22 JANUARY 22.
ONE man approaches the divine Redeemer
asking no divine redemption, but touched
and fascinated by the beauty of that perfect
life. He would feed his wonder, he would
cultivate his taste, upon it. ... Another man
comes to Jesus with a self that is all alive with
curiosity. He takes Christ's revelations for
Christ does not refuse him either and goes
away content to know much of God and man,
and what there is beyond this world. . . . Each
gets from Jesus that which the nature he
brings can take. . . . Only when at last there
comes a man with his self all open, with door
behind door all unclosed, ready to give him-
self entirely, wanting everything that Jesus
has to give, wanting and ready to take the
whole of Jesus into himself only then are the
last gates withdrawn, and as when the ocean
gathers itself up and enters with its tide the
open mouth of the river, ... so does the
Lord in all His richness, with His perfect
standards, His mighty motives, His infinite
hopes, give Himself to the soul which has
been utterly given to Him. in. 284, 285.
Lord, we are rivers running to Thy sea,
Our waves and ripples all derived from Thee;
A nothing we should have, a nothing be,
Except for Thee.
Sweet are the waters of Thy shoreless sea,
Make sweet our waters that make haste to
Thee;
Pour in Thy sweetness, that ourselves may be
Sweetness to Thee!
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.
JANUARY 23. 23
And the king said, Is there not yet any . . .
that I may show the kindness of God unto him ?
2 SAM. ix. 3.
HOW shall you make man know that God
loves him ? In every way, there is no
speech nor language in which that voice may
not be heard, but most of all by loving the
man with a great love yourself, by a lofty and
generous affection of which he shall know that,
coming through you, it comes from beyond
you, and say, "It is my Father that my
brother utters," and so be led up to the
Father's heart. We talk about men's reaching
through Nature up to Nature's God. It is
nothing to the way in which they may reach
through manhood up to manhood's God, and
learn the divine love by the human. God
make us all such revelations of His love to
some of His children!
V. 50.
For by human lovings climb we
(As to cause from consequence)
To some dim, imperfect vision,
To some awed but precious sense
Of the Love of love whose loving
We have surnamed " Providence."
Ah, what gladness in the glory
Of the better land to know
That to some poor, doubting, fearing,
Hungering, thirsting soul below,
All unknowing, in our loving,
We the love of God did show.
J. L. M. W.
24 JANUARY 24.
For our light affliction, which is but for a
moment, worketh out for us a far more exceeding
and eternal weight of glory j while we look not at
the things which are seen, but at the things which
are not seen : for the things which are seen are
temporal ; but the things which are not seen are
eternal. 2 COR. iv. 17, 18.
OH, the next life seems all so vague to us!
We reach out after it. We believe in it,
but how hard it is for us to take hold of it!
How can we ? Only by living here with Him
who is to bring us there. Only by growing so
familiar with Christ that when He outruns us
and enters in behind the veil, when the strings
of His influence outgo our mortal state and
run into the darkness, we may still feel the
tug upon them from beyond the darkness and
know the reality of heaven because our Christ
is there. By constant living with the Eternal,
so only can you realize Eternity. . . .
To welcome all His leadings now so cor-
dially that we shall know our Leader when He
opens the last great door; to be always fol-
lowing Him so obediently that we shall have
faith to follow Him when He leads us into the
river and into darkness, this, and only this,
is readiness for death. vi. 185, 186.
O Lord of Light, steep Thou our souls in Thee,
That when the daylight trembles into shade,
And falls the silence of mortality,
And all is done, we shall not be afraid,
But pass from light to light; from earth's dull
gleam
Into the very heart and heaven of our dream.
RICHARD WATSON GILDER.
JANUARY 25. 25
And suddenly there shined round about him a
light from heaven : . . . And he trembling and
astonished said, Lord, what wilt Thou have me to
do ? ACTS ix. 3, 6.
WE talk so much about confession and
forgiveness; we elaborate their theory
so much; we see such intricate relations of
the divine and human natures involved in the
transaction, that we almost unconsciously
transfer the long train of thought into a long
period of time. We feel as if that result
which implies so much spiritual action must
be reached only by a process of correspond-
ingly prolonged duration. " To confess and
be forgiven that is the work of months and
years, of a whole lifetime," we declare. . . .
But the volcano that the chemistry of years
has been preparing breaks into eruption in an
hour. Tire blossom that the patient plant
has been designing for a century bursts into
flower in a single night. And so the reconcili-
ation of a soul to God, which it has been the
labor of the ages to make possible, which
dates for its conception back to the dateless
time when the Lamb was slain from the foun-
dation of the world, comes to its completion
in the sudden meeting of a soul filled with
penitence and a God filled with mercy.
VII. 184.
As to Thy last Apostle's heart
Thy lightning glance did then impart
Zeal's never-dying fire,
So teach us on Thy shrine to lay
Our hearts, and let them day by day
Intenser blaze and higher. KEBLE.
26 JANUARY 26.
Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every
word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.
MATT. iv. 4.
MAN is represented as feeding on the words
of God, and every word of God must
come for nurture to the life that is made up
of many parts. How splendid the figure is!
God . . . speaks once: "Let the earth bring
forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the
fruit-tree yielding fruit." And as He spoke,
those words, " proceeding out of the mouth
of the Lord," were caught by the quick, obe-
dient ground of Genesis, and became the power
by which the physical life of man in all his
generations has been nourished. . . . Again,
He speaks out of some Sinai mountain, or
out of that Sinai of the inner lifie, our con-
science. "Do this," He says, "and live,"
laying down duty after duty, which the moral
nature takes to itself and feeds upon, and
grows by them into rectitude and strength.
And then, last of all, to the highest life of
all, He utters His sublimest voice. What shall
we say that last word is by which He utters
Himself to, on which He feeds, man's deep
religious nature ? What can it be but that
eternal " Word" which was in the beginning
with God, which was God, which was made
flesh, and dwelt among us; that bread of life
which came down from heaven, of which a man
may eat and never die; the fulness of divine
utterance in the world's Saviour, Jesus Christ ?
VII. 155, 156.
JANUARY 27. 27
'"THE real life, what is it ? Is it the wretched,
* sordid details of earthly living, unin-
spired by a single-suggestion that in their mud
and mire there are the seeds of any spiritual,
transcendent fruit or flower ? On the other
hand, is the real life a vision of some expe-
rience beyond the stars which has no connec-
tion with the dreariness and degradation of
many of the mortal conditions which it has
passed through and left behind ? Not so.
The real life of a man is his highest attainment
kept in perpetual association with the meanest
and commonest experience out of which it has
been fed. When men shall so write and paint
the lives of one another, then we shall have
the true realism, a realism in which, to use
the Psalmist's words, " Truth shall flourish
out of the earth and Righteousness look down
from Heaven."
VI. 226.
Natural things
And spiritual; who separates these two
In art, in morals, or the social drift,
Tears up the bond of nature, and brings
death . . .
Leads vulgar days, deals ignorantly with men,
Is wrong, in short, at all points.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING,
28 JANUARY 28.
For we can do nothing against the truth, but for
the truth. 2 COR. xiii. 8.
THERE is an absolute truth about every-
thing, something which is certainly the
fact about that thing, entirely independent of
what you or I or any man may think about it.
No man on earth may know that fact correctly
but the fact exists. It lies behind all blunders
and all partial knowledges, a calm, sure, un-
found certainty, like the great sea beneath its
waves, like the great sky behind its clouds.
God knows it. It and the possession of it
makes the eternal difference between God's
knowledge and man's.
It is a beautiful and noble faith when a man
thus believes in the absolute truth, unfound,
unfindable perhaps by man, and yet surely ex-
istent behind and at the heart of everything.
It is a terrible thing when a man ceases to be-
lieve in it, and ceases to seek for it.
VI. 210.
Seek, then, now, O my soul, so singular and
so supereminent a Good.
As long as thou art in the flesh, cease not to
seek ;
Since that can never be sought enough, which
can never be grasped to the full.
THOMAS A KEMPIS.
Jesus saith unto him, I am . . . the Truth.
JOHN xiv. 6.
JANUARY 29. 29
CONSIDER what would be the idea of
Christ and His relation to the world
which we should get if this were all we knew
of Him, if He as yet had told us nothing of
Himself but what is wrapped up in these rich
and simple words, " I am the Light of the
World," "I am the Light of Life." They
send us instantly abroad into the world of
Nature. They set us on the hill-top watching
the sunrise as it fills the east with glory. They
show us the great plain flooded and beaten
and quivering with the noon-day sun. They
hush and elevate us with the mystery and
sweetness and suggestiveness of the evening's
glow. There could be no image so abundant
in its meaning; no fact plucked from the world
of Nature could have such vast variety of truth
to tell; and yet one meaning shines out from
the depth of the figure and irradiates all its
messages. They all are true by its truth.
What is that meaning ? It is the essential
richness and possibility of the world and its
essential belonging to the sun.
V. 2.
O only Lord God, Father of lights and Maker of dark-
ness, send forth Thy light and Thy truth that they may
lead us through dimness of things seen to clarity of things
unseen : For our Lord Jesus Christ's sake, the Light of
the world. Amen.
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI.
30 JANUARY 30.
/ am the Light of the world. JOHN viii. 12.
A THOUSAND subtle, mystic miracles of
deep and intricate relationship between
Christ and humanity must be enfolded in those
words; but over and behind and within all
other meanings, it means this, the essential
richness and possibility of humanity and its es-
sential belonging to Divinity. . . . The truth
is that every higher life to which man comes,
and especially the highest life in Christ, is in
the true line of man's humanity; there is no
transportation to a foreign region. There is
the quickening and fulfilling of what man by
the very essence of his nature is. The more
man becomes irradiated with Divinity, the
more, not the less, truly he is man. The fullest
Christian experience is simply the fullest life.
To enter into it therefore is nowise strange.
The wonder and the unnaturalness is that any
child of God should live outside of it, and so
in all his life should never be himself.
V. 4, 6.
'Tis He, as none other can,
Makes free the spirit of man,
And speaks, in darkest night,
One word of awful light
That strikes through the dreadful pain
Of life a reason sane
That word divine which brought
The universe from nought.
RICHARD WATSON (III.DKR
JANUARY 31. 31
There is no power but of God. ROM. xiii. i.
" "II 7HERE does the power come from?"
VV is the natural question always when
we are watching any strong effect. "Where
did it begin?" we curiously ask as we stand
by the side of any process and watch its steady
flow. . . . Such search for the seats of origi-
nal power is among the first instincts and the
keenest pleasures of the human mind. And
when such a source of power is found, then
the human soul bows down before it and pours
out its reverence. All idolatry is merely the
giving to some secondary cause that virtue
and regard which can belong only to the High-
est and First Cause: to worship the sun in-
stead of the God who makes him shine; to
deify a hero or sage into the place of the God
who makes him brave or wise; to glorify an
abstract virtue until it sits cloudily in the
place of the distinct personal God in whose
nature all virtue has its being these are the
great types in which idolatry has prevailed
among mankind. And to-day the man who is
looking to his money or his education or his
good repute or his family for the satisfaction
and the culture which God gives us through
them all, but which neither of them gives us
of and by itself, he is the modern idolater.
He, like all the idolaters of old, has cut the
channels of life off from the source of life,
and sits with his thirsty lips pressed to their
dry mouths, getting no real refreshment, how-
ever he may delude himself. VII. 35, 36.
These are wells without water. 2 PET. ii. 17.
32 FEBRUARY i.
To be spiritually minded is life and peace.
ROM. viii. 6.
" T HAVE no spiritual capacity," says one.
I " It is not in me to be a saint," another
cries. " I have a covetous soul. I cannot
live except in winning money." " I can make
many sacrifices, but I cannot give up my
drink." " I can do many things, but I cannot
be reverent." So the man talks about him-
self. Poor creature, does he think that he
knows, down to its centre, this wonderful
humanity of his ? It all sounds so plausible and
is so untrue! . . . How can he know what
lurking power lies packed away within the
never-opened folds of this inactive life ? Has
he ever dared to call himself the child of God,
and for one moment felt what that involves ?
Has he ever attacked the task which demands
those powers whose existence he denies, or
tried to press on into the region where those
evil things cannot breathe which he compla-
cently declares are an inseparable portion of
his life ? VI. 69.
Oh, there are heavenly heights to reach
In many a fearful place
Where the poor timid heir of God
Lies blindly on his face,
Lies languishing for light divine,
That he shall never see
Till he go forward at Thy sign,
And trust himself to Thee.
WHITTIER.
FEBRUARY 2. 33
And the Child grew, and waxed strong in spirit,
filled with wisdom ; and the grace of God was
upon him. LUKE ii. 40.
'"THE evident design of God's creation, the
* comprehensive form of the incarnation,
the clear presence in children of the power of
and the need of religion, these are the forces
which, in spite of every tendency of the
grown people to make children wait till they
grow up, has always kept alive a hope, a
trust, however blind, that a child's religion
was a possible reality; that a child might serve
and love and live for God. . . . His are the
years when one can really believe in ideals.
God can stand out before him, awful, yet
dear. . . . No doubt of God's faithfulness, no
questioning of His ways comes in to cloud the
perfectly unspotted adoration. How good it
is that there are years at the beginning of every
life when it is the most easy thing to believe
in absolute right and goodness!
IV. 136, 137.
How good a thing is feeling admiration ! It is the
bread of angels, the eternal food of cherubim and sera-
phim.
AMIEL.
34 FEBRUARY 3.
MAN never is sent into the world, and bid-
den to evolve out of his own being the
conditions in which he is to live. Always
there is something before him. . . . The food
is before the hunger, and says, "I have waited
for you to come." The river is before the
thirst. Beauty was in the sky and on the hills
before the eye was fashioned. Music was
breathing on the winds before the ear was
framed. Fragrance was in the violet and the
forest before the nostrils came to catch its
odor. The picture was before the imagi-
nation which discerned it; the sea before the
ship that sailed it. Man finds the rocks
waiting with their problems, frost and heat
holding their inspiration and their comfort in
expectation of his coming. And he never
says, " Here I am," that the servants do not
stand in ranks at the door of his great home-
stead to welcome the heir into his own, and
to pledge him their obedient service. The
material is background for the spiritual, the
earth, which is body, for man, who is soul.
V. 41.
For us the winds do blow;
The earth doth rest, heaven move, and foun-
tains flow.
Nothing we see but means our good,
As our delight, or as our treasure:
The whole is either our cupboard of food,
Or cabinet of pleasure.
GEORGE HERBERT.
FEBRUARY 4. 35
To whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words
of eternal life. JOHN vi. 68.
IF a soul has many doubts and bewilderments
about Christ, and yet knows that there is
a Saviour, and that that Saviour's home is in
the land of righteousness and truth, then to
that land of righteousness and truth that soul
will go by any road that it can find, eager to
get there, seeking a road, pressing through
difficulties, that it may be in the same country
with, and somewhere near, its unfound Lord.
It may be that the clouds that for us mortals
haunt that land of righteousness and truth
may long hang so thick and low that living
close to Him the soul may still fail to see Him,
but some day certainly the fog shall rise, the
cloud shall scatter, and in the perfect enlight-
enment of the other life the soul shall see its
Lord, and be thankful for every darkest step
that it took towards Him here.
VI. 150.
I felt like one upon his journey brought
By ways he knows not of; these pathways
dim
Had ever seemed their promised end to cheat,
Yet had they led to Him
In whom life's tangled, broken threads com-
plete
Are gathered up, its wasted things made meet
For holier use, its roughness smoothed, its bit-
ter turned to sweet.
DORA GREENWELL,
36 FEBRUARY 5.
Come and see. JOHN i. 46.
EVERYWHERE this invitation rings
through the world. True, the sight which
we send out in answer to the invitation must
be the large use of all our faculties. Not
merely the outward eye must see, the mind
must see as well. It is not answering the
whole invitation unless the whole man goes
and sees with all his powers of vision. The
eye sees phenomena; the soul sees causes un-
derlying and connecting the phenomena. We
must not stop merely with what the eye sees,
and, having written down the facts we have
discovered, call that the all of science, and
brand all beyond as superstition. It is not
superstition, not prejudice, but science still,
spiritual science, when the mind sees a causal
will, out of which all phenomena proceed, and
the heart feels a mighty love beating through
all the ordered system. It is not well to live
and see only from the eyes and brain outward.
VI. 138.
Look down in pity, Lord, we pray,
On eyes oppressed by moral night,
And touch the darkened lids, and say
The gracious words, " Receive thy sight! '
Then in clear daylight, shall we see
Where walks the sinless Son of God;
And, aided by new strength from Thee,
Press onward in the path He trod.
BRYANT.
FEBRUARY 6. 37
We love Him because He first loiied us.
i JOHN iv. 19.
TO' know that long before I cared for Him,
He cared for me; that while I wandered
up and down in carelessness, perhaps while I
was plunging deep in flagrant sin, God's eye
was never off me for a moment, He was always
watching for the instant when His hand might
touch me and His voice might speak to me,
there is nothing which can appeal to a man
like that. The man is stone whom that does
not appeal to. When, touched by the knowl-
edge of that untiring love, a man gives himself
at last to God, every act of loving service
which he does afterwards is fired and colored
by the power of gratitude, surprised gratitude,
out of which it springs. How shall he over-
take this love which has so much the start of
him ? This is what makes his service eager
and enthusiastic. It is a " reasonable service, ' '
justified by the sublime reason of the soul
which loves its God because He first loved it.
V. 54-
Because Thy love hath sought me, %
All mine is Thine, and Thine is mine;
Because Thy love hath bought me,
I will not be mine own, but Thine.
I lift my heart for Thy heart,
Thy heart sole resting-place for mine:
Shall Thy heart crave for my heart,
And shall not mine crave back for Thine ?
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI.
38 FEBRUARY 7.
Let the peace of God ride in your hearts.
COL. iii. 15.
"""THAT peace cannot come in this life, you
* say. But I do not know. There have
been men and women with lives so calm and
high that they seemed to have reached it, even
on this tumultuous earth. Hardly a flake of
spray from the storm below them ever seemed
to dash up and wet their steadfast and placid
feet. But whether it can come in this life or
not, the struggle for it makes the two lives
one. Already to him who is working towards
it, part of its peace is given. The rock runs
out under the sea, and your feet may be firm
upon it even while the waves are still breast
high.
Such be the peace in Christ which shall
make all of our lives strong through all their
struggle, until at last we enter into that rest
which remaineth for the people of God.
VI. 127.
No clouds of care that gather,
No waves of sin that toss,
No blasts of desolation,
No blight, no strife, no loss,
Shall break the mystic circle
Of that enshrining peace
Which round the steadfast spirit
Doth grow, and doth not cease.
J. L. M. W.
FEBRUARY 8. 39
WHAT is it in the highest sense to do what
all men try to do in some sense, to get
a living ? Those words are very lightly used,
and narrowed down to very insignificant
dimensions. . . .
Breathing is not life, thought is not life,
duty is not life. The perfect life includes
them all. No man is thoroughly, that is,
through and through, alive unless from end
to end of his capacity that capacity is full.
Complete life involves the conception of a
body with every power perfect, a mind with
every ability active, a conscience that never
swerves from purity, a spirit that reaches to
and fastens itself on God. Everything short
of that is stagnated, impeded, partial life.
To complete that high result is what a man
ought to mean when he talks about " getting
a living." Is it not one of the mortifying
things, dear friends, to take now and then
these words that we are using every day so
lightly and see how much they really mean;
to wipe through the dust and rust that are on
these coin-words, which constant friction has
worn so smooth and unimpressive, and look
upon the royal image and superscription that
is on them ? VII. 152, 154.
There is no end to the sky,
And the stars are everywhere,
And time is eternity,
And the here is over there;
For the common deeds of the common day
Are ringing bells in the far-away.
HENRY BURTON.
40 FEBRUARY 9.
ALL history of man bears witness that man,
though himself finite, demands infinity
to deal with and to rest upon. What truly
enthusiastically human man will tolerate the
drawing of any line, however far away, out-
side of which he shall be bound to believe
that human enterprise shall never go ? Who
will let any limit mark for him the certain
boundary beyond which no yet more wonder-
ful invention shall be devised, and no yet more
beautiful miracle of art flower out of the rich
ground of man's exhaustless fancy ? What
man ever truly loves and sets a limit, con-
sciously and absolutely, to the loveliness of
that which he is loving ? The love that de-
fines the limits of its idol's loveliness is not
entire love; pure love lives in its power of
idealizing, and loves the infinite in the finite
type to which it gives its homage. So every-
where there comes the testimony of this end-
less reach of man after the infinite, and of
his inability to rest upon anything less.
III. 120.
The saints' good days
Are good, because the good Lord lays
No bound of shore along the sea
Of beautiful Eternity.
HELEN HUNT JACKSON.
FEBRUARY 10. 41
A peasant may believe as much
As a great clerk, and reach the highest stat-
ure:
Thus dost Thou make proud knowledge bend
and crouch,
While grace fills up uneven nature.
GEORGE HERBERT.
NO man grows good by mere increase of in-
tellectual development. Look at the
melancholy record of the private lives of
many of the most brilliant thinkers and schol-
ars. Look at the dissoluteness of the bad,
bright times of Greek or Roman culture. . . .
As powerless as is the mere training of the
body to educate the mind, or the culture of
the mind to reform the morals, so utterly hope-
less is it that any man living under God's in-
evitable laws should grow by the mere strug-
gle of moral rectitude into that condition of
resemblance and spiritual nearness to God
which we mean when we speak of a man's
being holy. That high estate, the abiding of
the divine life in the human soul you must
set it down as the first truth of your religion
can be ever reached only by the personal
acceptance of that means by which it was first
and forever typified the indwelling of the
Divine in the human in the great representa-
tive miracle of spiritual history, the Incarna-
tion of Jesus Christ. VII. 157.
I say, the acknowledgement of God in Christ,
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee
All questions in the earth and out of it,
And has so far advanced thee to be wise.
BROWNING.
42 FEBRUARY u.
S0 speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be
judged by the law of liberty. JAMES ii. 12.
THE freeing of souls is the judging of souls.
A liberated nature dictates its own des-
tiny. . . . Look at Christ, and see [this truth]
in perfection. His was the freest life man ever
lived. Nothing could bind Him. He walked
across old Jewish traditions and they snapped
like cobwebs. He acted upon the divinity that
was in Him up to the noblest ideal of liberty.
But was there no compulsion in His working ?
Hear Him: " I must be about my Father's busi-
ness." Was it no compulsion that drove Him
those endless journeys, footsore and heartsore,
through His ungrateful land ? "I must work
to-day." What slave of sin was ever driven to
his wickedness as Christ was to holiness ? What
force ever drove a selfish man into his voluptu-
ous indulgence with half the irresistibility that
forced the Saviour to the cross ? O my dear
friends, who does not dream for himself of a
freedom as complete and as inspiring as the
Lord's ? Who does not pray that he too may
be ruled by such a sweet despotic law of
liberty ? II. i 97 , 198.
O voice of Duty, still
Speak forth: I hear with awe;
In thee I own the sovereign Will,
Obey the sovereign law.
Thou higher voice of Love!
Yet speak thy word in me;
Through Duty let me upward move
To thy pure liberty!
SAMUEL LONGFELLOW.
FEBRUARY 12. 43
Abraham Lincoln born, 1809.
GREAT men are in the world what the most
enlightened and exalted experiences are
in the life of any man. They are the mountain-
tops on which the influences which are after-
ward to fertilize our whole humanity have
birth. There stands out some great pattern of
unselfishness; some martyr-life which totally
forgets itself and lives in suffering self-sacrifice
for fellow-men. About that man's life gathers
an utterance, an exhibition, of the glory of self-
sacrifice of how it is the true life of mankind,
of how in it alone man becomes truly man.
Does all that abide in him, live and die in his
single personality ? Does it disappear forever
in the withering flames which consume him at
the stake ? Does not that fire set it free, cast
it forth into the atmosphere of the universal
human nature, and make it the possession of
all mankind ? Have not you and I the power
to live more unselfishly to-day because of the
unselfishness of the great monumental lives
of devotion ?
VII. 344-
As thrills of long-hushed tone
Live in the viol, so our souls grow fine
With keen vibrations from the touch divine
Of noble natures gone.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
44 FEBRUARY 13.
Heroes are the mortal pipes
Thorough which God's breath doth blow;
Little care they how they strain
If aright the tune doth go. j. L. M. W.
IDEALITY, magnanimity, and bravery,
1 these are what make the heroes. These
are what glorify certain lives that stand
through history as the lights and beacons of
mankind. The materialist, the sceptic, and
the coward, he cannot be a hero. We talk
sometimes about the unheroic character of
modern life. We point to our luxurious living
for the reason. But, oh, my friends, it is not in
your costly houses and your sumptuous tables
that your unheroic lives consist. It is in the
absence of great inspiring ideas, of generous
enthusiasms, and of the courage of self-forget-
fulness. . . . Do not blame a mere accident
for that which lies so much deeper. There are
moments, when you bear your sorrows, when
you resist a great temptation, when your faith
or your country is in danger, there are such
moments with you all when you seize the idea
of human living and are made generous and
brave because of it. Then, for all your modern
dress, for all your modern parlor where you
stand, you are heroic like David, like Paul,
like any of God's knights in any of the ages
which are most remote and picturesque. Then
you catch some glimpse of a region into which
you might enter, and where, with no blast of
trumpets or waving of banners, you might
be heroic all the time.
II. 173-
FEBRUARY 14. 45
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst
after righteousness, for they shall be filled.
MATT. v. 6.
THE essence of every beatitude is in the
human heart, and yet the human heart
loves to hear the utterance of the beatitudes
from the mouth of God as if they were His
arbitrary enactments. I know by that of the
nature of God wh'ich is in me as His child,
that they which hunger and thirst after right-
eousness shall certainly be filled. I am sure,
by that subtle knowledge of Him which the
child must have of the Father, that He could
not leave a really longing soul unsatisfied in
all His world. That importunate happiness,
ready to give itself away, must pour itself into
every ready life.
VIII. 32.
There's not a craving in the mind
Thou dost not meet and still;
There's not a wish the heart can have
Which Thou dost not fulfil.
All things that have been, all that are,
All things that can be dreamed,
All possible creations, made,
Kept faithful, or redeemed,
All these may draw upon Thy power,
Thy mercy may command;
And still outflows Thy silent sea,
Immutable and grand.
FABER.
46 FEBRUARY 15.
Behold, what manner of love the Father hath
bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons
of God. i JOHN iii. i.
'T'HERE is a deeper nature which belongs to
* every one of us as a child of God. . . .
The man who lives in that deeper nature, the
man who believes himself the son of God,
is not surprised at his best moments and his
noblest inspirations. He is not amazed when
he does a brave or an unselfish thing. He
is amazed at himself when he is a coward
or a liar. He accepts self-restraint only as
a temporary condition, an immediate neces-
sity of life. Not self-restraint, but self-indul-
gence, the free, unhindered utterance of the
deepest nature, which is good that is the only
final picture of man's duty which he tolerates.
And all the life is one; the specially and spe-
cifically religious part being but the point at
which the diamond for the moment shines,
with all the diamond nature waiting in reserve
through the whole substance of the precious
stone.
V. 20.
Take all in a word: the trust in God's breast
Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed;
Though He be so bright and we so dim,
We are made in His image to witness Him.
BROWNING.
FEBRUARY 16. 47
A STRONG, unalterable persuasion that
*"* God is merciful and kind has been poured
onto your life, into your mind. That fact it-
self, once known, absorbs your contemplation.
You would sit lonely in the empty world and fill
your soul with gazing on the brightness of that
truth. So you do sit to-day when there conies
some sort of appeal from fellow-men. . . .
Somehow the cry awakens you, and you go
down and put your truth into your brother's
hands. At first it seems almost a profanation.
The truth is so sacred and seems so thoroughly
your own. But as you give it to your brother,
new lights come out in it. For God to be good
means something more when the goodness
turns to new forms of blessing in the new need
of this new life. O you who think you know
that God is merciful because of the mercy
which He has shewed to you, be sure there is a
richness in your truth which you have not
reached yet, which you will never reach until
you let Him make your life the interpreter of
His goodness to some other soul!
IV. 15.
A toil that gains with what it yields,
And scatters to its own increase,
And hears, while sowing outward fields,
The harvest-song of inward peace.
WHITTIER.
48 FEBRUARY 17.
The blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich.
PROV. x. 22.
V/'OU say, How can I believe in God ? Only
1 by coming close to God, and learning by
deep and sweet experience that He has better
things to give to His beloved than what men
call prosperity, the peace that passeth un-
derstanding, the calm rest of forgiven sin, and
of a soul trusted away from itself into its
Saviour's hands. To one who knows what
those high blessings mean, how little does it
seem that other hands should fill themselves
with the shining trifles which its hands are too
full to hold. Think how it will seem in heaven!
Standing before the throne, filled with the un-
speakable vision, conscious through all the
glory of the culture that suffering has brought,
hurrying with joy on the high missions of the
Lord, who will look back then and be troubled
an instant at the recollection of how a wicked
man sat at a little richer table, or had a little
higher seat in the market-place when we were
here on earth ?
VI. 126.
Lose the less joy that doth but blind;
Reach forth a larger bliss to find.
To-day is brief; the inclusive spheres
Rain raptures of a thousand years.
ADELINE D. T. WHITNEY.
FEBRUARY 18. 49
CONSECRATIONS of our lives to others
V-^ are often not less real and powerful
because they are unconscious. . . . We have
gone on with our work in life, thinking that
the purpose of our work was centred in our-
selves. . . . But some day a friend died one
who was very near to us, one in whom our life
was bound up in many ways. Who has not
known the dreadful going out of all the in-
terest of living at the time of such a death ?
It seemed as if there were nothing left to live
for. ... It was terrible. But it was blessed
if you did not stop there, but, with persistent
love that would not be satisfied until it found
the object it had lost, you traced the precious
life on as it left you, till you followed it into
the very bosom of the God who took it, and
poured out there the treasures of devotion
which had no longer any one dear enough to
tempt them on the earth.
VI. 48, 49.
And, dearer than -the living ones that dwell
Beyond the throbbing sea,
And dearer than the Dead, whose voices swell
The heavenly melody,
ONE visiteth His people in the night,
Who giveth songs, and makes the darkness
bright.
B. M.
50 FEBRUARY 19.
NOTHING is more sad than the way in
which we comfort ourselves and one an-
other for our sorrows, by vague, unrealized
promises that sorrow cannot last forever.
We conceive of life as a great swinging
sphere which must forever run a vast orbit,
doomed to perpetual change, and so sure by
and by to sweep into the sunlight, if we can
only keep alive and wait. It is a forlorn and
miserable comfort. It loses all the certain-
ty and personal graciousness of Christianity.
There is no piety about it. ... David's pil-
grims going through the vale of misery " use
it " for a well. . . . It was not simply a sorrow
that was succeeded by joy, not merely a peace
promised and looked for and waited for, it
was a peace found. When they grew thirsty
they looked, not merely farther on into the
heart of the future, but deeper down into the
bosom of the present.
VI. 23, 24.
Some narrow hearts there are
That suffer blight when that they fed upon
As something to complete their being fails;
And they retire into their holds and pine,
And, long restrained, grow stern. But some
there are
That in a sacred want and hunger rise.
And draw the misery home and live with it,
And excellent in honor wait, and will
That something good should yet be found in it,
Or wherefore were they born ?
JEAN INGELOW.
FEBRUARY 20. 51
HOW to secure humility is one of the hard
problems of all systems of duty. ... It
is the oneness of the soul's life with God's
life that at once makes us try to be like Him
and brings forth our unlikeness to Him. It is
the source at once of aspiration and humility.
The more aspiration, the more humility. Hu-
mility comes by aspiration. If, in all Christian
history, it has been the souls which most looked
up that were the humblest souls; if the Chris-
tian man keeps his soul full of the sense of
littleness, even in all his hardest work for
Christ, not by denying his own stature, but
by standing up at his whole height, and then
looking up in love and awe and seeing God
tower in infinitude above him, certainly all
this stamps the morality which is wrought out
with the idea of Jesus with this singular es-
sence, that it has solved the problem of faith-
fulness and pride, and made possible humility
by aspiration.
VIII. 66.
All service should be done for Thee
In meek humility
And awe most sweet,
That Thou shouldst take,
E'en for Thy Son Christ Jesus' sake,
Service from servants so unmeet.
ANNA E. HAMILTON.
52 FEBRUARY 21.
Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also
reap. GAL. vi. 7.
He which soweth sparingly shall reap also spar-
ingly ; and he which soweth bountifully shall reap
also bountifully. 2 COR. ix. 6.
'"FHE world seems to be a great field in which
* every man drops his seed, and which
gives back to every man, not just the same
thing which he dropped there, any more than
the brown earth holds up to you in the autumn
the same blackberry which you hid under its
bosom in the spring, but something which has
its true correspondence and proportion to the
seed to which it is the legitimate and natural
reply. Every gift has its return, every act
has its consequence, every call has its answer
in this great live, alert world, where man stands
central, and all things have their eyes on Him
and their ears open to His voice. III. 265.
Sow truth if thou the truth wouldst reap;
Who sows the false shall reap the vain;
Erect and sound thy conscience keep;
From hollow deeds and words refrain.
Sow love, and taste its fruitage pure;
Sow peace, and reap its harvest bright;
Sow sunbeams on the rock and moor,
And find a harvest-home of light.
HORATIUS BONAR.
FEBRUARY 22. 53
Great Truths are portions of the soul of man;
Great souls are portions of eternity;
Each drop of blood that e'er through true
heart ran
With lofty message, ran for thee and me.
IT is the great patriots that interpret the
value of their country to the common cit-
izen. The man absorbed in his own small
affairs, or so restricted in his power of thought
that he would never have taken in the national
idea for himself abstractly, sees how Wash-
ington and Webster and Lincoln loved the
land; and through their love for it, its worthi-
ness of his own love becomes made known to
him. Still his love for his country, when it is
awakened, is his own, and may impel him to
serve her in most peculiar personal ways, very
different from theirs, but none the less it is
true that but for the interpretation of these
great men's honor for her, he would have hon-
ored his country less or not at all. They in-
terpret to their fellow-men what God has first
interpreted to them, till ultimately the fire
which starts from the central heart of all
runs through the world, and the blindest are
enlightened to discern, and the most timid be-
come bold enough to praise, the movement
which at first had no friend but God.
V. 328, 338.
And shall we praise ? God's praise was his
before ;
And on our futile laurels he looks down,
Himself our bravest crown!
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
54 FEBRUARY 23.
Great peace have they which love Thy law.
Ps. cxix. 165.
A RE you at peace with yourself ? If your
** will is taking your powers, which were
made to do noble and gentle and generous
things, and forcing them to do sordid and
brutal and mean things; if you are living a
life of miserable drudgery, treating yourself
like a machine; or if you are living a life of
dissipation, treating yourself like a brute, then
you are not at peace with yourself surely.
Yourself is misusing, is abusing yourself. . . .
A man is both harp and harper. The harp
may not complain, but all the time the music
it was meant to make sleeps in its strings; and
it cannot be at peace with the cruel fingers
that make it unmusical. And in your powers
sleeps the nobleness that they were made to
do, in everlasting protest against the wicked-
ness to which you compel them. O my dear
friends, to be at peace with ourselves is not to
loosely approve ourselves in what we are. It
is to work with ourselves, that we may be all
that God made us for.
VI. 194.
" Couldst thou in vision see
Thyself the man God meant,
Thou never more wouldst be
The man thou art content."
FEBRUARY 24. 55
Of these men which have companied with us, . . .
must one be ordained to be a witness with us of
His resurrection. . . . And the lot fell upon
Matthias. ACTS i. 22, 26.
TTOWEVER the Gospel may be capable of
* * statement in dogmatic form, its truest
statement we know is not in dogma but in per-
sonal life. ... So I think a man's best ser-
mon is the best utterance of his life. ... If
it is really God's message through him, it
brings him out in a way that no other expe-
rience of his life has power to do, as the
quality of the trumpet declares itself more
clearly when the strong man blows a blast
for battle through it than when a child whis-
pers into it in play. Remember this: . . .
then, when you hear your brother preach,
honor the work that he is doing and listen as
reverently as you can to hear through him
some voice of God. . . . He is the mes-
senger of Christ to the soul of man always.
XI. 27, 135, 140.
O Almighty God, who didst choose Thy faithful servant
Matthias to take part in the ministry and apostleship from
which Judas by transgression fell ; Grant that Thy Church,
preserved from false Apostles, may ever be blessed with
faithful Ministers of Thy word and sacraments ; through
Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
MEXICAN PROVISIONAL OFFICES.
56 FEBRUARY 25.
As Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee,
that they also may be one in us. JOHN xvii. 21.
WHO can read words like these and not
catch sight of what it was that was to
fill these disciples' lives with energy, and to
be the atmosphere wherein their new goodness
should get all its growth? God's fatherhood
made visible to them in Christ, His Son; their
sonship to God made visible in Christ, their
brother. It was as if at the beginning of all
ages down which their Christian life has run,
they lay, like Jacob on the night when he went
out to his new life from his father's home, and
to them, as to him, a ladder seems to stretch
up into heaven, and the angels of God ascend-
ed and descended on it, the angels of duty
bringing God's strength to men, and carrying
men's obedience to God, on the ladder of the
fatherhood and sonship that bound the heav-
ens to the earth, set up in the new Beth-el,
the new House of God, which was the life of
Jesus.
VIII. 60.
By eyes that are pure and hearts that are clean,
At morn and at eve is a Ladder still seen:
And the angels still come, and the angels still
go
To the hands lifted up, from the heads bended
low,
With the blessings He gives and the thanks
that we say,
With the grace that we need and the worship
we pay.
J. L. M. W.
FEBRUARY 26. 57
O YOUNG disciples, whatever other kind
of falseness to your faith you may fall
into, may you be saved at least from ever
being ashamed of it. It is the noblest, the
divinest, thing on earth. You may have only
got hold of the very borders of it, but if in any
true sense you can say, " Jesus is the Lord,"
you have set foot into the region wherein man
lives his completest life. Go on, without one
thought or dream of turning back, and with
no shamefaced hiding of the new mastery under
which you are trying to live. If your Chris-
tian service is too small in its degree for you
to boast of, it is too precious in its kind for
you to be ashamed of. Go on forever craving
and forever winning more faith and obedience,
and so learning more and more forever that
faith and obedience are the glory and crown
of human life.
VI. 100.
Life may be given in many ways,
And loyalty to Truth be sealed
As bravely in the closet as the field,
So bountiful is fate;
But then to stand beside her,
When craven churls deride her,
To front a lie in arms and not to yield,
This shows, methinks, God's plan
And measure of a stalwart man.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
58 FEBRUARY 27.
HOW in a time like this can a man live and
get the best out of it, and at the same
time shun its worst? Here in this time of un-
certainties, here in this wandering transition
age, we are to live, whether we will or no. . . .
And what can one do with his own personal
life to keep it from complete confusion, and, if
it be possible, to make it grow strong and
rich and true, out of these very circumstances
which, perhaps, we hopelessly deplore ? . . .
Above all things, there is the strength and per-
manence of religion. Never was there such a
time for a man to cling to that. " Ah, but,"
you say, "that is the most uncertain of all
things ! What is more unsettled than relig-
ion ?" But no, my friends. . . . The knowl-
edge that love is at the root of everything; the
answer of the human soul to the appealing
nature and life of Jesus Christ; the value of
the soul above the body, of the character
above the circumstances; and the eternal
life, these are what men may cling to. If
any man does cling to these, he is really upon
a rock, and whatever else which he thought
was rock may prove to be ice and melt away,
here he is safe. Here is the great, last cer-
tainty. Be sure of God. With simple, loving
worship, by continual obedience, by purifying
yourself even as He is pure, creep close, keep
close to Him. I. 172, 173.
With Thee our souls in peace abide;
In Thee heaven's childhood we begin;
Thy kingdom we shall enter in,
Not pure, but purified.
LUCY LARCOM.
FEBRUARY 28. 59
Then Jesus took unto Him the twelve, and said
unto them, Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and all
things that are written concerning the Son of man
shall be accomplished. LUKE xviii. 30.
A XI) so every true life has its Jerusalem to
which it is always going up. At first
far off and dimly seen, laying but light hold
upon our purpose and our will, then gradually
taking us more and more into its power, com-
pelling our study, directing the current of our
thoughts, arranging our friendships for us, de-
ciding for us what powers we shall bring out
into use, deciding for us what we shall be. . . .
You stop the student at his books, the philan-
thropist at his committee, the saint at his
prayers. You say to each of them, "What
does it all mean ? What are you doing ? What
is it all for ? " And the answer is everywhere
the same : " Behold, we go up to Jerusalem."
We draw back the vail of history, and every-
where it is the same picture that we see.
Companies, great and small, climbing moun-
tains to where sacred cities stand awaiting
them with open gates upon the top. The man
who is going up to no Jerusalem is but the
ghost and relic of a man. He has in him no
genuine and healthy human life.
IV. 317.
Yea, very vain
The greatest speed of all these souls of men,
Unless they travel upward to Thy throne !
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.
60 MARCH i.
Whose high endeavors are an inward light
That makes the path before him always
bright; . . .
Who, doomed to go in company with pain,
Turns his necessity to glorious gain.
WORDSWORTH.
IF the life which you have chosen to be your
life is really worthy of you, it involves
self-sacrifice and pain. If your Jerusalem
really is your sacred city, there is certainly
a cross in it. What then ? Shall you flinch
and draw back ? Shall you ask for yourself
another life ? O no, not another life, but
another self. Ask to be born again. Ask
God to fill you with Himself, and then calmly
look up and go on. Go up to Jerusalem ex-
pecting all things that are written concerning
you to be fulfilled. Disappointment, mortifi-
cation, misconception, enmity, pain, death,
these may come to you, but if they come to
you in doing your duty it is all right. "It
cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jeru-
salem," said Jesus. "It is dreadful to suffer
except in doing duty. To surfer there is glori-
ous." That is our translation of his words
into our own life.
IV. 331.
One endless living story!
One poem spread abroad!
And the sum of all our glory
Is the countenance of God.
GEORGE MACDONALD.
MARCH 2. 61
The time is short. i COR. vii. 29.
THE shortness of life is closely associated,
not merely with the great hopes of the
future, but with the real vitality of the pres-
ent. What then ? If you and I complain how
short life is, how quickly it flies through the
grasp with which we try to hold it, we are
complaining of that which is the necessary
consequence of our vitality. You can make
life long only by making it slow; and if you
want to make it slow, I should think there
were men enough in town who could tell
you how, men with idle hands and brains,
who seem to have so much trouble to get
through life as it is that we cannot imagine
that they really wish that there were more of
it. ... The shortness of life is bound up
with its fulness. It is to him who is most ac-
tive, always thinking, feeling, working, caring
for people and for things, that life seems
short. Strip a life empty and it will seem
long enough.
I. 318, 319.
He liveth long who liveth well,
All other life is short and vain;
He liveth longest who can tell
Of living most for heavenly gain.
Waste not thy being; back to Him
Who freely gave it, freely give;
Else is that being but a dream
"Pis but to be, and not to live.
HORATIUS BONAR.
62 MARCH 3.
'"THE more we watch the lives of men, the
I more we see that one of the reasons why
men are not occupied with great thoughts and
interests is the way in which their lives are
overfilled with little things. It is not that
you deliberately dislike thought and study
and benevolence. It is mainly that you are
so busy with amusement and society and idle-
ness that you are living such an unprofitable
life. It is not that you despise the highest
hopes and interests of your immortal nature
that you neglect them so. It is that your
passions crowd so thick about you that you
are entirely occupied with them. . . . You
have got to say to these crowding passions of
yours: " Stand aside. Leave my soul open,
that it and God, it and duty, may come to-
gether; " making an emptiness about the soul
that the higher fulness may fill it. It may be
temporary. Once more the lower needs may
fasten on us, the lower pleasures try to satisfy
us; but they never can be quite so arbitrary
and arrogant as they were, after they have
once had to yield to their superiors. . . .
Perhaps some day they may themselves be-
come, and dignify themselves by becoming,
the meek interpreters and ministers of those
very powers which they once shut out from
the soul. II. 206, 209, 212.
For when thou seekest not altogether visible things to
enjoy them,
But beholdest them to bless the name of thy Creator
Fashioning to thyself out of the highest and lowest of His
works a sort of ladder,
On which thou mayest lean to get upwards
Thou shall be delivered from the baneful snares of this
world. THOMAS A KEMPIS.
MARCH 4. 63
THE purpose of God's government, the one
design on which it all proceeds, is that
the whole world, through obedience to Him,
should be wrought into His likeness, and made
the utterance of His character. . . . With
wills harmonized with His will; with souls that
love and hate in truest unison of sympathy with
His; with no purposes left in us but His pur-
poses, then we have come to what He wants
the world to come to. We have taken our
places in the slowly rising temple of His will.
To whatever worlds Fie carries our souls when
they shall pass out of these imprisoning
bodies, in those worlds these souls of ours
shall find themselves part of the same great
temple; for it belongs not to this earth alone.
There can be no end of the universe where
God is to which that growing temple does
not reach, the temple of a creation to be
wrought at last into a perfect utterance of
God by a perfect obedience to God. n. 69, 71.
Thy wonderful grand will, my God;
Triumphantly I make it mine;
And faith shall breathe her glad " Amen "
To every dear command of Thine.
Beneath the splendor of Thy choice,
Thy perfect choice for me, I rest;
Outside it now I dare not live,
Within it I must needs be blest.
Then may Thy perfect, glorious Will
Be evermore fulfilled in me,
And make my life an answering chord
Of glad, responsive harmony.
JEAN SOPHIA PIGOTT.
64 MARCH 5.
HE who has lived in the form of an experi-
ence looks back, while he who has en-
tered into the substance and soul of an expe-
rience looks forward. " The outward man
perishes," as Paul says, " but the inward man
is renewed day by day." The perishing of a
form and method in which we have lived may
naturally bring a pensive sadness like that
which always comes to us as we watch a set-
ting of the sun, but he who is in the true spirit
of the sunset turns instantly from the west-
ward to the eastern look. The things the
day has given him, its knowledge, and its
inspirations, and its friendship, and its faith,
these the departing sun is powerless to carry
with it. They claim the new clay in which to
show their power and to do their work. Live
deeply and you must live hopefully. That is
the law of life.
VI. 329.
Though this very day
Casts but a dull stone on Time's heaped-up
cairn,
A morning light will break once more and
draw
The hidden glories of a thousand hues
Out from its crystal depths and ruby-spots
And sapphire-veins, unseen, unknown before.
Time
Is God's, and all his miracles are His;
And in the Future he overtakes the Past,
Which was a prophecy of times to come.
GEORGE MACDONALD.
MARCH 6. 65
Men see not the bright light which is in the
clouds. JOB xxxvii. 21.
THE sense of human pain grows stronger all
the time. And it sometimes seems as
if the sense of purpose and education grew
weaker in a multitude of souls. It is the
heart of man taken, Balaam-like, to a place
whence it can see the part and not the whole;
and who that listens does not hear the mut-
tering of the curse ? Where is the help, first
for your soul, then for the whole great world ?
Not in saying that pain is not pain, not in
shutting the eyes to the part which is so aw-
fully manifest, but in seeing, in insisting upon
seeing, the whole.
" To feel, although no tongue can prove,
That every cloud that spreads above,
And veileth love, itself is love."
That is the only help. He who lets his
heart bear witness, he who lets the experience
of countless sufferers bear witness, he who
lets Christ bear witness, that no suffering ever
yet came to any human creature by which it
was not possible that that human creature
should be made better and purer and great-
er, he has caught sight of the whole; and
though he walks in silence and perplexity and
suspense, he does not curse.
VI. 222.
Knowing that here we live but in a tent,
And that our house is yonder, without fail.
GEORGE MACDONALD.
66 MARCH 7.
Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the
wilderness to be tempted of the devil,
MATT. iv. i.
THE temptation of Jesus is certainly a very
wonderful event. There is no incident
in all His history on which the imagination
may expend itself with a more lavish spec-
ulation; and, on the other hand, there is
none that comes nearer to practical life with
stimulus and comfort. . . . The man who has
seen Christ tempted will not deny temptation
thenceforth. He will not be found explaining
it away. He will not delude himself with
vain hopes of escaping it and living a smooth,
untempted life. He will read in the tempta-
tion of the perfect Life that that is impossible
forever for any man. When he is depressed
and hungry and exhausted, he will look for the
devil as his Lord did, and when he sees him
corning, when lie hears his words and feels
the desire of sin stirring in his heart, he will not
say, " Oh, this is nothing but one stage of my
growth." He will recognize the old enemy
of his Master coming for the old battle, and
gather up his strength and pray for his Mas-
ter's strength in the hour of terrible, inevita-
ble struggle. VII. 130, 133.
Distrust thyself, but trust His grace,
It is enough for thee :
In every trial thou shalt trace
Its all-sufficiency.
Distrust thyself, but trust His strength :
In Him thou shalt be strong :
His weakest ones may learn at length
A daily triumph-song.
FRANCES R. HAYKKGAL.
MARCH 8. 67
SURELY it always must be full of meaning,
that Christ Himself, before He began His
struggles with the Pharisees and Scribes, went
out into the desert and struggled with Him-
self. . . . Many a time the wilfulness, and
narrowness, and selfishness which He saw in
the faces which surrounded Him in some
crowd in the temple must have been clearer to
Him and easier to understand, because they
were just the passions which had tried to take
possession of His own heart, and failed, dur-
ing those long terrible days in the dark wilder-
ness. And oh! my friends, there is no way in
which whatever personal struggles with faith-
lessness and sin we may have gone through
can be made to keep their freshness and power,
and at the same time be kept from becoming
a source of morbid wretchedness, no way that
is half so efficient as that they should con-
stantly be called on to light up for us the
same sort of struggles in other men, and give
us the power to help them with intelligence
and sympathy. Demand that lofty service
of every deep experience through which you
pass. Demand that it shall help you under-
stand and aid the battles of your brethren.
VI. 84, 85.
So thou wilt be sterner foe,
So thou wilt be dearer friend;
So the saints thy name shall know,
And Christ own thee at the end.
CANTICA SPIRITUALIS.
68 MARCH 9.
Command that these stones be made bread.
MATT. iv. 3.
IF we had stood there and heard the Satanic
demand made we should have waited, stop-
ping our breath to hear some supreme asser-
tion of the Godhead that repelled so low an
insult. "Go to men," we should have lis-
tened for the Lord to say " go to men with
arguments like those. Their natures are built
to answer such appeals. All that a man hath
will he give for that life which bread must
feed." . . .
I love Christ all the more when I see how
different His answer was from that. I love
Him when I see Him declare Himself a man,
and from the human standpoint fling aside
the tempter's plea v I reverence and cling to
the true human nature that there was in Him
when I hear Him go back and take up the
words that had been on human lips, that de-
clared the resources of human nature, that
asserted the higher life in Man: " It is writ-
ten, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by
every word that proceedeth out of the mouth
of God." The danger is to us who hold so
much to the divinity of Christ that His human-
ity will mean too little. Let us remember
that in times such as this of the temptation
there is a strength for us in the thought that
it was a Man who fought and conquered,
which no simple assurance of His being God
could give. VII. 151, 152.
For in that He himself hath suffered, being
tempted, He is able to succor them that are tempted.
HEB. ii. 18.
MARCH 10. 69
YOU cannot be man and live a man's life
without coming into this world where
sin is and where you must be tried. That
great temptation that comes swaggering up
and frightening you so has got the best part
of your character held under his brawny arm.
You cannot get it without wrestling with him
and forcing it away from him. That moun-
tain that towers up and defies you has got
your spiritual health away up on its snowy
summit. That is what shines there in the sun.
You cannot reach it except by the terrible
climb. Ask yourself what you would have
been if you had never been tempted, and own
what a blessed thing the educating power of
temptation is. And then ... as Christ's
temptation was vicarious, and when He con-
quered He conquered for others besides Him-
self, so it was with us. There are men and
women all around us who have got to meet
the same temptations that we are meeting.
Will it help them or not to know that we have
met them and conquered them ? Will it help
us or not to know that if we conquer the
temptation we conquer not for ourselves only,
but for them ? The vicariousness of all life!
There is not one of us who has not some one
more or less remotely fastened to his acts,
concerning whom he may say, as Christ said,
" For their sakes I sanctify myself."
VII. 140, 141.
Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.
EMERSON.
70 MARCH n.
Count it all joy that ye fall into divers tempta-
tions. JAMES i. 2.
HOW strange it seems to us that there
should be such a thing as temptation in
the world at all! God sends us into the world
and hangs in the great distance before us cer-
tain lofty prizes goodness, truth, purity
which He has made our hearts capable of de-
siring. . . . But we have not really started
towards them before the presence of another
power begins to show itself. Hands pluck at
us to draw us out of the straight way. Voices
call to us with enticements or with threats to
make us turn aside. . . . No adoption of
any strict rule of life, no separation of our-
selves from a certain region of dangerous
occupations, sets us free from the persecution
of temptation. We are tempted to sin every-
where. It is pathetic, almost terrible, to think
how long this has been going on. Through
all those weary years which it tires us to think
of, they have been so many; through all those
monotonous generations that we hear flowing
on endlessly through the cavernous depths of
history, as one listens to a stream dropping
down monotonously forever underground;
through all the years and generations of
human life men have been tempted not one
that ever lived that did not meet this persist-
ent, intrusive enticement to sin. VII. 130.
Now, the training, strange and lowly,
Unexplained and trying now :
Afterward, the service holy,
And the Master's " Enter thou ! "
FRANCES R. HAVERGAL.
MARCH 12. 71
Will He plead against me with His great power?
No ; but He would put strength into me.
JOB xxiii. 6.
FOR years you have lived, it may be, a se-
cluded and protected life. " Lead me
not into temptation," so you have prayed
every morning, and every day has brought
the answer to your prayer. But some day all
that breaks and goes to pieces. A great
temptation comes and is not hindered. Then
you cry out for the old mercy and it is not
given. . . . And then, behold what comes! A
new mercy! You go into the temptation. Your
old security perishes, but by and by out of its
death comes a new strength. Not to be saved
from dying but to die and then to live again
in a new security, a strong and trusty charac-
ter, educated by trial, purified by fire, that
is what comes as the issue of the whole. Not
a victory for you, preserving you from danger,
but a victory in you, strengthening you by
danger, that is the experience from which
you go forth, strong with a strength which
nothing can subdue.
V. 35-
Oh, may we follow undismayed
Where'er our God shall call!
And may His spirit's present aid
Uphold us lest we fall!
Till in the end of days we stand
As victors in a deathless land.
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN.
72 MARCH 13.
The mind shall banquet, though the body pine.
SHAKESPEARE.
HEALTH, companionship, life itself, these
are no longer indispensable when Christ
has shown us God. A resignation that is not
despair, but aspiration; a looser grasp on
time, that means how strongly we are holding
to eternity; this must come to us when, after
all our doing of little temporary things, we
have at last begun in Christ the life and work
that is to go on forever and forever. Then
even the most essential things of this world
we can do without, if need be. We have
passed from the lower to the higher necessi-
ties. We walk by faith, and not by sight.
Already, even while we are yet in the flesh,
before we cross the river, the promise finds
its fulfilment. We live in the world, but we
do not live by the world. Already the sun is
no more our light by day; neither for bright-
ness does the moon give light unto us; but the
Lord is unto us an everlasting light, and our
God our glory. I. 298.
Light of the world! for ever, ever shining;
There is no change in Thee;
True Light of life, all joy and health enshrin-
ing,
Thou canst not fade nor flee.
Thou hast arisen, but Thou descendest never;
To-day shines as the past;
All that Thou wast Thou art, and shalt be
ever,
Brightness from first to last!
HORATIUS IjUNAR,
MARCH 14. 73
Then Jesus answered and said unto her, O wo-
man, great is thy faith : be it unto thee even as thou
wilt. MATT. xv. 25.
FAITH is the necessary power that the
weaker has over the stronger, the lower
over the higher. . . . This power comes to
perfection in Jesus. Could there be a more
complete picture of it than shines out in His
own story of the shepherd and the sheep ?
The shepherd has folded his ninety-and-nine;
everything is safe and strong and prosperous;
he stands with his hand upon the sheepfold
gate; and then, just as he seems all wrapped
up in the satisfaction and completeness of the
sight, there comes, so light that no ear except
his can hear it, the cry of one poor lost sheep
off in the mountains, and it summons him with
an irresistible challenge, and his staff is in his
hand instantly, and he turns his back on
everything else to be the slave of that one
lost sheep till it is found. What a wonderful
and everlasting and universal story that par-
able is! III. i 74 , i 75 .
He bendeth low from His holy hill
Searching the shadows gray and chill,
And clear through the angel-singing
What time the sons of God
Shout loud, for joy upspringing,
Till all the heavens are bowed
He hears the faintest sighing
Of some poor, far-off soul,
Who turns to look to the holy place
While the billows round him roll.
B. M.
74 MARCH 15.
/ seek not mine own will, but the will of the
father who hath sent me. JOHN v. 30.
IT was in His sonship to God that the secret
of the holiness of Jesus lay. His Father's
business was the sum of all His life. . . .
The model and the impulse of all duty He car-
ried in His own filial heart, which was forever
bearing witness to Him of His Father's per-
fectness. His incarnate days, with all their
common duties held and illuminated in that
high consciousness of sonship, must have been
one with the eternity of the past and the eter-
nity that was to be. Duty must have been its
own revealer and its own reward. Liberty
must have been sublimely consistent with the
most scrupulous obedience. The doing right
and the being right must have been like the
sunshine and the sun. And what duty was to
our Master it shall be to us just as soon as we
are filled with His idea, just as soon as His
spirit bears witness with our spirits that we are
the sons of God.
VIII. 70.
For what is freedom but the unfettered use
Of all the powers that God for use had given ?
But chiefly this, Him first, Him last to view
Through meaner powers and secondary things
Effulgent, as through clouds that veil His
blaze. S. T. COLERIDGE.
MARCH 16. 75
No man cometh unto the Father but by Me.
JOHN xv. 6.
BY the power of Christ we may all come
near to God too, and have from out the
open door of His sanctuary, to which we have
fled, His view of mortal life and all its inter-
ests. For us, too, this world's existence may
subside into its clearly marked circles, and we
may see as God sees where each circle ends;
see how the selfishnesses soon die out; see
how the affections sweep out into wider lines;
see how nothing but the highest loves reach
out into infinity and send life forward into
eternity. These times, when we are nearest
to God, are the times when this world's things
show their true values to us. Do you not
know that ? Do you remember how it all
looked to you when you came home from the
funeral, not morbid with hopeless sorrow, but
seeming to be above the world, and to be
standing with the friend who had gone, in the
presence of the throne of God ? Do you
remember how things changed their relative
importance to you then, how the last were
first and the first were last, as they shall be
on the judgment day ? . . . You were above
complaints and small trials. You had entered
into the sanctuary of God, and you saw the
end of these things.
VI. 121.
The Almighty's shadow is a starlit night;
His cloud is ever full of hidden light.
SAMUEL LONGFELLOW.
76 MARCH 17.
'"THE great truth of Christianity, the great
truth of Christ, is that sin is unnatu-
ral. . . . And that which is unnatural is not
by any necessity permanent. The struggle of
all nature is against the unnatural to dislodge
it and cast it out. That beautiful struggle
pervades the world. It is going on in every
clod of earth, in every tree, in every star, and
in the soul of man. First to declare and then
to strengthen that struggle in the soul of man
was the work of Christ. That work still lin-
gers and fails of full completion, but its power
is present in the world. When He takes pos-
session of a nature He quickens that struggle
into life. No longer can that nature think
itself doomed to evil. . . . The wonder is
not that it should some day be cast out; the
wonder is that it should ever have come in.
The victory promised in a sinless Son of man
is already potentially attained in the intense
conception of its naturalness.
VI. 65.
Courage! we travel through a darksome cave;
But still, as nearer to the light we draw,
Fresh gales will reach us from the upper air,
And wholesome dews of heaven our forehead
lave,
The darkness lighten more, till full of awe,
We stand in the open sunshine unaware.
R. G. TRENCH.
MARCH 18. 77
YOU never did a sin that did not give its
warning to you before you did it. ...
Perhaps you did not hear, but it was not that
the warning bell did not ring. Perhaps you
called that first sign of weakness a mere acci-
dent, and tried to believe that it meant noth-
ing, but if you gave your thought to it you
knew ... it was the house's feeble timbers
creaking before their fall. There are such
warnings of coming sins that every one of us
has received sins yet undone; sins which, it
may be, are to make our whole life dark some
day, whose threatening we can read, if we are
wise enough, in something that has come to us
already. . . .
Life is full of such warnings. No man
grows to be more than a mere boy without
learning on what side of his moral nature he
will fall if he falls at all. Every one of us
knows, who is in the least thoughtful, what
sort of villain he would be if he grew villain-
ous. Thank God, these warnings may save
us from the things they warn us of. These
blessed bells that ring out in the darkness may
turn us resolutely off from the cruel surf that
roars behind them.
VII. 121, 122.
Man is no star, but a quick coal
Of mortal fire:
Who blows it not, nor doth control
A faint desire,
Lets his. own ashes choke his soul.
GEORGE HERBERT.
78 MARCH 19.
The mystery of iniquity. 2 THESS. ii. 7.
HPHERE is something oppressive, something
* terrible, in this great mysterious pres-
ence of sin right in our midst, so that nothing
goes on save in its shadow, no state is
formed, no family grows up, no social com-
pact is organized, no character matures with-
out its blighting mixture. Right in our midst,
and yet no voice of man or God is opened to
tell us how it came here. . . . [Yet] there was
a time when it was not, there was a moment
when it began to be. . . . There is no other
way of explaining the strange fact that amid
all the personal badness, and social corruption
that is in the world, the human mind has been
able to preserve the ideal of a pure society and
a perfect life, to dream of it, sometimes to
strive after it, except by acknowledging the
reality of an entrance of iniquity into the
world, and looking back to a time before that
invasion when the world was sinless.
VI. 9, 4-
My own hope is, a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;
That after Last returns the First,
Though a wide compass round be fetched ;
That what began best can't end worst,
Nor what God blest once, prove accurst.
BROWNING.
MARCH 20. 79
That whosoever believeth in Him should not
perish, but have everlasting life. JOHN iii. 16.
WE have spoken of the mysteriousness of
sin in its origin and operations. It
would be cruel, false, and unchristian if I
closed without telling you of the diviner mys-
tery in which human iniquity finds its cure.
The first thought round which the grand won-
der of the atonement grows into shape is this
thought of sin as a real live thing standing
forth to be fought with, to be conquered, to
be killed. . . . To meet that enmity, to slay
that giant, Christ comes forth with his won-
derful nature. He undertakes a distinct and
dreadful struggle. We see its outward mani-
festation in the agony of the cross. All the
deeper battle goes on out of our sight. We
know not how it fares till the word of God
comes to tell us that the victory is won by our
Redeemer, and that Satan is trodden into death
by the dying Christ. Of all the Mystery of
Iniquity, where is the Mystery like this ? You
see how true a mystery it is. Nothing but the
fact we know. . . . That shining, splendid
fact, that gracious, glorious fact the fact of
the Lord's victory and of Satan's fall stands
forth so clear that none can doubt it. It takes
its place as the one certain, central fact of
hope. By it the living live, by it the dying
die; in it the glorified rejoice forever.
VI. 14, 15-
8o MARCH 21.
Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said,
Why could not we cast him out ?
MATT. xvii. 9.
HE tells them that the reason of their failure
is that they have been trying to do by
themselves what they can only do when He is
behind them, when their natures are so open
that His strength can freely flow out through
them. . . . Look at the artist's chisel.
" Why cannot I carve ?" it cries. And then
the artist comes and seizes it. The chisel lays
itself into his hand, and is obedient to him.
That obedience is faith. It opens the chan-
nels between the sculptor's brain and the hard
steel. Thought, feeling, imagination, skill
flow down from the deep chambers of the
artist's soul to the chisel's edge. The sculp-
tor and the chisel are not two, but one. It is
the unit which they make that carves the
statue.
This is our principle, then. The unit of
power for moral victory in other words, for
goodness on the earth is not man and is not
God. It is God and man, not two, but one,
not meeting accidentally, not running together
in emergencies only to separate again when
the emergency is over; it is God and man
belonging essentially together, God rilling
man, man opening his life by faith to be a part
of God's, as the gulf opens itself and is part
of the great ocean.
III. 181, 185.
MARCH 22. 81
When I am weak, then I am strong.
2 COR. xii. 10.
IF the condition for which man was made was
a related, a bound up, a dependent condi-
tion, then the highest human happiness must
always come with the most complete conform-
ity to that first idea of human life. If depend-
ence, then, be happiness, . . . independence
of God, self-sufficiency, must be unhappiness.
And since suffering, in all its various depart-
ments, is the breaking up of self-sufficiency, of
self-confidence, is it not evident that, rightly
used, it may be the setting free of the human
soul from an unnatural and forced condition,
into its natural, intended, and so happiest
life ? . . . Anything in body, brain, or heart
that gets that idea of insufficiency home to us,
may set us to digging beneath the self-surface
of our vale of misery to find the God below
for which the thirsty soul was made. . . .
Prosperity is unconscious of God. Suffering,
whether we will or no, has to be conscious of
him.
VI. 29, 30.
Submit thy sorrow and thy soul to God,
And learn what peace it is to kiss His rod,
Who answers wishes ere they turn to prayers,
And with His blessings takes us unawares.
ABRAHAM PERCY MILLER.
MARCH 23.
No man can say that Jesus is the Lord but by
the Holy Ghost. i COR. xii. 3.
NO soul is too low to be brought by the Holy
Spirit to the place where, answering
back by the divine within it to the divine
above it, it may say that " Jesus is the Lord."
No soul is too high to find in that announce-
ment of its faith the consummation of its life.
Here, then, is where the highest and the low-
est meet. Here is where they have met
through all the ages. Glorious thinkers, great
strong workers, sufferers whose lives were
miracles of patience, all of these singing as
they went their ways, " Jesus is Lord, Jesus is
Lord." And all around them, and in among
them, dull, plodding souls, and minds whose
thought was all confused and bewildered with
emotion, and little children, with their crude
clear pictures in their simple brains, all these
too singing, in their several tones and with
their several clearness, "Jesus is Lord, Jesus
is Lord." . . .
And oh, my friends, remember that the own-
ing of Christ's mastery here is but the begin-
ning of the participation in Christ's glory in
heaven. VI. 106, 107.
Oh, let Christ and sunshine in,
Let His Love its sweet way win !
Nothing human is too mean
To receive the King unseen;
Not a pleasure or a care
But celestial robes may wear:
Impulse, thought, and action may
Live immortally to-day. LUCY LARCOM.
MARCH 24. 83
If ye have faith) and doubt not.
MATT. xxi. 21.
("^ ET rid of the awful assumption that it
^-^ [si 11 ] is bound up in your constitution;
cease to be a weak fatalist about it. ... There
are few things more constantly marvellous
about our human nature than its power of ac-
climating itself in moral and spiritual regions
where it once seemed impossible that it should
live at all. The tree upon the hillside says:
" Here and here alone can I live. Here my
fathers lived in all their generations. . . .
Take me down to the plain and ! shall die."
The gardener knows better. He takes the
doubting and despairing plant and carries it,
even against its will, to the broad valley, and
sets it where the cold winds shall not smite it,
and where the rich ground feeds it with luxu-
riance. And almost as they touch each other
the ground and the root claim one another,
and rich revelations of its own possibility
flood the poor plant and fill it full of marvel
with itself.
VI. 68.
For all grows sweet in Thee
Since Thou didst gather us in One, and bring
This fading flower of our humanity
To perfect blossoming.
DORA GREENWELL.
84 MARCH 25.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see
God. MATT. v. 8.
THROUGH the mists of long and devout
tradition which have obscured her char-
acter and made her very person almost myth-
ical, we are surprised sometimes in reading the
Gospels at the clearness and simplicity with
which Mary the mother of our Lord stands
out before us there. She speaks only on three
occasions, but . . . those three utterances of
hers are like three clear notes of a bell, that
show how sound and rich its metal is. Think
what they were. In the presence of the mes-
senger who comes to tell her of her great
privilege she bows her head and says, " Behold
the handmaid* of the Lord. Be it unto me
according to thy word." When she finds her
Son in the temple she cries out to Him, " Son,
why hast Thou thus dealt with us ? Thy father
and I have sought Thee sorrowing." When
she stands with Him before the puzzled guests
at Cana she turns to the servants and says,
"Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it."
The young soul's consecration! The mother's
overrunning love! The disciple's perfect loy-
alty! What can be clearer than the simple,
true, brave, loving woman that those words
reveal?
V. 340.
Still to the lowly soul
He doth himself impart,
And for His cradle and His throne
Chooseth the pure in heart.
KEBLE.
MARCH 26. 85
In Thy light shall we see light.
Ps. xxxvi. 9.
STAND where you cannot see man's great-
ness, and the Incarnation seems a wild,
inexplicable dream. Stand where no music
reaches you from the deep harmonies of man's
present spiritual life, and it is out of your
power to believe in heaven. Lose sight of
sin, and the darker possibilities of eternity are
hideous impossibilities. The religious truth
which you see by itself, out of its position in
the great whole which ought to hold it, fails
to bear witness of its truth. Strive then for
wholes, and let the parts reveal themselves
within them. Strive for God, who is the
whole By obedience, by communion,
climb to the height where you shall be with
God, and then the truths about God shall open
their reasonableness, their richness, and their
harmony.
VI. 22O.
For no man by himself is able to investi-
gate this mystery;
Nor is it grasped by human wisdom;
But rather by the strength of faith,
And the intuition of a pure mind,
Enlightened from above.
THOMAS A KEMPIS.
86 MARCH 27.
T^HE age of real faith does not covet again
* the chains of superstition. The world at
peace does not ask to be shaken once more by
the earthquakes of war. But faith does feel the
beauty of complete surrender which supersti-
tion kept for its sole spiritual virtue; and
peace, with its diffused responsibility, is
kindled at thought of heroic and unquestion-
ing obedience which the education of war pro-
duced. Still let superstition and war lie dead.
We will not call them back to life; but we will
borrow their jewels of silver and jewels of gold
as we go forth into the wilderness to worship
our God with larger worship. Do you not feel
this is in all the best progress ? Do you not see
it in the eyes of mankind, in the depths of the
eyes of mankind always, as it turns away from
the dead forms of its old masters and goes
forth into the years to be; the hoarded power
of the past glowing beneath the satisfaction
of the present and the fiery hope of the un-
known future ? VI. 62.
Out of the years bloom the eternities!
And nothing dies that ever was alive;
All that endears
And sanctifies the human must survive;
Of God they are, and in His smile they thrive
The immortal years!
LUCY LARCOM.
MARCH 28. 87
They say imto Him, We have here but five
loaves, and two fishes. He said, Bring them
hither to me. MATT. xiv. 17, 18.
SURELY, the act is a very striking one. . . .
Our first notions of a Deity are of One
who is above all law and order and economy.
Let the poor be niggardly, a slave to rules,
counting over his little stock, squeezing every
penny that he pays; but let the Ail-Powerful
be open-handed, counting as nothing what
other beings must save, originating life when-
ever life is needed, full of an easy spontaneity,
flinging the miracles of creation everywhere.
But it is striking to see how, as men go on and
learn more of God, these ideas which were at
first cast almost indignantly out of their con-
ception of Him, gradually come back and are
set in the place of highest honor. It is God's
highest glory that He is a God of Law. Con-
tinuousness is the crown of His government.
That He brings every future out of some past
is the charm of all His government. That
He lets nothing go to waste is the highest per-
fection of His boundless resource. Continuity
and economy are His solemn foot-prints by
which we trace His presence in our world.
The need of evolution, the necessity that
everything which is to be should come out of
something which has been before, and the
abhorrence of waste, continuity and econ-
omy, these are the proof-marks of Divinity.
II. 129, 130.
Earth holds heaven in the bud . our perfection there has
to be developed out cf our imperfection here.
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.
88 MARCH 29.
""THERE is the surface sight of life, which is
1 bright and enthusiastic. There is the
sight of life which is deeper than this, which
is sad and puzzled. There is the deepest
sight of all, which is bright again with a truer
light, and enthusiastic again with a soberer
but a more genuine happiness. . . . There
come forth adaptations for the higher work in
things which have seemed wholly unfitted to
produce the lower. Things which never could
have made a man happy, develop a power to
make him strong. Strength and not happi-
ness, or rather only that happiness which
comes by strength, is recognized as the end of
human living. II. 151, 153.
" Give me the wine of happiness," I cried,
' The bread of life! Oh ye benign, unknown,
Immortal powers ! I crave them for mine own ;
I am athirst, I will not be denied
Though hell were up in arms!" No sound
replied;
But turning back to my rude board and lone,
My soul, confounded, there beheld a stone,
Pale water in a shallow cup beside!
With gushing tears, in utter hopelessness,
I stood and gazed. Then rose a voice that
spoke:
" God gave thee this, and what He gives will
bless."
And 'neath the hands that trembling took and
broke,
Lo, truly, a sweet miracle divine
The stone turned bread, the water ruby wine!
STUART STERNE.
MARCH 30. 89
If He should make my web a blight
Of life's fair picture of delight,
My heart's content would find it right.
EMERSON.
AMONG the tests of men there stands very
high this power to do without. . . .
But then this power of doing without some
things is, at its bottom, a power of not doing
without some other things. We are rescued
from the abject slavery of the lower by enter-
ing into the absolute servantship of the higher.
He to whom honor is necessary can do with-
out money. He who must have goodness can
get along without praise. He who must have
God's communion can do without the sweet
companionships of fellow-men. He who can-
not lose his eternity can easily cast aside time
and the body which belongs to it, and by the
martyr's slow or sudden death exchange
the visible for the invisible, the symbol for
the reality. Nay, he who values most intensely
his friend's or his child's eternal life can, not
easily but still not grudgingly, let go the joy
and daily comfort of his friend's or his child's
hourly presence, and see him die that he may
enter into life. On these two ladders, as it
were, by these two scales, the order of human
character mounts up, the power to do with-
out and the power not to do without.
I. 292.
Not for ourselves alone we strive,
Since thy perfection manifest
Bids self resign what self desired,
Postponing good for best.
BLISS CARMAN.
90 MARCH 31.
We wrestle . . . against powers.
EPHES. vi. 12.
OT. PAUL believed in spirits good and bad.
^ The beauty of his belief in them was
that, different as they might be from us in the
conditions of their life, they still belonged to
the same great moral system to which he be-
longed. The good spirits were not to be pro-
pitiated, and the evil spirits were not to be
disarmed by magic and incantations. He who
did righteousness called to himself the most
mysterious strength of the unseen worlds. . . .
For him all good beings fought; against his
simple righteousness all evil beings would beat
themselves in vain, and ultimately must go
down and fail, here or beyond the stars. That
is a noble faith. In the simplicity and gran-
deur of a faith like that, man will some day
come once more to the now almost lost belief
in the connection of his life with unseen spirit-
ual powers.
VI. 75-
While we discern it not, and least believe,
On stairs invisible betwixt His heaven
And our unholy, sinful, toilsome earth
Celestial messengers of loftiest good
Upward and downward pass continually.
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH.
APRIL i. 91
MEN talk very religious men as if God
were a sort of reserve force, to be called
in when He was needed, a sort of last resort
when man's strength failed. . . . The thought
of God which Christ came to reveal, the
thought of God of which all Christ's own life
was full, is something totally different from
that. To Christ's thought God and man are
part of one system one structure, one work-
ing-force. To separate them is not simply to
deny man a power that he needs : it is to break
a unity, and to set a part of the power to the
attempt to do what the whole power ought to
do as one. ... It is engine and steam that
are to make the running power. It is artist
and chisel that are to carve the statue. It is
God and you that live your life. For you to
try to live it alone is to try to do all the work
with one part of the power. God is not a
crutch coming in to help your lameness, un-
necessary to you if you had all your strength.
He is the breath in your lungs. The stronger
you are, the more thoroughly you are your-
self, the more you need of it, the more you
need of Him.
VI. 102, 103.
He breathed forth His spirit
Into the slumbering dust, and upright stand-
ing, it laid its
Hand on its heart, and felt it was warm with
a flame out of heaven.
Quench, oh, quench not that flame! It is the
breath of your being.
LONGFELLOW.
92 APRIL 2.
TN a picture by Domenichino at Bologna, an
* angel stands at the foot of the empty cross,
and tries with his finger one of the sharp points
in the crown of thorns which the Saviour had
worn during His passion. It is all a sad in-
explicable wonder to him. It appeals to no
experience of wickedness and woe in his pure
and angelic nature. But when you or I take
the crown of thorns into our hands we know in
our own hearts the meanness, the jealousy, the
hatred which it represents. . . . With simple
wonder an angel might walk through our
State Prison halls; but a man must walk there
full of humbleness and charity; for, as the
best man that ever lived finds something of
common humanity in us which makes his good-
ness seem not impossible to us, so the worst of
men stirs by the sight of his human sin some
sense of what human power of sinfulness we
too possess.
I. 251.
How much, preventing God, how much I owe
To the defences Thou hast round me set,
Example, custom, fear, occasion slow,
These scorned bondsmen were my parapet.
I dare not peep over this parapet
To gauge with glance the roaring gulf below,
The depths of sin to which I had descended,
Had not these me against myself defended.
EMERSON.
APRIL 3. 93
MEN cry to-day, " Christianity is the re-
ligion of the rich and comfortable, "and
while they speak their cry is drowned in the
rush of the poor, the hungry, and the wretched
to some common men's revival. They cry
again, " The Christian belief belongs to the
ignorant," and lo, the wisest thought of the
world comes back again, as it is ever coming,
to the mystery of Christ and of His treatment
of the soul of man. It is not that they have
mistaken the class to which they should assign
the Christian faith. Their mistake is in giving
it to any class. It belongs to the individual.
It always has its eyes fastened on him. One
of the noblest functions of Christianity in the
world is to lie behind the class crystallizations
of mankind, like a solvent into which they
shall return and blend with one another, to
crystallize, no doubt, again, but always to be
reminded that the classes into which they crys-
tallize are lesser facts than the manhood into
which they are repeatedly dissolved.
VIII. 114.
For the love of God is broader
Than the measures of man's mind;
And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind.
But we make His love too narrow
By false limits of our own;
And we magnify His strictness
With a zeal He will not own.
There is plentiful redemption
In the blood that has been shed;
There is joy for all the members
In the sorrows of the Head. FABER.
94 APRIL 4.
Through Jesus Christ. ROM. vi. 23.
IN Jesus of Nazareth appeared the Mediator
by whom was to be the Atonement. His
was the life and nature which, standing be-
tween the Godhood and the manhood, was to
bridge the gulf and make the firm, bright road
over which blessing and prayer might pass and
repass with confident, golden feet for ever. . . .
But from which side did the bridge spring ?
Who moved toward the reconciliation ? It is
the most precious part of our belief that it was
with God that the activity began. It is the
very soul of the Gospel, as I read it, that the
Father's heart, sitting above us in His holi-
ness, yearned for us as we lay down here in
our sin. And when there was no man to make
an intercession, He sent His Son to tell us of
His love, to live with us, to die for us, to lay His
life like a strong bridge out from the divine
side of existence, over which we might walk,
fearfully but safely, back into the divinity
where we belonged. Through Him we have
access to the Father. As the end was divine
so the method is divine. As it is to God that
we come, so it is God who brings us there. I
can think nothing else without dishonoring
the tireless, quenchless love of God. i. 237.
The exhibition of so great a love and mercy is
a very deep abyss,
And as it were a divine sea which can not be
swum over,
Yet in which the spiritual fishes, small and great,
Whom Thou hast inclosed in the net of faith,
Swim to and fro. THOMAS A KEMPIS.
APRIL 5. 95
T^HERE comes no real content to the seeker
after goodness until, behind all the pat-
terns which hold themselves up to him with
pride and boasting in their practicalness, at
last he hears the voice of the sublime imprac-
ticable standard, far out beyond them all, call-
ing to him, " Be ye perfect as your Father in
heaven is perfect." Then the finite has heard
the voice of the infinite to which it belongs, to
which it always will respond, and straightway
it settles down to its endless journey and goes
on content.
III. 121.
I toil, but I must also climb;
What soul was ever quite at ease
Shut in by earthly boundaries ?
I am not glad till I have known
Life that can lift me from my own:
A loftier level must be won,
A mightier strength to lean upon.
And heaven draws near as I ascend;
The breeze invites, the stars befriend:
All things are beckoning towards the Best:
I climb to Thee, my God, for rest.
LUCY LARCOM.
96 APRIL 6.
TS it not wonderful to see how few sins in this
world are done flatly, fairly, blankly, as
sins ? We carry our consciences by side at-
tacks, by elaborate strategies and artifices.
We almost never charge up in the face of our
sense of right and take it by assault. It is a
very rare thing, I think much rarer than we
are often ready to suppose, for a man to say
to himself, this thing is bad, bad and not
good, certainly and necessarily nothing but
bad, and yet I will do it. . . . Covetousness
dresses itself in the decent robes of prudence,
idleness calls itself innocence, prodigality goes
garbed as generosity, they all masquerade
through society and trap the souls of men. . . .
We have our sins here all decently labelled, all
decently clad. What if He came, the Spirit
of all truth, and wiped out every false name
and wrote up every true one! We tremble to
think of what ' these walls must see. We
should not dare look upon one another's
shame, bowed down each with the supreme
shamefulness of his own.
VI. ii, 13.
Into the truth of things,
Out of their falseness rise, and reach thou, and
remain.
BROWNING.
APRIL 7. 97
If any man will do His will, he shall know of
the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I
speak of myself > JOHN vii. 17.
I HAVE been struck by seeing how favorite
a text that has become in our day. . . .
Many and many a soul has found that that was
indeed the message that it needed. Turning
away from vain disputes of words, leaving
theological subtleties alone, just trying to
turn what it knew of Christ into a life, it has
found that it has become assured of His divin-
ity, sure that His doctrine was of God. Such
souls have not found that the thousand curious
questions of theology were answered, and all
the mystery rolled away out of the sky of
truth. Christ did not promise that. But they
have found what He did promise: that com-
ing near to Him in obedience, they have been
made sure of the true divinity that was in Him
and in the teachings that he gave. . . .
It is like all Christ's teachings, one utter-
ance of an essential universal truth. Every-
where the flower of obedience is intelligence.
. . . Obey Jesus with cordial loyalty and you
will understand Jesus. Not by studying Him,
but by doing His will, shall you learn how
divine He is. Obedience completes itself in
understanding.
I. 32.
For meek Obedience, too, is Light,
And following that is following Him.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
7
9 8
In the wilderness shall waters break out, and
streams in the desert. Is. xxxv. 6.
A MAN loses his friend and he is sorry; he
loses his property and he is crushed; he
loses his health and he almost gives up; but
there is a yet untasted woe of which that man
knows nothing. . . . Let him find himself
a sinner, let him stand guilty, guilty, without a
plea, without a hope, just with his frightened
and naked soul before the eye of God, and
then in the conviction of sin, then he has found
what suffering is. ... He walks the valley
of his misery and all is dark. And can this
valley break forth into wells ? Can these dry
pools be filled with water ? . . . Tell me,
all ye who, bowed down in the dust in the
humiliation of your worthlessness, have heard
there, with your face close to the ground,
what you could never hear while you stood
upright, the streams of pardon running sweet
music down below, tell me, is not the well of
richest joy right here in the midst of the val-
ley of completest sorrow ? where sin abounded
does not grace much more abound ?
VI. 31.
Yea, though I sin, my sin is not to death;
In my repentance I have joy, such joy
That I could almost sin to seek for it
Yes, if I did not hate it and abhor,
And know that Thou abhorr'st and hatest it,
And will'st, for an example to the rest,
That Thine elect should keep themselves from
it.
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH.
APRIL 9. 99
THE truth which God gives us is like the
wheat that a bounteous country sends
into the city. It is all the same wheat; but
men go and buy it and eat it, and this same
identical wheat is turned into different sorts
of force in different men. It is turned into
bartering force in one, and thinking force in
another, and singing force in another, and
governing force in another. It is made mani-
fold as soon as it passes into men. So I think
every minister finds that, as his disciples grow
older, if he has really succeeded in getting the
truth to be their truth, they grow into more
various forms of Christian charity and useful-
ness. Each grows more evidently to be not
merely a Christian, but the Christian that God
intended him to be. They think more. They
think differently. The pure white light breaks
itself to each in different colors.
Let us rejoice in the clear individuality of
maturing Christian life. Its one principle is
still identical; and so it already prophesies
heaven, where we are sure we shall be all
different illustrations of the one same grace,
showing different characters, set to different
works, but all moved by one spirit all illustra-
tions of the one same grace still. n. 44, 45.
Lord, make me one withThine own faithful ones,
Thy Saints who love Thee, and are loved by
Thee,
Till the day break and till the shadows flee,
At one with them in alms and orisons;
At one with him who toils and him who runs,
And him who yearns for union yet to be.
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.
ioo APRIL 10.
One star differ eth from another star in glory.
i Cor. xv. 41.
m an who is a Christian must live a
* ' Christian life that is peculiarly his own.
Every candle of the Lord must utter its pecul-
iar light; only the true individuality of faith
is marked by these characteristics which res-
cue it from bigotry: first, that it does not add
something to the universal light, but only
brings out most strongly some aspect of it
which is specially its own; second, that it
always cares more about the essential light
than about the peculiar way in which it utters
it; and third, that it easily blends with other
special utterances of the universal light, in
cordial sympathy and recognition of the value
which it finds in them. Let these character-
istics be in every man's religion, and then the
individuality of faith is an inestimable gain.
Then the different candles of the Lord burn in
long rows down His great palace-halls of the
world; and all together, each complementing
all the rest, they light the whole vast space
with Him.
II. 14.
" Slender the streams of good
That flow from the lives of men,
But united they swell to a gracious flood
That blesseth again and again."
APRIL IT. 101
And the multitudes that went before, and that
followed, cried, saying, Hosanna to the Son of
David ; Blessed is He that cometh in the name of
the Lord. . . . And when He was come into Jeru-
salem, all the city was moved, saying, Who is this ?
MATT. ix. 10.
SO Jesus came into Jerusalem. He came at
once as an Intruder and a King. There
were men . . . who made the old streets ring
with shouts of welcome. There were other
men who . . . with muttered curses saw
Him go by in His triumph. But through it
all Jesus held on His way, claiming the town
for His town because it was His Father's.
And so he claims our hearts. An Intruder
and a King at once He seems to those hearts
as He stands there on the threshold. There
is something in every one of them that says to
Him, "Come in, come in!" There is some-
thing, too, in every one of them that rises up
at His coming and says, " Begone, begone!
We will not have this Man to rule over us."
But through their tumult, their struggle,
Christ, whether He be King or Intruder,
whether He be welcomed or rejected, goes on
His way, pressing on into each heart's most
secret places, claiming always that He and He
alone is the heart's King. VII. 220.
Lord, we would fain some little palm-branch lay
Upon Thy way . . .
If but the foldings of Thy garment's hem
Shall shadow them,
These worthless leaves which we have brought and strewed
Along Thy road
Shall be raised up and made divinely sweet,
And fit to lie beneath Thy feet.
SUSAN COOLIDGE.
102 APRIL 12.
He goeth before you into Galilee.
MATT, xxviii. 7.
"THIS is Christ's way. Wherever He would
1 have His disciples go, He goes first Him-
self, and through the door which He has
opened He draws them by His love. That is
the whole philosophy of Christian culture.
And that is the meaning of the Incarnation.
God entered into human life; made Himself
one with it as He only could have done with
a nature that was originally one with His own.
He became man as He could not have become
brute or stone. Then in that human nature
He outwent humanity. He opened yet un-
opened gates of human possibility. He
showed what man might be, how great, how
god-like ! And by the love and oneness He has
always been claiming man for the greatness
whose possibility He showed. As we think
of the Incarnation deeply, these three stages
come in one thought. First, the God in Christ
seems very near to us as we think of His love.
Then He seems very far above us as we think
of His holiness, and then again He seems to
bring us very near to Himself as we feel His
power. He is one with us. He goes beyond
us, and He comes again and receives us unto
Himself. VI. 179.
Ah, the dear message that He gave her then,
Said for the sake of all bruised hearts of men !
" Go, tell those friends who have believed on Me,
I go before them into Galilee :
" Into the life so poor, and hard, and plain,
That for a while they must take up again,
My presence passes. Where their feet toil slow,
Mine, shining-swift with love, still foremost go."
ADELINE D. T. WHITNEY.
APRIL 13. 103
Who is among you that feareth the Lord, . . .
that walketh in darkness, and hath no light? let
him trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon
his God. Is. i. 10.
"\I7HAT shall I do with this sorrow that
** God has sent me ?" " Take it up and
bear it, and get a strength and blessing out of
it." "Ah, if I only knew what blessing there
was in it, if I saw how it would help me, then I
could bear it like a plume ! " " What shall I
do with this hard, hateful duty which Christ
has laid right in my way?" "Do it, and
grow by doing it." "Ah, yes; if I could only
see that it would make me grow!" In both
these cases do you not see that what you are
begging for is not more faith, although you
think it is, but sight ? You want to see for your-
self the blessing in the sorrow, the strength in
the hard and hateful task. Faith says not,
" I see that it is good for me, and so God must
have sent it," but " God sent it, and so it
must be good for me."
V. 351.
Hast thou forgotten that we v/alk by faith ?
For keenest sight but multiplies the shows.
Lift up thine eyelids; take a valiant breath;
Fearful, dare yet the terror in God's name;
Step wider, trust the Invisible.
GEORGE MACDONALD.
104 APRIL 14.
Father, save me from this hour : But for this
hour came I into the world. Father, glorify Thy
name. JOHN xii. 27, 28.
NO duty of doing frightens and dismays the
human soul like the duty of mere suffer-
ing. I know nothing that will so cow and
crush a strong, well man, with the red blood
riotous in his full veins, as a certain convic-
tion coming suddenly upon him that he is to
be a poor, miserable, dependent invalid all
the rest of his days until he dies. Nothing
makes a man cry out to die like that. It is the
most terrible sight one ever sees. . . . And
then it is the most beautiful sight one ever
sees. As the man lies there in his misery, out
of the darkness comes his past and reads itself
to him. Each bright old year of health comes
with its message of God's unforgetting
love. . . . He slowly sees that all the past
of active duty was stocking his life with the
graces that should fit him for these slow years
of suffering duty. This bed of wretchedness
was the result to which every path of educa-
tion led. Slowly his soul accepts the lesson.
" Father, save me from this hour. Nay, for
this purpose came I unto this hour. Father,
glorify Thy name." Then the hands drop
patiently from their resistance. The meek
lips are put up to taste the bitter cup. The
life grows happy in its new enlightenment of
pain.
"' ' Glory to God, to God ! ' he saith ;
' Knowledge by suffering entereth,
And life is perfected by death.' "
VII. 228.
APRIL 15. 105
/ am the bread of life.
He that eateth Me, even he shall live by Me.
JOHN vi. 35, 57.
TO feed on Christ is to get His strength into
us to be our strength. You feed on the
cornfield and then go and build your house,
and it is the cornfield in your strong arm that
builds the house, that cuts down the trees and
piles the stone and lifts the roof into its place.
You feed on Christ and then go and live your
life, and it is Christ in you that lives your life,
that helps the poor, that tells the truth, that
fights the battle, and that wins the crown.
But what is this strength of Christ that
comes to us ? It is His character, His
strength, His purity, His truth, His merciful-
ness, in one word, His holiness, the perfect-
ness of His moral life. That is the inner
strength. That is the strength of food.
And notice how this last alone is vital. It
alone makes life. It lives. The buttress keeps
the dead wall standing, but the sap makes the
live tree still more alive with growth. So com-
pulsion and fear keep us true to duty, but love
makes us larger and fit for greater duty every
day. Every vital strength must be the strength
which incorporates itself with the very being of
the thing that it supports. Except we eat we
can have no life in us. II. 246, 242.
Lord, evermore give us this bread. JOHN vi. 34.
Lord, leave us not athirst, unfed, . . .
Until, these mortal needs all past,
We sit at Thy full feast at last,
The bread of angels broken by Thee,
The wine of joy poured constantly.
SUSAN COOLIDGE.
106 APRIL 16.
Pilate saith unto them, Behold the man.
JOHN xix. 5.
THINK of Christ's life and death, not with
reference to the mysterious redemptive
efficac)' that was in it, but as the great human
life, the representative life that set forth the
ideal experience and culture of a human soul.
And surely it does not fail us here. Whatever
else comes to a life, there is a final grace and
greatness which it cannot have until it has
been touched by pain. I do not speak it
sentimentally. I do not mean the mere pa-
thetic romance which gives a charm to the
story of the unfortunate. I mean the very
stuff and qualities of our manhood those
things which make us really and completely
men. . . . Maturity of character is as sure a
sign of some healthy experience of pain, how-
ever secret, as the brilliancy and clearness of
a bit of glass is of the fire through which it
has passed.
We do not dishonor the humanity of Jesus
when we thus make it the type of what ours
may be. He wanted and He loves to have us
use it so. " As I am, so are ye in this world,"
He declared. Only remember He is not only
pattern, but power. We must be like Him,
but we cannot be, save as He makes us. We
must come to Him, but we can only come to
Him by His grace and help. VII. n, 12.
Thou art our Pattern to the end of time,
Oh Crucified! and perfect is Thy will:
The workers follow Thee in doing good;
The helpless think of Calvary, and are still.
CAROLINE M. NOEL.
APRIL 17. 107
THE broken edges everywhere! The half-
finished tasks that men have to leave and
go into the darkness! The young careers so
full of promise that suddenly stop! The great
ideas and wishes, growing legitimately out of
earthly life, yet evidently too large for it, find-
ing no satisfaction here! And most of all the
unfinished characters! I can think that it is
no great thing for a man to die with his for-
tune half made, or his barn half built; but
that he should die just as his character is
rounding into shape, and from a crude study
becoming a picture of beauty and an engine of
power, this is what most bewilders us. This
is what most of all, I think, has made men
guess that this earthly life we see is a part and
not a whole, and set their eyes pathetically
searching for that other world they thought
must be beyond the waters.
XI. 15.
Still must we hope what we believe,
And what is given us receive;
Must still believe, for still we hope
That in a world of larger scope
What here is faithfully begun
Will be completed, not undone.
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH.
io8 APRIL 18.
If after the manner of men I have fought with
beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the
dead rise not 1 i COR. xv. 32.
YOU can test the work that you are en-
gaged in in the world by seeing whether
it needs, whether it is restless and cramped
without the truth of, an immortality. If it is
not, if you can do your little fight just as well
without any hope of an eternity, be sure the
fight that you are at is a poor one, is not
worthy of your highest powers is too small a
fight for a man, a child of God, to spend his
life in fighting.
The world's poor heart knows very well
what it wants. For years and years it longed
to see one-man rise from the dead. If it could
only have that! It could let many other ques-
tions go unanswered, but, oh, for some light
on that darkness oh, for some sound out of
that silence! If it could have that, then its
bonds would be broken, its whole pale life
flooded with color, its best truths verified com-
pletely, and a hope lighted upon every grave.
No longer should spiritual philosophy labor
under the burden of materialism; no longer
should the dying die in terrible doubt, and the
mourners go hopelessly about the streets. My
friends, the world's prayer is answered. A
true man has risen from the grave. Life and
immortality are brought to light.
XII. 29.
Most human and yet most divine,
The flower of man and God!
WHITTIEK.
APRIL 19. 109
TTOW this "power of the resurrection"
^ transfigures and changes not merely all
internal, but all external things! . . . The
world itself, even material nature trees and
fields and skies, noontimes and mornings, sun-
sets and midnights cannot be the same when
they are found to be the education-place of a
being with a destiny such as the resurrection
of Jesus Christ makes known for man. They
must bring moral meanings to that soul which
this new truth of immortality exalts to be the
monarch of the world. You say that this is
poetry. There is no poetry on the earth like
the Christian's faith, that most noble of all
creative powers, "the substance of things
hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."
And so it is the commonest Christian conscious-
ness, belonging to all Christian minds in their
several degrees, that to them, with their new
life, the whole world of nature became new
too, had new words to speak to them of God
and of eternity, and that all through their
lives there are times when the enlightened uni-
verse becomes vocal, and its visible realities
impart to them
" Authentic tidings of invisible things,
Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power,
And central peace subsisting at the heart
Of endless agitation."
VII. 283.
no APRIL 20.
Handle me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh
and bones as ye see me have. LUKE xxiv. 39.
IN these words Christ after His resurrection
appeals to His disciples to bear witness
that He is a true living man, and not a dis-
embodied spirit. He bids them use their
human senses to discover that He is truly
human like themselves. The words therefore
may represent to us the perpetual appeal which
Christ makes to our human consciousness and
to the perceptions of mankind to recognize
His true humanity. As He then offered His
human body for the inspection of His disci-
ples, and bade them own that it was truly a
man's body, so He is always offering His
whole human nature and calling on men to
witness that He is truly human in thought and
feeling and character, the pattern and fulfil-
ment of humanity.
There are two knowledges of Christ, one
lower and one higher. The first knowledge
brings us to obedience. The second knowl-
edge is the power of spiritual growth.
Into that higher knowledge may we all ad-
vance; making Christ ours first, that in the
end He may make us His. With reverent
hands may we handle Him and see that He is
truly manly, that He really wears our human-
ity, that so we may through His humanity
come to the Father God whom He reveals.
II. 253, 269.
APRIL 21. in
In your patience possess ye your souls. . . . Your
redemption draweth nigh. LUKE xxi. 19, 28.
THE world is growing better I know it. A
great unceasing movement toward truth
and goodness is carrying slowly forward ever
the character of this great, mighty, mysterious
humanity. How slow it is, but oh, how real
it is, the study of the ages tells. And yet
behold how the good causes fail. Behold how
selfishness comes in to paralyze each great
endeavor for the good of man. Alas for him
who only sees this surface fact; who does not
feel beneath it all the heave and movement of
the whole race forward toward goodness,
toward God! To him who hears at once the
tumult of moral failures all around him and
the steady progress of the great moral success
beneath him to him the world becomes
solemn and beautiful, pathetic and full of
hope. For him despairing pessimism and silly
optimism both become impossible. A divine
optimism, which, while it dares not say,
" Whatever is is best," devoutly says, "The
best is strongest and shall ultimately conquer
and use even the worst," becomes the habit
of his life. Such was the optimism of Jesus.
Such is the optimism of His disciples if they
catch His spirit. VII. 206.
Then life is to wake, not sleep;
Rise, and not rest; but press
From earth's level, where blindly creep
Things perfected more or less,
To the heaven's height, far and steep.
BROWNING.
APRIL 22.
'""PHERE is a religion which finds the world
1 unsatisfying, and so turns longingly,
wistfully, pathetically, wearily to God. There
is another religion which finds the world won-
drously beautiful and good, yet always sug-
gesting something more beautiful and better
than itself, and this religion too turns to God,
but glowingly, springingly, hopefully. The
first religion starts from a sense of sin and
comes to God for forgiveness. The second
religion starts in a thankful joy, a sense of
promise, and comes to God for fulfilment.
The first starts with disgust at self, and so
comes to love for God. The second starts in
admiration of God, and so comes to forgetful-
ness of self.
IV. 136.
Happy ! Yes; and wherefore
Should I not be so ?
Love Divine o'erhangeth
All the way I go.
Darkest shadow showeth
Smiling sun behind;
Where the sickle goeth,
There the reapers bind.
Happy ! Yes; and wherefore
Should I not be so,
Since by ways appointed
Unto heaven I go ?
J. L. M. W.
APRIL 23. 113
'"THERE are many great and exultant mo-
* ments in our lives; moments in which
some new, heretofore unfelt motive takes us
into its power, when some new work for us
and some new power in us starts forth and
makes life seem fresh and green, like a spring
morning that forgets all the stains and storms
that have gone before it. But among all such
moments there is none that can compare with
that in which duty passes into love when
morality, reaching itself out into eternity, as-
serts its sameness of nature with the service
that the glorified nature is to render to God in
the heavenly city, so that the obligation of
honesty in our bargains is seen to rest on the
same sanctions and to be lustrous with the
same beauty now that will belong to the sing-
ing of the everlasting songs and the casting of
the crowns before the Saviour's feet the
moment when our life thus knows Christ and
the power of His resurrection.
VII. 285.
Something that leaps life's narrow bars,
To claim its birthright with the hosts of
heaven;
A seed of sunshine that doth leaven
Our earthly dulness with the beams of stars,
And glorify our clay
With light from fountains elder than the Day.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
H4 APRIL 24.
Father, I will that they also, whom Thou hast
given me, be with me where I am j that they may
behold my glory. JOHN xvii. 24.
BEFORE the words can soar into the high,
pure meaning which belongs to them,
we must remember what Christ's glory is which
He wants us to see. Its essence, the heart
and soul of it, must be His goodness. . . .
And here the truth comes in, that in moral
things only the like can see its like; only the
good can really discern, appreciate, and under-
stand goodness. That needs no proof. We
see it every day. Men live alongside of the
best saints the world possesses, do business
with them, pass their whole lives with them,
and never know that they are good. If we
have ever made any advance in purity and
unselfishness, has not the best of all its satis-
faction been in this, that it has let us see some-
thing new of the self-sacrifice and purity in
other men which have been hidden from us?
The higher we climb, the more the peaks open
around us. Now apply all this to the Sav-
iour's prayer that we may see His glory.
His glory is His goodness. Only by growth
in goodness can His goodness open itself to
us. What is He praying for then ? Is it not
that we might be like Him? So only can we
see Him. It is His glory that He wants us
to see, but, back of that, He wants us to be
such men and women that we can see His
g!ory. I. 308, 309.
Walk with Him now ; so shall thy way be bright,
And all thy soul be filled with His most glorious light.
IIORATIUS BONAK.
APRIL 25. 115
That we henceforth be no more children, tossed
to and fro, but . . . may grow up into Him in all
things. EPHES. iv. 14, 15.
THE true faith which a man has kept up to
the end of his life must be one that has
opened with his growth and constantly won
new reality and color from his changing ex-
perience. ... It is the field that once held
the seed, now waving and rustling under the
autumn wind with the harvest that it holds,
yet all the time it has kept the corn. The joy
of his life has richened his belief. His sorrow
has deepened it. His doubts have sobered
it. His enthusiasms have fired it. His labor
has purified it. His doctrines are like the
house that he has lived in, rich with associa-
tions which make it certain that he will never
move out of it. His doctrines have been illus-
trated and strengthened and endeared by the
good help they have given to his life. And
no doctrine that has not done this can be
really held up to the end with any such vital
grasp as will enable us to carry it with us
through the river and enter with it into the new
life beyond.
I. 62.
O Almighty God, who hast instructed Thy holy Church
with the heavenly doctrine of Thy Evangelist Saint Mark ;
Give us grace that, being not like children carried away
with every blast of strange doctrine, we may be established
in the truth of Thy holy Gospel ; through Jesus Christ
our Lord. Amen.
BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER.
6.
r\ESPERATION and bitterness come with
l_x_ the sight of pain without the sight of the
higher consequences and results of pain. . . .
"Curse God and die," seems sometimes to be
the only outcome of it all. ... It is the only
outcome of it all, if the pain you see or feel is
all. But if the whole of a man's life from its
beginning to its endless end, from its surface
to its inmost heart, is capable of being taken
into account, then the desperate outcome is
not the only one. There is a blessing and a
thankfulness which may overcome and drown
the curse. . . . Suppose that, looking at
pain, and with the curse just growing into
shape upon your lips, a great hand takes you
up and lifts you. And as you rise your vision
widens. And slowly education grows into
your view, surrounding pain, and drawing out
its sense of cruelty, and crowding in upon it its
own sense of love and purpose. Then, in the
larger vision, must not the curse perish ? And
if the lips are not strong enough to open into
thankfulness, at least the eyes, still full of
pity, may wait in peace.
VI. 221.
The Way of the Just is made strait, and
the journey of the Saints is prepared.
After what manner ?
By sorrow and labor; for this is the way to
the Kingdom of Heaven.
Is there no other way to the Life Eternal ?
None. The only straight way is that of the
Cross.
It is so. Christ hath taught this in His Word.
THOMAS A KKMIMS.
APRIL 27. 117
We live by admiration, hope and love:
And even as these are well and wisely fixed,
In dignity of being we ascend.
WORDSWORTH.
\I7HAT does it mean when men as they
* * grow older become narrow, sordid, and
machine-like, when a vulgar self-content
comes over them, and all the limitations of a
finished life that hopes for and expects no
more than what it is makes the sad picture
which we see in hosts of men's middle life ?
Is it not certainly that those men have
ceased to admire and trust ? . . . The blight
that falls upon their natures is the token of
what a lofty and life-giving faculty it is which
they have put out of use. It was this faculty
which made them at every moment greater
than themselves, which kept them in com-
munion with the riches of a higher life, which
preserved all the enthusiasm of active energy,
and yet preserved humility which held all the
other faculties to do their best work. This is
the faculty whose disuse makes the mature
life of so many men barren and dreary, and
whose regeneration, when the man is lifted up
into the new admiration and the new trust, the
admiration for and trust in God, makes a large
part of the glory of the full-grown life of
faith. VI. 95, 96.
n8 APRIL 28.
EVERY now and then there are flashes of
light upon the Gospel page which let
us see what a bright, sunny, and sympathetic
life the Saviour lived, how perfectly free from
harshness and asceticism was that character
which, at the same time, carries a sweet and
gentle seriousness and a robust earnestness
with it wherever it went. " The Son of man
came eating and drinking, and they say, Be-
hold, a man gluttonous and a wine-bibber, a
friend of publicans and sinners," so Jesus
himself described one day the current impres-
sion that His life made on the people of Jerusa-
lem. The words are like an instantaneous pho-
tograph of that far distant time. . . . In those
words we can see friends and enemies alike
busied with the strange life of Jesus, and only
gradually finding out that it was they who
were strange, and not He, gradually coming
first to feel and then to understand that this life
of His, so bright and yet so serious, so individ-
ual and yet so social, had reached completely
what their lives were only crudely struggling
after. VIII. 86.
We would see Jesus! not alone in sorrow,
But we would have Him with us in our
mirth;
He at whose right hand there are joys for ever,
Doth not disdain to bless the joys of earth.
ANNA E. HAMILTON.
Let us never be afraid of innocent joy. God is good,
and what He does is well done. We must dare to be
happy . . . regarding ourselves always as the depositaries,
and not as the authors of our joy. AMI EL.
APRIL 29. 119
He giveth power to the faint, and to them that
have no might He increaseth strength. Is. xl. 29.
DO you know what it is to be failing every
day, and yet to be sure humbly but
deeply sure that your life is, as a whole, in
its great movement and meaning, not failing,
but succeeding ? You want to do that best
work that a man can do to make life brighter
and nobler for your fellow-men. Not a day
passes in which you do not somehow try to
do that blessed work; but every time you turn
away after one of those attempts to give sym-
pathy or inspiration to your brethren, how your
heart sinks, so cold and so ignoble are the
words which you meant to be so generous and
warm ! And yet all the while you know that
the whole life does not fail. Still there is the
purpose ! It does not die. It is not given
up. It presses forward, wounded and bleed-
ing, but more and more determined every day.
Every day it grows clearer and clearer to you
that without that wish and hope and resolu-
tion life would not be worth living.
VII. 40.
That Thy full glory may abound, increase,
And so Thy glory shall be formed in me,
I pray: the answer is not rest or peace,
But charges, wants, anxieties; . . .
But all my life is blossoming inwardly,
And every breath is like a litany,
While through each labor, like a thread of gold,
Is woven the sweet consciousness of Thee.
SUSAN COOLIDGE.
120 APRIL 30.
Some falls are means the happier to rise.
SHAKESPEARE.
THERE is a verse of one of the subtlest and
truest of the English poets of our time
which expresses so perfectly this idea of the
relation between final success and the failures
which precede it that I quote it to you: . . .
" For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main."
The noisy waves are failures, but the great
silent tide is a success. The waves are borne
upon the bosom of the tide; they share its
motion; nay, the failure of each of them in
some degree is a reaction of the tide's motion
as it is cast back from the beach. But all the
time the tide is succeeding while the waves are
failing. The failures are carried on the bosom
of a success which is present underneath them
all the time. A life might be succeeding in
the struggle after goodness even while every
effort of the man who lived that life to be good
fell so far short of what he wanted it to be that
he could call it nothing but a failure. The
purpose, the consecration, of the life to God
and goodness is its tide. The special strug-
gles to do good things are the waves. The
deep, persistent, and unchanging hate of the
peculiar sin, which is determined never to be
reconciled to it and to fight against it till it
dies that is the soul's success, which does not
falter or stop, and which carries along upon it
all the partial failures of which the life is full.
VII. 197, 198, 201.
MAY i.
Philip saith unto him, Come and see.
JOHN i. 46.
THIS was the admirable wisdom of Philip.
What had converted him was the personal
sight of Jesus. He has no other religion but
that. . . . Jesus was His own evidence. To
get his friend face to face with Jesus this was
his object. . . .
Christianity offers to the world her historic
Christ. . . . Back in the centuries, yet set so
clearly in the light of authentic history that
all attempts to melt His life into a cloudy myth
have always failed, there stands this figure.
She claims that this Being to whom she points
is the power and wisdom of God present upon
the earth. You hesitate and doubt. Then
" Come and see," she says. Put yourself in
the presence of this Being. . . . Ennoble hu-
manity as completely as you will, and it will
not explain this phenomenal character and
life. . . . She says it is God manifest in the
flesh. Come, and find another explanation,
if you can. Come, and if there is no other to
be found, take this and own the divine
Christ. VI. 139, 144.
Behold Him now where He comes !
Not the Christ of our subtile creeds,
But the Lord of our hearts, our homes,
Of our hopes, our prayers, our needs;
The Brother of want and blame,
The Lover of women and men,
With a love that puts to shame
All passions of mortal ken.
RICHARD WATSON GILDER.
122 MAY 2.
As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the
Father. JOHN x. 15.
THE words are full of that idea of mutual-
ness which gives so much of warmth and
richness to all life. Any relation which is all
one-sided is unsatisfactory and dull. It is not
vividly interesting. We love to think of any
two objects, any two beings which have to do
with one another as ministering each to each,
each sending to the other something in answer
to that which it receives. That fills the rela-
tionship with motion, and with motion come
light and heat. The sun and the earth, the
insect and the plant, the nation and the citi-
zen, the teacher and the pupil, the parent and
the child, the air which, filled with light, gives
to the light its substance and its swiftness, in
every relationship there is this principle of re-
ciprocity. Nothing alone is thoroughly alive;
all complete life subsists in the reaction of mu-
tuality. To give is never perfect life; it needs
the complement, the fulfilment of taking. To
take is never perfect life; it needs the comple-
ment, the fulfilment of giving.
IV. 283.
O Jesus, who lovest us all, stoop low from
Thy glory above:
Where sin hath abounded make grace to abound
and to superabound,
Till we gaze on Thee face unto Face, and re-
spond to Thee love unto Love.
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.
MAY 3. 123
Shall we serve Heaven
With less respect than we do minister
To our gross selves ?
SHAKESPEARE.
YOUR Christian duties, the prayers you pray,
the self-denials that you practise, the
charities you give, what is the matter with
them? . . . You serve yourself, and how clear
you are to yourself, and so, what life there is in
every act of your own service; but you serve
Christ and how dim He has grown ! and so,
how listlessly the hands move at His labor !
Now if the Holy Spirit can indeed bring Him
clearly to you, is not the Holy Spirit what you
need ? And this is just exactly what He does.
I find a Christian who has really " received the
Holy Ghost," and what is it that strikes and
delights me in him ? It is the intense and in-
timate reality of Christ. . . . His whole life
is light and elastic with this buoyant desire of
doing everything for Jesus, just as Jesus would
wish it done. So simple, but so powerful! So
childlike, but so heroic! Duty has been trans-
figured. The weariness, the drudgery, the
whole task-nature, has been taken away. Love
has poured like a new life-blood along the dry
veins, and the soul that used to toil and groan
and struggle goes now singing along its way,
The life that I now live in the flesh, I live by
the faith of the Son of God who loved me and
gave Himself for me."
II. 228.
i2 4 MAY 4.
CHRIST saw all life in God. That means
^-* that He saw life in its completeness. No
being ever saw the evil and misery as He be-
held it. He saw sin with all the intensity of
holiness. But nobody ever has dared call
Jesus Christ a pessimist. He saw the end from
the beginning. He saw the depth from the
surface. He saw the light from the darkness.
He saw the whole from the parts. Therefore
He could not despair. There was no curse of
life upon His lips, but infinite pity ! A pity
that has folded itself around the world's torn
and bleeding heart ever since but no curse !
And who are we, with our little feeble rage
and petulance, flinging our testy curses where
the Lord's blessing descended like the love of
God?
VI. 214.
There is one Mind, one omnipresent Mind
Omnific. His most holy name is Love.
Truth of subliming import ! with the which
Who feeds and saturates his constant soul,
He from His small particular orbit flies
With blest outstarting. From himself he flies,
Stands in the sun, and with no partial gaze
Views all creation, and He loves it all,
And blesses it, and calls it very good !
S. T. COLERIDGE.
MAY 5. 125
/ came not to send peace ', but a sword.
MATT. x. 34.
WE must think of Jesus as a soul undergo-
ing experiences, living a life all through
those years, or else the Gospels are a very
dead and barren book. And if we have known
what it is to look forward and see, with a ter-
ror which yet is glorified by hope, that the
great purpose on which our heart is set is to
be won only by first casting it, with seeming
recklessness, away, . . . then we can under-
stand how the Rebuilder of human life about
the fatherhood of God dwelt with pathetic cer-
tainty upon the destruction that must come
before that construction could begin. The
more intensely He knew the preciousness of
the end, the more necessary and the more ter-
rible became the seeming sacrifice of that end
before He must go to reach it. The more He
gloried, with His heart full of the memories
of heaven, in the prospect of the re-estab-
lished family of God where each child should
find his own distinctive childhood in the com-
mon filial life of all, so much the more He
saw with sadness, but with certainty, that the
merely human groupings of men, in which
each man lost his true self among his brethren,
must be broken up. VIII. 102.
Old things shall pass away ;
The new shall come in abundance,
The holy desires shall overflow,
And rise up on every side where the cherishing spirit
bloweth :
There shall be no more fear, but love shall fill all ;
For this change is from the right hand of God.
THOMAS A KEMPIS.
i 2 6 MAY 6.
T^HERE are those who seem to be doomed
1 to most earthly toil; just to be conscien-
tious, and upright, and thorough, and true. It
seems as if that were everything for them.
There are other men whose souls leap to tri-
umphant thoughts, and whose eyes are open
to ecstatic visions. . . . These two sorts of
men belong together, make one world, are
serving the purposes of one God, and making
ready one celestial kingdom, and deserve
each the other's whole-souled respect. It is not
that the lesser man is making his life success-
ful by making possible a higher life which
some other man may live, though that is
much. It is that in this universe, where natu-
ral and spiritual succeed and minister to one
another, he who at any spot is doing good
work of any kind is serving the Universal
Master and contributing to the universal suc-
cess.
VI. 257-
Morning, evening, noon, and night,
" Praise God ! " sang Theodite.
Then to his poor trade he turned,
Whereby the daily bread was earned.
But ever at each period,
He stopped and sang, " Praise God ! "
Said Blaise, the listening monk, " Well done;
I doubt not thou art heard, my son,
As well as if thy voice to-day
Were praising God the Pope's great way."
BROWNING.
MAY 7. 127
There is one glory of the moon, and another glory
of the sun, and another glory of the stars.
i COR. xv. 41.
SAINT PAUL builds his argument for im-
mortality upon the richness and the splen-
dor of this mortal life. Often enough have
men made heaven a compensation for the woes
of earth. . . . Paul makes heaven not a com-
pensation, but a development. Because this
world is so glorious, therefore the glory of
heaven must be surpassing and unspeakable.
How much nobler is Paul's way ! How much
fuller of inspiration and of genuine faith! . . .
For he who finds in the manifold glories of
this mortal life a symbol and witness of the
glories which belong to immortality will al-
ways be led to live this life as intensely and
profoundly as he can, in order that the higher
life may become real and attractive to him.
Men have thought that they must separate
themselves from earth in order that they
might believe in heaven. Paul's doctrine
says emphatically, "No! ' He says, "The
deeper that you go in life, the more life must
spread itself out around you and become
eternity. He who gets to the centre feels the
sphere."
V. 59-
Deep love lieth under
These pictures of time;
They fade in the light of
Their meaning sublime.
EMERSON.
J2 8 MAY 8.
Your joy no man taketh from you. JOHN xvi. 22.
IN these words Christ declared that there was
a joy which no man could disturb. There
is a limit to our power over one another;
there is a chamber of our inner selves where
we may turn the key and no one can come
in. . . . The very fact that there is such a
limit interests us. We can see how good it is
for a man's life that, while there should be
great regions of his happiness which are in-
volved with what other men are and do, there
should be also other regions which no man but
himself can touch.
As I watch the growing life of the disciples,
I see them coming to the best picture of what
a human life ought to be, open and sensitive
and sympathetic, and yet all the while self-
respectful and independent; feeling other men
and yet living their own life; as responsive as
the ocean's surface to the winds of the living
humanity which blew across them; and yet
keeping, like the ocean, a calm and hidden
depth which no storm upon the surface could
disturb. III. 290, 293.
O weary ways of earth and men !
O self more weary still !
How vainly do you vex the heart
That none but God can fill !
These surface-troubles come and go
Like rufflings of the sea;
The deeper depth is out of reach
To all, my God, but Thee.
FAIJKR.
MAY 9. 129
Your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man
taketh from you. JOHN xvi. 22.
IT was a special joy, the inmost, the most
secret and sacred of all joys which their
Master promised. . . . And Jesus tells His
disciples just what the power of this secret joy
is to be. It is to be His presence with them:
"I will see you again, and your heart shall
rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from
you." Everything is based upon the associa-
tion which they are to have with Christ their
Master. There is nothing at all of self-suffi-
ciency in what is promised. It is not that
these men are to develop some interior
strength, or to drift into some region of calm
indifference where the influences of their fel-
low-men shall not touch them any longer. It
is that they are to come to a new life with
Him. The new joy which is to enter into
them, which they are to enter into, is to be
distinctly a joy of relationship and not of self-
containment, a joy which is to escape the in-
vasion of the men who disturb all other joys
by being held in the hand of a stronger being,
out of which no earthly power shall be able to
pluck it.
III. 292, 294.
He who has a relish for Thee, will he not
find sweetness in everything ?
And he that has no relish for Thee, what
can be sweet to him ?
THOMAS A KEMPIS.
130 MAY 10.
Could not this man, which opened the eyes of the
blind, have caused that even this man should not
have died? JOHN xi. 37.
not Christ have saved Lazarus
\^t from dying ? Could not Christ have
saved you or me from perplexity or tempta-
tion or doubt ? He could, because the power
of life and death was in Him. . . . But if it
were best for Lazarus to die, then Christ could
not have caused that he should not have died.
That is a sublime incapacity; to stand with
the gift of life in the all-powerful hands, to
see the cry for life in the eager eyes, to hear it
in the dumb appeal of the terrified lips, and
yet to say, " No, not life but death is best,"
and so to be unable to give life, that is a
sublime, a divine incapacity. Could not Christ
have answered your prayer? No, He could
not; not because the thing you asked for was
not in His treasury, but because behind the
question of His giving or refusing it there lay
the fundamental necessity of His nature and
His love, that He should do for you only the
absolutely best. The thing you asked for was
not absolutely best, therefore He could not
give it. Back of how many unanswered prayers
lies that divine impossibility !
V. 38.
If He turn His face away,
Never answering a word,
When for some ill boon we pray, . . .
Blessed be His name for aye
For the prayers He hath not heard.
KATHERINE TYNAN HINKSON.
MAY ii. 131
Ye shall be sorrouiful, but your sorrow shall be
turned into joy. JOHN xvi. 20.
IT must be somewhere in the grief that the
help of the grief is hidden. It must be in
some discovery of the divine side of the sor-
row that the consolation of the sorrow will be
found. It is a wondrous change when a man
stops asking of his distress, " How can I throw
this off?" and asks instead, " What did God
mean by sending this?" Then, he may well
believe that time and work will help him.
Time, with its necessary calming of the first
wild surface-tumult, will let him look deeper
and ever deeper into the divine purpose of the
sorrow, will let its deepest and most precious
meanings gradually come forth so that he may
see them. Work, done in the sorrow, will
bring him into ever new relations to the God in
whom alone the full interpretation and relief
of the sorrow lies. Time and work, not as
means of escape from distress, but as the hands
in which distress shall be turned hither and
thither that the light of God may freely play
upon it; time and work, so acting as servants
of God, not as substitutes for God, are full of
unspeakably precious ministries to the suffer-
ing soul. But the real relief, the only final
comfort, is God; and He relieves the soul al-
ways in its suffering, not from its suffering;
nay, he relieves the soul by its suffering, by
the new knowledge and possession of Himself
which could come only through that atmos-
phere of pain.
II. 279.
132 MAY 12.
'"THERE is something very beautiful to me
1 in the truth that suffering, rightly used,
is not a cramping, binding, restricting of the
human soul, but a setting of it free. It is not
a violation of the natural order, it is only a
more or less violent breaking open of some
abnormal state that the natural order may be
resumed. It is the opening of a cage door.
It is the breaking in of a prison wall. This is
the thought of those fine old lines of an early
English poet:
" The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed.
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made.
Stronger by weakness, wiser men become
As they draw near to their eternal home."
Oh, how many battered cottages have thus
let in the light ! How many broken bodies
have set their souls free, and how many shat-
tered homes have let the men and women who
sat in darkness in them see the great light of
a present God! "Stronger by weakness!"
" Who passing through the vale of misery use
it for a well."
VI. 30.
Cast into the pit
Of lonely sorrow,
The suffering soul,
Looking aloft,
Sees with amaze
In the daytime sky
The light of stars.
RICHARD WATSON GILDER.
MAY 13. 133
WE paint our heroes fighting their battles
in the clouds or in the depths. Types
of power which can only be developed in
supreme joy or supreme sorrow enthrall our
imagination; and then some plain man comes
who knows not either rapture or despair, who
simply has his daily work to do, his friends to
help, . . . his trials to bear, his temptations to
conquer, his soul to save; and what a healthi-
ness he brings into our standards, with what a
genuine refreshment he fills our hearts. Be-
hold how great are these primary eternal quali-
ties patience, hope, kindness, intelligence,
trust, self-sacrifice.
The arctic frost ! The torrid heat ! Behold
the true strength, the real life of the planet is
not in these. It is in the temperate lands that
the grape ripens and the wheat turns calmly
yellow in the constant sun. Blessed is the life
which grows itself into the consciousness of
how strong a man is who with the average
powers of a man keeps his integrity and pur-
ity, becomes ever more upright and pure, and
also encourages the lives of other men.
IV. 204.
All service ranks the same with God:
If now, as formerly He trod
Paradise, His presence fills
Our earth, each only as God wills
Can work. God's puppets, best and worst,
Are we; there is no last or first.
BROWNING.
134 MAY 14.
To another he gave two talents.
MATT. xxv. 15.
'""THIS quiet, common-place, unnoticed man,
* going his faithful way in his dull dress
which makes no mark and draws no eye, doing
his duty insignificantly and thoroughly, win-
ning so unobtrusively at last his master's
praise, ought to be interesting to us all.
He ought to be interesting because he rep-
resents so much the largest element in uni-
versal human life. The average man is by far
the most numerous man. The man who goes
beyond the average, the man who falls short
of the average, both of them, by their very
definition, are exceptions. They are the out-
skirts and fringes, the capes and promontories
of humanity. The great continent of human
life is made up of the average existences, the
mass of two-talented capacity and action.
IV. 194.
God sows June fields with clover, and the
world
Broadcasts with common kindnesses,
With plain, good souls that cheerfully fulfil
Their homely duties in the common field
Of daily life, ambitious of no more
Than to supply the needs of friend or kin,
Yet serve God's higher will to human hearts.
SAMUEL LONGFELLOW.
MAY 15. 135
Ignorance is the curse of God,
Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to
heaven.
SHAKESPEARE.
THOUGHT and the struggle after truth are
the best joys of the best men. To follow
out the lines of speculation and of revelation
until they lead us near the heart of things,
which yet we know that we can never perfectly
reach; to make some few steps forward on the
journey which stretches out before us, end-
lessly tempting and interesting, into eternity;
to add each day some new stone to the struc-
ture whose lines already as they leave the earth
prophesy an infinite height for the far top-
stone, he has not lived who has not felt this
pleasure. He is not really living, however
full he may be of warmth of feeling and of
energy in action, who does not in some degree
know what it is to crave ideas and knowledge,
to seek for truth, and to delight in finding it.
III. 302.
The sequences of law
We learn through mind alone;
'Tis only through the soul
That aught we know is known :
With equal voice she tells
Of what we touch and see
Within these bounds of life,
And of a life to be :
Proclaiming One who brought us hither,
And holds the keys of Whence and Whither.
FRANCIS TURNER PALGRAVE.
136 MAY 16.
When the Spirit of truth shall come He shall
guide you into all truth. JOHN xvi. 13.
\A/E live in a redeemed world, a world full
* " of the Holy Ghost forever doing His
work, forever taking of the things of Christ
and showing them to us. That Christ so shown
is the most real, most present power in this new
Christian world. Men see Him, men talk with
Him continually. They do not recognize
Him ; they do not know what lofty converse
they are holding ; but some day when, in some
way, a man has become really earnest and
wants to believe in the Son of God, and is
asking, "Who is He that I may believe on
Him ?" then that Son of God comes to him,
not as a new guest from the lofty heaven,
but as the familiar and slighted friend who
has waited and watched at the doorstep, who
has already from the very first filled the soul's
house with such measure of His influence as
the soul's obstinacy of indifference would
allow, and who now, as He steps in at the
soul's eager call to take complete and final
possession of its life, does not proclaim His
coming in awful, new, unfamiliar words, but
says in tones which the soul recognizes and
wonders that it has not known long before,
' Thou hast seen me. I have talked with
thee." V. 211.
MAY 17. 137
Thrice Holy Faith ! whatever thorns I meet,
As on I totter with unpractised feet,
Still let me stretch my arms and cling to Thee,
Meek nurse of souls through their long infancy.
S. T. COLERIDGE.
THERE is a large healthy hunger after be-
lief which is as different from the morbid
appetite of superstition, as health always is
different from disease. There are men who
want to believe, who would rather believe
than not, when some great spiritual theory
of the universe is offered them to account for
its bewilderments and to help its troubles.
The secret of their life seems to be this, that
they are men deeply impressed with the infi-
niteness of life. Does that seem vague and
transcendental ? They are men who are al-
ways conscious of the spiritual and unseen
underneath the visible and material, men
who are always sure that there is a great re-
gion of unknown truth which they ought to
know, and who are restless after it. To such
men all that they see presupposes things
which they do not see.
V. 207.
Every natural flower which grows on earth
Implies a flower upon the spiritual side,
Substantial, archetypal, all aglow
With blossoming causes, not so far away
But we whose spirit-sense is somewhat cleared
May catch at something of the bloom and
breath,
Too vaguely apprehended.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.
138 MAY 18.
Again, the devil taketh Him up into an exceed-
ing high mountain and showeth Him all the king-
doms of this world, and the glory of them.
MATT. iv. 8.
SO does the young man in some moment or
some period of his life come in sight of
the great world. ... It is all very vague
it must be. The traveler upon the road to
London, all aglow with its vision, does not
trace how every street and alley runs in the
great city, nor see how the bricks are laid
in every man's back yard. It is the " light
of London," not the lamp in this or that
shop-window, that he sees. And so it is
the world, all vague, mysterious, and wonder-
ful, which the spirit of the young man sees
from his mountain, not this or that which is
happening in the world. It is the world all
together, the world of tumultuous, roaring,
awful, fascinating human life, the kingdoms
of the world, and the glory of them this is
what he sees. There is a special value, a
special contribution to the total experience
and character of a man, in the years which
hold that vision the years when the narrow-
ness of childhood is broken, but the absorption
in the details of life has not yet begun; these
years wherein the young man is catching sight
of the world. Blessed is he who keeps those
years pure and lofty.
VII. 168, 169.
MAY 19. 139
Watch and pray that ye enter not into tempta-
tion, MATT. xxvi. 14.
OUR Lord's temptation makes us see that
temptation is not sin, nor does it neces-
sarily involve sin. Christ was sinless and yet
tempted; therefore it is possible for man to be
tempted and yet sinless. Now so many of us,
the moment we are strongly tempted, seem to
fall into a sort of demoralized condition, as if
our innocence were over, as if the charm were
broken and we were already sinners; and so
we too often give ourselves up easily to the
sin. . . . To any soul in such a state what
could we say but this : " Look up and see the
truth in Jesus ; do you not see it there ? To
be tempted is not wicked, is not shameful, is
not unworthy even of Him. It is the lot, in
one view it is even the glory, of humanity.
Sin does not begin and shame does not begin
until the will gives way, until you yield to
temptation. Stand guard over that will, resist
temptation, and then to have been tempted
shall be to you what it was to your Saviour
a glory and a crown, a part of your history
worthy to be written with thanksgiving in the
Book of Life, as His is written in His book of
life." Is not this the strength and courage
that many a soul needs ? VII. 133, 134.
Pray
" Lead us into no such temptations, Lord."
Yea, but, O Thou whose servants are the bold,
Lead such temptations by the head and hair,
Reluctant dragons, up to who dares fight,
That so he may do battle and have praise.
BROWNING.
140 MAY 20.
I T is good to multiply experiences. It is good
* to do many things and to have manifold
relations with the world. It is good to touch
many people and to see many sights; but it
is good, it is necessary, to be content with no
experience which remains simply as experience
and does not pass on and into character.
Events are great if they make dispositions.
The Natural is precious if " afterward," out of
it, comes the Spiritual. The experienced man
is happy, if he has really drunk the rain and
sunshine of the experiences which have come
to him into his heart and is the ripened man,
otherwise he is only like the rock on which
every passer-by has scrawled his name.
VI. 254.
And so shall bright patience
And trustfulness teach
Some wonderful alchemy,
Turning to gold
All things whatsoever
That come in its reach
The dull and the narrow,
The new and the old,
Till each shall be bright
With the grace and the glow
Of the goodness of God,
Who loveth us so !
J. I,. M. w.
MAY 21. 141
Be strong, . . . and work ; for I am with you,
saith the Lord of hosts. HAG. ii. 4.
T THINK we want to urge most strenuously
upon young men the need, the absolute
necessity, that in the appointed and demanded
work of their life they should look for and
should find the joy of their life. To do your
work because you must ; to do your work as
a slavery ; and then, having got it done as
speedily and easily as possible, to look some-
where else for enjoyment, that makes a very
dreary life. No man who works so does the
best work. No man who works so lingers
lovingly over his work and asks himself if there
is not something he can do to make it more
perfect. " My meat is to do the will of Him
that sent me, and to finish His work," said
Jesus.
II. 32.
Go from the east to the west, as the sun and
the stars direct thee,
Go with the girdle of man, go and encompass
the earth;
Not for the gain of the gold, the getting, the
hoarding, the having,
But for the joy of the deed, but for the duty
to do.
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH.
142 MAY 22.
Man, if he do but live within the light
Of high endeavors, daily spreads abroad
His being armed with strength that cannot fail.
WORDSWORTH.
'"FHERE are many among us who feel the
^ need to have the labor of our life re-
deemed, merchants, clerks, lawyers, labor-
ers, teachers, housekeepers, one thing or an-
other, the chosen or fated task of our life so
often seems to be mere drudgery, crowding us
down, pressing the life out of us. . . . What
you need is some purpose beyond. What
shall it be ? ... If you can do your work
for a friend or for a family as well as for your-
self, you have already redeemed much of its
sordidness. If you can do it for a cause, for
the progress of society and the improvement
of business, for your country, for your church,
then you have lifted it still more. If you can
do it for God, in perfect, childlike, loving de-
sire for His glory, then your work, be it as
heavy in its nature as it may, leaps of itself
from the low ground, and, instead of crush-
ing you with it to the earth, carries you up
every day into the presence of the God for
whom you did it.
VI. 52, 53-
Ye know that your labor is not in vain in the
Lord. i COR. xv. 58.
MAY 23. 143
/ shall shew you plainly of tJie Father.
JOHN xvi. 25.
WHEN we want to gather into one great
comprehensive statement the purpose
for which Jesus lived, and the power which
His life has had over the lives of men, we
must seize His great idea and find His power
there. . . . His power is not in the miracles
that He did, not even in the marvellous
nature that He bore, but in the great truth,
the primal and final fact of the universe,
so far as man has any part in it, which the
whole nature of the Saviour uttered. . . .
That idea is the relation of childhood and
fatherhood between man and God. Man is
the child of God by nature. He is ignorant
and rebellious, the prodigal child of God;
but his ignorance and rebellion never break
that first relationship. It is always a child
ignorant of his Father; always a child rebel-
lious against his Father. That is what makes
the tragedy of human history, and always pre-
vents sin from becoming an insignificant and
squalid thing. To reassert the fatherhood and
childhood as an unlost truth, and to reestablish
its power as the central fact of life; to tell men
that they were, and to make them actually be,
the sons of God, that was the purpose of the
coming of Jesus, and the shaping power of
His life. vill. 12, 13, 14.
Who knows God's fatherhood
Knows he rides safe, however tempest-tossed:
There is no darkness ; in love's light 'tis lost.
S. W. WEITZEL.
144 MAY 24.
Ask, and ye shall receive. JOHN xvi. 24.
We kneel how weak, we rise how full of power !
Why, therefore, should we do ourselves this wrong,
Or others, that we are not always strong,
That we are ever overborne with care,
That we should ever weak and heartless be,
Anxious or troubled, when with us is prayer,
And joy, and strength, and courage are with thee?
R. G. TRENCH.
PURE humanitarian ism and pure fatalism
can neither of them pray. But let us
have a world where the Creator's glory and the
creature's good are like sound and echo, like
sunlight and reflection to each other ; where
every advance in one chronicles and repeats it-
self in the other ; let man by sovereign mercy
be admitted into such an intimacy with his
God, and then prayer what is it ? What
but the answer of the echo to the sound, the
uttered sympathy of the one common life,
man responding to God's " Be happy, O my
child ! " with an ever grateful and reverent
" Be glorious, O my Father ! " As we go up
higher in the new life prayer becomes less ser-
vile and so becomes more true. When the
new life is finished, the sympathy complete in
heaven, who can say what prayer will be ? It
will be what Christ's was, in His perfect human-
ity talking with the perfect Divinity to which
it stood so near. There will be no wandering
eyes, no listless thoughts, no formal words, no
hearts that pray because they must; but souls
alight with a new likeness shall leap into a new
nearness to their God, and prayer be heaven
to the perfected human life. God's glory and
man's good who will divide them there ?
VII. 233.
MAY 25. 145
Remember how short my time is.
Ps. Ixxxix. 47.
IF a man is able to conceive of immortal-
ity; if he can picture to himself a being
who can live forever; if he recognizes in him-
self any powers which can outlast and laugh
at death, then any limit of life must seem
narrow; against the broad background of the
whole, any part must seem small. On the
blue sky the almost million miles of the sun's
breadth seem narrow. It is here that the
truth about the matter lies. It is only by the
dim sense of his immortality, only by the di-
vine sight of himself as a being capable of
long, long life, that man thinks his life on
earth is short. Only by losing that divine
sight of himself, and looking at himself as the
beasts look at themselves, can he come to
think his life long. The beast's life never
seems short to him. Think of yourself as a
beast and your life will never seem short to
you. It is the divine consciousness in man,
the consciousness that he is a child of God,
that makes him know he is short-lived. Feel
this, and is not the shortness of life the crown
and glory of the race ?
I. 318, 319.
Courage! for life is hasting
To endless life away :
The inner life unwasting
Transfigures thy dull clay!
GEORGE MACDONALD.
146 MAY 26.
A MEMORY which is not also a prophecy
is terrible. . . . You recall the happy
days of an old friendship. Unless it is a per-
petual revelation to you of the perfect friend-
ship of the perfect life it comes to be a tor-
ture.
' ' Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all ; "
but the true blessedness is reached only when
you know that that which you have seen
plunged into the fiery furnace is to come out
again, the same, but finer, purer, holier, more
worthy of the child of God !
When we have really grasped this truth,
then how interesting and impressive becomes
the sight of the life of our fellow-men! Many
and many of these men whom we see plodding
on in their dusty ways are travelling with
visions in their souls. Nobody knows it but
themselves and God. Once, years ago, they
saw a light. They knew, if only for a moment,
what companionships, what attainments, they
were made for. That light has never faded.
It is the soul of good things which they are
doing in the world to-day. It makes them
sure when other men think their faith is gone.
It will be with them till the end, until they
come to all it prophesies.
VII. 341, 342.
The vision is yet for an appointed time, but at
the end it shall speak, and not lie ; though it tarry,
wait for it. HAB. ii. 3.
MAY 27. 147
A CLOUD received Him out of their
sight. ' ' Into mystery and a darkness to
which His going there alone gives any true light
our Saviour goes. But oh, my friends, when by
and by our way leads also into mystery and
darkness, when truth, becomes covered with
doubt, and joy with sadness, and life begins
to feel the waiting death, what can help us
like the faith of the ascended Jesus ? The
way into the cloud may be a way up and not a
way down, a way toward Him and not a way
from Him. Doubt, sorrow, death these may
be, these to the true soul must be, like the
clouds over the Mount of Olives through which
the Son of God went up to the right hand of
His Father. "We which remain shall be
caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in
the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.
Wherefore comfort one another" comfort
yourselves too, comfort and strengthen your-
selves and one another "with these words."
VII. 301.
Out to the earthward brink
Of that great tideless sea
Light from Christ's garments streams.
Cowards that fear to tread such beams
The angels can but pity when they sink.
Believing thus, I joy although I lie in dust. . .
Long as God ceases not, I cannot cease:
I must arise. -
HELEN HUNT JACKSON.
148 MAY 28.
I go to prepare a place for you, . . . that where
I am, there ye may be also. JOHN xiv. 2, 3.
IF on some hitherto unexplored and unin-
habited island far away in the seas a man
goes to live, ... he clothes the island with
intelligibleness. I can understand and realize
its existence when I know that a human foot
has been pressed upon its sandy beach. If he
is a great, strong, notably manly man who
goes there, carrying with him a large share of
our humanity, then he gives the island more
than intelligibleness. He gives it dignity. It
is full of interest. . . . But if the man who
goes there is my friend, and if he tells me that
he is going to make it ready for my coming,
that he will come back again and take me to
it by and by, then how that island burns for
me the one live, real, shining spot in all the
world ! It is the goal of all my thoughts, the
lodestone of my hopes. I think of it until the
familiar house in which I was born, and where
I am living still, seems strange to me com-
pared with that one shining spot that has be-
come so real. My friend's love makes it all
glow and burn before me as if I myself already
saw the sun shining on its mountain-tops and
flashing on the surface of its rippling streams.
VII. 300.
So, when the times of restitution come
The sweet times of refreshing come at last
My God shall fill my longings to the brim ;
Therefore I look and wait and long for Him :
Not wearied, though the work be wearisome,
Nor fainting, though the time be almost past.
CHRISTINA G. ROSSKTTI.
MAY 29. 149
LET us try, if we are really Christians who
believe that Christ our Lord has "as-
cended into heaven," to enter into His heav-
enly life by the largeness and loftiness of the
prayers that we bring to Him. God forbid
that we should so misread His exaltation that
we should hesitate to ask Him for the very
smallest things; but the things that belong to
our peace are what He wants to give us. The
things that make this world and its interests
seem small when we think of them : the for-
giveness of sin, the perfect purification of our
souls, the driving out of selfishness, the disre-
gard of comfort in pursuit of duty, the care
for brethren more than for ourselves; not
comfort, not spiritual rest, not freedom from
pain here or hereafter not these, but the
chance, the power, the will to glorify God our
Father in our lives as He, the perfect Son, did
in His this we may ask if we believe in the
Ascension and have understood the heavenly
life of Him who is still our Brother and
Saviour.
VII. 294.
Beyond this shadow and this turbulent sea,
Shadow of death and turbulent sea of death,
Lies all we long to have or long to be.
Take heart, tired man, toil on with lessen-
ing breath,
Lay violent hands on heaven's high treasury,
Be what you long to be through life's long
scathe.
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.
150 MAY 30.
When, the burnt offering began, the song of the
Lord also began with the trumpets.
2 CHRON. xxix. 27.
THE act of sacrifice was done with a chorus
of delight. . . . Self-sacrifice, which is
what these burnt offerings picturesquely rep-
resented, is universally and perpetually neces-
sary. . . . Can the life, too, be offered as
the beast was of old, with song and trum-
pet ? . . . There are always glimpses of
man's highest life which show us, like the first
streaks of light before the dawn, what it would
be if all the sky were filled with glory; and so
there are always exalted lives, and exalted mo-
ments in the lives, I hope, of all of us, in
which we do catch sight of the joy and glory
of self-sacrifice. Not many years ago, when
the young men went to the war, was it not
true that the fact of sacrifice intensified the
joy ? It was a joy to save their country, to
feel sure, as it is not often given to men viv-
idly to feel, that they were doing a real and
valuable part of her salvation. No safe and
easy task could ever have filled the heart with
such a sober and deep delight.
II. 23, 25.
'Tis no Man we celebrate,
By his country's victories great ? . . .
But the pith and marrow of a Nation
Drawing force from all her men,
Highest, humblest, weakest, all,
For her time of need, and then
Pulsing it through them again.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
MAY 31. 151
/ saw the dead, small and great, stand before
God. REV. xx. 12.
TOT. JOHN] saw what souls go to. We are
L O so apt to see only what souls go from.
When our friend dies we think of all the
warm delights of life, all the sweet friend-
ships, all the interesting occupations, all the
splendor of the sunlight which he leaves be-
hind. If we could only know, somewhat as
John must have known after his vision, the
presence of God into which our friend enters
on the other side, the higher standards, the
larger fellowship with all his race, and the new
assurance of personal immortality in God; if
we could know all this, how our poor com-
fortless efforts of comfort when our friends
depart, our feeble raking-over of the ashes of
memory, our desperate struggles to think that
the inevitable must be all right; how this
would all give way to something almost like a
burst of triumph, as the soul which we loved
went forth to such vast enlargement, to such
glorious consummation of its life !
IV. 72.
Where chill or change can never rise,
Deep in the depth of Paradise
They rest world-wearied heart and eyes
Jubilate.
Safe as a hidden brooding dove,
With perfect peace within, above,
They love, and look for perfect love
Hallelujah.
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.
152 JUNE i.
Only the anointed eye
Sees in common things
Gleam of wave and tint of sky
Heavenly blossomings.
To the hearts where light was birth
Nothing can be drear;
Budding through the gloom of earth,
Heaven is always near.
LUCY LARCOM.
I BELIEVE our lives are too prosaic. I
think we might all live up in a purer
air. ... I think the strange beauty of the
nature all around us might be more fully
grasped. I think that, made pure and strong
by thoughts like these, we might all make our
lives to poems:
" Be good, be true, and let who will be clever ;
Do noble things, not dream them, all day long ;
And so make life, death, and that vast forever,
One grand, sweet song."
If it be poetry, as I think it is, to go out
to-morrow morning with all our closets open
and all our moral enginery in play, ready to
see the miracle that the sun will bring up over
the river and the hills once more, ready to
learn the lesson of the earth a work to do
and manly strength to do it, ready to sym-
pathize with and worship all that is worthy of
our sympathy and homage, ready to grow
more godlike in our reverence for God if this
be poetry, then fifty poems may begin to-mor-
row, with earth's grand music for them all to
sing to, and heaven at last to crown the vic-
tor with a sweet " Well done."
X. 245, 246.
JUNE 2. 153
Still are we saying, " Teach us how to pray " ?
Oh, teach us how to love! and then our
prayer
Through other lives will find its upward way.
T T E best finds God and is God's who finds
* * Him and becomes His, not in separation
from his brethren but in the certainty of God's
love to all and of the belonging of all souls to
God. ... If I prayed all alone, my prayer
the only prayer which pierced the darkness be-
cause mine was the only soul which stood in
need, then I can possibly imagine that as I
stood and looked I should behold the answer
come like a white dove out of the distance
until it laid itself upon my soul and gave it
peace. But now I cannot help seeing what a
far greater richness there will be if my peti-
tion blends with a million others, and the an-
swer comes in some great outpouring of the
divine light and love which addresses itself to
all the world.
V. 128.
Nor nursing each our own distress,
To Thee we press;
Prayer's overflow drowns selfishness;
Soul within soul,
One voice to Thee our linked petitions roll;
Healer of the world's hurt, oh, make us whole!
LUCY LARCOM.
iS4 JUNE 3.
But He answered her not a word.
MATT. xv. 23.
SOME prayers Christ does not answer, we
may say, because they ask Him to do our
work for us. ... Tell me, is there a kinder
thing that you can do for your pupil who
comes up to you with his slate, asking you to
work out for him his problem, than to bid him
go back to his seat and do his task himself,
and get that discipline and learning which is
really the object of his having his task set to
him at all ? You ask Christ to show you with
a flash of lightning what your sorrow means.
You ask him to reveal to you by some super-
natural illumination which path of life you
ought to take, which friendship you shall cul-
tivate, what profession you can most success-
fully pursue. There comes no answer to those
prayers. . . . And why ? Those are your
problems. It is by hard work of yours, by
watchful vigilance, by careful weighing of
consideration against consideration, that you
must settle those things for yourself.
V. 133-
Not for thy neighbor nor for thee,
Be sure, was life designed to be
A draught of dull complacency.
One Power too is it who doth give
The food without us, and within
The strength that makes it nutritive. . . .
So thou but strive, thou soon shalt see
Defeat itself is victory.
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH.
JUNE 4. 155
If Thou be the Son of God, command that these
stones be made bread. MATT. iv. 3.
DO you not see what the temptation was
and what it is forever ? O my dear
friend, God made these things, and made you
to live by them, but not by them alone. Go
on; gather the joy out of the earth and sky,
out of the bread He gives you power to win,
out of the water that He makes to gush at
your feet; only, when the time comes as it
is sure to come some time, as perhaps it is to
come now when, in order to speak some word
out of His mouth to you, some word of duty
or charity or holiness, He takes these things
away, and you are tempted to shut your ear to
His word in order that you may keep these
pleasant things, then you are just where Jesus
was the devil is at your ear. May God help
you to see what Jesus saw what He said after-
ward, perhaps remembering His own tempta-
tion: " The life is more than meat." May he
help you to say, " No! Nothing not even
His gifts shall blind or deafen me to Him.
Man shall not live by bread alone, but by
every word out of the mouth of God " the
blessed sacrifice of sense to spirit.
VII. 143.
To sacrifice, to share ;
To give even as He gave ;
For others' wants to care ;
Not our own lives to save
The hidden manna this,
Whereof who eateth, he
Grows up in perfectness
Of Christ-like symmetry.
LUCY LARCOM.
156 JUNE 5.
If any man thirst, let him come to me and drink.
JOHN vii. 37.
DEMEMBER, it is not just compensation,
f\ but transformation that you are to seek.
Not Heaven yet. That looms before us al-
ways, tempting us on; but now the earth, with
all its duties, sorrows, difficulties, doubts, and
dangers. We want a faith, a truth, a grace to
help us now, right here, where we are stum-
bling about, dizzied and fainting with our
thirst. And we can have it. One who was
man, yet mightier than man, has walked the
vale before us. When He walked it, he turned
it all into a well of living water. To them
who are willing to walk in His footsteps, to
keep in His light, the well He opened shall be
forever flowing. Nay, it shall pass into them
and fulfil there Christ's own words: "Who-
soever drinketh of the water that I shall give
him shall never thirst, but the water that I
shall give him shall be in him a well of water
springing up into everlasting life."
VI. 34-
I am the Fountain of Life, that cannot be
exhausted.
Whosoever is sorrowful, let him come to me
that he may be comforted;
Whosoever is dry, let him come th'at he may
be filled with the richness and fulness of the
Spirit;
Whosoever is wearied, let him come that he
may be refreshed with joy.
THOMAS A KEMPIS.
JUNE 6. 157
The communion of the Holy Ghost be with you
all. 2 COR. xiii. 14.
THE doctrine of the Holy Ghost is a contin-
ual protest against every constantly re-
curring tendency to separate God from the cur-
rent world. A God who made the world and
then left it to run its course under the tyranny of
force and law; a God who redeemed the world
eighteen centuries ago and left it to be blessed
by or to miss the blessing of the redemption
which He had provided neither of these
ideas of Deity can comprehend the truth of
God the Holy Ghost. A present God, an
ever-living God, an ever-pleading, ever-help-
ing, ever-saving God this is the God whom
Christ told of and promised, the God who
came in the miracle of Pentecost and is for-
ever here. . . . Wherever men's dealings with
each other, or men's value of each other, is
colored with the influence of the truth that we
live in a world full of God; wherever our
communion with each other takes place through
Him, the sacredness and usefulness of what
we are to each other resulting from what He
is to all of us, then our communion is a com-
munion of the Holy Ghost. VII. 307.
We faintly hear, we dimly see,
In differing phrase we pray;
But, dim or clear, we own in Thee
The Light, the Truth, the Way.
Thy litanies, sweet offices
Of love and gratitude;
Thy sacramental liturgies
The joy of doing good. WHITTIER.
158 JUNE 7.
A friend, it is another name for God,
Whose love inspires all love, is all in all;
Profane it not, lest lowest shame befall!
Worship no idol, whether star or clod;
Nor think that any friend is truly thine,
Save as life's closest link with Love Divine.
LUCY LARCOM.
ONE of the most valuable changes which
comes to a human friendship when it is
deepened into a communion of the Holy Ghost
is the assurance of permanence which it ac-
quires. There is always a lurking distrust and
suspicion of instability in friendship which has
not the deepest basis. No present certainty
answers for the future. Present kindness only
bears witness of present regard, and each new
moment needs its new proof. How we have
all felt this!
" Alas that neither bonds nor vows
Can certify possession !
Torments me still the fear that love
Died in its last expression."
This must be so to some degree with an affec-
tion where each is held to each only by the
continuance of personal liking. But when
friendship enters into God, and men are bound
together through their common union with
Him, all the strength of that higher union au-
thenticates and assures the faithfulness and
perseverance of the love that is bound up with
it. The souls that meet in God may well be-
lieve that they shall hold each other as eter-
nally as He holds each and each holds Him.
VII. 312.
JUNE 8. 159
My peace I give unto you. JOHN xiv. 27.
T KNOW that there is such a thing as peace
* to seek and find. But here is my work to
do, to worry over whether I am doing it right,
to keep myself restless over how it will turn
out. ' ' My work, ' ' I say ; but if I can know that
it is not my work, but God's, should I not cast
away my restlessness, even while I worked on
more faithfully and untiringly than ever ? . . .
If I could pour through all the good plan
over which I am laboring the certainty that all
that is good in it is God's and must succeed,
how that certainty would drive the darkness
out of it! and while I worked harder than
ever, my work would have something of the
calmness with which He labors always. . . .
To every poor sufferer, to every discouraged
worker, to every man who cannot think much
of himself and yet is too brave to despair, this
is the courage that the gospel gives. Not
what you can do, but what He can do in you;
not what you are, but what you can help men
to see that He is that is the power by which
you are to work.
VII. 49, 53-
Lord, Thoii wilt ordain peace for us ; for Thou
also hast wrought all our works in us.
Is. xxvi. 12.
160 JUNE 9.
We see but half the causes of our deeds,
Seeking them wholly in the outer life,
And heedless of the encircling spirit-world,
Which, though unseen, is felt, and sows in us
All germs of pure and world-wide purposes.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
OH, there are households among you where
some son or daughter who is dead is
stronger in the shaping of the daily life than
any of the men and women who are still alive.
His character is at once a standard and an in-
spiration. . . . To say that he is not with you
is to make companionship altogether a phys-
ical, not at all a spiritual thing. To say that
he is absent from you, and that the neighbor
of whom you know nothing, for whom you
care nothing and who cares nothing for you,
is present with you, is to confuse all thoughts
of neighborhood, to put the false for the true,
the superficial for the deep.
This is the difference of men those whose
power stops with their death, and those whose
power really opens into its true richness when
they die. The first sort of men have mechan-
ical power. The second sort of men have
spiritual power. And the final test and witness
of spiritual force is seen in the ability to cast the
bodily life away and yet continue to give help
and courage and wisdom to those who see us
no longer; to be, like Christ, the helper of
men's souls even from beyond the grave.
VII. 14, 15.
JUNE 10. 161
Thou shalt hide them in the secret of Thy pres-
ence from the strife of tongues. Ps. xxi. 20.
WE believe in Jesus and try to live with
Him. How is it that a flippant toss of
skeptical smartness about Him, or a sneer at
our folly in making Him our Master, lays hold
of and stings us so, sends us home anxious,
puzzled, and worried ? We are not wholly
hidden from the strife of tongues. It must
be that we are not completely in the secret of
His presence. We are not there constantly
enough. There are moments, times when we
are praying, times when in sorrow His sympa-
thy is like life to us, when there is not the
tongue so rude and bitter that it could ruffle
the rest of our souls in Him; times when
nothing that man could say would frighten or
depress us. At such times we learn what it
is to be thoroughly with Him, and understand
what a guarded and safe life it must be to be
hidden there always.
I. 88.
Wisest of spirits that spirit which dwelleth
apart
Hid in the presence of God for a chapel and
nest,
Sending a wish and a will and a passionate
heart
Over the eddy of life to that Presence in
rest:
Seated alone and in peace till God bids it
arise.
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.
162 JUNE ii.
And they sent forth Barnabas, . . . Who,
when he came, . . . exhorted them all, that with
purpose of heart they should cleave unto the Lord.
ACTS xi. 22, 23.
WHEN a man gathers up his life and goes
out simply to spend it all in telling the
children of God who never heard it from any
other lips than his that their Father is their
Father; when all that he has known of Christ
is simply turned into so much force by which
the tidings of their sonship is to be driven
home to hearts that do not easily receive so
vast a truth; to that man certainly the idea
has become a master and a king, as it has not
to us. Belief is power. By the quantity of
power I may know the quantity of belief. He
is the true idealist, not who possesses ideas,
but whom ideas possess; not the man whose
life wears its ideas as ornamental jewels, but
the man whose ideas shape his life like plastic
clay. And so the true Christian idealist is he
whose conception of man as the redeemed
child of God has taken all his life and moulded
it in new shapes, planted it in new places, so
filled and inspired it that, like the Spirit of
God in Elijah, it has taken it up and carried it
where it never would have chosen to go of its
own lower will. II. 176.
Should He need a goodly tree
For the healing of the nations,
He will make it grow; if not,
Never yet His love forgot
Human love and faith and patience.
DINAH MULOCH CRAIK.
JUNE 12. 163
Serving the Lord with all humility.
ACTS xx. 19.
T T OW very rare it is to find an exceedingly
* * useful and hard-working man whose en-
ergy and devotion are not tainted by self-sat-
isfaction! But here, if all we do is but to
make ourselves channels through which the
power of God shall flow; if when a man stands
up and calls a whole city out of corruptness,
or a whole race out of slavery, he is deeply
and genuinely conscious that it is not he that
speaks, but God (as Jesus, you remember, told
His disciples it should be with them), then
that is won which is so rare in the great work-
ers (or in little ones either): all self-satisfac-
tion disappears. The man is lost in the cause;
nay, the cause itself is lost in joy that God,
whom to know is life, has made Himself
hereby a little more known to men.
VII. 49.
Lord, give me light to do Thy work;
For only, Lord, from Thee
Can come the light by which these eyes
The way of work can see
The work is Thine, not mine, O Lord,
It is Thy race we run ;
Give light! and then shall all I do
Be well and truly done.
HORATIUS BONAR.
164 JUNE 13.
Awful in unity,
O God, we worship Thee,
More simply One, because supremely Three!
WHEN we preach the Fatherhood of God
we preach His divinity; when we point
to Christ the perfect Saviour, it is a Divine
Redeemer that we declare; and when we plead
with men to hear the voice and yield to the
persuasions of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter
into whose comfort we invite them is Divine.
The divinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
this is our Gospel. By this Gospel we look
for salvation. It is a Gospel to be used, to be
believed in, and to be lived by; not merely to
be kept and admired and discussed and ex-
plained.
I. 228.
If a man does believe the doctrine of the
Trinity, he ought to rejoice and glory in his
faith as the enrichment of his life. Not as
a burden on his back, but as wings on his
shoulders, he ought to carry his belief. To
cease to believe it would be, not welcome lib-
erty, but incalculable loss. For a new soul to
come to believe it is not, as men have often
foolishly talked, the putting out into a sea all
dark with mists and fogs. It is the entrance
into a luxuriant land where all life lives at
its fullest, where nature opens her most lavish
bounty, and where man has the consummate
opportunity to be and do his best.
VII. 334-
JUNE 14. 165
NOTHING could be more misleading than
... to talk about the doctrine of the
Trinity as if it claimed to be the solution, the
dissipatioff, of the mystery of God. I say
"God" to the heathen who has gone so far
as to believe that there is one God and not
many gods in the universe; and he gazes into
the darkness of the great idea and says: " I
do not know what God is. A million questions
come buffeting me like bats out of the darkness
the moment that I dare even to turn my face
that way. Let me hear .His commandments
and go and do them. For Himself I dare not
even ask what He is." That is the mystery of
darkness. . . . Then I say "God" to the
Christian and he looks up and says: " Yes, I
know; Father, Son, and Spirit; my Father,
my Brother, my inspiring Friend. I know
Him, what He is, for He has shown Himself
to me." But with each word, Father, Brother,
Friend, there come flocking new questions, not
like bats out of the darkness, but like sun-
beams out of the light, bewildering the be-
lieving soul with guesses and insoluble sugges-
tions and intangible visions of the love, the
truth, the glory of God, which were impossi-
ble until this clothing by God of Himself with
radiance in Christ had come. That is the
mystery of light.
II. 312.
O Blessed Trinity!
In the deep darkness of prayer's stillest night
We worship Thee blinded with light!
FABER.
i66 JUNE 15.
Who coverest Thyself with light as with a gar-
ment. Ps. civ. 2.
WITH all deep things the deeper light
brings new mysteriousness. The mys-
tery of light is the privilege and prerogative
of the profoundest things. The shallow things
are capable only of the mystery of darkness.
Of that all things are capable. Nothing is so
thin, so light, so small, that if you cover it
with clouds and hide it in half-lights it will not
seem mysterious. But the most genuine and
profound things you may bring forth into the
fullest light, and let the sunshine bathe them
through and through, and in them there will
open ever new wonders of mysteriousness. The
mystery of light belongs to them. And how
then must it be with God, the Being of all
beings, the Being who is Himself essential
Being, out of whom all other beings spring and
from whom they are continually fed ? Surely
in Him the law which we have been tracing
must find its consummation. Surely of Him
it must be supremely true that the more we
know of Him, the more He shows Himself to
us, the more mysterious He must forever be.
The mystery of light must be complete in Him.
II. 309.
The subtlest and profoundest of men can-
not explain mysteries; the simplest person
can appropriate and exult in them.
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.
JUNE 16. 167
And the four and twenty elders fall down before
him that sat on the throne, and worship Him that
liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns be-
fore the throne. REV. iv. 10.
ONLY those who have crowns to cast can
do true homage before His throne. . . .
Only those who are kingly themselves can
properly honor the kingliest. . . . Men are
measured by their reverences. All human life
is like the annual procession of the Jews,
marching up to Jerusalem, to the Holy City.
The nearer we are to that place of supreme
adoration, the nearer the purpose of our life
is fulfilled. What do you adore, what do you
really reverence and respect ? is the real test
question of your life. In an age which makes
too little of reverence, let us not dare to let
drop the truth that only that which is high can
worship the highest, and so covet as the best
crown of our existence the power so to know
and feel that we can genuinely worship God.
VI. 38, 44, 45.
It is life
From self-enfranchised, opening every vein
To let in glory from above, and give
What we receive in fragrance, color, fruit,
Life, which is Heaven's: ourselves dead mat-
ter, else.
LUCY LARCOM.
168 JUNE 17.
SO long as a man is living for himself and
honoring himself, there is an association,
however remote it may be, with all the lowest
forms of selfishness in which men have lived;
but the moment a man begins to live in genu-
ine adoration of the absolute good, and wor-
ship God, he parts company from all these
lower orders of human life. . . . When you
say to God, " O God, take me, for the high-
est thing that I can do with myself is to give
myself to Thee, ". . . you sweep into the cur-
rent of the best, the holiest, and the most
richly human of our humanity, which in every
age has dedicated itself to God. The worship-
pers of all the world the Jew, the Greek, the
Hindu, the Christian in all his various cultures,
take you for their brother. . . . You are never
in such company as when you are before God's
throne offering Him your brightest and most
precious. VI. 44, 45.
Be of good cheer, brave spirit; steadfastly
Serve that low whisper thou hast served; for
know
God hath a select family of sons
Now scattered wide through earth, . . .
Who are thy spiritual kindred.
And Time, who keeps God's word, brings on
the day
To seal the marriage of these minds with
thine.
... Ye shall be
The salt of all the elements, world of the
world.
EMERSON.
JUNE 18. 169
F\I 7HEN] ground is trodden hard, it is the
L VV very substance of the ground that lies
impenetrable and catches the seed, and will
not let it in and claim the soil and do its fruit-
ful work. . . . This is the notion of the Crust.
It is not a foreign material; but the thing
itself, grown hard and rigid, shuts the soft and
tender and receptive portions of the thing
away. . . . Thus out of the very substance
of a man's life, out of the very stuff of what
he is and does, comes the hindrance which
binds itself about his being, and will not let
the better influences out. . . . That self-made
barrier must be broken up, must be restored
to its first condition and become again part of
the substance out of which it was evolved, be-
fore the life can be fed with the dew of first
principles and the rain of the immediate de-
scent of God.
What is the crust upon your life that keeps
out holy influences ?
VI. 155, 156.
This crust of selfishness and sin
That shuts my better self within,
If Thou canst make it soft and fine,
So bloom and fruitage there may shine
In answer to Thy dew and sun,
I can but say: Thy will be done!
For where the deepest cuts Thy plough,
And all is bare and broken now,
Faith sees the tender grain-rows spring,
The teeming valleys laugh and sing!
J. L. M. W.
170 JUNE 19.
IF, as we profess to believe, all right is for-
ever antagonistic to all wrong, then what
a lesson there is to us in the steadfast law and
faithfulness of all the universe around us.
How each day coming to its task of crowding
labors, each night bringing in its blessed peace
of sleep in obedience to the old command of
Genesis, brings with it a remonstrance against
our faint-heartedness and constant wavering
of loyalty and truth. The stars in their courses
fight against us as they fought against Sisera.
The duty that they are doing cries shame on
the duty that we are leaving undone every
day. . . . While this morning's sunrise is rosy
with the memory of last night's sunset, while
noon looks longingly down the eastern sky
that it has travelled, and fondly onward to the
night toward which it hurries, while month
links in with month, and season works with
season, and year joins hand with year in the
long labor of the world's hard life, there is a
lesson for us all to learn of the unity and the
harmony of our existence. Let us take the
lesson, and with it in our hearts go out to be
more tolerant, more kindly, and more true in
our dealings with our fellow-men. ... It is
sympathy, it is love, it is healthy interest in
one another, that all these great teachers make
their lesson.
X. 243.
So links more subtle and more fine
Bind every other soul to thine
In one great Brotherhood divine.
ADELAIDE A. PROCTER.
JUNE 20. 171
The Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of
the world. i JOHN iv. 14.
AND when an earnest soul accepts this ever-
lasting Christ, is there not a new glory
in his salvation when he thinks that it has been
from everlasting? He looks back, and lo, the
Saviour was his Saviour before the worlds
were made! The covenant to which he clings
had its sublime conditions written in the very
constitution of the Godhead. It was not
spoken first on Calvary; nay, it did not begin
when it was told to David, or to Moses, or to
poor Adam crushed into the dust with his new
sinfulness outside the garden-gate. Before
them all, in the very nature of the Deity, was
written the prophecy that if ever in the un-
folding of the ages one poor human soul like
mine should need salvation, the eternal Christ,
bringing His credential of Eternal Human
Brotherhood, should come to save it. The ages
rolled along; my soul was born, and sinned;
it cried out to be saved, and lo, Christ came!
What is there left for me to do but cling to
Him with a love strong as His precious prom-
ises and a faith firm as His Everlasting Sav-
iourship ?
VI. 319-
Except the Cross, and Him who died
Upon it, now in earth or heaven
What own I, claim I ? Now below
I seek no farther; here is woe
Assuaged forever: now above
I look no longer; here is love!
DORA GREENWELL.
172 JUNE 21.
He that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit
reap everlasting life. GAL. vi. 8.
had His word of encouragement
and strength to say to every soldier in
His army and to every worker at His work.
. . . Not merely scholars in their studies, not
merely missionaries in their martyrdoms, not
merely saints in their closed closets, but every
working man and woman everywhere, they
are all His. The spirit which proceeds from
Him may pour through the whole mass and
find out every particle, and give to each an
impetus towards its own next higher stage of
life, and so bear the whole along together to-
wards the completion of each man and the
completion of the whole social and business
life, and politics and education, and then, as
the crown of them all, Religion. ' That is
not first which is Spiritual, but that which is
Natural; and afterward that which is Spirit-
ual! " But they are all God's; and to make
each instinct with what measure of His life it
is capable of containing that is to build them
all into a flight of shining stairs, sweeping
upward into even clearer and intenser light,
until he who mounts to the full summit stands
by the altar of God's unclouded presence and
realizes the blessedness of perfect Communion
with Him.
VI. 258.
For ive are laborers together with God.
i COR. iii. 9.
JUNE 22. 173
Life is too short to waste
In critic peep or cynic bark,
Quarrel or reprimand,
'Twill soon be dark:
Up! mind thine own aim, and
God speed the mark! EMERSON.
MEN complain that God does not do this
and that and the other thing for them,
which He never undertook to do. They say,
" He does not make me rich. He does not
fill my life with friendships." So they flutter
about with their complainings as a bird will
sweep this way and that, doubtful and wan-
dering and tempted on every side. But as at
last the bird catches sight of the home where
it belongs, though very far away, and all its
flutterings cease, and setting itself straight
towards that, it steadies itself and seeks it
without a single turn aside; so by and by one
of these wanderers among many hopes discov-
ers far away the hope, the one only hope, for
which God made him, and forgetting every-
thing else thenceforth gives himself to that,
to serve God and by serving Him to grow into
His goodness. I. 312.
I go to prove my soul!
I see my way as birds their trackless way; I
shall arrive! What time, what circuit,
I ask not; but . . .
In some good time His good time I shall
arrive:
He guides me and the bird. In His good
time! BROWNING.
174 JUNE 23.
A central peace subsisting at the heart
Of endless agitation. WORDSWORTH.
BUT motion without fatigue, or waste, or
need of refreshment or repair, that is
the finished idea of Peace. We talk about the
" Peace of God." Is not this really the con-
ception which, carried to its highest, reaches
that sublime idea ? " My father worketh hith-
erto and I work," said Jesus. It is no Orien-
tal apathy. The Christian thought of God is
full of interest, zeal, emotion, action, only it
is always perfectly balanced with its surround-
ings, since its surroundings are the utterance
and creation of itself. God and the universe
in their unbroken harmony. The universe
never asking anything of God which God can-
not do. God having no power or affection
which the universe cannot utter. That is the
Perfect Peace. To match that consummate
Peace in our lower little sphere, to be to our
world as God is to His, to work as perpetually
and yet as calmly and so effectively as He
works; that is the real thing that we pray for
when we ask for one another the Peace of
God. VI. 189.
Roll round, strange years; swift seasons, come
and go;
Ye leave upon us but an outward sign;
Ye cannot touch the inward and divine,
Which God alone does know;
There, sealed till summers, winters, all shall
cease,
In His deep peace. DINAH MULOCH CRAIK.
JUNE 24. 175
He was not that Light, but was sent to bear wit-
ness of that Light. JOHN i. 8.
TO look different from other people, to wear
other clothes, to be somehow eccentric,
. . . this is the most superficial form of the
desire for originality. . . . To start some new
idea, to send forth something that shall show
our fellows that this machinery within us does
not work just the same with all the mental
machinery in all the world this is the higher
ambition of a higher man. Different from
both of them is that religious consciousness
which the devout man has that God made him
for a special purpose, for a special exhibition
of himself; and so the desire to be himself
completely, in order that no purpose which
God had in his creation may fail through his
being distorted or obscured. This is a desire
for the divine originality of character which God
intended. . . . Many men try to be John
the Baptists by wearing the skins and eating
the locusts and wild honey. Others would be
John the Baptists by preaching strange doc-
trines. Very few seek to live the life that he
lived by recognizing that they are sent into the
world, not to shine themselves, but merely by
some way of their own to bear witness of the
Light of God. VII. 41.
O Lord Jesus Christ, Who didst make Thy forerunner,
Saint John Baptist, to be as a bright light in Thy temple ;
Grant that we may ever shine in Thy Church, with the
ardor of faith, in works of charity, and in true humility ;
through Thy mercy, O Christ our God, Who, with the
Father and the Holy Ghost, livest and reignest, ever one
God, world without end. Amen. ANCIENT COLLECTS.
176 JUNE 25.
THERE are two persons to whom life is
pretty clear, the man who does not think
or feel at all, and the man who thinks and feels
very deeply. . . . The sluggish creature who
just runs his little fragment of the universe
and asks no questions further is troubled by
no doubts. The finished soul who sees with
God's eyes the great moral laws which govern
all God's worlds, he, too, may rest in peace.
Between the two the great mass of men, see-
ing the difficulties, but not seeing their solu-
tions, live in disquietude and questionings.
And when one has once outgrown the first
repose of ignorance and thoughtlessness, he
never can go back to it there is no hope for
him except to go on to the higher repose of
faith and knowledge and sympathy with God.
VI. 112.
Therefore to whom turn I but to Thee, the
ineffable Name ?
Builder and maker, Thou, of houses not
made with hands!
What, have fear of Thee who art ever the
same ?
Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that
Thy power expands ?
There shall never be one lost good! What
was, shall live as before,
The evil is null, is nought, is silence imply-
ing sound:
What was good shall be good, with, for evil,
so much good more;
On the earth, the broken arcs; in the heaven,
the perfect round.
BROWNING.
JUNE 26. 177
A man should rejoice in his own works, for that
is his portion. ECCLES. iii. 22.
IT is the mere smatterer in any profession
who thinks it is slight and is contemptuous
about it. It is a universal rule that he is a
poor workman who does not honor and respect
his work. A man has no right to be doing
any work which, as he grows greater within it,
does not offer him new views of itself to call
out an ever-increasing reverence and honor.
And in all the good occupations of life (one
would like to impress it upon every young
merchant, young mechanic, and young student
whom he can speak to) a man's best proof of
growing greatness in himself is a growing per-
ception of the greatness and beauty of his
work.
VI. 40.
And everywhere, here and always,
If we would but open our eyes,
We should find, through these beaten foot-
paths,
Our way into Paradise.
Dull earth would be dull no longer,
The clod would sparkle a gem;
And our hands, at their commonest labor,
Would be building Jerusalem.
LUCY LARCOM.
i 7 8 JUNE 27.
Hereby we knmv that He abideth in us, by the
"Spirit which He hath given us. i JOHN iii. 24.
The branch cannot bear fruit of itself except it
abide in the Vine. JOHN xv. 4.
IN this truth of the believer's abiding in
Christ, there are two notions involved of
Permanence and of Repose. . . . There is a
new tranquillity which is not stagnation, but
assurance, when a life thus enters into Christ.
It is like the hushing of a million babbling,
chattering mountain streams as they approach
the sea and fill themselves with its deep pur-
poses. It is like the steadying of a lost bird's
quivering wings when it at last sees the nest
and quiets itself with the certainty of reaching
it, and settles smoothly down on level pinions
to sweep unswervingly towards it. It is like
these to see the calm of a restless soul that
discovers Christ and rests its tired wings upon
the atmosphere of His truth, and so abides in
Him as it goes on towards Him.
VI. 299, 300.
O my soul, how noble thou art,
What a wonderful power lies hid in thee!
For thou canst not rest until thou attain the
highest good,
And find out the ultimate end;
Which being recognized and found,
Thy restlessness shall cease.
THOMAS A KKMPIS.
JUNE 28. 179
I Ve know that we have passed from death unto
life because we love the brethren. i JOHN iii. 14.
THAT man ought to distrust his Christianity
very deeply who finds that when he has
become a Christian he takes no more large
and hopeful and charitable view of his fellow-
men and their lives than he did before. The
glory of a revealed immortality is that it ex-
alts into struggle for a purpose that which
seemed to be only the restless tossing and
heaving of mere discontent . . . poor fitful
efforts after goodness, broken and distracted;
a mere unrest and moral turmoil everywhere.
What can interpret it except the great opening
of an eternity, and the sight of the power of
that eternity working even here ? With that
in view, we come to a large and tolerant sus-
pense of judgment that is good for us. Who
can say how much of this which seems pur-
poseless restlessness is really purposeful strug-
gle ? The wild, confused waves are going
somewhere. We grow to a sure conviction
that very much of what seems bad is only good
unformed and struggling under the power of
the resurrection to its full development and
exhibition.
VII. 281, 282.
Only add
Deeds to thy knowledge answerable; add faith,
Add virtue, patience, temperance; add love,
By name to come called charity, the soul
Of all the rest: then wilt thou . . . possess
A Paradise within thee.
MILTON.
iSo JUNE 29.
SIMON called Peter left his net and followed
Jesus. He went out of the old life into
the untried new life, following this Master. He
went out to a friendship and a work that were
to fill his days with delight and inspiration.
He went to new thoughts, new hopes, new
duties. But did he go to nothing else ? As
he turns and follows Jesus does he not go bur-
dened with new dangers which he did not have
before ? . . . If from that moment of his
choice it is possible for him to acknowledge
Christ, is it not possible also to deny Him ?
Does not such a truth as this, when it is un-
derstood and deeply felt, make men reject the
privileges which bring such dangers with
them ? Happily it is not so ... commonly
the scale of men's construction is loftier than
that. Commonly the man who is man enough
to see this truth is man enough to meet it. It
fills him with a soberness which is energy and
not despair. And besides, men see that it is
a danger which they cannot shirk. To avoid
privilege in order to escape the chance of sin
which it brings with it is essentially to commit
the very sin of which we are afraid. For
Peter to refuse to follow Jesus because he sees
the denial looming in the distance is really
only to anticipate his sin and to deny his Mas-
ter now.
VII. 114, 115.
Fear ballasts hope, hope buoys up fear,
And both befit us here.
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.
JUNE 30. 181
Yea, Lord, Thou knowest that I love Thee.
JOHN xxi. 15.
THE true sign of forgiveness is not some
mysterious signal waved from the sky;
not some obscure emotion hunted out in your
heart; not some stray text culled out of your
Bible; certainly not some word of mortal
priest telling you that your satisfaction is com-
plete. The soul full of responsive love to
Christ, and ready, longing, hungry to serve
Him, is its own sign of forgiveness. ... I
think that with all we know of the divine heart
of Jesus He would far rather see a soul trust
Him too much, if that is possible, than trust
Him too little, which we know is possible
enough. When a man who has sinned, and
who, like Simon Peter, has not a shadow or a
ghost of an excuse to offer for his sin, has so
known Christ that he never thinks of Him as
one to be propitiated, never doubts for an
instant that if he is forgivable he is forgiven,
and so lets his hatred of his old sin break out
in an utterance of his love for the Holy One,
and lets his sorrow for his treason only show
itself in his desire for loyal work, then that
poor sinner's sin is dead and gone.
VII. 127.
Turn all to love, poor soul;
Be love thy watch and ward;
Be love thy starting-point, thy goal,
And thy reward.
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.
182 JULY i.
Behold, this stone shall be a witness unto us ; for
it hath heard all the words of the Lord.
JOSH. xxiv. 27.
THERE are always people who are to the
world they live in what that stone in
Shechem was to the nation in the midst of which
it stood. Not voluble people, not people with
their glib and ready judgment upon every-
thing which goes on about them, perhaps
people who have seemed to the world at large
mere stones; but people who some time in
their lives had had the primary truth of God,
the Divinity of Righteousness, spoken so into
their ears that it has filled their being. Thence-
forward they spoke that word in all its simpli-
city to everybody. All earnest struggle after
righteousness feels their approval and sympa-
thy, and counts it really God's. All shuffling,
cowardly and wanton sin hides or hurries
away from their rebuking presence. They
declare no subtleties and no refinements. They
simply, broadly utter right and wrong. Such
people have a noble place and function in the
world. Men who would not own God's judg-
ments directly, own God's judgments as they
come through them. They purify and bless
the circle, the community in which they live,
as that stone under the oak at Shechem must
have seemed to purify and bless the whole
land of Israel. VI. 263.
Through such souls . . .
God, stooping, shows sufficient of His light
For us i' the dark to rise by.
BROWNING.
JULY 2. 183
Unto one he gave five talents, to another two,
and to another one ; to every man according to his
several ability. MATT. xxv. 15.
IN the life which that parable describes, the
different talents of different servants are
fully taken into the account. Duty is measured
by chance, and yet the essential idea of duty
is never weakened. I am bound to do less
than you, but I am just as severely bound to
do my little as you are to do your much.
Where else could those ideas be kept in perfect
harmony and peace, neither of them hurting
the other, but within the larger idea of father-
hood ? In what group could the child take his
little task, fitted to his little hands, and do it,
with the entire conviction that he must do it,
and, nevertheless, not vexed nor bewildered by
the sight of tasks a thousand times greater
than his own being done close by his side; and
at the same time, the great man, the hero, dedi-
cate himself to his vast work with no sense of
oppression nor injustice, nor with any feeling
of superiority or pride, in what group could
these two faithful souls work on, in such differ-
ence and yet in such identity, but in a family,
where every child has his own special duty,
great or small, clothed with the absoluteness
of the Fatherhood which is over all ?
VIII. 63.
For what is infinite must be a home,
A shelter for the meanest life,
Where it is free to reach its greatest growth,
Far from the touch of strife.
FABER.
i8 4 JULY 3.
T^HE more we read the Psalms, and indeed
* all the Bible, we are impressed with the
remarkable value which belongs to the Holy
Land as representing not merely the localities
of certain historical events, but also by a higher
association the geography of the spiritual life
of man. . . . Though the historic land which
lies between the Mediterranean sea and the Asi-
atic deserts should be blotted from the surface
of the earth to-morrow, there would be eter-
nally a Holy Land. Still all over the world,
the Jordan would roll clown its rocky bed to
the Dead sea; still the hills would stand about
Jerusalem; still the desert would open between
Judea and Galilee; still Egypt must mean
captivity, and the Red sea deliverance, and
the Gilgal providence, and Bethany domestic
piety, and Calvary redeeming love, although
the visible places to which those names belong
should cease to be forever. We little know
how much we owe to this eternal picture
drawn in the hearts of men, this mapped-out
Palestine of the inner life.
VI. 18.
For all of good the past hath had
Remains to make our own time glad
Our common daily life divine,
And every land a Palestine.
WHITTIER.
JULY 4. 185
Flag of Freedom and Union, wave!
Peace and order and beauty draw
Round thy symbol of Light and Law!
WHITTIER.
JESUS was a patriot. That sentiment which
^ makes so much of the poetry of the earth
the love of men for their native land was
very strong in His bosom. . . . But why is
it that His patriotism is a part of His life to
which we least often turn ? It is not only that
He lived a larger life and did a larger work,
which has far outreached the Jewish people
and touched us with its influence. It is the
constant predominance of the sonship to God
over the sonship to David in His conscious-
ness, making Him always eager for the land
of David because of the interests of God
which it enshrined. This is a distinct and
definite quality when it appears in a man's
patriotism. It makes his patriotism fine and
lofty above the measure of the common patri-
otic feeling of mankind.
VIII. 131, 132.
Our country hath a gospel of her own
To preach and practise before all the world,
The freedom and divinity of man,
The glorious claims of human brother-
hood, . . .
And the soul's fealty to none but God.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
i86 JULY 5.
And be clothed with humility. i PET. v. 5.
IT is striking that almost without exception
the word humility, used before the time of
Christ, is used contemptuously and rebuk-
ingly. It always meant meanness of spirit.
To be humble was to be a coward. It
described a cringing soul. It was a word of
slaves. Such is its almost constant classic use.
Where could we find a more striking instance
of the change that the Christian religion
brought into the world, than in the way in
which it took this disgraceful word and made
it honorable ? To be humble is to have a low
estimation of one's self. That was considered
shameful in the olden time. Nobody claimed
it for himself. Nobody enjoined it upon
another. You insulted a man if you called
him humble. It seemed to be inconsistent
with that self-respect which is necessary to
any good activity. Christ came and made the
despised quality the crowning grace of the
culture that He inaugurated. Lo! the dis-
graceful word became the key-word of His
fullest gospel. He redeemed the quality, and
straightway the name became honorable. It
became the ambition of all men to wear it.
To call a man humble was to praise him now.
Men affected it if they did not have it. Pride
began to ape humility when humility was
made the crowning grace of human life.
I. 325-
Christ was pleased Himself to be
Our Pattern of humility :
To show no path of duty lies
Too low for highest dignities. J. L. M. W.
JULY 6. 187
JESUS was never guarding himself, but
^ always invading the lives of others with
His holiness. . . . His life was like an open
stream that keeps the sea from flowing up into
it by the eager force with which it flows down
into the sea. He was so anxious that the
world should be saved, that therein was His
salvation from the world. He labored so to
make the world pure that He never even had
to try to be pure Himself. Health issued
from Him so to the sick who touched His
garments that He was in no danger of their
infection coming in to Him. This was the
positiveness of His sinlessness. He did not
spend His life in trying not to do wrong. He
was too full of the earnest love and longing to
do right, to do His Father's will.
So we are sure at once, and we learn it cer-
tainly from Christ, that the true spotlessness
from the world must come, not negatively, by
the garments being drawn back from every
worldly contact, but positively, by the gar-
ments being so essentially, divinely pure that
they fling pollution off, as sunshine, hurrying
on its mission to the world, flings back the
darkness that tries to stop its way.
I. 182, 184.
Have Jesus in thy heart,
And thou wilt be preserved from all defilement.
THOMAS A KEMPIS.
i88 JULY 7.
Be ye glad and rejoice forever in that which I
create. Is. Ixv. 18.
IT means something that, in the disorder of
thought and feeling, so many men are flee-
ing to the study of orderly nature. And it is
rest and comfort. Whatever men are feeling,
the seasons come and go. Whatever men are
doubting, the rock is firm under their feet, and
the steadfast stars pass in their certain courses
overhead. Men who dare count on nothing
else may still count on the tree's blossoming
and the grape coloring. It is good for a man
perplexed and lost among many thoughts to
come into closer intercourse with Nature, and
to learn her ways and to catch her spirit. It is
no fancy to believe that if the children of this
generation are taught a great deal more than
we used to be taught of nature, and the ways
of God in nature, they will be provided with
the material for far healthier, happier, and less
perplexed and anxious lives than most of us
are living.
I. 171.
Nature . . . can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us or disturb
Our cheerful faith that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.
WORDSWORTH.
JULY 8. 189
T SEEM to hear a certain sort of apologetic
1 tone among men of faith, which is not
good. . . . The man who trusts God some-
times seems almost to say to his unbelieving
brother, " Forgive me. I am not as strong as
you are. I cannot do without this help. You
are more strong and do not need it. But let
me keep it still." No open foe of faith can
do faith so much harm as that kind of be-
liever. ... It is a sick man apologizing to
death because he is not quite ready yet to die.
It is the meagreness of health in him that
prompts his poor apology. Let him grow
healthier and he begins to look not down to
death with apologies, but up to life with hopes
and aspirations. So let the weak disciple grow
more strong in faith, and he will have no longer
feeble words of shame and self-excuse to say
about his trust in Christ; only his whole life
will grow one earnest prayer for an increase of
faith, as the child's life is one continued hope
and prayer for manhood.
VI. zoo.
Belief's fire, once in us,
Makes of all else mere stuff to show itself:
We penetrate our life with such a glow
As fire lends to wood and iron.
BROWNING.
1 9 o JULY 9.
If any man thinketh he is wise, . . . let him
become a fool, that he may be wise.
r Cor. iii. 18.
BEHOLD, wisdom is the end of all! No
less in th'e Bible and in the Church than
in the schools. ... If the Gospel discredits
any of man's achievements, declaring them to
be incompetent to satisfy the soul and educate
the nature, it is always only that it may insist
upon a higher knowledge. Christ was a
teacher. Christ is a teacher forever. If He
declares that no scholastic culture, and no skill
in the arts of life, and no acquaintance with
the ways of men can save a soul, it is only
that He may insist that man must know his
own soul, and the deep difference of right and
wrong, and the infinite holiness of God. These
are true knowledges. ' That they might know
Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ
whom Thou hast sent." It is of all impor-
tance that we should know that the Christian
life is a life of knowledge, not of ignorance.
It is a separate, a higher region of knowledge
than that to which we generally give the
name; but it is knowledge still. It is the
apprehension of truths, of those vast truths
which the senses cannot discover, nor the
intellect evolve, but which through the open
avenues of the spirit enter in and occupy the
life. vi. 167.
Have I knowledge ? confounded it shrinks at
wisdom laid bare!
Have I forethought ? how purblind, how blank
to the Infinite Care! BROWM.NC.
JULY 10. 191
IT is the law of God, that wherever there is
duty there is also possible joy. Just as
the man who sees foliage knows that some-
where there must be water, although his eyes
or ears cannot discern it, and the trees seem
to grow out of the sand; so the man who is
sure that in any spot there is duty for him to
do knows that there is a happiness for him
somewhere in the doing of that duty, even
though for the present it seems to be a dread-
ful drudgery. In the expectation of that joy
he works. The expectation of joy is joy; and
so the man who in his voluntariness surrenders
some delight or privilege, finds that there is a
subtler mastery of happiness which is to be
gained only by giving it up and seeking some-
thing higher, though for the time it seems to
separate us from the happiness we love. Many
and many an experience there is in this world
which gives us the right to believe that happi-
ness is something very coy and wilful, which,
when we chase it, runs away from us; but,
when we turn away from it and seek for some-
thing better, and forget to seek it, changes its
mind and chases us.
III. 238.
He was not all unhappy. His resolve
Upbore him, and firm faith, and evermore
Prayer from a living source within the will,
And beating up through all the bitter world,
Like fountains of sweet water in the sea,
Kept him a living soul.
TENNYSON.
i 9 2 JULY n.
With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured
to you again. MATT. vii. 2.
IT is a law of vast extent and wonderful
exactness. The world is far more orderly
than we believe; a deeper and a truer justice
runs through it than we imagine. We all go
about calling ourselves victims, discoursing on
the cruel world, and wondering that it should
treat us so, when really we are only meeting
the rebound of our own lives. What we have
been to things about us has made it necessary
that they should be this to us. As we have
given ourselves to them, so they have given
themselves to us. . . . Only, keep your minds
clear of any materialism which would think
that in mere earth itself resides this power of
just and discriminating reply. It is as we and
all things exist together in the great embrac-
ing and pervading element of God that all
things give themselves to us as we give our-
selves to them. So all the phenomena of life
are at the same time divine judgments if we
are only wise enough to read them.
III. 268.
Vainly the lonely tarn its cup
Holds to the feeding skies;
Unless the source be lifted up,
The streamlet cannot rise:
By law inexorably blent,
Each is the other's measurement.
SUSAN COOI.IDGE.
JULY 12. 193
IN some strange shrine of Romish or Pagan
religion, all glorious with art, all blazing
with the light of precious stones, there bend
around the altar the true devotees who believe
with all their souls; while at the door. . . .
lingers a group of travellers full of joy at the
wondrous beauty of the place; and as when
the music ceases and the lights go out they go
away, each carrying what it was in him to
receive, the devotee his spiritual peace, the
artistic tourist his aesthetic joy: so men bestow
themselves on Christ, and by the selves that
they bestow on Him the giving of Himself to
them must of necessity be measured. . . .
Not merely with outstretched hands but with
open hearts we must stand before Him. . . .
Then to each of us even here upon the earth
shall begin that which is to be the everlasting
wonder and delight of heaven, the perfect giv-
ing of the Lord to souls that are perfectly
given to Him, the everlasting action and reac-
tion, the unhindered beating back and forth of
need and grace between the Saviour on His
throne and His servants at their tireless work
for Him.
III. 286.
What Thou hast given, do Thou receive the
same;
And whence the rivers rise, thither let them
return.
THOMAS A KEMPIS.
194 JULY 13.
Lord, is it I ? MATT. xxvi. 22.
NO sin is sudden. The warning may be only
half recognized, but when the sin of our
life comes, who of us has not felt, strangely
mingled with its strangeness, a certain dread-
ful familiarity, such as one might feel when a
man whom he had never seen, but of whom he
dreamed last night, and whose face he remem-
bered from the dream, stepped in the living
flesh across his threshold ? . . . The man in
business, spurning the very thought of cheat-
ing, as ready as he ever was to strike down
any man who dared approach him with temp-
tation, finds himself some day questioning duty
and trying to make it say that it is not duty,
or seeing how close he can run under the lee
of a doubtful transaction and yet sail out safe.
He has not sinned, but if he is a sensitive and
thoughtful man he sees, as he opens his eyes
to what he is doing, how he might sin. He
shudders as a man might who, walking in his
sleep, woke up and found that what he thought
was music is the roaring in his ears of the
chasm on whose brink he stands. His coming
sin has given him its warning.
VII. 119, 120.
Out of my soul's depths to Thee my cries have
sounded;
Lord, shouldst Thou weigh our faults, who's
not confounded ?
CAMPION.
JULY 14. 195
OUR best moments are the utterance of our
highest, truest possibility. . . . They
are the type of what we always might and
ought to be. For the exceptionalness of an
event is not properly measured by its rarity.
The exception is the departure from the law
of life, whether it comes rarely or comes often.
If the law of a man's life, the standard, the
ideal of it, is that he shall be true, and ninety-
nine times to-day he lies and only once he tells
the truth, those ninety-nine times are really
ninety-nine exceptions. Once, only once, he
has been his true self, conformed to his law.
If all the world could know that, what a
great change would come! If we could all be
sure that our best is our most natural that it
is the evil which is most unnatural; if I knew
man simply in his intrinsic nature, nothing at
all of this long dark history of his, I think
that nothing he could do would be so good as
to surprise me. It would be his wickedness
that would seem strange. To keep that feel-
ing about him, in spite of this long history of
his that is the triumph of the truest faith.
VII. 348, 349.
All is well, I know, without;
I alone the beauty mar,
I alone the music jar.
Yet, with hands by evil stained,
And an ear by discord pained,
I am groping for the keys
Of the heavenly harmonies;
Still within my heart I bear
Love for all things good and fair.
WHITTIER.
196 JULY 15.
HAVE you been in the habit of thinking of
Christ as of one so far away, so different
from us, that what he is and does seems to
throw no light on what we may be and do ?
But such a thought as that denies the very
power of the Incarnation. Here stand our
human lives, all dark and lustreless. Here
stands one human life in which has been
lighted the fire of an evident divinity. Shall
we look on and see the fine lines and the fair
colors of human nature brought out by the
fire which burns within, and not make any
glowing inference with regard to our own
humanity, with regard to its unfulfilled pos-
sibilities and the attainments for which it may
confidently hope ? Surely not so! . . .
Let us believe indeed that in the experience
of Christ there is such revelation of the pos-
sibility, such confirmation of the hopes of our
humanity! So only does this life become that
beacon on the mountain-top, that bugle-cry at
the army's head, which He evidently counted
it to be, which it has so often been through all
the Christian centuries!
IV. 282, 283.
Jesus, Saviour, Friend most dear!
Dwell Thou with us daily here;
By Thine own life teach us this
How divine the human is!
One with God, as heart with heart,
Saviour, lift us where Thou art;
Join us to His life, through Thine,
Human still, though all divine!
LUCY LARCOM.
JULY 16. 197
And He answered to him never a word ; inso-
much that the governor marvelled greatly.
MATT, xxvii. 14.
OO the prisoner revealed Himself to His
^ amazed and frightened judge. By silence
often of necessity and not by speech He must
make Himself known, because the revelation
is too great for words to contain; because the
hearer cannot hold the truth and yet, by his
strange human capacity, can hold Him who
speaks the truth, Him who is the truth; be-
cause words sometimes hide instead of reveal-
ing what they try to tell, for all these rea-
sons the Lord often when we pray to Him
answers us not a word.
Oh, my friends, if our answered prayers are
precious to us, I sometimes think our un-
answered prayers are more precious still.
Those give us God's blessings; these, if we
will, may lead us to God. Do not let any
moment of your life fail of God's light. Be
sure that whether He speaks or is silent, He
is always loving you, and always trying to
make your life more rich and good and happy.
V. 139.
All as God wills, who wisely heeds
To give or to withhold,
And knoweth more of all my needs
Than all my prayers have told.
WHITTIER.
198 JULY 17.
And a vision appeared to Paul in the night :
There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him
. . . Come over, and kelp us. ACTS xvi. 9.
SO far as we know there was no one man in
Macedonia who wanted Paul. . . . But
what, then, means the man from Mace-
donia ? . . . He is the utterance not of a
conscious want, but of the unconscious need
of those poor people. It is the unsatisfied soul,
the deep need, all the more needy because the
outside life, perfectly satisfied with itself, does
not know that it is needy all the time, it is
this that God hears pleading. This soul is the
true Macedonia. And so this, as the repre-
sentative Macedonian, the man of Macedonia,
brings the appeal. How noble and touching
is the picture which this gives us of God. The
unconscious needs of the world are all appeals
and cries to Him. He does not wait to hear the
voice of conscious want. The mere vacancy
is a begging after fulness; the mere poverty is
a supplication for wealth; the mere darkness
cries for light. . . . The "man of Mace-
donia" was the very heart and essence of
Macedonia, the profoundest capacities of truth
and goodness and faith and salvation which
Macedonia itself knew nothing of, but which
were its real self. These were what took form
and pleaded for satisfaction. n. 94, 95.
O Lord God, hear the silence of each soul,
Its cry unutterable of ruth and shame,
Its voicelessness of self-contempt and blame :
Nor suffer harp and palm and aureole
Of multitudes who praise Thee at the goal,
To set aside Thy poor and blind and lame !
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.
JULY 18. 199
Knowing that ye are thereto called, that ye
should inherit a Messing. i PET. iii. 9.
"T^HE-RE are always great unifying truths
1 waiting to close around and bind into a
surprising unity the fragmentary lives we live.
For we certainly do live very much in frag-
ments. Our special blessings stand isolated,
and are not grasped and gathered into one
great pervading consciousness of a blessed
life, of a life brooded over and cared for and
trained by God the Blesser. ... If you
could believe in one great utterance of God,
one incarnate word, the manifested pity of
God and the illustrated possibility of man at
once, then, with such a central point, there
could be no more fragmentariness any-
where. . . . Blessings of every sort are
reflections of that great blessing. . . . The
manifestation of the Son of God, of Christ,
gives all other blessings a place and meaning,
just as the sun in heaven accounts for and
rescues from fragmentariness every little light
of the innumerable host which, in every hue
and brilliancy, sparkle and flash and glow from
every point of our sun-lit world, v. 199, 202.
My being, Lord, will nevermore be whole
Until Thou come behind my ears and eyes,
Enter and fill the temple of my soul
With perfect contact such a sweet sur-
prise
Such presence as, before it met the view,
The prophet-fancy could not once foresee,
Though every corner of the temple knew
By very emptiness its need of Thee.
GEORGE MACDONALD.
200 JULY 19.
eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, . . .
and if ye suffer for righteousness 1 sake, happy are
ye. i PET. xii. 14.
IT is so hard to do right, you say. Yes, of
course it is; and the soul that tries to do
right does wrong so constantly! But then it
is so glorious glorious to do right through
struggle; glorious to mount from the lower to
the higher life, and seeing how God has
bound our perfection to His own, have but one
confident prayer for both: not, " Father, save
me from this hour" from any hour, however
hard it be but " Father, glorify Thy name."
And as to Christ when He prayed, so often
to us, sharers not only of His struggle, but of
His triumph, there shall come a voice from
heaven, saying, " I have both glorified it, and
will glorify it now again in thee." Who cannot
dare all things and bear all things in the
celestial courage of that promise 1
VII. 237.
God's trumpet wakes the slumbering world;
Now, each man to his post!
The red-cross banner is unfurled;
Who joins the glorious host t
He who, with calm, undaunted will,
Ne'er counts the battle lost,
But, though defeated, battles still,
He joins the faithful host!
He who is ready for the cross,
The cause despised loves most,
And shuns not pain or shame or loss,
He joins the martyr host!
SAMUEL LONGFELLOW,
JULY 20. 201
And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled
with fire ; and them that had gotten the victory
. . . having the harps of God. REV. xv. 2.
DISAPPOINTMENTS of every sort, sor-
rows, sufferings, trials, struggles, rest-
lessness and dissatisfaction, false friends, poor
health, low tastes and standards all about us
who shall catalogue the troubles of human
life ? Who shall tell the difference between
two men who live in different aspects of all
these things ? Are they intrusions, accidents,
thwartings and disappointments of the will of
God ? Or are they (this is what our doctrine
says they are) Messiahs, things sent, having,
like the ships that sail to our ports from far-off
lands of barbarian richness, rare spices and
fragrant oils and choice foods that we cannot
find at home, whose foreign luxuriance forces
its odorous way through the coarse and uncouth
coverings in which their wealth was packed
away in the savage lands from which they
came ? Are they prolific sources of spiritual
culture, contributing what our best happiness
could not have except from them, the energy
and vitality which there is no way of stirring
up in human nature but by some sense of
danger, the fire to mingle with the glass ?
IV. 117.
Happy is he whose heart
Hath found the art
To turn his double pains to double praise!
GEORGE HERBERT.
202 JULY 21.
WHEN we open our eyes morning after
morning and find the old struggle, on
which we closed our eyes last night, awaiting
us; . . . when all our habits and thoughts
have become entwined and colored with some
tyrannical necessity, which, however it may
change the form of its tyranny, will never let
us go, it grows so hard as almost to appear
impossible for us to anticipate that that domin-
ion ever is to disappear, and that we shall ever
shake free our wings, and leave behind the
earth to which we have been chained so long.
But the day comes, nevertheless. Some
morning we go out to meet the old struggle,
and it is not there. . . . Things do get done,
and when anything is really finished, then
come thoughtful moments in which we ask
ourselves whether we have let that which we
shall know no longer do for us all that it had
in its power to do, whether we are carrying
out of the finished experience that which it has
all along been trying to give to our characters
and souls. VI. 56, 57.
I search, but cannot see
What purpose serves the soul that strives, . . .
. . . unless the fruit of victories
Stay, one and all, stored up and guaranteed
its own
Forever, by some mode whereby shall be made
known
The gain of every life. BROWNING.
Afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of
righteousness. HEB. xii. u.
JULY 22. 203
He led them forth by the right way, that they
might go to a city of habitation. Ps. cvii. 7.
A TRAVELLER is going to a great city
which is his final goal. At the very be-
ginning of the journey the road leads over a
high hill. Upon the summit the traveller can
clearly see the spires of the far-away city flash-
ing in the sunlight. He feasts his eyes on it.
And then he follows the road down into the
valley. It plunges into forests. It sounds
the depths in which flow the dark waters which
the sun never touches. But yet it never for-
gets the city which it saw from the hilltop.
It feels that distant unforgotten glory drawing
it toward it in a tight straight line. And when
at last the traveller enters in that city, it is not
strange to him, because of the prophecy of it
which has been in his heart ever since he saw
it from the hill.
If we read rightly, thus, the method by
which God brings His children to their best
attainment, it is certainly a method full of
wisdom and beauty. First He lets shine upon
them for a moment the thing He wants them
to become, the greatness or the goodness which
He wishes them to reach. And then, with
that shining vision fastened in their hearts, He
sets them forth on the long road to reach it.
The vision does not make it theirs. The jour-
ney is still to be made, the task is still to be
done. But all the time, that sight which the
man saw from the mountain-top is still before
the eyes, and no darkness can be perfectly dis-
couraging to him who keeps that memory and
prophecy of light. VII. 340.
204 JULY 23.
Ye are My witnesses, saith the Lord, that I am
God. Is. xliii. 12.
NO man is a separate, rounded character,
independent of any other, carrying his
own qualities included within himself; every
man is a medium through which God expresses
Himself with more or less of clearness and
effectiveness, according to the dimness or the
transparency of the character on which His
light falls. We are like windows through
which a higher light is always falling; but
the window is blurred and mottled because at
some places it is stained deep and will not let
the light through; and where it does receive
it, it is always conscious of receiving. The
radiance with which it shines comes to it from
without not // shines, but the light shines
through it.
We learn to count men, thus, not by the
witness that they bear of themselves, but by
the witness that they bear of God. . . .
Many of the most subtle and perplexing
phenomena of human life become clearer to
us when we have once reached this conception
of the unity of the universe, of the way in
which man exists and manifests himself only
in relation toward God. " Christ is all, and
in all;" or, in Paul's phrase, "None of us
liveth to himself, and no man dieth to him-
self. Whether we live, therefore, or die, we
are the Lord's."
VII. 38, 39.
JULY 24. 205
No reflection so imperfect
But it something clear doth speak
Of a fuller revelation
Waiting for the eyes that seek;
Love is made in heavenly likeness
Though the image be but weak.
J. L. M. w.
AS the sun shines upon a bank of snow no
two of all the myriad particles catch his
light alike or give the same interpretation of
his glory. Have you ever imagined such a
purpose for your commonplace existence ? If
you have you must have asked yourself what
the quality is in a man's life which can make
it reflective of God capable of bearing witness
of Him. There is some quality in the polished
brass or in the calm lake that makes it able to
send forth again the sunlight that descends
upon it. What is it in a soul that makes it
able to do the same to the God who sheds
Himself upon its life ? The Bible has its one
great name for such a great transforming qual-
ity, and that is " love." Love in the Bible is
not so much an action of the soul as it is a
quality in the soul permitting God to do His
divine actions through it. The love of God
is a new nature, a new fiber, a new fineness
and responsiveness in the soul itself, by which
God is able to express Himself upon and
through it as He cannot when He finds only
the medium of the coarse material of an un-
loving heart. VII. 46.
If any man love God, the same is known of Him.
i COR. viii. 3.
206 JULY 25.
Here is the patience and faith of the saints.
REV. xiii. 10.
F)ETTER that the whole calendar were
D swept away and every saint forgotten,
than that one of them should take anything
from that perfect prerogative of saviourship
which is the Saviour's own. But this need not
be. . . . Christ is more utterly my sole re-
source in strong temptation, the only Being I
can flee to, when I see strong men of the
saintly histories turned into weakness before
the power of evil, and fleeing in desperation to
that same Christ, to be restrengthened with a
higher power than the old. There is a use of
the saints that can make Christ nearer, clearer,
dearer to our souls. They may be like a mere
atmosphere between our souls and Him, whose
every particle, filled with Him, has passed on
His life to the next particle, and so at last sent
Him down to us pure, as He is, uncolored with
its own blueness, the " light that lighteth every
man," lighting us all the more brightly be-
cause it has lighted them.
I. 128, 129.
What is the flame of their fire, if so I may
catch the flame;
What the strength of their strength, if also
I may wax strong ?
The flaming fire of their strength is the love
of Jesu's Name,
In whom their death is life, their silence
utters a song.
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.
JULY 26. 207
I am He that liveth, and was dead ; and, behold,
I am alive forevermore j . . . and have the keys
of . . . death. REV. i. 18.
IT is because He died that He holds the keys
of death. . . . They who have under-
gone and overcome stand with their keys to
open the portals of life's great emergencies to
their brethren. The wondrous power of ex-
perience! And see how beautiful and enno-
bling this makes our sorrows and temptations.
Every stroke of sorrow that issues into light
and joy is God putting into your hand the key
of that sorrow to unlock it for all the poor
souls whom you may see approaching it,
through all your future life. It is a noble thing
to take that key and use it. There are no nobler
lives on earth than those of men and women
who have passed through many experiences of
many sorts, and who now go about with calm
and happy and sober faces, holding the keys,
some golden and some iron, and finding their
joy in opening the gates of these experiences
to younger souls, and sending them into them
full of intelligence and hope and trust. Such
lives, I think, we may all pray to grow into as
we grow older, and pass through more and
more of the experiences of life.
I. 217, 219.
Blessed be God, . . . Who comforteth us in all
our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort
them which are in any trouble, by the comfort
wherewith we are comforted of God.
2 COR. i. 3, 4.
208 JULY 27.
And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and
sang praises unto God. ACTS xiv. 25.
\\ 7HEN it enters like a flood of light into
* ' the soul of some wretched invalid or
some victim of relentless misfortune, that by
a faithful patience under his suffering he can
glorify God and show forth the power of
Christ, then what a change comes to him!
How all is transfigured! How full of beauty
the hated sick-room grows! There is some-
thing behind the suffering for the suffering to
rest and steady itself upon. The light has
been kindled behind the dark window, and all
its fair lines and bright colors shine out. In
the purpose of the suffering the escape from
the suffering is found; as when Paul and Silas,
in the book of Acts, sang praises to God by
night in prison, when they turned their im-
prisonment into a tribute to their Master, then
"the foundations of the prison were shaken,
and . . . the doors were opened, and every
one's bands were loosed."
VI. 51.
We take with solemn thankfulness
Our burden up, nor ask it less,
And count it joy that even we
May suffer, serve, or wait for Thee,
Whose will is done.
WHITTIER.
JULY 28. 209
Mark how the fire in flints doth quiet lie,
Content and warm t' itself alone;
But when it would appear to others' eye,
Without a knock it never shone.
GEORGE HERBERT.
SUPPOSE that years ago there came some
crisis in your life which taught you the
necessity and the glory of being brave. It
was some mighty day of God with you. . . .
You dared to fight because you dared not feebly
run away. It was a revelation of you to your-
self. What then ? The crisis past, the light-
nings faded and the thunders hushed, you
came down from the mountain. Ever since
that you have walked on in quiet, level ways.
But many a time, in simple tasks which had
not power of themselves to bring you such
self-revelations, you have found yourself able
to be brave with a bravery whose possibility
you learned in that tremendous hour. . . .
Men are meeting the petty enemies of the
household and the street to-day with a fortitude
and a fearlessness which they learned thirty
years ago on the battle-fields of the Rebellion.
Men are bearing little disappointments with a
patience which was born in them while they
stood by the death-bed of their best beloved.
... It is good that the power which is first
born under exacting and peculiar circumstances
should then be set free from those circum-
stances altogether and become the general
possession of the life, available for all its
needs. The cloud forms about the mountain-
peak; but once formed there, it floats away and
drops its blessing upon many fields. VII. 343.
210 JULY 29.
And the day was dark over them.
MIC. iii. 6.
f~\ MY dear friends, it is a terrible thing
^-^ when one's religion is too small for the
world, and is always leaving great parts of the
world's life unaccounted for, unilluminated,
and is always dreading to have the world made
any larger, lest this religion shall seem even
more meagre and insufficient. But it is a
great thing when the world is too small for
one's religion, and the soul's sense of the glory
and dearness of God is always craving larger
and larger regions in which to range. Then
welcome all discoveries, all illuminations, all
visions of the greatness of the world of God.
VII. 177.
Then the ever-lifted cry:
Give us light, or we shall die!
Cometh to the Father's ears,
And He hearkens, and He hears. . . .
They, hardly trusting happy eyes,
Discern a dawning in the skies:
'Tis Truth awaking in the soul;
Thy Righteousness to make them whole.
What shall men, this Truth adoring,
Gladness-giving, youth-restoring,
Call it but eternal Light ?
'Tis the morning, 'twas the night.
GEORGE MACDONALD.
JULY 30. 211
CVERYWHERE the lower furnishes oppor-
' tunities for the higher, and is a failure
unless the higher blooms out of the ground
which the lower has made ready. It is Paul's
groaning and travailing creation. It is the
unity of the universe in which, from end to
end, there is no hardest, commonest, and
cheapest thing which, living in simple healthi-
ness and self-respect, may not become the
gathering point and manifestation point of the
most infinite celestial light, no stone that
may not make an altar. Reverence the simple,
the prosaic, the natural, the real; but demand
of every common thing of life, whether it be
your body or your money or your daily experi-
ence, that it shall bloom to fine results in your
own soul and in your influence upon the
world.
VI. 254.
One small life in God's great plan,
How futile it seems as the ages roll,
Do what it may, or strive how it can,
To alter the sweep of the infinite whole! . . .
But the pattern is rent where the stitch is lost,
Or marred where the tangled threads have
crossed;
And each life that fails of its true intent
Mars the perfect plan that its Master meant.
SUSAN COOLIDGE.
2i2 JULY 31.
Love mocks thee, whose mounting desire
Doth not to the Perfect aspire.
TWO men who have known each other for
years become together the servants of
Christ. His spirit comes to them. They
begin the new life of which He is the centre
and the soul. How their old friendship
changes! How it is all the same, and yet how
different it is! It opens depths and heights
they never dreamed of. Where they used to
do so little for each other, now they can do so
much. Where they used to touch only on the
outside, now their whole natures blend. They
have taken friendship and planted it where it
belongs, in the soil and air of the divine love;
and it opens its essential richness as the trop-
ical flower which has been living a half-life in
the northern soil tells its whole sweet and
gorgeous story of itself when it is carried to
the bright skies and warm ground for which
God made it.
VII. 312.
A friend! Deep is calling to deep!
A friend! The heart wakes from its sleep,
To behold the world lit by one face,
With one heavenward step to keep pace.
O Heart wherein all hearts are known,
Whose infinite throb stirs our own,
O Friend beyond friends, what are we,
Who ask so much less, yet have Thee!
LUCY LARCOM.
AUGUST i. 213
Jesus saith unto them, How many loaves have
ye? MATT. xv. 34.
WHEN you stand face to face with a
hungry-eyed creature whom you want
to feed with better life, be sure that you imi-
tate your Lord. Be sure that you begin by
asking him " How many loaves have you, my
poor friend ? What can you give me to begin
with ? What has God done for you already ?
Show me your best, and we will pray to God
together that as you put it into His hands He
will bless it and multiply it, till your whole life
is fed with the grace which is all His but which
He has made yours by bidding it work upon
the substance of what He had given you
already."
" How many loaves have you ? " It is the
Lord's first question; and the hands of those
who really want His help, search their robes
to see what they have hidden there. One
brings his joy; another brings his pain;
another brings his helpless desire; another
brings his poor resolution; another has noth-
ing to bring except just his sorrow that he has
nothing. It is a poor collection; only seven
loaves, and a few little fishes; but it is enough.
His blessing falls upon them, and they come
back to the souls which gave them up to Him,
multiplied into the means of healthy, holy,
happy life.
May God help us all, every day of our lives,
to come to Christ just as we are, that He may
make us more and more just what we ought
to be.
II. 142, 146.
214 AUGUST 2.
THE home, school, and shop must be here
on the fairest hillsides and plains of the
world for something. If we will not claim
them for their best use, and by our use of
them exalt them to their best explanations, we
need not wonder at the low and godless ex-
planations which men give of them. When we
are willing to see in them the ministrations of
God; when men, asking for the means of
grace, are pointed, first of all, to the duties
and relations of their lives as the places where
they will meet God, where they will find the
deepest experiences, conviction of sin, utter
humility, the need of Christ, and the ideal of
holiness, then how the dead earth and all
that is upon it will glow with a fire that no
materialism will quench. Till then, so long
as we fail to use the world for spiritual culture,
no wonder if it be dead; and who cares
whether the dead thing sprang from the hand
of a creator or took shape of chaos by a force
as dead as itself ? X. 31.
Not he who spins with subtle art
The webs of fine philosophy,
Not he who dwells alone, apart,
In scorn of poor humanity,
Nor he who cries, Lo, here! Lo, there!
The hidden Christ is sure to be!
But he who treads the narrow path
Of homely duty day by day,
And lends whatever strength he hath
To help his brother on the way,
Will surest hear at set of sun,
The Master's loving word, " Well done! "
J. L. M. W.
AUGUST 3. 215
THE best and noblest natures are marked
by hardly anything so much as this, the
simultaneousness and reasonableness of the
lives they live. . . . The spontaneousness
does not obscure the reason, and the reason
does not hamper and clog the spontaneousness.
So it always seems to me that it is with Jesus.
He presses His brother's hands with brotherly
affection. His brother's sneer wounds as no
stranger's can. His mother's sorrow enters into
its own secret chamber of sympathy in Him
where no other sorrow can intrude. And yet
all the while, with all the instinctive value
which He gave to them for their own sake,
these home affections all are ties to bind Him
to humanity, windows through which He looks
into the depths of human life, interpretations
to His soul of the wider brotherhood in the
vaster family.
Surely here is a noble indication of what the
family affections may be to all men.
VIII. 184.
To Thee our full humanity
Its joys and pains belong;
The wrong of man on man to Thee
Inflicts a deeper wrong.
Who hates, hates Thee; who loves becomes
Therein to Thee allied;
All sweet accords of hearts and homes
In Thee are multiplied.
WHITTIER.
216 AUGUST 4.
IF human sin needs a humanity to judge it,
do not these weak and struggling efforts
of our life after goodness crave some sympathy
to which they can appeal as they go up to
judgment? What! shall I send these poor
pretences of holiness up to heaven, this ineffec-
tive virtue which is not a being good, but only
a trying to be so, shall I send them up to lay
themselves against the fiery purity of God and
be burnt off like spots of blemish from the
white light of His perfectness ? Oh, no, give
me a man! Though He be perfect, He will
know what human imperfection is. ... He
will comprehend what my poor struggles
mean. ... If we look deep enough, we
ought to feel, every time when we see a little
child at night trustfully laying his day's life,
made up of faint desires, feeble effort and con-
tinual failures, into the hands of God, what a
blessed thing it is that there is in that everlast-
ing God an everlasting Christ, an undying
humanity, which will take that day's life into
a brother's hands and count it precious with all
the intelligence of sympathy. VI. 322.
Thou, O Elder Brother, who
In Thy flesh our trial knew,
Thou who hast been touched by these,
Our most sad infirmities,
Thou alone the gulf can span
In the dual heart of man,
And between the soul and sense
Reconcile all difference,
Change the dream of me and mine
For the truth of Thee and Thine.
WHITTIER.
AUGUST 5. 217
TN this mixture of good and evil which we
* call Man, this motley and medley which we
call human character, it is the good and not
the evil which is the foundation color of the
whole. Man is a son of God on whom the
Devil has laid His hand, not a child of the
Devil whom God is trying to steal. . . . The
great truth of Redemption, the great idea of
Salvation, is that the realm belongs to Truth,
that the Lie is everywhere and always an
intruder and a foe. He came in, therefore he
may be driven out. When he is driven out,
and man is purely man, then man is saved.
It is the glory and the preciousness of the first
mysterious, poetic chapters of Genesis that
they are radiant all through their sadness with
that truth.
V. 9, 10.
'T were glorious, no doubt, to be
One of the strong-winged hierarchy,
Yet I, perhaps, poor earthly clod,
Could I forget myself in God,
Could I but find my nature's clue
Simply as birds and blossoms do,
And but for one rapt moment know
'Tis Heaven must come, not we must go,
Should win my place as near the throne
As the pearl-angel of its zone.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
218 AUGUST 6.
And He went up into a mountain to pray. And
as He prayed, the fashion of His countenance was
altered, and His raiment was white and glistering.
LUKE ix. 28, 29.
IN Jesus our humanity went up into the
mountain and was transfigured. It shone
with light there on the cross. Thenceforth,
into whatever depths of selfishness it might
descend, it carried the power of that transfig-
uration with it. In its certainty that He who
suffered there was one with it and really bore
its nature, it knew that not to be selfish, but
to be unselfish, was its true life. That is the
reason why so wonderfully, through all the
years of miserable self-seeking which have
come since, souls everywhere have come out
under the power of that cross and let them-
selves be crucified for fellow-men, and why
the dream of a world glorious with mutual
devotion has never been lost out of men's
hearts.
Those lives of self-devotion, however humble
and obscure they seem, have always themselves
the same power which belongs to the sac-
rifice of Jesus. They too throw light on
darker lives. They are lesser hill-tops grouped
around the great mountain. Such lives may
we live in any little world where God has set
us! VII. 345.
But we would be of those who do Thy will,
And unto whom Thou dost in love disclose
The brightness of Thy face, to overfill
Their heart with sweetness, we would be of
those. CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.
AUGUST 7. 219
And Peter answered and said unto Jesus,
Master, it is good for us to be here.
MATT. ix. 5.
TO many, if not to all, men's lives come
such splendid moments as came to Peter
on the mountain of the Transfiguration. . . .
Once on a certain morning you felt the glory
of living, and the misery of life has never
since that been able quite to take possession of
your soul. Once you knew for a few days
what was the delight of a perfect friendship.
Once you saw for an inspired instant the idea
of your profession blaze out of the midst of
its dull drudgery. Once, just for a glorious
moment, you saw the very truth and believed
in it without the shadow of a cloud. . . .
And often the question must have come,
"What do they mean? What value may I
give to these transfiguration times ? "
The first instinct is to feel that they are not
complete and final; that they point to some-
thing which is yet to come; that they are the
premonitions, the anticipations, of a fuller
condition, in which that which they manifested
fitfully and transiently shall become the con-
stant and habitual possession of the life.
VII. 338, 339-
Nothing resting in its own completeness
Can have worth or beauty, but alone
As it leads and tends to further sweetness,
Fuller, higher, deeper than its own.
Life is only bright when it proceedeth
Toward a truer, deeper life above ;
Human love is sweetest when it leadeth
To a more divine and perfect Love.
ADELAIDE A. PROCTER.
AUGUST 8.
Ye shall know them by their fruits.
MATT. vii. 16.
CONDUCT is the mouth-piece of character.
What a man is declares itself through
what he does. . . . Character without con-
duct is like the lips without the trumpet, whose
whispers die upon themselves and do not stir
the world. Conduct without character is like
the trumpet hung up in the wind which whistles
through it, and means nothing. The world
has a right to demand that all which claims to
be character should utter itself through con-
duct which can be seen and heard. The
world has a right to disallow all claims of
character which do not utter themselves in
conduct. ' ' It may be real, it may be good, ' '
the world has a right to say, "but I cannot
know it or test it; and I am sure that how-
ever good and real it is, it is deprived of the
condition of the best life and growth, which is
activity."
V. 308, 309.
Therefore love and believe; for the works will
follow spontaneous,
Even as day does the sun: the Right from the
Good is an offspring,
Love in a bodily shape; and Christian works
are no more than
Animate Love and Faith, as flowers are the
animate spring-tide.
LONGFELLOW.
AUGUST 9. 221
We are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the
flesh. ROM. viii. 12.
SELF-MORTIFICATION, self-sacrifice, is
not the first or final law of life. You are
right when you think that these appetites and
passions were not put into you merely to be
killed, and that the virtue which only comes by
their restraint is a poor, colorless, and feeble
thing. You are right in thinking that not to
restrain yourself and to refrain from doing, but
to utter yourself, to act, to do, is the purpose
of your being in the world. Only, this is not
the self you are to utter, these are not the acts
you are to do. There is a part in you made to
think deeply, made to feel nobly, made to be
charitable and chivalric, made to worship, to
pity, and to love. You are not uttering your-
self while you keep that better self in chains
and only let these lower passions free. Let me
renew those nobler powers, and then believe
with all your heart and might that to send out
those powers into the intensest exercise is the
one worthy purpose of your life. You will
not so much have crushed the carnal as em-
braced the spiritual. Christ will have made
you free. You will be walking in the Spirit,
and so will not fulfil the lusts of the flesh.
I. 364, 365-
To this life things of sense
Make their pretence:
In the other angels have their right by birth:
Man ties them both alone,
And makes them one,
With the one hand touching heaven, with the
other earth. GEORGE HERBERT.
AUGUST 10.
Are the consolations of God small with tJiee ?
JOHN xv. ii.
THEY do not take your sorrow off; and
oh, . . . whatever be your suffering, I
beg you to learn first of all that not that, not
to take your sorrow off, is what God means,
but to put strength into you that you may
carry it as the tired man, who has drunk the
strength-giving river, lifts up his burden by
the river-bank and goes singing on his way.
Be sure your sorrow is not giving you its
best . . . unless it opens to you ideas that
have before been unfamiliar; mostly these
three ideas, education, spirituality, immortal-
ity. Those ideas are the keys of all the mys-
teries of life, and so the gateways to consola-
tion. And it is wonderful to see how, just as
soon as a man is really crushed and sorrowful,
God seems by every avenue to be offering
those great ideas for that man's acceptance.
He seems to write them on the sky, to whisper
them from every movement of the commonest
machinery of life, to fill books with them that
never seemed to know anything of them be-
fore, to make the vacant house and the full
grave declare them. You are a child of God
whom He is training. You have a soul which
is your true value. You are to live forever.
Know these truths. By them triumph over
the sorrow that He cannot take away, and be
consoled. I. m.
Trusting that sorrow is but love's disguise,
And all withholding but another way -
Of making richer by what love denies
So grows the soul a little, day by day.
MARY C. SEWARD.
AUGUST ii. 223
Blessed be God, . . . the Father of mercies, and
the God of all comfort ; who comforteth us in all
our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort
them which are in any trouble, by the comfort
wherewith we are comforted of God.
2 COR. i. 3, 4.
THE power of Paul or of any man to grasp
and realize this high idea of the pur-
pose of the help which God sends, shows a
very clear understanding that it is really God
who sends the help. Indeed, I think no man
can really mount up to the idea that God truly
and personally cares for him enough to reach
down and turn the bitterness of his cup to
sweetness, without being, as it were, com-
pelled to look beyond himself. All strong
emotions, all really great ideas, outgo our
individual life, and make us feel our human
nature. If you are not sure that any mercy
comes to you from God; if, whatever pious
words you use about it, the recovery of your
health, or the saving of your fortune, seems
to you a piece of luck, some good thing which
has dropped down upon you from the clouds,
then you may be meanly and miserably selfish
about it. You shut it up within the jealous
walls of your own life. It is a light which you
have struck out for yourself, and may burn in
your own lantern. But if the light came
down from God, if He gave you this blessing,
it is too big for you to keep for yourself. He
must have meant it for a wider circle than your
little life can cover, and it breaks through
your selfishness to find for itself the mission
that it claims. I. 3.
224 AUGUST 12.
Lord, show us the father. JOHN xiv. 8.
|\]OW we are very apt to take it for granted,
* ^ that however we may differ in our defini-
tions and our belief of the deity of the Son and
of the Holy Spirit, we are all at one, there
can be and there is no hesitation, about the
deity of the Father. God is divine. God is
God. And no doubt we do all assent in words
to such a belief; but when we think what we
mean by that word God; when we remember
what we mean by " Father," namely, the first
source and the final satisfaction of a depend-
ent nature . . . think how many of us look
for neither of them any farther back or any
farther on than this routine in which we live.
We devote ourselves to it; we deck it with all
the graces we can bestow upon it, because
there is no higher fatherhood present to our.
thoughts, because we know no loftier God.
Now to such a man what is the first revelation
that you want to make ? Is it not the divinity
of the Father ?
I. 234, 235.
With gentle swiftness lead me on,
Dear God, to see Thy face;
And meanwhile in my narrow heart
Oh, make Thyself more space!
FABER.
AUGUST 13. 225
Through Him we both have access by one Spirit
unto the Father. EPHES. ii. 18.
CVERY act is made up of a purpose, a
*' method, and a power. And so the pur-
pose and the method and the power are here.
What is the purpose or the end? "To the
Father we all have access." What is the
method? " Through Christ Jesus." What is
the power? "By the Spirit." . . . In this
one total act, the end, the method, and the
power are distinguishable, . . . and what is
more, each is distinctly personal. . . . This
salvation, which is all the work of God, first,
last, and midmost, has its divine personalities
distinct for its end and its method and its
power. It is salvation to the Father, through
the Son, and by the Spirit. The salvation is
all one; yet in it method, end, and power are
recognizable. It is a three in one.
The end of the human salvation is " access
to the Father." That is the first truth of our
religion that the source of all is meant to be
the end of all, that as we all came forth from
a divine Creator, so it is into divinity that we
are to return and find our final rest and satis-
faction, not in ourselves, nor in one another,
but in the omnipotence, the omniscience, the
perfectness, and the love of God.
I. 231, 234.
Enough for me to feel and know
That He in whom the cause and end,
The past and future, meet and blend, . . .
Guards not archangel feet alone,
But deigns to guard and keep my own.
WHITTIER.
226 AUGUST 14.
" IV\ ^^ shall not live by bread alone, but
iVl by every word that proceedeth out of
the mouth of God," by every word, from
the gentlest to the severest, that the eternal
lips know how to speak. . . . And remember
this is not a doctrine for the world's heroes
and martyrs only; it is for every living soul
when it is called on to give up the lower that
it may attain the higher life. It is for the man
who has to give up his dollar that he may keep
his honesty, to give up a doubt that he may
win a truth. It is for the young man who has
to give up a fascinating acquaintance that he
may keep his purity, to let go a tempting
chance of business because there is something
about its associations that is going to degrade
his life . . . for the woman who abandons
worldliness to serve her God, who turns her
back on fashion and its wretched littleness that
she may go up into eternal life. . . . Wher-
ever truth and interest conflict, wherever the
desire to be popular, to be rich, to be wise, to
be anything else, has to be cut away and cast
behind a man that he may go on unhindered to
be good and true and holy, there the law of
the martyrs and the heroes, there the law of the
Christ, whose meat was to finish His Father's
work, and who for the eating that eternal meat
fasteth from the bread that perisheth, comes
down and proves itself the law of all true life.
VII. 162.
With love for all around
Our days and hours to fill:
Thus be it ever found
Our meat to do Thy will!
LUCY LARCOM.
AUGUST 15. 227
Go d is faithful, who will not suffer you to be
tempted above that ye are able : but will with the
temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may
be able to bear it. i COR. x. 13.
ONLY those temptations which we encounter
on the way of duty, in the path of con-
secration, only those has our Lord promised
us that we shall conquer. He sends us out to
live and work for Him. The chances of sin
which we meet while that divine design of life,
the life and work for Him, is clear before us,
shall not hurt us. When we forget that de-
sign, our arm withers, our immunity is gone.
This is what we really mean, what we often
put blindly enough, when we ask whether such
a man is a religious man or not. We mean, or
we ought to mean, whether religion or the ser-
vice of God is present with him as a continual
purpose; not whether he is ever tempted; not
whether he ever sins; we know the answers to
those questions well enough; but whether be-
hind all the temptation, under all the sin, his
soul is still set toward God with genuine and
strong devotion. If it is, we know that he
must come out safe.
IV. 340.
The lightning and thunder,
They go and they come;
But the stars and the stillness
Are always at home.
GEORGE MACDONALD.
228 AUGUST 16.
IN all artificial religiousness, all that is not
bound to life, educated through life, and
uttering itself in life, there are gaps and
breaks. It is the sadness of every Christian
experience, the loveless time between the
moments of ecstatic apprehension; the total
secularness between the points of religious per-
formance. . . . The Spirit of God, expected
only at certain seasons and by certain doors,
finds sometimes those doors closed, and no
welcome waiting Him at any other. It is only
when we know that any door capable of admit-
ting any influence may admit the blessed influ-
ence of God, only then can we be hopeful of
keeping the breadth and variety of life, and
at the same time of always receiving the cul-
ture and the grace of God. Let only the
western shutters be open, and we shall see only
the western sun. Let all the windows be open
and expectant, and from sunrise round to sun-
set there shall be no interval in the unbroken
light. The sun, in the course of the day, will
look into them all.
X. 27.
Light of the world! undimming and unsetting,
Oh, shine each mist away!
Banish the fear, the falsehood, and the fretting,
Be our unchanging day!
HORATIUS BONAR.
AUGUST 17. 229
All of you are the children of the Most High.
Ps. Ixxxii. 6.
TT seems to me absolutely certain that if
1 there is in man a real essential belonging
with God, if in a true and indestructible sense
he is God's child, then the reaching out of the
child's soul after the Father's soul, of the
human soul after the divine soul, must be a
perpetual fact, it can never be stopped. . . .
Agnosticism, Nescience, Pessimism, Secularism
must be all temporary phenomena; none of
them can be the settled and permanent condi-
tion of the human soul if man is the child of
God. If he is not, then one is ready to accept
whatever comes; for who cares whether a beast
that is but a beast dreams that he is an angel,
or with a bitter wisdom knows his beasthood ?
III. 122.
If thou hast wanderings in the wilderness,
And find'st not Sinai, 'tis thy soul is poor:
There towers the mountain of the Voice no
less,
Which whoso seeks shall find; but he who
bends
Intent on manna still and mortal ends,
Sees it not, neither hears its thundered lore.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
23 o AUGUST 1 8.
WHEN we see the man in great trouble or
great joy grown suddenly religious the
glad " Thank God!" or the agonized "God
help me! " bursting out of unaccustomed lips,
it does not mean desperation, and it does not
mean hypocrisy. It means that for once in
that man's life the true soil of his nature has
been laid bare, and it has claimed the divine
relations for which it was made; just as you
strip the layer of rock off from a bed of earth
that lay below it, and in a day the newly ex-
posed earth is sprouting all over with grass
that you never planted. It has caught the
grass seeds out of the air. The wandering
birds have brought them to it. It has found
them treasured in itself. It puts forth upon
them its own simple nature, and grows green
from side to side. The man's hard surface
may close over when the great agony or the
great joy is past, and all may seem just as be-
fore, but he who once has known the move-
ments of this new capacity never can think of
himself as he was used to think. . . . He
may go on living a most earthly life, but he
knows forever that there is a spiritual heaven
and a spiritual hell. He never can say of
himself again, " I have no spiritual capac-
ity." . . . He has looked upon God, and his
soul can never forget how it answered when it
met the gaze of the love and power which made
it, and for which it was made. I. 152.
For God, who commanded the light to shine out
of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the
light of the knowledge of the gtory of God.
2 COR. iv. 6.
AUGUST 19. 231
Go into the city, and it shall be told thee what
thou must do, ACTS ix. 6.
'Tis here, O pitying Christ, where Thee I seek,
Here where the strife is fiercest, where the sun
Beats down upon the highway thronged with
men,
And in the raging mart. Oh, deeper lead
My soul into the living world of souls
Where Thou dost move!
RICHARD WATSON GILDER.
THE final spiritual state of man is pictured
as a heavenly city, a place of a thousand
relationships springing out of his human na-
ture. The training-place of his spiritual life
must be a city, a place of many relationships
as well. . . . Continuity, variety, influence,
reality these are the things after which our
spiritual life is hungering and thirsting. To
grow spasmodic, monotonous, uninfluential,
unreal, is not this the familiar death of the
spiritual life that saddens many a closet and
many a church ?
I have not said superficially that to labor is
to pray. Prayer lies behind all ; but I am sure
that by the finite act of labor the infinite act
of prayer is helped to its completeness, as the
soul grows by the body's ministries to its per-
fect life. Labor which is conscious of minis-
tering to prayer that is, of giving the soul
deeper perceptions of God and of itself grows
proud of and rich in its mission. It catches
much of the loftiness of prayer itself. It
goes enthusiastically and buoyantly upon its
way, sowing the spiritual life. X. 32.
232 AUGUST 20.
HAVE you grown weary of looking for any
signs of promise in this dull mass of fel-
low-men and withdrawn yourself into some
luxury of self-culture, feeling as if what you
had and were was too good to be wasted upon
such creatures as these sick and poor and igno-
rant ? You must be rescued from this proud
conceit, not simply by counting yourself
lower, but by valuing more highly the spiritual
natures of these fellow-men. You must value
them as He valued them, who gave His life
for them, before you can be as humble in their
presence as He was; and that can come only
by making yourself their servant. Only he
who puts on the garment of humility finds how
worthily it clothes his life. Only he who
dedicates himself to the spiritual service of
his brethren, simply because his Master tells
him they are worth it, comes to know how rich
those natures of his brethren are, how richly
they are worth the total giving of himself to
them. I. 348.
And know that pride
Howe'er disguised in its own majesty,
Is littleness; that he who feels contempt
For any thing, hath faculties
Which he hath never used ; that thought with him
Is in its infancy. The man whose eye
Is ever on himself doth look on one,
The least of Nature's works, one who might
move
The wise man to that scorn which wisdom holds
Unlawful, ever. Oh, be wiser, thou!
Instructed that true knowledge leads to love.
WORDSWORTH,
AUGUST 21. 233
ALL life tends to encrust itself, to imprison
itself within itself, and its crust needs to
be constantly broken and returned into the
general mass out of which it was formed, in
order that the best influences may be received.
Ever there must be a return to a primitive sim-
plicity, to a condition of first principles, in
which the power to receive may be freshened
and renewed. Do you not recognize that ? It
is part of the old craving to begin the game of
life again. It is not that life has been miser-
able, or has wholly failed, but it has lost sim-
plicity. ... Is not that craving for a return
to simplicity just what St. Paul has in his mind
when he says of the man whom he wants to
see made wise, " Let him become a fool " ? Is
it not just this getting rid of the crust of life,
in order that life itself may be open to the sun-
shine ? This is what he means by his strange
word " fool," I think. It may have some ref-
erence to what the world will think of him
who accepts the Gospel in its simpleness; but
more than that, I think it also must refer to
that condition of simplicity to which the na-
ture must return before Christ with all His
great enlightenment can take possession of it.
VI. 160, 161.
Wisdom ofttimes is nearer when we stoop
Than when we soar.
WORDSWORTH.
234 AUGUST 22.
And when He was come near He beheld the city^
and wept over it. LUKE xix. 41.
WE may picture the approach of Jesus to
our souls under the figure of His en-
trance into Jerusalem. He comes to one of
us as He came to that city of His and of His
Father's. Think how sacred it was to Him.
Think how He loved it. Think what vast
precious possibilities he could see sleeping be-
hind its brilliant walls. There was His Father's
temple. There was the whole machinery for
making the complete manhood. And yet there
was defiance, selfishness, unspirituality, and
cruelty the house of prayer turned into the
den of thieves. O my dear friends, if Christ,
as He comes to any one of us to offer us His
salvation, never forgets for a moment what we
might be in the sight of what we are, and
never forgets for a moment what we are in the
vision of what we might be; if He always sees
our sins in the light of our chances, and our
chances against the shadow of our sins, then
what Jerusalems we must be to Him! He
loves us as He loved that city, with a love full
of reproach and accusation. He stops as He
comes in sight of us, and "beholds the city,
and weeps over it." I can think of no picture
which so lets me into the very depths of the
soul of Christ, as He approaches a soul of
man which He longs to save, as that which
depicts Him stopping on the Mount of Olives,
where Jerusalem first comes into sight, and
beholding the city, and weeping over it.
VII. 212.
AUGUST 23. 235
"WE must be born again," said Jesus. Pon-
I der these divine words of His, and ever
more and more they seem immeasurably deep.
To think of them is like gazing into endless
space. But one great truth which they assur-
edly contain is this: that life for any man is
not complete until a deeper and a higher life
is put beneath and over the mere life of ac-
tion, into which the soul can perpetually re-
treat, and on whose breast the life of action
can be buoyantly upborne. There are men
who the world thinks are always failing who
are themselves conscious of a success which is
a truer truth to them than all their failures.
They are the men who have been born again,
and who carry the new life underneath the old
life all the while. The Master of that new
life is Christ. The soul worried and torn with
disappointments, haunted by the taunts of fel-
low-souls which tell it it has failed, suspicious
of itself, yet keeping still its faithfulness and
consecration, goes to Him, to Christ, and lo!
it finds a new fact there. Below its failures
He has for it success. Through all its deaths
He brings out for it, as He brought out for
Himself, life! " I too, " He says, " seemed to
fail, but in my Father I succeeded." "You
shall share with me. Ye are they which have
continued with Me in My temptations. And I
appoint unto you a kingdom, as My Father
hath appointed unto Me."
Whatever failures He may have for us to
pass through first, may He bring us all at last
to that success in Him.
VII. 207.
236 AUGUST 24.
Beloved of God, called to be saints. i COR. i. 2.
IT is out of the very heart of the discipleship
that the apostleship proceeds. . . . Jesus
calls all His disciples together, and out of
them He chooses twelve. It is no inattentive
idlers hanging on the outskirts of the group
who listen to Him, that he thinks good enough
to go and carry His message. It is they who
have listened to Him longest, and most intel-
ligently, and most lovingly. It is Simon and
Andrew his brother, James and John, Philip
and Bartholomew, Matthew and Thomas; it is
men like these, the very heart and soul of the
discipleship, whom he selects and calls apostles.
And so it always is. Always it is the best of
the inward life of anything, that which lies the
closest to its heart and is the fullest of its
spirit, which flowers into the outward impulse
which comes to complete its life. The heart of
any good thing is catholic and expansive. It
claims for itself the world. It longs to give
itself away, and believes in the capacity of all
men to receive it. This noble and beautiful
truth, whose illustrations are everywhere, was
it not declared by Jesus when out of the
choicest heart of the group of His disciples,
He chose His apostles ?
IV. 154, 155, 156.
The footprints of the Life divine
Which marked their path remain in thine;
And the great Life transfused in theirs
Awaits thy faith, thy love, thy prayers.
WHITTIER.
AUGUST 25. 237
WHEN I see the noble life of a man whose
faith I believe is all wrong, or is wofully
imperfect, let me not dare to say that his is
not true nobleness. That confuses my moral
standards and throws me into the worst hope-
lessness. Let the sight of him give me a new
faith in the power of human nature to be gen-
erous and good, which can break through the
most oppressive circumstances, and open into
flower out of the most barren soils. Let it
make me ashamed of the small show of gen-
erosity and goodness which I with my better
faith am able to display; but let it not delude
me into saying that what I know is my better
and fuller faith is a thing of no consequence ; let
it not hide from me the fact that my infidel
friend, with all his excellence, would be a finer
and nobler man than his own present self if
he believed in the truth and lived in the power
of that which I know to be the faith of God;
let it not lead me to forget that the real power
of a faith is to be estimated not by the influ-
ence of its presence or its absence in individ-
uals who may be exceptional, but by its effect
upon broad stretches of human history over
wide areas of time and space.
III. 215.
Noble, gentle, self-forgetting,
In earth's best affections rife,
There is yet one thing thou lackest
'Tis the Spirit's breath of life.
CAROLINE M. NOEL.
238 AUGUST 26.
Judge righteous judgment. JOHN vii. 24.
THE great question after all is this: Shall
we judge man by God or God by man ?
Does light and understanding flow upward or
downward ? If we judge man by God, at once
we have true and discriminating thoughts of
human life. We have absolute standards.
We have a test of the worth of all we do or
see. But if we judge God by man, we only
have over again what the world has been so
full of, the persuasions of self-interest, the
disbelief in absolute righteousness, the chang-
ing standards of the changing times. Men
have gone into the sanctuary of their own
selfishness, the sanctuary of themselves, and
straightway they have seemed to see an end
of God. All sense of a supreme and awful
Fatherhood on which all men depended, to
which all action must go back for judgment,
has been lost. No higher power than the
human has seemed to be moving under and
giving meaning to the events of ordinary life.
VI. 124.
If He could doubt on His triumphant cross,
How much more I, in the defeat and loss
Of seeing all my selfish dreams fulfilled,
Of having lived the very life I willed,
Of being all that I desired to be ?
My God, my God! why hast Thou forsaken
me!
W. D. H DWELLS.
AUGUST 27. 239
Blessed is the man that endureth temptation.
JAMES i. 12.
ANY temptation through which a man may
go without yielding is a glory and a
strength. But shall men go on courting temp-
tations, finding them out, and running into
them, so that they may come out glorious and
strong ? Look at Christ's temptation. There
is one phrase which lights up the whole story.
Christ was " led up of the Spirit to be tempted
of the devil." He had a certain work to do.
That work was not His own, but was His
Father's. His Father's Spirit guided Him,
and told Him how to do it. ... We too
have a work, a duty. ... In doing our duty
the Spirit of our Father may lead us into
temptation, but if He really leads us there He
will protect us there. If He does not lead us,
if we go of our own self will, we have no
pledge of His protection. ... If your duty
lies right by the gates of hell, walk there
boldly, and the gates of hell shall not prevail
against you. If your duty does not carry you
there, you cannot be too fastidiously careful
for your purity, to keep it out of the way of
every lightest zephyr of temptation. Such is
the manifest difference of the temptations into
which God leads us and those into which we
run ourselves. VII. 135, 136.
Evil knowledge acquired in one wilful mo-
ment of curiosity may harass and haunt us to
the end of our time.
And how after the end of our time ?
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTJ
240 AUGUST 28.
In all points tempted like as we are, yet without
sin. HEB. iv. 15.
THERE will come a world where there will
be no temptation a garden with no ser-
pent, a city with no sin. The harvest day will
come and the wheat be gathered safe into the
Master's barn. It will be very sweet and glo-
rious. Our tired hearts rest on the promises
with peaceful delight. But that time is not
yet. Here are our tempted lives, and here,
right in the midst of us, stands our tempted
Saviour. If we are men we shall meet temp-
tation as He met it, in the strength of the
God who is the Father of whom all men are
children. Every temptation that attacks us
attacked Him and was conquered. We are
fighting with a defeated enemy. We are strug-
gling for a victory which is already won. That
may be our strength and assurance as we re-
call, whenever our struggle becomes hottest
and most trying, the wonderful and blessed
day when Jesus was " led up of the Spirit into*
the wilderness to be tempted of the devil."
VII. 148.
' Tempted and tried! "
Yet the Lord shall abide
Thy faithful Redeemer, thy Keeper and Guide,
Thy Shield and thy Sword,
Thy exceeding Reward.
Then enough for the servant to be as his Lord!
FRANCES R. HAVERGAL.
AUGUST 29. 241
/ was glad when they said unto me, Let us go
up to the house of the Lord. Ps. cxxii. i .
OOMETHING very beautiful and grand,
<J almost awful ... is the yearly gathering
from every corner of the land to the sacred
festival meeting at Jerusalem. The land
swarms and hums with movement. The men of
the seashore and the hills, they are all stirring.
Every pass is full, every hillside is alive. . . .
Every man brought his own burden, his own
sorrow, his own sin. The problems of the
year, the things that had perplexed them as
they worked in the fields alone, or debated with
their brethren, or met the troubles of the
household all these they brought to offer to
the Lord, to seek solution for them in the
higher, calmer atmosphere of the temple.
There was the place where their darkened and
frightened understandings would find light
and peace.
It is an old-time picture. We do not go to
church so now. . . . But woe to us if our
more rational belief, instead of lifting all the
earth up to heaven, only crowds down the hill-
tops and leaves no heaven, and makes our
whole earth earthly.
VI. no, in.
The Lord answer thee in the day of trouble ;
The name of the God of Jacob defend thee ;
Send thee help from the sanctuary,
And strengthen thee out of Zion ; . . .
Grant thee thy heart's desire,
And fulfil all thy mind.
PS. XX. I, 2, 4.
AUGUST 36.
// was too painful for me, until I went into the
Sanctuary of God ; then understood I the end of
these men. Ps. Ixxiii. 15, 17.
HOW old the bewilderments of the world
are! . . . Here, almost three thousand
years ago, is a poor man who . . . has been
puzzled because the ungodly were rich, as if
riches were the appropriate premium of good-
ness; but when he comes to stand with God all
that is altered. He comes in sight of larger
circles of bliss. He sees that God has other
rewards to give His chosen besides these little
trinkets. ... So long as he knows no higher
happiness than prosperity, it puzzles him that
the bad should have it. So soon as he comes
to know the infinitely higher joy of company
with God, and sees that that can be given only
to the good, " without holiness no man can
see the Lord," it no more troubles him that
bad men should have the poor counterfeit of
happiness, than it troubles the solid merchant,
sitting in his houseful of plain and solid com-
fort, to see a miserable fop strut by in cheap
and gaudy finery making believe and perhaps
thinking that he is rich.
VI. 109.
Happier he whose inward sight,
Stayed on his subtile thought,
Shuts his sense on toys of time,
To vacant bosoms brought.
EMERSON.
AUGUST 3 i.
And Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the
seashore. Ex. xiv. 30.
DO we believe in the death of our Egyptian ?
What is your Egyptian ? Some passion
of the flesh or of the mind ?
It was on the farther shore of the Red Sea
that the Egyptian pursuers of the Israelites lay
dead. It was when the people of God had
genuinely undertaken the journey to the land
that God had given them, that the grasp of
their enemy gave way and the dead hands let
them go. You must go forth into a new land,
into the ambition of a higher life, then,
when he tries to follow you there, he per-
ishes. . . . Not merely by trying not to be
selfish, but by entering into the new joy of
unselfish consecration, so only shall you kill
your selfishness. When you are vigorously
trying to serve your fellow-men, the last chance
that you will be unjust or cruel to them will
disappear. When you are full of enthusiasm
for truth, the cold hands of falsehood will let
you go. . . . Seek not the same low things by
higher means; seek higher things, and the low
means will know that they cannot hold you
their slave.
VI. 65, 66, 67.
Nor can I count him happiest who has never
Been forced with his own hand his chains to
sever,
And for himself find out the way divine.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
244 SEPTEMBER i.
OVER a broad open plain there blows a
strong steady wind. It never stops, it
never changes. All over the plain there are
men and women on their journeys. Hear them
cry out. "This wind, this dreadful wind!"
cries one, all out of breath and gasping.
" How bitter it is, how cruel, how it hates
me!" ' This wind, this blessed wind! " cries
another, within hail of him. " How kind it is,
how helpful, how it loves me! " Are there
two winds, or has the one fickle wind its favor-
ites ? No, the one constant wind is blowing
steadily and is no respecter of persons; but
one man has set his face against it and the
other man is walking with it.
Through this great open world moves God
like a strong wind or spirit, finding out all the
public and the secret places of the life of
man. . . . But while your brother at your side
is full of the sense of God's love, to you God
seems the hindrance of your life; His right-
eousness defeats your plans, His purity rebukes
your lust, His nature and being smite you in
the face like a blast that blows bitter and cold
from a far-off judgment day. Does God hate
you and love your brother ? No, He loves
you both: but you with your disobedience
are setting yourself against His love. You
must turn round. IV. 312, 313.
The blast that smites thee, face and breast,
Is God's clear voice to thee:
' This way is neither joy nor rest,
Turn, turn, and go with me! "
JUUA WOOD.
SEPTEMBER 2. 245
Lead me in Thy truth and teach me ; for Thou
art the God of my salvation. Ps. xxv. 5.
NO familiarity of religion, no presentation
of it as a regulative force, no offer by
Christ of Himself as the friend of daily life,
must seem to us to depreciate the power of
our salvation or make it appear to us other
than the touch of God. There will come to
you hours of great exaltation; you will go up
to mountain-tops of vision. The Divine Voice
will speak to you out of the sun and out of
the cloud. Those will come in their time as it
is best. But let no experience and no expec-
tation of them make you careless or distrustful
when out of commonest things, out of daily
tasks, and daily difficulties, and daily joys,
and the simplest needs of your nature, and the
most domestic familiarities of life, God speaks
to you and offers you His Son. Know His
voice so truly that you cannot mistake it from
whatever unexpected quarter it may speak.
Watch for the Divine Light so anxiously that
you may never say that it is not divine from
whatever humblest quarter it may shine.
VI. 294.
All common things, each day's events,
That with the hour begin and end,
Our pleasures and our discontents,
Are rounds by which we may ascend.
LONGFELLOW.
246 SEPTEMBER 3.
If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you,
ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto
you. JOHN xv. 7.
CAN he in whom the words of Christ abide
pray an unanswered prayer ? . . . Can
he in whom this word of Christ's abides
" Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His
righteousness" go on clamoring with miser-
able mercenary prayers for food and drink,
houses and lands, as if they were the first
things to seek ? Or he in whom this everlast-
ing word of Christ abides " In this world ye
shall have tribulations," can you conceive
of him as vexing God with querulous supplica-
tions to be released from suffering, and not
delighting God with holy petitions that he may
be brave and patient under it, that he may be
purified and made perfect by it ? . . . How
many times we have complained that our
prayer brought no answer, when it was a prayer
that we never could have prayed unless we first
drove out every word of Christ from its abid-
ing-place within us! Is there a Christian
here who can declare before God that he ever
prayed to God in perfect submission to Christ's
will, in perfect conformity to Christ's words,
and got no answer ? Not here; not in all the
world; not in all the ages! VI. 305.
No voice of prayer to Thee can rise,
But swift as light Thy love replies ;
Not always what we ask, indeed,
But, O Most Kind ! what most we need. . . .
For bread may nourish less than stone
If eaten thankless or alone ;
And many a pure, desired thing
Might prove a snare or hide a sting.
HARRIET MCWEN KIMBALL.
SEPTEMBER 4. 247
Thy will be done. LUKE xi. 2.
\17HAT is it that you ask for when you
* * kneel and pray ? Directly, no doubt, it
is some special mercy. It is the coming in of
your ship; it is the recovery of your friend;
it is the opportunity of usefulness which you
desire for yourself. But do you want any of
those things if God does not see that it is best
that you should have them ? . . . Is it not
His will which is your real, your fundamental,
your essential prayer ? You must keep that
essential prayer very clear, or the special
prayer becomes wilful and trivial. You must
pray with the great prayer in sight. You
must feel the mountains above you while you
work upon your little garden. Little by little
your special wishes and the eternal will of
God will grow in harmony with one another,
all conflict will die away, and the great spir-
itual landscape from horizon to horizon be but
one. That is the prayer of eternity, the
prayer of heaven, to which we may come no
one can say how near on earth:
V. 121.
Which brings to God's all-perfect will
That trust of His undoubting child,
Whereby all seeming good and ill
Are reconciled.
WHITTIER.
248 SEPTEMBER 5.
For if the ministration of condemnation be
glory, much more doth the ministration of right-
eousness exceed in glory. 2 COR. iii. 9.
r ~PHINK of the minister's necessary relation
1 to God. God is the granary from which
he must be immediately fed, the armory from
which his weapons must be immediately drawn.
.... He must sanctify himself that the peo-
ple may be sanctified through him. . . . Then
think of the minister's relation to mankind.
Whatever tells upon his people's characters
he shares with them. Their temptations and
their victories are his. He goes with them up
into the heavens and down into the depths.
His personal life is multiplied by theirs. What
is it to live ? To crawl on in the dust, leaving
a trail which the next shower hastens to wash
away ? Is it to breathe the breath of heaven
as the tortoise does, and to bask in the sun-
shine like the lizard ? Or is it to touch the
eternal forces which are behind everything
with one hand, and to lay the other on the
quivering needles and the beating hammers of
this common life ? Is it to deal with God and
deal with man ? Is it to use their powers to
the utmost, and to find ever new power coming
into them constantly with their use? If this is
life, then there is no man who lives more than
the minister; and the generous youth whose
cry is, " Let me live while I live," must some
day feel the vitality of great service of God
and man, and press in through the sacred
doors, saying, " Let me, too, be a minister! "
VI. 339-
SEPTEMBER 6. 249
The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord.
PROV. xx. 27.
rnPHERE is a] perpetual revelation of God by
L 1 human life. . . . See how at the very
bottom of His existence, as you conceive of it,
lie these two thoughts purpose and righteous-
ness; how absolutely impossible it is to give
God any personality except as the fulfilment
of the intelligence that plans in love, and the
righteousness that lives in duty. Then ask
yourself how any knowledge of these qualities
of what they are, of what kind of being they
will make in their perfect combination could
exist upon the earth if there were not a human
nature here in which they could be uttered,
from which they could shine. Only a person
can truly utter a person. Only from a charac-
ter can a character be echoed. You might
write it all over the skies that God was just,
but it would not burn there. It would be, at
best, only a bit of knowledge; never a Gospel;
never something which it would gladden the
hearts of men to know. That comes only
when a human life, capable of a justice like
God's, made just by God, glows with His
justice in the eyes of men, a candle of the
Lord.
II. 6.
As the planets to the sun,
We would moor our souls to Thee;
Kindle us, All-Heavenly One,
Torches of Thy truth to be!
LUCY LARCOM,
250 SEPTEMBER 7.
Methinks we do as fretful children do,
Leaning their faces on the window-pane
To sigh the glass dim with their own breath's
stain,
And shut the sky and landscape from their view ;
And thus, alas! since God the Maker drew
A mystic separation 'twixt those twain,
The life beyond us and our souls in pain
We miss the prospect which we're called unto.
Be still and strong,
O man, my brother, hold thy sobbing breath,
And keep thy soul's large window pure from
wrong,
That so, as life's appointment issueth,
Thy vision may be clear to watch, along
The sunset, consummation-lights of death.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.
PAUL tells of Christians who " through fear
of death are all their lifetime subject to
bondage." There are some men and women
who haunt their lives and make them cheerless,
for fear they will not be able to meet the king
of terrors when he comes. Dear friends, learn
from your Saviour that no duty reveals itself
till we approach it. The duty of death, when
you approach it, will light itself up, you may
be sure, and seem very easy to your soul. Till
then do not trouble yourself about it. To
live, and not to die, is your work now. When
your time comes the Christ who conquered
death will prove Himself its Lord, and pave
the narrow river to a sea of glass for you to
cross. The work of life is living, and not, as
we are so often told, preparing to die, except
by living well. VII. 235.
SEPTEMBER 8. 251
Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord.
COL. iii. 23.
AN act of yours is not simply the thing you
do: it is the reason why you do it. Why
are you selling your goods ? If without false-
hood you can say, " Because it is my duty, in
order that I may maintain my family and serve
my generation and honor God by useful-
ness," then certainly the act opens itself and
becomes a church. It is the house of God. It
is the gate of heaven. ... In every act con-
sciously and devoutly done for God's sake,
God gives Himself to the soul and feeds it, in
the act; not after it and in reward of it, but
in it.
Seek your life's nourishment in your life's
work. Do not think that after you have
bought or sold or studied or taught, you will
go into your closet and open your Bible, and
repair the damage and the loss that your day's
life has left you. Do those things certainly, but
also insist that your buying or selling or study-
ing or teaching shall itself make you brave,
patient, pure and holy! Do not let your oc-
cupation pass you by, and leave you only the
basest and poorest of its benefits the money
with which it fills your purse. Compel it to
give up to you the charity and faith and char-
acter and godliness which it has as its heart,
which it hides charily, but which it must give
to you if you insist upon it and are able to
receive it.
IV. 238, 242.
252 SEPTEMBER 9.
/ will lift mine eyes unto the hills, from whence
cometh my help. Ps. cxxi. i.
I TURN to Jesus, and in all His human life
there seems to me nothing more divine
than the instinctive and unerring way in which
He always reached up to the highest, and re-
fused to be satisfied with any lower help. In
the desert the Devil offered Him bread, good
wholesome bread. Apparently He could have
had it if He would; but he replied, " Man shall
not live by bread alone, but by the word of
God." . . . On the cross they held up to Him
the sponge full of vinegar; but the thirst that
was in Him demanded a deeper satisfaction,
and He gave His soul to His Father and finished
His obedient work. So it was everywhere with
him. The souls beside Him found their helps
and satisfactions in the superficial things of
earth. . . . He could not rest anywhere till
He had found God His Father, and laid the
burden which was crushing Him into the bosom
of the eternal strength and the exhaustless love.
It is your privilege and mine, as children of
God, to be satisfied with no help but the help
of the highest. When we are content to seek
strength or comfort or truth or salvation from
any hand short of God's, we are disowning
our childhood and dishonoring our Father.
II. 285.
Oh! there is never sorrow of heart
That shall lack a timely end,
If but to God we turn, and ask
Of Him to be our friend.
WORDSWORTH.
SEPTEMBER 10. 253
What is the chaff to the wheat ? saith the Lord.
JER. xxiii. 24.
NEVER be afraid to bring the transcendent
mysteries of our faith, Christ's life and
death and resurrection, to the help of the
humblest and commonest of human wants.
There is a sort of preaching which keeps them
for the great emergencies, and soothes the
common sorrows and rebukes the common
sins with lower considerations of economy.
Such preaching fails. It neither appeals to
the lower nor to the higher perceptions of
mankind. It is useful neither as law nor gos-
pel. It is like a river that is frozen too hard
to be navigable but not hard enough to bear.
Never fear to bring the sublimest motives to
the smallest duty, and the most infinite com-
fort to the smallest trouble. They will prove
that they belong there if only the duty and
the trouble are real.
IX. 27.
For He who bore all sorrow weighed,
Nailed to His own, each lesser cross;
He knows the burden on us laid,
The secret pain, the hidden loss.
Touched with our woes, He lifteth up
The humblest follower in His train;
He maketh sweet the bitter cup,
And death itself is blessed gain.
HARRIET McEwEN KIMBALL.
254 SEPTEMBER u.
HOW many of us have said, "I will love
God; I ought to, and I will," and so
have wrestled and struggled to do what they
could not do, what in their hearts they knew
no real reason for doing, and have miserably
failed, and now are satisfying themselves with
loveless obedience, or else have left God alto-
gether and tell their hearts that they must
forego all such beautiful, hopeless ambitions.
Ah, my friend, what you need is to get away
round upon the other side of the whole matter.
It is not whether you love God but whether
God loves you. If He does, and if you can
know that He does, then give yourself up to-
tally and unquestioningly to the assurance of
that love. Rejoice in it by day and night. Go
singing for the joy of it about your work and
your play. And as you go singing for joy
that God loves you, behold the response is
born before you know it, and you are loving
God as countless souls, have always loved
Him, "because He first loved us."
V. 51.
If I Him but have,
If He be but mine,
If my heart, hence to the grave,
Ne'er forgets His love divine
Know I naught of sadness,
Feel I naught but worship, love, and gladness.
GEORGE MACUONALD.
SEPTEMBER 12. 255
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord
thy God . . . with all thy mind.
MATT. xvii. 37.
EVERYWHERE, to think that divine truth
lies beyond or away from the intelligence
of man, is at once to make divine truth unreal
and unpractical, and to condemn the human
intelligence to dealing not with the highest,
but only with the lowest themes. . . . Love
God with all your mind, because your mind,
like all the rest of you, belongs to Him, and
it is not right that you should give Him only a
part to whom belongs the whole. When the
procession of your powers goes up joyfully
singing to worship in the temple, do not leave
the noblest of them all behind to cook the
dinner and to tend the house. Give your in-
telligence to God. Know all that you can
know about Him. In spite of all disappoint-
ment and weakness, insist on seeing all that
you can see now through the glass darkly, so
that hereafter you may be ready when the time
for seeing face to face shall come!
III. 41, 42.
No religion that does not think is strong.
. . . Mysticism, disowning doctrine and depre-
ciating law, asserts that religion belongs to
feeling, and that there is no truth but love. . . .
The hard theology is bad. The soft theology
is worse. . . . Value no feeling which is not
the child of truth and the father of duty.
IX. 243, 244.
256 SEPTEMBER 13.
OH, how we separate our knowing and our
obeying powers, our mental and our
moral natures, as if either of them could live
without the other! No, the promise that we
shall know includes the promise that we shall
obey. So it attains its fullest richness.
When we say that, eternity springs into life
and lives. No longer a bare doctrine, no
longer a great, arid fact, that we shall live
forever, but a great, actual reality! Hark,
through the atmosphere of that belief can you
not hear the music of the activity which fills
the streets of the New Jerusalem ? I hear the
feet hurrying over the glassy pavements, the
voices calling to each other in the joy of ser-
vice, the ringing of the hammers on the anvils
where in the fire of the love of God, the per-
fect obedience of His redeemed is forging His
perfect will into the instruments of perfect
deeds. . . . You need not live alone, for you
may, if you will, know and obey God. You
and God, you and God, one system of power
knit together in mutual knowledge, and in
common standards. That is what Christ
claimed you for. . . . Come by Him to the
Father, and then live! O Christ, draw us,
thy Father's children, to our Father now!
IV. 295.
I need drawing, yea, much drawing.
For unless Thou drawest,
No one comes, no one follows,
Because every one turneth to himself.
THOMAS A KEMI-IS.
SEPTEMBER 14. 257
Now I know in part ; but then I shall know
even as I am known. i COR. xiii. 12.
'"THE more one thinks and studies, the more
1 he becomes aware how infinite is truth.
. . . Upon the subject which we know best we
are still out at sea. Every time a fellow-man's
finger touches our faith, it makes it rock, and
compels us to feel that, however well anchored
it is, so that it will not drift, it is very far
from being bolted and mortised into the solid
ground. . . . We know this is not good:
yet we very often do not see how it is to be
escaped. The real escape, I think, lies here.
The Christian faith is not primarily a belief in
Christian truth, but a belief in Christ. All
truth which we believe, we believe in and be-
cause of Him. We know that though we have
truly taken Him for our Master, He is very
far yet from having told us all that He has to
tell. That knowledge binds us to Him not
merely by what He has already taught us, but
by the far greater truth which He is keeping
for us, which He will give us in His good time.
III. 304, 305.
For veils of hope before Thee drawn,
For mists that hint the immortal coast
Hid in Thy farthest, faintest dawn,
My God, for these I thank Thee most.
Joy, joy! to see, from every shore
Whereon my step makes pressure fond,
Thy sunrise reddening still before!
More light, more love, more life beyond!
LUCY LARCOM.
258 SEPTEMBER 15.
Now we see through a glass darkly, but then
face to face. 2 COR. xiii. 12.
// doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we
know that when He shall appear, we shall be like
Him. i JOHN iii. 2.
ALL these words reach forward. They all
own a present incompleteness. The soul
which uses them is discontented, and lives
upon its hope. And when their great fulfil-
ment comes, he who has entered into the joy
they promise will look back as from a moun-
tain top, and see all experience till then only
as the climbing, shining stairway, so built that
along it this complete destiny, this entire life,
might be attained. XII. 21.
Enough that blessings undeserved
Have marked my erring track;
That wheresoe'er my feet have swerved
His chastenings turned me back,
That more and more a Providence
Of love is understood,
Making the springs of time and sense
Sweet with eternal good,
That care and trial seem at last,
Through memory's sunset air,
Like mountain ranges overpast
In purple distance fair,
That all the jarring notes of life
Seem blending in a psalm,
And all the angles of its strife
Slow rounding into calm. WHITTIER.
SEPTEMBER 16. 259
The Beatitiful Gate of the temple. ACTS iii. 10.
EVERY human life starts in the beautiful
mystery of childhood. Through that
Beautiful Gate every man comes into the tem-
ple. . . . And that sets us to asking whether
to the beautiful temple of a mature religious
life there is also a beautiful gate. . . . Here
are children all among us, and yet we often
talk to one another as if nobody under twenty
had anything to do with the great things which
are of such unspeakable importance after we
have come of age. . . . The current idea of
the churches, which has only just begun to be
dislodged, that adult conversion is the type
and intended rule of Christianity, comes largely
from the fact that the first preachers had of
necessity to be occupied with men who had
known nothing of Christianity in their youth.
Peter and Paul had to go to grown-up men,
and ask them to begin the Christian life. But
surely that was not to be the perpetual picture
of Christian culture. Christ was too human for
that. . . . Christ had been too evidently a
child; the Incarnation had too evidently taken
all of life into its benediction for the children
ever to be wholly counted out.
IV. 128, 129, 130.
The innocence that is so wise,
The trust that dreams of no disguise,
The simple faith in mysteries,
These still shall in the world survive
So long as God doth children give,
To keep the child in us alive.
SAMUEL LONGFELLOW.
260 SEPTEMBER 17.
WE hear much in these days of the preco-
city of childhood. . . . Josephus tells
us that once in the siege of Jerusalem this
golden gate which we have made the image of
childhood, " was seen to be opened of its own
accord about the sixth hour of the night."
Some thought it was a good omen, "as if God
did open to them the gate of happiness."
Others thought it was very bad, "as if the gate
were open to the advantage of their enemies."
So in this critical time of ours, not the least
critical sign is this: that the golden gate stands
open wide, that childhood is exposed and sensi-
tive to new impressions and ideas. Is it for
good or evil ? . . . The wider open the gate
the better, if only the truth can be poured in.
The more receptive the children's life the
better, if only they who train the children can
thoroughly believe that there is a manly and
beautiful religion of which the child is capa-
ble, and work with God to bring their children
to it. When that conviction takes possession
of the Church, then the Church shall indeed
have her children in her arms. Then Isaiah's
vision of the complete New Jerusalem shall be
fulfilled: "Thou shalt call thy walls salva-
tion, and thy gates praise."
IV. 150.
" Beautiful gates are for beautiful things,
Beautiful thought on beautiful wings,
Beautiful love that heavenward springs."
SEPTEMBER 18. 261
IN almost every Christian's experience come
times of despondency and gloom, when
there seems to be a depletion of the spiritual
life, when the fountains that used to burst and
sing with water are grown dry, when love is
loveless, and hope hopeless, and enthusiasm so
utterly dead and buried that it is hard to be-
lieve that it ever lived. At such times there is
nothing for us to do but hold with eager hands
to the bare, rocky truths of our religion, as
a shipwrecked man hangs to a strong, rugged
cliff when the great retiring wave and all the
little eddies all together are trying to sweep
him back into the deep. . . . Then, when the
tide turns, and we can hold ourselves lightly
where we once had to hang heavily, when faith
grows easy, and God and Christ and responsi-
bility and eternity are once more the glory and
delight of happy days and peaceful nights,
then certainly there is something new in them,
a new color, a new warmth. The soul has
caught a new idea of God's love when it has
not only been fed but rescued by Him.
IV. 120.
I know not what the future hath
Of marvel or surprise,
Assured alone that life and death
His mercy underlies.
I know not where His islands lift
Their fronded palms in air;
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond His love and care.
WHITTIER.
262 SEPTEMBER 19.
And one of them, when he saw that he was
healed, turned back, and fell down on his face at
His feet, giving Him thanks.
LUKE xvii. 15, 16.
THERE is such a difference between coming
out of sorrow thankful for relief, and
coming out of sorrow full of sympathy with
and trust in Him who has released us. Nine
lepers hurry off to show themselves with their
white skins to the priest. One leper only
waits to cast himself at the feet of Jesus and
worship Him. Tell me, will not those nine
be different from that one if ever a new dis-
ease should fall upon them all ?
Let that one leper be the type of the soul
to whom the whole blessedness of a blessing
from Christ has come. Not only the health
but the Healer he delights in. Not only the
salvation but the Saviour is his glory and his
joy. Such souls there are; souls to which all
the deliverances and the educations that have
filled their past lives are precious, not merely
for the safety and the instruction which they
have brought, but far more for the personal
knowledge of the Deliverer and the Teacher
which has been won in them, and in whose
strength the soul looks on and faces all that
the future has to bring without a fear.
II- 333-
Faith sees the future in the past:
Its Saviour is its First and Last.
SEPTEMBER 20. 263
\I 7E cannot believe in our Christ for our-
' ' selves, unless we believe in Him for all
the world. The more deeply we believe in
Him for ourselves, the more certain we shall
be that he is the Saviour of the world. A deeper
personal faith, a more complete discipleship,
that is what you want. Have that, and the
apostleship must come. If there is any part of
your life not wholly consecrated to Him, if
there is any of His love which you have not
appropriated, if there is any undone duty
which, as you do it, will open a new door into
His heart, if there is any word by speaking
which you may the more utterly commit your-
self to Him; just as surely as in any of these
ways you deepen your own spiritual life and
make Jesus more your Saviour, just so surely
you will believe in Foreign Missions, and long
to tell all men that He is their Saviour too.
IV. 172.
Oh, if our brother's blood cry out at us,
How shall we meet Thee who hast loved us
all,
Thee whom we never loved, not loving him ?
The unloving cannot chant with seraphim,
Bear harp of gold or palm victorious,
Or face the vision beatifical.
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.
264 SEPTEMBER 21.
Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and
said, Why could not we cast him out ?
MATT. xvii. 9.
IN our story Christ, when He came and found
the Disciples helpless before their task, put
forth His hand and healed the sick boy with
no help of theirs. But that was an excep-
tional event. . . . The great method of His
operation when it was thoroughly established
was to work through obedient men. It was
Matthew's obedience in the hand of Christ's
commandment that saved Matthew. ... If
any of you are struggling with your sins, I
beg you to learn the truth and see it wholly.
You cannot cast them out, but if you will give
yourself to Him, He can cast them out with
you. Hate your sins for His sake; let His
love fill you with love, and then the conquer-
ing of your sins by His help shall be in its
course one long enthusiasm, and at the end a
glorious success. III. i 9 g, 199.
I could not do without Thee,
Saviour of the lost!
Whose precious blood redeemed me,
At such tremendous cost.
I could not do without Thee;
1 cannot stand alone;
I have no strength or goodness,
No wisdom of my own.
But Thou, beloved Saviour,
Art all in all to me;
And weakness will be power,
If leaning hard on Thee.
FRANCES R. HAVERGAL.
SEPTEMBER 22. 265
The good will of Him that dwelt in the bush.
DEUT. xxxiii. 16.
THE identity of God's eternal being stretches
under, and gives consistence to, our frag-
mentary lives. God's eternity makes our time
coherent. And so it was God in the old bush
that made it still visible to Moses across the
eventful interval. He saw that bush when all
the other bushes of Egypt had faded out of
sight, because that bush was on fire with God.
And as Christianity is the most vivid of all re-
ligions, with its personally manifested God,
there is a more perfect unity in a Christian life
than in any other. It keeps all its parts, and
from its consummations looks back with grati-
tude and love to its beginnings. The crown
that it casts before the throne at last is the
same that it felt trembling on its brow in the
first ecstatic sense of Christ's forgiveness,
and that has been steadily glowing into greater
clearness as perfecting love has more and more
completely cast out fear. The feet that go
up to God into the mountain, at the end, are
the same that first put off their shoes beside the
burning bush. This is why the Christian,
more than other men, not merely dares but
loves to look back and remember.
II. 40.
Help me to look behind, before,
To make my past and future form
A bow of promise, meeting o'er
' The darkness of my day of storm.
PHEBE GARY.
266 SEPTEMBER 23.
good will of Him that dwelt in the
1 bush." ... In some church-pew, in
some closet's privacy, in some stillness or
some crowd, years ago the fire came; the com-
mon life about you burned with the sudden
presence of Divinity; God called you, and you
gave yourself to God. I bid you look back
and see the mercy that has led you ever since,
and strengthen your hope and courage and
charity and faith as you remember the long,
long good-will of Him that dwelt in the bush.
And some of you are standing just by the bush-
side still, the shoes off your feet, the voice of
God in your ears, lifted up with the desire for
the new life of Christ. You are determined
to be His, for He has called you. Well, till
the end, life here and hereafter will be only
the unfolding of this personal love which seems
to you so dear and so mysterious now. . . .
The mercy which takes you into its bosom at
last in heaven, will be still the old familiar
good-will of Him that dwelt in the bush.
II. 58.
My soul is melted by that love,
So tender and so true;
I can but cry: My God and Lord,
What wilt Thou have me do ?
My blessings all come back to me,
And round about me stand;
Help me to climb their dizzy stairs,
Until I touch Thy hand!
ALICE GARY.
SEPTEMBER 24. 267
There is some soul of goodness in things evil,
Would men observingly distil it out.
SHAKESPEARE.
THE sins Christ has forgiven are dead, but
they are not gone. If none of the dead
go from us, if when death comes a new and
finer life begins, and he whom we call dead is
with us in sweetest, subtlest portion of his
life, with everything of harshness, every dis-
agreement, every power of harm taken out,
why may it not be so with our dead sins ? It
is so, surely! There is a soul in them which
lives on still while their body of wickedness
has perished a soul of patience, of watchful-
ness, of gratitude, and of never-dying love.
O my dear friends, we have not done with a
sin of ours, we have not finished its history,
until, long, long after it has died in the kind
forgiveness of the Saviour, we have traced the
eternal career of the spirit which its death
has liberated into life, giving steadfastness to
duty, and charity to friendship, and unutter-
able tenderness to the love of the Saviour till
eternity shall end.
That is what our sins shall be to us forever.
They die as sins in forgiveness that they may
live forever as the impulses of holiness and
the exhaustless fountains of love.
VII. 128.
From rank decay the fairest flowers grow;
From buried springs the sweetest waters flow.
JULIA WOOD.
268 SEPTEMBER 25.
JUST as a delightful study, into which some
^ dear friend first initiated you, has always
over and above its own delightfulness a beauty
that comes from your love to him; so the soul
that Jesus has made holy lives always in the
beauty of holiness, made more exquisite and
dear by the loveliness of Christ. Of every
earthly grace as well as of the heavenly glory
it is true that ' ' the Lamb is the light thereof. ' '
Every new attainment which the Christian
makes is but an entrance into another man-
sion which his Saviour has made ready for
him. He grows brave, but Christ was brave
before him. He enters into self-sacrifice, but
Christ leads him with His cross. He finds the
home of his soul at last in perfect union with
God; but the Godhood is familiar and doubly
dear to him because of the Christhood through
which he enters it. All virtue, holiness, and
truth, throughout the universe, loses the chill
of abstractness and glows with the warmth of
personal love.
VI. 184.
Love greatens and glorifies
Till God's a glow to the loving eyes
In what was mere earth before.
BROWNING.
Do not I fill heaven and earth ? saith the Lord.
JER. xxiii. 28.
SEPTEMBER 26. 269
From henceforth let no man trouble me, for I
bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.
GAL. vi. 17.
IN its clumsy, halting way the outer is the
record of the inner life. The body is the
story of the soul. We bear in our flesh the
marks of our masters. . . . "Who is your
master?" is the question that includes all
questions. If a man tries to push that ques-
tion aside, he declares that he is his own mas-
ter. And then he bears in his body the marks
of himself; the faded colors and the scars mean
only wilfulness and selfishness. But now sup-
pose that life has meant for that man, from
the beginning, the claiming of his soul by a
higher soul; . . . that the life is Christ's life,
uttering His wishes, seeking His purposes,
filled and inspired by His love, reckoning its
vitality by the degree of conscious and realized
sympathy with Him, and then it will be true
that every outward sign in which those inward
experiences are recorded will become a mark
of the Lord Jesus, a sign of the occupation of
the nature by His nature which is what it has
meant for this man to live.
II. 357, 358, 359-
Yea, let the fragrant scars abide,
Love-tokens in Thy stead,
Faint shadows of the spear-pierced side
And thorn-encompassed head.
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN.
270 SEPTEMBER 27.
No man can serve two masters. MATT. vi. 24.
SHALL you be God's or the world's ? Be
both! Not in any low miserable compro-
mise. Not by the effort to serve God and
mammon. But by a brave and filial question-
ing of God that He may tell you just how He
wants a child of His to live in this peculiar
time and under these peculiar circumstances of
yours. There is a type of universal human life
in harmony with the best life of all the ages, in
tune with the sublimest and finest spiritual
music of the universe, in harmony also with
the profoundest dictates of your own personal
conscience, which you can live in your parlor
and your shop; and that life you can reach if
you are consecrated to God in your own place
and time. If you live that life, the world of
the present owns you and claims you and re-
joices in you. The most distant life of man
looks in on you and recognizes you as a part
of itself, and says, "Well done!" Up from
your own conscience speaks your self-approval.
And God your Father bends His love around
you, and out of His blessing feeds you with
His strength. VI. 240.
Take my life, and let it be
Consecrated, Lord, to Thee.
Take my will, and make it Thine;
It shall be no longer mine.
Take myself, and I will be
Ever, only, all for Thee.
FRANCES R. HAVERGAL.
SEPTEMBER 28. 271
TO be religious, to be a Christian, means
something accurate and specific. It is
not to be a little stronger than the strongest, a
little wiser than the wisest, a little truer than
the truest. It is something more. It is some-
thing different from all. It is to have taken
up a new quality of being, which God only
gives through Jesus Christ, ... to have be-
come the subject of forces deeper, dealing with
profounder regions of the nature, than were
ever stirred before. . . .
Let a plant try to be a bird forever and it
will forever fail. It may grow to be a very
superior plant, unfold a lordly beauty to the
wondering sun, but between it and the song
and the flight and the nest lies forever the gulf
that separates flower-life from bird-life and
never can be crossed. Let a man try to be a
Christian forever. The struggle may make
him, I believe it will make him, a better man;
but between him and the strength and the
peace and the love yawns forever the gulf that
separates man-life from God-life, and which no
man ever yet crossed save as he stretched out
both his helpless hands to God and felt a hand
too powerful not to trust clasp them and lift
him, whither he knew not, till lo! the gulf was
crossed, and he had entered on the new life
that they live who live in God.
VII. 160.
In Thy presence is fulness of joy. Ps. xvi. n.
272 SEPTEMBER 29.
NOTICE the mysterious personalness with
which sin presents itself as a tempter to
the hearts of men, what we usually hear
stated as the doctrine of "besetting sins."
. . . Why is it that he who is most liable to
pride, has such continual incitements to over-
weening vanity ? Why is it that the poor ine-
briate, trying to give up his drink, finds the
whole world full of beckoning fingers and
tempting voices that keep calling back again
his dying passions into life ? To the light and
over-frivolous character all nature shapes itself
into a chorus and sings siren songs to scare
incipient thoughtfulness away. . . . Does it
not seem that we are living in the midst of
mysterious forces leagued against our souls,
that our enemy is mysterious, is superhuman ?
Mysterious and superhuman, then, must be our
safety and defence. ... " We wrestle not
against flesh and blood, but against . . .
powers, against the rulers of the darkness of
this world."
VI. 9, 10, 27.
Michael, the leader of the hosts of God,
Who warred with Satan for the body of him
Whom, living, God had loved! If cherubim
With cherubim contended for one clod
Of human dust, for forty years that trod
The gloomy desert of man's chastisement,
Are there not ministering angels sent
To battle with the devils that roam abroad,
Clutching at living souls ? The living, still,
The living, they shall praise Thee!
DINAH MULOCH CRAIK.
SEPTEMBER 30. 273
When Jacob slept in Bethel, and there dreamed
Of angels ever climbing and descending
A ladder, whose last height of splendor seemed
With glory of the Ineffable Presence blend-
ing, . . .
Foretold they His descent, the Son of God,
Who humbly clothed Himself in vestments
mortal,
And so, encumbered with our weakness, trod
With us the stairway to His Father's portal
To life whose inner secret none can win
Save by surmounting earthliness and sin ?
LUCY LARCOM.
BE sure that you mount up to Christ by
gaining His view of yourself, and that
you do not drag Him down to yourself by
your selfishness, and then you may freely claim
Him in your commonest life, and bid Him do,
and honor Him for doing, the work which He
craves and delights in when He says: " I am
among you as He that serveth." ... I will
be studiously on my guard not to mistake the
cravings of my nature for the voice of the
coming Christ, but I will not silence those
cravings of my nature when they welcome the
coming Christ, I will bid them speak, I will
listen for God's answer to them, and when
Christ does come it shall make the witness of
His coming perfectly conclusive and complete
that it is not merely in the clouds of heaven,
but through the worn and torn avenues of my
conscious human necessities, that He comes.
VI. 293.
274 OCTOBER i.
If I lay waste and wither up with doubt
The blessed fields of heaven where once my
faith
Possessed itself serenely safe from death;
If I deny the things past finding out;
Or if I orphan my own soul of One
That seemed a Father, and make void the place
Within me where He dwelt in power and grace,
What do I gain by that I have undone ?
W. D. Ho WELLS.
THERE is a great deal of danger of our
forgetting that to believe much, and not
to believe little, is the privilege and glory of
a full-grown man. There will come times
and upon such a time our lot has fallen when
men are led to sing the praise and glorify the
influence of doubt. Assuredly it has its bless-
ings, but while we magnify them we ought
never to forget that they are always of the
nature of compensation. . . . There do come
times when you must cut a tree down to its
very roots in order that it may grow up the
richer by-and-by; but a whole field of stumps
is not the ideal landscape. The forest, with
its wealth of glorious foliage, is the true cor-
onation of the earth. . . . Seek faith as full
and rich a faith as you can find. Try to know
all you can about God and your own soul.
Count every new conviction which is really
won a treasure and enrichment of your life.
VII. 319.
OCTOBER 2. 275
Help Thou mine unbelief. MATT. ix. 24.
YOU say: " Why is it so easy for others to
believe, so hard for me?" There is a
willing and an unwilling unbelief. Man must
not complain that the sun does not shine on
him, because he shuts his eyes. If it is un-
willing unbelief; if you really want the truth;
if you are not afraid to submit to it as soon
as you shall see it; . . . then you are not
to be pitied. To climb the mountain on its
hardest side, where its granite ribs press out
most ruggedly, where you must skirt round
chasms and clamber down and up ravines,
all this has its compensations. You know the
mountain better when you reach its top. It
is a realler, a nobler, and so a dearer thing.
... If you can only keep on bravely, perse-
veringly, seeking the truth, saying, " I must
have it or die; " saying that till you do die;
dying at last, if needs be, in the search; then
I declare not only that somewhere here or in
a better world the truth shall come to you,
but that, when it comes, the peace and the
serenity of it shall be made vital with the en-
ergy of your long search. . . . For perfect
truthfulness must find the truth at last, or
where is God ?
IV. 122.
If thou seek for truth, and do it,
Not in vain shalt thou pursue it.
If thou seek for truth, and live it,
He who is the Truth will give it.
L. M.
276 OCTOBER 3.
That ye may be filled with all the fulness of
God. EPHES. iii. 19.
THE Incarnation, the beginning of the
earthly life of Christ, was the fulfilment,
the filling full, of a human nature by Divinity.
It made the man in whom the miracle occurred
absolutely perfect man. It did not make Him
something else than man. . . . Whenever He
says to men " Follow Me," He is declaring
that He is man as they are men, that the pe-
culiar Divinity which filled Him, while it car-
ried humanity to its complete development,
had not changed that humanity into something
which was no longer human. Can we picture
that to ourselves ? Is it not just as when the
sunlight fills a jewel ? The jewel throbs and
glows with radiance. All its mysterious nature
palpitates and burns with clearness. It opens
depths of color which we did not see before.
But still it is the jewel's self that we are see-
ing. The sunlight has made us see what it
is, not turned it into something different from
what it was. . . . One thing evidently ap-
pears; which is that the developing power,
which brings the being into which it enters to
its best, has essential and natural relations to
the being which it develops. The jewel be-
longs to the light. And this must always be
the truth which must underlie all understand-
ing of the Incarnation. Man belongs to God.
The human nature belongs to the Divine.
II. 255, 256, 257.
/ am come that they might have life, and that
they might fyive it more abundantly. JOHN x. 10.
OCTOBER 4. 277
That ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may
be able , . . to know the love of Christ, which
passeth knowledge. EPHES. iii. 17, 19.
HEAVEN is not only real because His hu-
manity is there, not merely glorious
because His greatness is there. It is dear
because His love is there the love which
filled His earthly life, the love of the miracle
and of the wayside teaching and of the cross.
The nearness and the glory might be there and
yet Heaven not lay hold of our hearts. We
might be well content to stand far off and
gaze. We might not want to go there. We
might not listen for messages, nor send our
feeble voices forth in prayer. But now our
Christ is there, our Saviour, what wonder if
the earth a thousand times seems dull and
wearisome, and always gets its best brightness
from that other world in which He is, of which
this is the vestibule! . . . What wonder if the
hope that He will some day take us to Himself
abides calm and constant behind all the tran-
sitory hopes of life, which are lighted and go
out again and again, while that hope remains
always as the deep sky remains behind the
coming and the going of the stars!
VII. 301.
Some are resigned to go, might we such grace
attain
That we should need our resignation to re-
main.
RICHARD G. TRENCH.
278 OCTOBER 5.
Lo, I come. HEB. x. 7.
THE great Christian doctrine of the Atone-
ment tells us that when man fell from
holiness to sin, there appeared in the whole
universe only one nature which had in itself a
fitness to undertake the work of reconciliation
and restoral. . . . Then comes the question,
When did that fitness of the Christ begin ?
. . . What if He had borne forever the human
element in His Divinity, anointed Christ from
all eternity ? What if there had been forever
a Saviourhood in the Deity, an everlasting
readiness which made it always certain that, if
ever such a catastrophe as Eden came, such a
remedy as Calvary must follow ? Does not this
deepen all our thought of salvation ? Does it
not teach us what is meant by " the Lamb slain
from the foundation of the world " ?
And see how such a truth tallies with all
God's ways. This natural body of ours has
in itself the fitness for two sets of processes,
the processes of growth and the processes
of repair. You keep your arm unbroken,
and nature feeds it with continual health;
you break that same arm and the same nature
beautifully testifies her completeness, which
includes the power of the Healer as well as
the Supplier. So it is to me a noble thought,
that in an everlasting Christhood in the Deity
we have from all eternity a provision for the
exigency which came at last, a provision, not
temporary and spasmodic, but existing forever,
and only called out into operation by the
occurrence of the need.
VI. 316, 317.
OCTOBER 6. 279
am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.
MATT. v. 17.
IT is redemption and fulfilment that Christ
comes to bring to man. There is a true
humanity which is to be restored, and all whose
unattained possibilities are to be filled out.
. . . Man is a child of God, for whom his
Father's house is waiting. The whole crea-
tion is groaning and travailing until man shall
be complete.
As soon as we understand all this, then
what a great, clear thing salvation becomes.
Its one idea is health. Not rescue from suffer-
ing, not plucking out of fire, not deportation
to some strange, beautiful region where the
winds blow with other influences and the skies
drop with other dews, not the enchaining of
the spirit with some unreal celestial spell, but
health, the cool, calm vigor of the normal
human life; the making of the man to be
himself; the calling up out of the depths of
his being and the filling with vitality of that
self which is truly he, this is salvation!
V. 7, 9-
In Christ I touch the hand of God,
From His pure height reached down,
By blessed ways before untrod
To lift us to our crown;
Victory that only perfect is
Through loving sacrifice, like His.
LUCY LARCOM.
28o OCTOBER 7.
He answered and said, Who is He, Lord, that
I might believe on Him ? And Jesus saith unto
him, Thou hast both seen Him, and it is He that
talketh with thee. JOHN ix. 36, 37.
HOW touching in this special story is the
allusion to the light which the Lord had
given only that day!
Jesus reminds him of the lower mercy that
He may assure him of the higher. ... It is
as the Saviour of the past life that He offers
Himself for the future.
There have been great creative moments in
the history of the world, as all history and
science seem to show, moments when after
long, silent preparations, suddenly the old
order broke and a new, as if by magic, came
into its place. So it has been in physical and
social and political history. But in neither
was there any magic. The same force which
was in the last changing conviction had been
in all the preparation. The flower is but the
ripening of the same juices that built the
stem. So it is with conversion to the very
last. The Christ who in eternity opens the
last concealment, and lays His comfort and
life close to the deepest needs of the poor,
needy, human heart, is the same Christ that
first laid hands upon the blind eyes, and made
them see the sky and flowers.
V. 213, 214.
No stranger, but the Friend unseen,
Who from the first thy Friend hath been.
OCTOBER 8. 281
WHAT will heaven be ? ... I find manifold
fitness in the answer that tells us it shall
be " a sea of glass mingled with fire." Heaven
will not be pure stagnation, not idleness, not
any mere luxurious dreaming over the spirit-
ual repose that has been safely and forever
won; but active, tireless, earnest work; fresh,
live enthusiasm for the high labors which
eternity will offer. These vivid inspirations
will play through our deep repose and make it
more mighty in the service of God than any
feverish and unsatisfied toil of earth has ever
been. The sea of glass will be mingled with
fire.
Here too we have the type and standard of
that heavenliness of character which ought to
be ripening in all of us now, as we are getting
ready for that spiritual life. . . . Surely,
there is a very high and happy life conceiv-
able, which very few of us attain, yet which
our religion evidently intends for all of us.
Calm and active; peaceful and yet thoroughly
alive; resting always upon truth, but never
sleeping on it for a moment; working always
intensely, but serene and certain of results,
never driven crazy by our work; grounded and
settled, yet always moving forward in still but
sure progress; always secure, yet always alert,
glass mingled with fire. IV. 125, 126.
I dare not pray to Thee to give
The heaven which shall appear;
My cry is: Help me Thou to live
Within the heaven that's here!
ALICE GARY.
282 OCTOBER 9.
man ^ at ^ seen ^ oc ^ at
Jesus, but [beyond death] the power
of the new life is to be that "we shall see
Him as He is." It is our privilege to dwell
upon the untold, unguessed glory of the world
that is to come. It is a poor economy of
spiritual motive which tries to make heaven
real by taking out of it all thought of inex-
pressible and new delight, and bringing it
down to the tame repetition of the scenes and
ways of earth. But no one listens to the ta^k
or reads the books which are written about
heaven, without feeling that the glory and de-
light which they speak of are far too com-
pletely separated in kind from any which this
world's experience has taught us how to
value. It ought not to be so. The highest,
truest thought of heaven which man can have
is of the full completion of those processes
whose beginning he has witnessed here, their
completion into degrees of perfectness as yet
inconceivable, but still one in kind with what
he is aware of now.
V. 303.
Our Past had held our Future, like a rose
That may not yet its perfect self disclose,
Lest angry winds should scatter and molest;
So, shut within this narrow bud, its woes
Were but the crumpled leaves too closely
pressed,
And all its loveliness did but enclose
The germ of after beauty now a Guest,
But soon to be a Dweller.
DORA GREE.NWELL.
OCTOBER 10. 283
Whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased j
and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.
LUKE xiv. n.
SET a man to work, and if he were great
enough to be humble at all, his work
would bring him to humility. He would be
brought face to face with facts. He would
measure himself against the eternal pillars of
the universe. He would learn the blessed
lesson of his own littleness in the way in which
it is always learnt most blessedly, by learning
the largeness of larger things. And all this,
which the ordinary occupations of life do for
our ordinary powers, Christianity, with the
work that it furnishes for our affections and
our hopes, does for the higher parts of us.
It seems to come to this, that Christianity
is the religion of the broadest truthfulness. It
does not set men at any work of mere resolu-
tion, saying, " Come, now, let us be hum-
ble." That would but multiply the endless
specimens of useless self-mortification. But
true Christianity puts men face to face with
the humbling facts, the great realities, and
then humility comes upon the soul, as dark-
ness comes on the face of the earth, not be-
cause the earth has made up its mind to be
dark, but because it has rolled into the great
shadow. I. 350, 351.
284 OCTOBER ii.
" His state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest."
TO live in such a universe of obedient activ-
ity, to feel its movement, to be sensible
of its gloriousness, and yet to make no active
part of it would be dreadful. Milton felt this,
and in his last great line was compelled to
pierce down to the deepest truth about the
matter, and assert that he, too, even in his
blindness, had share in the obedience of the
untiring worlds:
" They also serve who only stand and wait."
.\y
Here is the deepest reason, here is the rea-
sonable glory of that which is perpetually ex-
alted and belauded in cheap and superficial
ways the excellence of work, the glory of
activity. Many of our familiar human in-
stincts live and act by deeper powers than
they know. That which is really the noble,
the divine element in the perpetual activity of
man is the sympathy of the obedient universe.
The circling stars, the flowing rivers, the grow-
ing trees, the whirling atoms, the rushing
winds, all things are in obedient action,
doing the will of God. It is the healthy im-
pulse of any true man who finds himself in
this active world to share in its activity. It is
the healthy shame of any true man to find
himself left out, having no part in that obe-
dience which keeps all life alive.
OCTOBER 12. 285
A MERICA was discovered in the fulness of
r\ time. First there had to come the long
education of the world which made possible
the energy and patience and skill that achieved
the task. And then we can see how it had to
be kept until the pressure of the crowded life
of the old world called for another continent
to work out to greater issues the problem of
human history. Then the great curtain was
withdrawn then, in the fulness of time.
So let men work away with their statistics
and their averages and prove how beautifully
under all our life there run the great necessi-
ties of God. . . . The curse or blessing cause-
less cannot come. And into the clear light of
all such speculations we may look to get a
clearer and more loving understanding of our
God. I see Him now as He stands holding
back the inventions and discoveries and insti-
tutions that are to make the next generation
glorious more glorious than ours, holding
them back until their time is full. The home
of the future, the republic of the future, the
Church of the future they must be built upon
the present, and they must wait until their
foundations shall be laid.
VII. 57, 60.
God's gracious purpose comes to fulfilment
Never too soon and never too late;
Bright o'er the clouded arch of His future
Shineth the legend: Trust thou and wait.
J. L. M. W.
286 OCTOBER 13.
WHO are the men who have succeeded in
the best way, who have done good
work while they lived, and have left their lives
like monuments for the inspiration of man-
kind ? They are the men who have . . . ques-
tioned the circumstances in which they found
themselves, and asked what was the best thing
which any man in just those circumstances
might set himself to do ? These are the men
before whom there rises by-and-by a dream,
which later gathers itself into a hope, and at
last solidifies into an achievement. Colum-
bus discovers America because he is Colum-
bus, and because the study of geography and
the enterprise of men have reached just this
point. Luther kindles the Reformation be-
cause he is Luther, and because the dry wood
of the papacy has come to just the right in-
flammability. You and I, who are not Luthers
nor Columbuses, but simply, by the grace of
God, earnest, true-hearted men, conceive some
purpose for our lives and "keep it clear before
us, praying that we may not die before we
do it; and at last doing it before we die, be-
cause we are we, and because the world in
which we live is just the world it is.
IV. 322.
Such faith, O God, our souls sustain,
Free, true, and calm, in joy and pain.
That even by our fidelity
Thy Kingdom may the nearer be!
SAMUEL LONGFELLOW.
OCTOBER 14. 287
'Tis sorrow builds the shining ladder up,
Whose golden rounds are our calamities,
Whereon our firm feet planting, nearer God
The spirit climbs, and hath its eyes unsealed.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
THE final purpose of all consolation and
help is revelation. The reason why we
are led into trouble and out again is not merely
that we may value happiness the more from
having lost it once and found it again, but
that we may know something which we could
not know except by that teaching, that we
may bear upon our nature some impress which
could not have been stamped except on na-
tures just so softened to receive it. u. 272.
Great truths are greatly won. Not found by
chance,
Nor wafted on the breath of summer dream,
But grasped in the great struggle of the soul,
Hard buffeting with adverse wind and
stream;
And in the day of conflict, fear and grief,
When the strong hand of God, put forth in
might,
Ploughs up the subsoil of the stagnant heart,
And brings the imprisoned truth-seed to the
light.
Wrung from the troubled spirit, in hard hours
Of weakness, solitude, perchance of pain,
Truth springs, like harvest from the well-
ploughed field,
And the soul feels it has not wept in vain.
HORATIUS BONAR.
288 OCTOBER 15.
Because thou hast kept the word of My patience ;
I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation.
REV. iii. 10.
TAKE the man whose life has known be-
reavement, who has passed sometime
through those days and nights which I may
not try to describe to you, but which come
up to so many of you as I say the old word,
death. Days and nights when he watched
the slow untwisting of some silver cord on
which his very life was hung, or suddenly felt
the golden bowl dashed down and broken of
which his very life had drank. The first shock
became dulled. The first agony grew calm.
The lips subsided into serenity. But was
there not something in him that made him
greater and purer and richer than of old;
something that let any one see who watched
the change, that it was " better to have loved
and lost than never to have loved at all " ? A
whole new quality, that rich quality which the
Bible calls by its large word "patience," the
power of his trial, was in his new serenity,
until he died.
IV. 114.
Grant us, O Lord, that patience and that faith :
Faith's patience imperturbable in Thee,
Hope's patience till the long-drawn shad-
ows flee,
Love's patience unresentful of all scathe.
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.
OCTOBER 16. 289
THE soul which God is training in solitude
thinks its life wasted because it is cut off
from society, and the soul that God keeps in
the very midst of its fellows sighs for the joy
and culture of being alone.
If we could only know that in its time only
is any Christian mood or condition beautiful,
and that God only knows its time! When
the day is over the stars will come, and then
it is good to see them; but to see them before
that, in the sunlight, you must go, men say,
down to the bottom of a well, where you do
not belong, which is unnatural and unhealthy.
When we have done with earth the heaven
will come; and, till that, only such heaven
and it is not a little as is possible upon the
dear old earth.
IV. 257.
What Thou wilt, O Father, give!
All is gain that I receive. . . .
Let the lowliest task be mine,
Grateful, so the work be Thine;
Let me find the humblest place
In the shadow of Thy grace. . . .
Clothe with life the weak intent,
Let me be the thing I meant;
Let me find in Thy employ
Peace that dearer is than joy;
Out of self to love be led
And to heaven acclimated,
Until all things sweet and good
Seem my natural habitude.
WHITTIER.
290 OCTOBER 17.
In everything ye are enriched by Him.
i COR. i. 4.
From Thee is all that soothes the life of man,
His high endeavors and his glad success,
His strength to suffer and his will to serve.
But O Thou sovereign Giver of all good,
Thou art, of all Thy gifts, Thyself the
crown ;
Give what Thou canst, without Thee we are
poor,
And with Thee rich, take what Thou wilt
away. COWPER.
THE knowledge of God lies behind every-
thing, behind all knowledge, all skill, all
life. That is the sum of the whole matter.
And then comes the great truth . . . that it is
only by the experiences of the soul, only by
penitence for sin, only by patient struggle
after holiness, only by trust, by hope, by love,
does God make Himself known to man. . . .
As the man becomes more pure, more peni-
tent, more sensitive to the least touch of sin,
more passionately eager to be good, so does
he grow for ever more and more sure of God.
And to him, thus growing ever surer of God,
the world he lives in becomes clothed with an
ever diviner light. . . .
Of heaven it is written that " the Lord God
Almighty and the Lamb are the light thereof."
This part of heaven at least may be begun be-
low. Not merely the earth we live in, but our
own especial life our work, our study, our
daily toil may live already in the light of
God. in. no.
OCTOBER 18. 291
Luke, the beloved physician. COL. iv. 14.
OF Luke alone it would appear as if he con-
tinued to do as a Christian the same
thing which he had done before. In him alone
we see what since his time has been the natu-
ral and normal type of Christian life, the
inspiration of a definite old occupation by a
new spiritual power, so that it continued to
be exercised, and showed its genuine capacity,
and fulfilled its true ideal.
Luke must have gone among his patients
saying, " I do this by the faith of the Son of
God." Tell me, when he could say that, was
there no holier sacredness in the finger which
he laid on the sick man's pulse ? Was there
no truer sense of sympathy with the men whom
he saw on every side of him engaged in other
works than his ?
Not by deserting your profession but by
deepening it, by seeking a new life under it,
by praying for and never resting satisfied until
you find regeneration, the new life lived by
the faith of the Son of God; so only can your
life of trade or art or profession be redeemed;
so only can it become both for you and for
the world a blessed thing. The necessary
labors which the nature of man and his rela-
tions to this earth demand, all done by men
full of the love of God, and each using to its
best the special faculty that is in him, the
world needs no other millennium than that.
V. 219, 224, 227.
292 OCTOBER 19.
And Balak said unto him, Come, I pray thee,
unto another place. . . . Thou shalt see but the
utmost part of them, and shalt not see them all:
and curse me them from thence,
NUMB, xxiii. 13.
THERE are parts of it [life] and aspects of it
which, if they were all, would make exist-
ence an accursed thing. "Come," says the
pessimist, " you shall not see the whole. I will
set you where you shall only see a part, and
curse me it from thence." There is where
pessimism is made. The man who sees the
whole of life must be an optimist. I know
dark points of view, grim gloomy crags of
moral vision, hideous observatories on which
if a man stands he can see nothing but the
dreadful side of life, its wretchedness, its dis-
appointment, its distress, its reckless, wanton,
defiant sin. I can see gathered on those hor-
rible observation points the despisers, the re-
vilers, the cursers of our human life. I know
that if I went up there and stood by their side,
my tongue would curse like theirs. But there
I will not go. If there be any point whence
I can see it all, however dimly, through what-
ever clouds, there I will go. So will I keep
my faith that life is good, and work with what
strength I can against its evils, knowing that
I work in hope. VI. 212.
" With patient step thy path of duty run:
God nothing does or suffers to be done,
But thou thyself would'st do it, didst thou see
The end of all events as well as He."
OCTOBER 20. 293
Pray without ceasing. 2 THESS. v. 17.
DRAYER involves far more than we ordina-
* rily think, a certain necessary relation
between the soul and God. The condition of
prayer is personal ; it looks to character. How
this rebukes our ordinary slipshod notions of
what it is to pray! God's mercy-seat is no
mere stall set by the vulgar roadside, where
every careless passer-by may put an easy hand
out to snatch any glittering blessing that
catches his eye. It stands in the holiest of
holies. We can come to it only through veils
and by altars of purification. To enter into
it, we must enter into God.
VI. 308.
O Infinite of joy and light,
Wherewith we are surrounded,
We lift our spirits to Thy height
Unfathomed and unbounded:
Thy greatness drowns our petty cares,
Thy heaven is in us, unawares.
O Infinite of Righteousness,
Breath of our inmost being!
Thy purity will cleanse and bless
The soul from evil fleeing:
We hide our sin-stained hearts in Thee,
And pray, " As Thou art, let us be! "
LUCY LARCOM.
294 OCTOBER 21.
YOU cry, " O Lord, solve me this problem! "
and the solution does not come. " What!
must I walk in darkness?" your poor soul
cries out; and then He comes and takes your
hand and says, " He that followeth Me shall
not walk in darkness, but shall have the Light
of Life." In place of the answer to your
prayer comes He to whom you prayed. You
have not got the solution of your problem; it
still floats in doubt. You have not got the
sure prophecy of the future; it is hid behind
the wavering and trembling veil. You have
not got the brother's dear presence for whose
life you cried and wrestled; he is walking be-
side the river of Life in the new Light of
Heaven. You have not got what you prayed
for, but you have got God! You have the
source, the fountain, the sun! You have
taken hold of the essential meaning and es-
sence of all these things for which you prayed,
in taking hold of Him to whom you prayed.
In His silence you have pressed back to Him.
. . . Not in the word He speaks but in the
word He is, you have found your reply.
V. 132.
Reach downward to the sunless days,
Wherein our guides are blind as we,
And faith is small and hope delays,
Take Thou the hands of prayer we raise,
And let us feel the light of Thee!
WHITTJER.
OCTOBER 22. 295
^ 11 7 HAT man goes bravely and faithfully
*^ through doubt and does not bring out
a soul to which truth seems to be infinitely
precious, and the human soul the most myste-
rious, sacred thing in the world ? Out of the
union of these two persuasions has come the
prophetship of this life which now you cannot
look at without seeing the infinite behind it
made clear by it.
Surely, if we believe this, then the way in
which God lets His children encounter great,
and sometimes terrible, experiences is not en-
tirely inexplicable. Surely if these souls which
are now deep in sorrow, or are being cast up
and down and back and forth in doubt, are
being thus annealed and purified that they
may come to be revealers, mediators between
God and their fellow-men, then into our won-
der at the existence of doubt and sorrow in
God's world there comes a little ray of light.
Who would not bear anything that could refine
his life into fitness for such a privilege as that ?
IV. 15.
Happy they who learn from crosses,
Changeful clouds and fears,
Life may richer be for losses,
Joyfuller for tears,
Faith by doubts be clearer made-
Stronger doubting souls to aid.
JULIA WOOD.
296 OCTOBER 23.
Though our outward man perish, yet the inward
man is renewed day by day. 2 COR. iv. 16.
IT is hard for us to imagine how flat and
shallow human life would be if there were
taken out of it this constant element the
coming up of the spiritual life where the phys-
ical life has failed. A man who never knew an
ache or a pain comes to a break in health, from
which he can look out on nothing but years of
sickness ; and then the soul within him . . .
claims its independence and supremacy, and
stands strong in the midst of weakness, calm
in the very centre of the turmoil and panic of
the aching body. The temper of the fickle
people changes, and the favorite of yesterday
becomes the victim of to-day; but in his mar-
tyrdom he sees for the first time the full value
of the truth he dies for, and thanks the flames
that have lighted up its preciousness. ... By
this revelation of the spiritual through the
broken physical life other men may learn its
value. This is what makes the sick-rooms and
the martyr-fires reasonable. In them has been
made manifest by suffering that the soul is
really more than the body, that the soul can
triumph when the body has nothing left but
disease and misery.
I. ii.
Most gladly, therefore, will I rest in my in-
firmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon,
me. 2 COR. xii. 9.
OCTOBER 24. 297
Arise, take up thy bed, and go into thine house.
MATT. ix. 6.
And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled
with fire. REV. xv. 2.
HOW does the fire get into the sea of glass ?
... It is repose mingled with struggle
. . . calmness still pervaded by the discipline
through which it has been reached. . . . You
may go through the crowded streets of heaven,
asking each saint how he came there, and you
will look in vain everywhere for a man morally
and spiritually strong, whose strength did not
come to him in struggle. . . . There is no ex-
ception anywhere. Every poor soul that the
Lord heals goes up the street like the man at
Capernaum, carrying its bed upon its back,
the trophy of its conquered palsy. There
are no glassy seas which will really bear the
weight of strong men but those that have the
fiery mingling. All others are counterfeits,
and crack or break. IV. 112, 119, 120.
Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows
Like harmony in music: there is a dark,
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, makes them cling to-
gether
In one society. How strange that all
The terrors, pains, and early miseries,
Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused
Within my mind, should e'er have borne a part,
And that a needful part, in making up
The calm existence that is mine when I
Am worthy of myself. Praise to the end!
Thanks to the means! WORDSWORTH.
298 OCTOBER 25.
'T'HIS time of ours, these men of ours, are
^ marked by a singular depth of personal
experience. The personal emotions, the anxi-
eties with regard to personal conditions, are
very intense. It is a time of much morbid-
ness, and so I think that the danger under
which men always labor, of letting the universe
take the color of the windows of their own
life through which they look at it, was never
so dangerous as to-day. More men to-day
think the world is wretched because they are
sad and bewildered, than would have trans-
ferred their own conditions to the outside uni-
verse in less introspective and self-conscious
times. The simplest men in the simplest ages,
when they were in sorrow, opened their win-
dows inward to let the world's sunlight in.
The elaborate and subtle men in the elaborate
and subtle ages, in their sorrow, open their
windows outward and darken the bright world
with their darkness. And among such men,
in such an age, we live.
II. 157, 158.
We make the light through which we see
The light, and make the dark:
To hear the lark sing, we must be
At heaven's gate with the lark.
ALICE GARY.
OCTOBER 26. 299
Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
Is with eternity, and only there.
WORDSWORTH.
TTHE history of man bears witness, that
man, though himself finite, demands in-
finity to deal with and to rest upon; he claims
to have relations with the infinite. That fact is
borne testimony to by all the ages; that fact
is the perpetual witness of the consciousness
in man's heart that he is the child of God.
The child may be reminded every moment
of his limitations and his youth, and yet he
always mounts up to claim the largeness of
his father's life for himself. And so man, the
more you make him feel his finiteness, so much
the more obstinately will he insist on his right
to a potential possession of the infinite. The
power of adoring love of which he is distinctly
conscious, brings him assurance that there is
a being worthy of such love.
III. I2O, 121.
Into the heaven of Thy heart, O God,
I lift up my life like a flower;
Thy light is deep, and Thy love is broad,
And I am not the child of an hour.
LUCY LARCOM.
300 OCTOBER 27.
Behold, as thou passest through things mortal,
And amidst creatures visible,
Seeking to be contented with them,
Thou losest better things.
Thou separatest thyself from the Sovereign
Good when thou doest this,
And turnest away from the true and blessed
life which is eternal.
THOMAS A KEMPIS.
TTAVE you ever stood in the midst of the
* * world of fashion and marvelled how it
was possible that men and women should care,
as those around you seemed to care, about the
little conventionalities which made the scenery
and the problems of its life ? . . . There is a
noble economy of the deepest life. . . . The
people of Nazareth wanted to stone Christ,
and He quietly passed away and left them with
their stones in their hands; but the cross de-
manded Him, and He went up to the terri-
ble experience with a soul consecrated to
endure it all, and spared Himself not one blow
of the scourge upon the shoulders, and not
one piercing of the nails into the hands and
feet. He knew what was worth while; and
He knew that because He was one with God,
the Son of God could not count the great
little nor the little great. That was the secret
of Hirs perfect life.
V. 247, 248, 251.
OCTOBER 28. 301
And when it was day, He called unto Him His
disciples, and of them He chose twelve, whom He
also named Apostles. LUKE vi. 13.
'""THINK what they must have been before
1 they knew their master. The open life of
free and thoughtless young men they must have
lived, easily making friends, easily entering
into everybody's superficial interests because
they had only superficial feelings of their own,
liking to be liked, and full of ready sympathies.
Then they met Jesus. They were drawn away
to Him. By Him they were drawn in upon
themselves. To know Him and their own
deeper lives in Him, became their longing.
. . . Their lives were folded in upon them-
selves, and upon Him who was at the centre of
each. But by-and-by a new power began to
work at the unfolded heart. He who had
drawn them in upon Himself began to send
them abroad. Another kind of love for their
old friends, and all the world whom those
friends represented, came to them. They be-
gan to be seen again upon the streets. Only
now they are telling every one of the new life.
They have been drawn in from the world upon
Christ, that He might send them out, full of
Himself, into the world. IV. 159.
And that Thou sayest " Go! "
Our hearts are glad, for he is still Thy friend
And best beloved of all, whom Thou dost send
The farthest from Thee; this Thy servants
know:
Oh, send by whom Thou wilt, for they are blest
Who go Thy errands. DORA GREENWELL.
302 OCTOBER 29.
If they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt
them ; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they
shall recover. MARK xvi. 19.
IS that a prize ? Is it wages which is offered
for a certain meritorious act which is
called faith ? Not so, surely! It is a conse-
quence. It is a necessity. Safety and help-
fulness. These come out of the full life of
Christ in the soul of man as the inevitable
fruits. Safety, so that what hurts other men
shall not hurt him. Helpfulness, so that his
brethren about him shall live by his life. . . .
It is by life, by full, vigorous, emphatic exist-
ence that men are safe in this world, and that
they save other men from death. I glory in
such a statement as that. It makes my Bible
shine. Men everywhere are trying to be safe
by stifling life; by living just as low as possi-
ble. Men everywhere are trying not to do
one another harm, trying to spare each
other's souls by tender petting, by guarding
them against any vigorous contact with life and
thought. The Bible comes glowing with pro-
test. " Not so," it says. " Only by the ful-
ness of life does safety come. Only by the
power of contact with life are sick and help-
less souls made whole. None but the live man
saves himself or quickens the dead to life;
saves himself or saves his neighbor."
IV. 337-
Light is light which radiates,
Blood is blood which circulates,
Life is life which generates.
EMERSON.
OCTOBER 30. 303
Hold hard, hope hard, in the subtle thing
That's spirit; though cloistered fast, soar free.
BROWNING.
1 THINK there never was a materialist so
complete that he did not realize that the
great mass of men were not materialists, but
believed in spiritual forces and longed for
spiritual companies. He might think the spir-
itual tendency the wildest of delusions, but
he could not doubt its prevalence. How
could he ? Here is the whole earth full of it.
Language is all shaped upon it. Thought is
all saturated with it. In the most imposing
and the most vulgar methods, by solemn ora-
cles and rocking tables, men have been always
trying to put themselves into communication
with the spiritual world and to get counsel
and help from within the veil. And if we
hear the cry from one another, how much more
God hears it, ... and has prepared a way of
aid. The power of the Holy Ghost! an ever-
lasting spiritual presence among men. What
but that is the thing we want ? That is what the
old oracles were dreaming of, what the modern
spiritualists are fumbling after. The power
of the Holy Ghost . . . that is God's one
great response to the unconscious need of
spiritual guidance which He hears crying out
of the deep heart of every man. n. 105.
Heavenly things my soul hath seen,
Things the Holy Spirit shows,
Things on which the heart can lean
When the flesh has no repose.
ANNA L. WARING.
304 OCTOBER 31.
In everything by prayer and supplication .
let your requests be made known unto God,
PHIL. iv. 6.
TRUE, the most earnest Christian may err
about the will of God. He may pray
for sunshine when it is the will of God that it
should rain. He may ask for comfort when
it is God's will that he should suffer. But
this can only come in superficial things. In
the one central thing of all his own spiritual
life he cannot err. He knows that " this is
the will of God, even his sanctification." He
may cry out for that with perfect certainty;
and for all other things, if he prays as every
Christian ought, submitting his prayer to
God's revision, " Nevertheless, not my will,
but Thine be done;" then, whether the spe-
cial blessing that he asked is sent or not, the
larger petition with which he covered in and
included his lesser one is surely answered.
The thing he really "willed" is "done unto
him."
VI. 305.
" Not as I will ": the sound grows sweet
Each time my lips the words repeat. . .
" Not as I will," because the One
Who loved us first and best has gone
Before us on the road, and still
For us must all His love fulfil
" Not as we will."
HELEN HUNT JACKSON.
NOVEMBER i. 305
The riches of the glory of His inheritance in
the saints. EPHES. i. 18.
T AM sure that the world is a better place for
you and me to live in to-day, not merely
for the hundred great pattern lives which have
passed into the heavens and which we call still
by their names, but far more for the countless,
nameless multitude of men and women who
have wrought into the very substance of the
earth, where at last they lay their bodies in
unnoticed graves, the great, first, simplest
words of God that man was sacred, that
duty was possible, that self-sacrifice was
sweet, and that love for one's brother was the
crown of life. And you ought not to be sat-
isfied until you find yourself able to feel that
the hope of doing something by your living
to make the world in a real, although an un-
appreciable, degree more full of these words
for the men who are to follow us, is the noblest
and most inspiring promise which can be set
before your soul.
VI. 268.
For he who blesses most is blest,
And God and man shall own his worth
Who toils to leave as his bequest
An added beauty to the earth.
WHITTIER.
3 o6 NOVEMBER 2.
WE have all stood upon the margin which
was the farthest which feet untransfig-
ured by death might reach, and sent some
beloved soul into the unknown world. Where
have we sent it ? To God, we say, bowing our
heads with resignation. But is there no bleak-
ness, no forlornness in our answer ? God is
so far off! However loving, kind, or wise,
He is all God; the child we sent Him was all
man in his fresh, genuine humanity. But what
if there be a humanity in God to which they
go ? What if, since it went out from us, that
human nature, made first in the image of
Christ the human, has touched again that per-
fect nature out of which it sprang and finds
itself at home ? Yes, let me set this Christ
eternally in the midst of the other world, and
then the human soul that goes there goes to
its own. It meets no strangeness on the other
shore. . . . The child is gathered into the
arms of a fatherhood and knows no strange-
ness or surprise. The brother clasps hands
with a newer and more trusty brotherhood.
. . . They go to Jesus and rest in Him, and
wait for us till our humanity, made perfect too
by death, shall find its place beside them.
VI. 325.
Praise God the Shepherd is so sweet !
Praise God the Country is so fair!
We could not hold them from His feet;
We can but haste to meet them there.
B. M.
NOVEMBER 3. 307
Who, passing through the valley of Baca, make
it a well. Ps. Ixxxiv. 6.
IN man, the user, rests the real nature of the
things he uses. They have no invariable,
fixed nature apart from him.
Now, let this great user, man, this one
moral force, be called upon to go down into
the vale of misery. He finds there all the
circumstances of suffering poverty, sickness,
bereavement, sin itself; what then ? these are
things, and he is man. Let him rule them,
not be ruled by them. Let him take down
there a religious, trustful nature, a pious,
cheerful heart, and there is more promised
him than just that his cheerful piety shall sup-
port him through; he shall exercise his human
right of ruling and using these, and shall come
out with a more perfect joy and certain faith
than he carried in. He shall not come out
half-dead with thirst, just able to drag himself
up to the fountain at the end, but it shall be
as David so beautifully says: " He shall drink
of the brook in the way, therefore shall he
lift up his head."
VI. 28.
O Lord, of good the fountain free,
Close by our hard day's journeying,
Be Thou the all-sufficing spring,
And hourly let us drink of Thee!
SUSAN COOLIDGE.
3 o8 NOVEMBER 4.
When no low thoughts of self intrude,
Angels adjust our rights;
But love that seeks its selfish good
Dies in its own delights.
How much we take, how little give!
Yet every life is meant
To help all lives; each man should live
For all men's betterment.
ALICE GARY.
MEN think that they can be safe without
being helpful, and thence come all the
selfish notions of salvation. Merely to crawl
through life with face and mouth so bandaged
up with caution that the foul air of life cannot
affect us; merely to strike out from the wreck
of a fallen world and swim ashore, shaking off
all the drowning men who clutch at us in the
wild water, and leaving the screaming wretches
to their fate, the man who seeks salvation
so, finds at last to his disappointment and dis-
may that he is not saved. It is not the hands
that catch us and hold on to us, it is the
hands of helpless men which we shake off in
our selfishness that drag us down. iv. 347.
Wherever upward even the lowest round
Man by a hand's help lifts his feebler
brother,
There is the house of God, and holy ground:
The gate of heaven is Love; there is none
other.
When generous act blooms from unselfish
thought,
The Lord is with us, though we know it not.
LUCY LARCOM.
NOVEMBER 5. 309
IT is not only the suffering in life that needs
to be spoken to and helped. There is
something else, I think, that is almost more
exhausting than suffering in its constant wear-
ing pressure upon the hearts of men. It is
that feeling of the insignificance of life that
often grows so hard to bear, . . . the wonder
whether it means anything, the utter loss of
any insight into what it means this work of
living. . . . Who can speak to and dispel this
spectre ? Who can tell us with authority that
life has a meaning, and make us see it and
rejoice to live for it ? Who but the gospel of
reconciliation ? If that is true, if all these
heavenly forces are at work upon our life, if
all this watchful interest hovers over what we
are doing, if we may really go on and be the
children of God, where is there any insignifi-
cant detail ? Who can help feeling purpose run
like life-blood through the half-dried veins of
his discouragement ? How life lifts itself up
with interest and dignity when it really be-
comes the culture of God's redeemed children
for their Father's house!
VII. 107.
I hear from all-wards, allwise understand,
The great bird Purpose bears me 'twixt her
wings,
And I am one of all the kinsmen things
That e'er my Father fathered. Oh, to me
All questions solve in this tranquillity!
SIDNEY LANIER.
3io NOVEMBER 6.
REAT is the power of a life which knows
that its highest experiences are its truest
experiences, that it is most itself when it is at
its best. For it each high achievement, each
splendid vision, is a sign and token of the
whole nature's possibility. What a piece of
the man was for that shining instant, it is the
duty of the whole man to be always. . . .
Strive for your best, that there you may find
your most distinctive life. We cannot dream
of what interest the world will have when
every being in its human multitude shall shine
with his own light and color, and be the child
of God which it is possible for him to be,
which he has ever been in the true home-land
of his Father's thought.
The hope of the world is in the ever richer
naturalness of the highest life.
V. 21, 22, 23.
Upward the soul forever turns her eyes;
The next hour always shames the hour before;
One beauty, at its highest, prophesies
That by whose side it shall seem mean and
poor.
No Godlike thing knows aught of less and less,
But widens to the boundless perfectness.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
NOVEMBER 7. 311
For we wrestle not agaimt flesh and blood, but
against principalities, against powers, against the
rulers of the darkness of this world.
EPHES. vi. 12.
T IFE is a battle. . . . The merchant is
I f fighting with the competition of his
brethren. The legislator is fighting with the
barbarous tendencies which still haunt the
most civilized societies. The philanthropists
are fighting with abuses and ignorance and
cruelty. And everywhere man, hopefully or
hopelessly, is fighting with what he calls his
fate, the general aggregate of things about
him which seems set to keep him down and to
impede his way. The world is full of all these
ideas of battle. And then right into the midst
of them steps Paul, with his clear, ringing
Christian word, " What are you fighting
with ? Do you ask that ? " he says. " Lo, I
can tell you. You are fighting with great
evil principles and powers. . . . The rivalry
of men, imperfect institutions, cruel habits,
all those are ugly enemies, but the real enemy
is Badness itself . The real fight is with that."
VI. 71, 72, 73.
But shall I shun the sacred fight
Which good maintains with ill ?
No: strong in my Redeemer's might,
Be mine to wrestle still.
Here only, in this strife,
Can I His soldier be;
Here only spend or lose a life
For Him who died for me.
J. CONDER.
3 i2 NOVEMBER 8.
And to keep himself unspotted from the world.
JAMES i. 27.
WE set out for the battle in the morning
strong and clean. By and by we catch a
moment in the lull of the struggle to look down
upon ourselves, and how tired and how cov-
ered with dust and blood we are. How long
back our first purity seems how long the day
seems sometimes how long since we began to
live. You know what stains are on your lives.
Each of us knows, every man and woman.
They burn to our eyes, even if no neighbor
sees them. They burn in the still air of the
Sabbath even if we do not see them in the
week. You would not think for the world
that your children should grow up to the same
stains that have fastened upon you. You
dream for them of a " life unspotted from the
world," and the very anxiety of that dream
proves how you know that your own life is
spotted and stained.
I. 176.
Whiteness most white. Ah, to be clean again
In mine own sight and God's most holy
sight!
To reach through any flood and fire of pain
Whiteness most white;
To learn to hate the wrong and love the right,
Even while I walk through shadows that are
vain,
Descending through vain shadows into night.
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.
NOVEMBER 9. 313
IT is wonderful how mere power, or mere
brightness, will win the confidence and
admiration of men from whom we might have
expected better things. A bright book or a
bright play will draw the crowd, although its
meaning be detestable. A clever man will
make a host of boys and men stand like
charmed birds while he draws their principles
quietly out of them, and leaves them moral
idiots. A whole great majority of a commu-
nity will rush like foolish sheep to the polls
and vote for a man whom they know is false
and brutal, because they have learned to say
that he is strong. All this is true enough;
and yet while men do these wild and foolish
things, they know the difference between the
illumination of a human life that is kindled
from above and that which is kindled from
below. They know the pure flames of one
and the lurid glare of the other; and however
they may praise and follow wit and power, as
if to be witty or powerful were an end suffi-
cient in itself, they will always keep their
sacredest respect and confidence for that
power or wit which is inspired by God, and
works for righteousness.
II. 12.
Oh, we are sunk enough, God knows! but not
quite so sunk that moments,
Sure, though seldom, are denied us, when the
spirit's true endowments
Stand out plainly from its false ones.
BROWNING.
314 NOVEMBER 10.
With twain he covered his face. Is. vi. 2.
YOU can know nothing which you do not
reverence. You can see nothing before
which you do not veil your eyes!
All of the mystery which surrounds and
pervades life is really one mystery. It is God.
Called by His name, taken up into His being,
it is filled with graciousness. It is no longer
cold and hard; it is all warm and soft and
palpitating. It is love. And of this personal
mystery of love of God it is supremely true
that only by reverence, only by the hiding of
the eyes, can He be seen. He who thinks
to look God full in the face and question
Him about His existence, blinds himself there-
by, and cannot see God. He sees something,
but what he sees is not God, but himself.
There is in Christ the continual awe of a
nature from the perfect knowledge of which
the conditions of His human life excluded
Him. And if He could not know the Father
perfectly while He lived here in the flesh, shall
we complain that we cannot ? Shall we not
rather rejoice at it ? Shall it not be a joy to
us to feel, around and through the familiar
things which we seem perfectly to understand,
the wealth and depth of Divinity, outgoing all
our comprehension ? v. 256, 257.
For greatness which is infinite makes room
For all things in its lap to lie;.
We should be crushed by a magnificence
Short of infinity.
FABER.
NOVEMBER n. 315
And with twain did he fly. Is. vi. 2.
THERE are two extremes of error. In the
one, action is disparaged. The result is
that character itself fades away out of the
inactive life. In the other, action is made
everything. The glory of mere work is sung
in every sort of tune. . . . The result is that
work loses its dignity, and the industrious man
becomes a clattering machine. Is it not just
here that the vision of the wings comes in ?
Activity in obedience to God. Work done for
Him and His eternal purposes. Duty conscious
of Him and forgetful of the doer's self, and so
enthusiastic, spontaneous, there is the field
where character is grown, there is at once
the cultivation of the worker's soul and the
building of some corner of the Kingdom of
God.
Oh, my young friends, listen to the great
modern Gospel of Work which comes to you
on every breeze, but do not let it be to you
the shallow, superficial story that it is to many
modern ears. Work is everything or work is
nothing according to the lord we work for.
Work for God. . . . Then you are standing
with your flying wings which will assuredly
bear you into fuller light as they carry some
work of God towards its fulfilment.
V. 267.
As the servants of Christ, doing the will of God
from the heart. EPHES. vi. 6.
316 NOVEMBER 12.
I ask not that for me the plan
Of good or ill be set aside,
But that the common lot of man
Be nobly borne and glorified.
PHEBE GARY.
IS it not true that any man makes his trade
or occupation ready to be filled with the
high motive of the love of God when he trains
himself to look at it in its ideal, and, at the
same time, is thoroughly conscientious in its
duties ? The shoemaker who, having opened
his heart to God's love, comes soonest and
fullest to find the work of his lapstone and
his bench touched and inspired by that mo-
tive, will be the shoemaker who most con-
ceives of his daily work as one connected with
human comfort and strength, and who, at the
same time, is most conscientiously faithful to
its details. These things a man can do: he
can resolutely abandon the sins which cannot
be spiritualized; he can open all the channels
of his life to spirituality by the study of the
ideal, and by faithful work in every part of
his living. One is the turning out of stran-
gers; the other is the preparing of the chambers
for the entering guest. The one is negative,
the other positive. When both are done, then
the man who has learned in one little spot
the conversion spot of his nature that God
loves him, and who has there begun to love
God, may look to see that new motive run into
all these newly opened chambers of his life,
making the half-ready places completely ready
by its touch. X. 23.
NOVEMBER 13. 317
WHAT is it that perpetuates the blighting
influence of fashion ? What are the
channels through which are spread abroad the
false standard of wealth, the base idea of
manliness which poisons countless hearts ?
Are they not the same God-created channels
through which the holiest influences were
meant to flow? "Simon, called Peter, and
Andrew his brother; James the son of Zebe-
dee, and John his brother " ? Many and many
a time their brotherhood is the power of a
common curse, instead of a common bless-
ing. . . . What shall we do then ? . . . It is
a very wide law and a very beautiful one, that
the best way to make a thing fit for the use for
which it was first made is to put it to that use.
The best way to make the dusty trumpet clear
is to blow music through it. The best way to
make the sluggish mind capable of thinking is
to think with it. And so the best way to make
the natural relationships capable of carrying
religious influence is to give them religious
influences to carry, so strong and ardent
that they shall force and burn their own way
through whatever artificial obstructions may
have stopped up the channel through which
they were meant to go.
V. 86, 89.
Pour Thy Holy Spirit in!
Sweep away the bars of sin;
For the grace that comes from Thee
Make us channels pure and free
Unto those that nearest be!
JOHN WORDEN.
318 NOVEMBER 14.
THE Holy Ghost is the constructive princi-
ple and power in human life. By Him
every society of good men is bound together.
By Him the Christian Church rises into the
sky of God's grace like a majestic tree full of
all precious fruit. By Him the family wins
new sacredness, and every friendship of men
who are trying to serve God is bound into in-
dissoluble union with an unseen but strong
compulsion. If you are afraid of yourself as
you find how you are drawing away from your
fellow-men and growing into a more and more
selfish life, you must come to God; you must
enter into the communion of the Holy Ghost.
If you have a quarrel which you hate and
know is miserable, but which holds you fast,
your only freedom from it is in the commun-
ion of the Holy Ghost. Come there and
your quarrel will break and scatter as the ice
melts when you bring it into the sun. ... It
is the communion of a common forgiveness
and a common inspiration.
VII. 316.
If thou be dead, forgive and thou shalt live;
If thou hast sinned, forgive and be for-
given;
God waiteth to be gracious, and forgive,
And open heaven.
Set not thy will to die and not to live;
Set not thy face as flint refusing heaven;
Thou fool, set not thy heart on hell: forgive
And be forgiven.
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.
NOVEMBER 15. 319
The Lord make you to increase and abound in
love, one toward another. i THESS. iii. 12.
WHAT is there that can keep the purity and
loftiness of domestic life ? What is there
that can preserve the color and glory of the
family like the perpetual consciousness, run-
ning through all the open channels of its life,
that they are being used to convey the truth
and the power of God ?
IV. 83.
What does it mean when religion enters
into a family, when over all the home life is
stretched out the hand of God, and all a
household is converted ? I do not know how
to tell the story of what happens then of the
deep, sweet, solemn change that comes over all
the family experience except by just this
phrase: that the communion of natural affec-
tion has passed into the communion of the
Holy Ghost. All these loves which were there
before move on still, but they are all sur-
rounded by and taken up into one great com-
prehending love; and he who enters in at the
door of that converted house hears them all in
deepened, richened music, the same strains
still, only full of the power of the new atmos-
phere in which they are played.
VII. 312.
Sweetest things in Thee are sweeter,
Holiest things in Thee completer;
Therefore, Lord, our home-life enter,
Be its light, its joy, its centre!
LOUISE MATHILDE.
320 NOVEMBER 16.
/ am not come to destroy but to fulfil.
MATT. v. 17.
INFLUENCES come from man to man as
1 the dew and sunshine come from the boun-
teous heavens to the ready ground. . . . Your
child, your scholar, your servant you may
fulfil him or you may destroy him. You de-
stroy him if you fasten on everything that is
bad and crude and ridiculous about him, and
pour out upon it rebuke and contempt. You
destroy him if you make him feel himself
weak and insignificant, and drive him to de-
spair. You destroy him if you make his great
feeling about his own life to be shame. On
the other hand you fulfil him, you fill him out
to his full, to his fullest, if you catch every-
thing that is good about him and water it with
judicious encouragement and praise. You
fulfil him if you recognize every feeblest and
clumsiest effort to do right, if you inspire him
with hope, if you make him seem to himself
worth cultivating and watching and developing.
Therefore, with all the strength which God
has given us, let us be fulfillers. Let us ...
with sympathy and intelligence, patience and
hope, bring up the lagging side in all the vital-
ity around us, and assert for man the worth,
the meaning and the possibility of this his
human life. IV. 213.
O Sun of our souls first arisen,
Give us light for the spirits that grope;
Make us loving and steadfast and loyal
To bear up humanity's hope!
LUCY LARCOM.
NOVEMBER 17. 321
AS the sun that lightens us makes all the ob-
jects round us the reflectors and distribu-
ters of his radiance, and so brings his light to
us clothed with the clearness that belongs to
them, so to the Christian the Spirit of his
Saviour seems to have subsidized everything
to make some new and more perfect revela-
tion of Him. The home relations and the
things in nature, our books, our friends, our
thoughts, have all been made interpreters
of Christ. Oh, there are times when, as one
sits in meditation or moves quietly about in
work for Jesus when all this seems so rich
and plain. A beautiful, serene simplicity
seems to come forth out of this complicated
snarl. We catch the music of one great per-
vading purpose in all this tumult and clatter.
It is all redemption working out its plans.
God made that hillside so perfect in order
that He might show me His fatherly love.
Christ gave me this task to do that I might
understand His self-sacrifice for me. The
Spirit brought me into my friend's friendship
that it might so interpret to me the friendship
of my God. At such times all seems plain.
The world is for the sons of God.
VII. 105.
O Centre of all forms! O concord's home!
O world alive in one condensed world!
O Face of Him in whose heart lay concealed
The fountain-thought of all this kingdom of
heaven !
GEORGE MACDONALD.
322 NOVEMBER 18.
WE can well believe while the rose is but a
bud, shut in between hard, glossy green
leaves, gathering only the first dream of color
into its pale petals, that its own color should
seem to it the purpose of its life, just to be
the perfect rose for the pure beauty of its per-
fectness. But when the bud bursts and the
rose is born what then? A world is waiting
for its fragrance and its loveliness. To serve
that world, to send the colorless light inter-
preted through its soft hues, and the odorless
atmosphere translated by its fragrance, to be
all that it may be for the sake of all that it
may do this is the larger purpose of its being,
and, learning this, it ripens to the perfect
flower. So may the scholar dream of pure
self-culture for its own sake. It is a noble
dream. . . . But if he grows he must outgrow
it. He must grow in the direction of human-
ity. All the vast needs of life lay hold on
him. . . . All that he knows and loves must
go out with him into all his life, and his schol-
arship must be part of the father who sits in
the family, of the citizen who votes at the
polls, if need be, of the soldier who fights in
the ranks. . . .
X. 272.
Yea, plant the tree that bears best apples,
plant,
And water it with wine, nor watch askance
Whether thy sons or strangers eat the fruit:
Enough that mankind eat and are refreshed.
EMERSON.
NOVEMBER 19. 323
I CANNOT conceive of God standing and
deliberately withholding from His world,
or from any least and humblest of His ser-
vants, till to-morrow any blessing which it is
possible for Him to give to-day. But, on the
other hand, I cannot conceive of God's giving
to-day any blessing which to-day His world or
His servant is unready to receive. Why is it
that ages have lived on without the blessings
of popular liberty and free government and
well-guarded rights ? Is it that God has said,
" The world shall not have them until my fa-
vorite century and race appear"? Is it not
rather that God has said, " The world cannot
have them until it has won by hard experience
the heart and hand to which these blessings
can be given, in which they can be held"?
Why is it that God did not give you long ago
the peace, the moral strength, which He will
certainly give you some day if you persevere ?
Has He been keeping them from you wan-
tonly and wilfully ? Has He not rather been,
nay, is He not, standing over you, eager to
give them at the first moment when the gift is
possible ?
XII. 28.
No more in heaven than earth will he find
God,
Who does not know His loving mercy swift
But waits the moment consummate and ripe,
Each burden from each weary heart to lift.
HELEN HUNT JACKSON.
324 NOVEMBER 20.
And shall I behold Thee face to face,
O God, and in Thy light retrace
How in all I loved here, still wast Thou ?
BROWNING.
I LOVE to think of this, that where men to-
day are most unconscious of His pres-
ence, Christ is laying foundations for His
future work. Here is a perfectly worldly man
who cares nothing for Christ or Christianity,
but yet Christ's touches are on him. He is
surrounded with blessings; he is pressed upon
with sorrows; he is led through apparently
meaningless experiences; and all that some
day, when he is really moved to cry out for a
Son of God, Christ may be able to come to
him, not new and strange, but with the strong
claim of years of care and thought and un-
thanked mercy. It makes the world very
solemn to think how much of this work Christ
must be doing everywhere. It makes our own
lives very sacred to think how much of it He
may be doing in us.
V. 213.
Our want and weakness, shame and sin,
His pitying kindness prove,
And all our lives are folded in
The mystery of His love.
His sun is shining pure and vast
O'er all our nights of dread;
Our darkness by His light at last
Shall be interpreted.
ALICE GARY.
NOVEMBER 21. 325
And He took the seven fishes and the loaves, and
gave thanks, and brake them, . . . and they did all
eat and were filled. MATT. xv. 36, 37.
ALL the history of the progress of men's
thought bears witness that when God
wants to give men knowledge which they have
not had before, He always opens it to them
out of something which they have already
known. Paul stands upon Mars' Hill at Ath-
ens, and wants to show those people Christ.
How does he begin ? He takes what he finds
there. He points to their altar to the un-
known god, and says, " Him whom ye igno-
rantly worship I declare to you." He opens
the books of their own writers and finds there
his text, " As certain of your own poets have
said." Out of their bit of truth he opens the
rich completeness of the truth he has to tell.
Is it not just exactly the miracle of Christ ?
. . . Continuity and economy; these are the
laws of Him who is leading us, the Captain
of our salvation. He always>binds the future
to the past, and He wastes nothing.
II. 134, 143.
Not by strange, sudden change and spell,
Baffling and darkening Nature's face;
Thou takest the things we know so well,
And buildest on them Thy miracle,
The heavenly on the commonplace.
SUSAN COOLIDGE.
326 NOVEMBER 22.
And Jesus said: Make the men sit down.
JOHN vi. 10.
QUIET has come in place of the noise; re-
pose instead of action. It [the crowd]
has become receptive. It is waiting to be
fed. . . . Some day the headlong current of
your life was stopped. The river ceased to
flow. The waves stood still, and then the ocean
which the flowing of the river had kept out
poured up and in, and there were sacreder
emotions in the old channels, and deeper
hopes and fears were beating upon the well-
worn banks. The day when your great be-
reavement came, . . . the day when joy, with
that subtle possibility of deep pain which is
always in her eyes, came to your door and
knocked, . . . the day when, being weak and
ill, you did not go to your business, . . . those
were the days when God was feeding you. . . .
No life is complete which does not sometimes
sit trustfully waiting to be fed of God.
IV. 227, 232, 234.
For not by bread alone
Can we, Thy children, live:
Some heavenly food unknown
Thou unto us must give.
Thy life, O God! Thy Word,
Outspoken through Thy Son
In Him our prayer is heard,
Our heart's desire is won.
The hidden manna this,
Whereof who eateth, he
Grows up in perfectness
Of Christlike symmetry. LUCY LARCOM.
NOVEMBER 23. 327
'""THERE is danger for many men, if not for
1 all, in the perpetual outgo of energy
which so much of our life involves. ..." All
is going out, nothing is coming in;" is not
that the dismay and the despair which settles
down upon many an experience as it attains to
middle life ? Existence comes to feel to many
of us like a great river, which is always flow-
ing with unbroken force downward to the sea.
It never stops. It is always pushing its life
outward. It gives the sea no chance to flow
up into it. So is the ever energetic life of one
whose sole idea is to exert influence, to make
himself felt in some result. How often the
river must long to pause. How often it must
become aware that its impetuous rush is losing
for it the richness of the great deep salt sea.
How often the busy life of man becomes aware
that somewhere round it there is richness
which it does not get because it opens outward
only, and not inward. . . . There is need of
rest and receptivity. IV. 229, 230, 231.
Many are coming and going with busy and
restless feet,
And the soul is hungering now, with " no lei-
sure so much as to eat," . . .
Oh, for a Sabbath of life, a time for renewing
of youth,
For a full-orbed leisure to shine on the foun-
tains of holy truth,
And to fill my chalice anew with its waters
fresh and sweet,
While resting in silent love at the Master's
glorious feet. FRANCES R. HAVERGAL.
328 NOVEMBER 24.
T ABOR and patience, activity and the
*-* growth which comes by passive suffering,
ought always to make one single total life. . . .
Make your most restful contemplation and
your most receptive listening at the lips of
God, not to be mere spiritual luxuries, but to
be forms and modes of action. Make them
acts. Let them call your powers into play.
Let them be not listless, but full of vigor. Let
them anticipate work for God and service of
His children so earnestly and eagerly, that
they themselves shall be work and service.
He who learns these lessons lives a life as
deep as the ocean and as powerful. There is
no tedium or fretfulness for him. His life
catches the quality of the life of God. He
works while it is called to-day, and yet he has
already reached the rest which remaineth for
God's people. Such lives may God help us to
live.
IV. 241, 243.
Toil is sweet, for Thou hast toiled;
Rest is sweet, for Thou didst rest;
Be our works from sin assoiled!
Be our rest upon Thy breast!
Be our work for Thee our rest!
Be our strife for Thee our peace!
Till our sun sink in the west,
And we reap Thy joy's increase.
J. L. M. W.
NOVEMBER 25. 329
He said unto me : Son of man, stand upon thy
feet. EZEK. ii. i.
Giving thanks always for all things unto God
and the Father, in the name of our Lord Jesus
Christ. EPHES. v. 20.
SHALL we, can we, thank God for His mer-
cies, standing upon our feet and rejoic-
ing that we are men, thoroughly grateful for
the real joy of life ? Back of all the special
causes for thanksgiving which our hearts rec-
ognize, is there a thankfulness for that on
which they all rest and in which they are sewn
like jewels in a cloth of gold; for the mere
fact of human life, for the mere privilege and
honor of being men and women ? . . .
If you have been dwelling solely on the evil
that is in man, or on the special evil which you
think is in your church, your nation, or your
age . . . stand up! Stand up upon your feet!
Believe in man! Soberly and with clear eyes
believe in your own time and place. There is
not, there never has been, a better time or a
better place to live in. Only with this belief
can you believe in hope.
II. 149, 161, 162.
How good is man's life, the mere living! how
fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses for-
ever in joy!
BROWNING.
330 NOVEMBER 26.
Thou hast kept the good wine until now.
JOHN ii. 10.
MAN says, " I choose to let the best come
first; and then, if need be, things must
degenerate. I would make sure of what good
there is. I am so sure of nothing, that anything
I can catch shall be caught instantly." But
God says, " No! The world grows better and
better. The best must be kept waiting till its
time shall have arrived. The best cannot
come until its time is ready. The best must
not come first but last." It is a difference
which one immediately feels when he comes
into the region of the religion of Christ. The
essence of Christianity is to believe that the
world is growing better, that the life of man
is growing better, under the discipline of
Christ. It is calm and hopeful with great as-
surances. It sets the old man, at the end of
his career, in the midst of fulfilled promises
and finished educations, splendidly saying, as
he looks back over his life: " It has all been
good, but this is the best of all. Thou, O
Christ, O Master, hast kept the best wine until
now! " XII. 7.
As Thou hast made the world without,
Make Thou more fair the world within;
Shine through its lingering clouds of doubt;
Rebuke its haunting shapes of sin;
Fill, brief or long, my granted span
Of life with love to Thee and man;
Strike when Thou wilt the hour of rest,
But let my last days be my best!
WHITTIER.
NOVEMBER 27. 331
When I would do good, evil is present with me.
ROM. vii. 21.
PAUL'S story has been your story. You
never sprang most bravely from the low
order of your living, that a hand did not
seem to catch you and draw you back. You
never felt a new power start up within you that
a new weakness did not start up by its side.
. . . Awful has grown this certainty that no
good impulse ever could go straight and unin-
terrupted to its victorious result, and yet is it
not wonderful how you have kept the assur-
ance that good and not evil is the master-
power of your life ? The resolution has been
broken. It has limped and halted. It has
stood for months, and made no progress, but
it has never died.
VI. 13.
Lord, I have laid my heart upon Thy altar,
But cannot get the wood to burn;
It hardly flares ere it begins to falter,
And to the dark return.
Old sap, or night-fallen dew, has damped the
fuel;
In vain my breath would flame provoke;
Yet see at every poor attempt's renewal
To Thee ascends the smoke!
'Tis all I have smoke, failure, foiled en-
deavor,
Coldness and doubt, and palsied lack:
Such as I have I send Thee; perfect Giver,
Send Thou Thy lightning back!
GEORGE MACDONALD.
332 NOVEMBER 28.
When the fulness of time had come, God sent
forth His Son. GAL. iv. 4.
IT was the emptiest age that the whole moral
and spiritual history of man had seen;
and just that emptiness it was which made it
the fulness of time for Christ. ... It was
out of the deadness of millions and millions
of souls that the cry for life came, uncon-
scious, unmeant, but no less recognized by
Him who watches and answers not only the
desires but the needs of men.
And so with all of us is it not the fulness of
time indeed ? Is there one of us who can say,
"It is not my time yet?" Now while the
morning is at hand, the night far spent; now
while we have, it may be, but a little while
left us to come to Christ or to come closer to
Christ, to be a Christian or to be a better
Christian; now while the Bridegroom's feet
are close upon us, are sounding already in the
distance, oh, let our loins be girded about,
and our lights burning, and we ourselves like
unto men that wait for their Lord.
VII. 67, 71.
Said Mark to Martin, "Wherefore spend
Such constant care thy vines to tend ?
It may be months, it may be years,
Before the vineyard's lord appears."
Said Martin, " Though it may be long
Before I hear his harvest-song,
If of that hour can no man say,
It may be that he comes to-day."
JULIA WOOD.
NOVEMBER 29. 333
ONLY when all was ready, only in the ful-
ness of time, did Jesus come . . . and
the men of whom He was the representative
and the chief have they their advents too ?
It is easy to believe it about the greatest of
them. . . . But it is hard to think the same
of common people such as you and I. [Yet]
hard as it is, great as is the strain which it
puts on all our low habits of thinking about
ourselves, the Bible is a strong and glorious
call to men to gird up the loins of their minds
and believe that God had a place for them and
put them in their own place. . . . The begin-
ning of a life goes back before the man is
here, a visible fact upon the earth. It lays
hold of the thought of God, which runs back
to eternity. God knew your nature. He
had a plan and pattern of your being in His
mind. As David says, His eyes did see your
substance, yet being imperfect, and in His
book were all your members written. Know-
ing you, He made ready a place for you; He
shaped a cradle for you in the ages, and when
it was all done He laid your new life in it the
advent before the nativity. VII. 4, 5.
So take and use Thy work,
Amend what flaws may lurk,
What strains o' the stuff, what warpings past
Thy aim!
My times be in Thy hand,
Perfect the cup as planned!
Let age approve of youth, and death com-
plete the same!
BROWNING.
334 NOVEMBER 30.
In my Father's house are many mansions. I go
to prepare a place for you. JOHN xiv. 2.
AH! there is no friendship worthy of the
sacred name where each of the two
friends is not always thus making ready places
for the other in higher and higher mansions of
the Father's house, where each is not always
opening to the other some higher life. Do
not dare to think that friendship is a mere
pleasant amusement. Do not dare to take out
of it the moral responsibility that makes its
depth and sacredness. . . . Husband and
wife live together in perfect domestic sympa-
thy. Not a thought of either that the other
does not share. But when one of them enters
into Christ and knows His peace and joy, it
seems as if for the first time they had sepa-
rated. But the soul that has found the Saviour
comes back with its love, and tells the story of
the Saviour it has found, and, Andrew-like,
brings the other soul to the Christ in whose
love it has found a place. Everywhere this
ministry of life to life is finding its illustra-
tions.
VI. 175, 176.
Come home with me, beloved,
Home to God's waiting heart!
In gladness met together
From paths too long apart;
Strangers no more, but brethren,
One life with Him to live;
Eternally receiving,
Eternally to give!
LUCY LARCOM.
DECEMBER i. 335
To every man according to his ability.
MATT. xxv. 15.
IT is a young man's right almost his duty
to hope, almost to believe, that he has
singular capacity, and is not merely another
repetition of the constantly repeated average
of men. Before he unfolds the bundle which
his Lord has given him, he may well see in
his imagination the ten bright talents shining
through its folds. To see those dreams and
visions gradually fade away; little by little
to discover that one has no such exceptional
capacity; to try one and another of the adven-
turous ways that lead to the high heights and
the great prizes, and find the feet unequal to
them; to come back at last to the great trod-
den highway, and plod on among the undis-
tinguished millions that is often very hard.
. . . Yet the man of two talents has a great
chance in the world. Alas for the world if he
had not! For it is of him that the world is
mainly composed. . . . And Christ must come
with special welcome and appreciation and de-
light to any man who feels his insignificance,
and is in danger of losing himself in the vague
mass of his fellows.
IV. 198, 204.
Be sure no earnest work
Of any honest creature, howbeit weak,
Imperfect, ill-adapted, fails so much,
It is not gathered as a grain of sand
To enlarge the sum of human action used
For carrying out God's end.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.
336 DECEMBER 2.
MEN get tired, one after another, of the fan-
tastic and one-sided types of character
which the world admires, and which seem to us
very attractive at first. Expectant without
impatience; patient without stagnation; wait-
ing, but always ready to advance; loving to
advance, but always ready to wait; full of
confidence, but never proud; full of certainty,
but never arrogant; serene, but enthusiastic;
rich as a great land is rich in the peace that
comes to it from the government of a great,
wise, trusty governor, this is the life whose
whole power is summed up in one word
Faith. " Here is the patience and faith of
the saints." This is the life to which" men
come who, through long years, "follow the
Lamb whithersoever He goeth."
II. 58.
The bravely dumb that did their deed,
And scorned to blot it with a name,
Men of the plain heroic breed,
That loved Heaven's silence more than fame:
Such lived not in the past alone,
But thread to-day the unheeding street,
And stairs to Sin and Famine known
Sing with the welcome of their feet.
LOWELL.
DECEMBER 3. 337
With good will doing service, as to the Lord,
and not to men. EPHES. vi. 17.
SUPPOSE for it is at least supposable
that behind every other motive, shining
through every other motive which made a man
work, there had been this the love of Christ.
Whoever he worked for secondarily, he worked
for Jesus first of all. Would that have made
no difference ? Like an electric atmosphere
poured around the shrine in which a jewel
rests, so that no hand can be thrust through
to steal the jewel; so round the work, full of
its joy, is poured the love of Christ, out of
which no man can snatch it. Suppose that
some strong opponent keeps him from doing
what he wants to do, there is still the assur-
ance that his doing that is but a part of a
vaster accomplishment, the will of his great
Master, which he knows must come in its
completeness whether this special act of his
attain success or not.
III. 300.
I seem to halt, and yet I know
The breath of God is in the sails:
Whether by zephyrs or by gales,
The ships of God must onward go.
E'en when to rest He singeth them,
He to the haven bringeth them.
C. G. HAZARD.
33 8 DECEMBER 4.
As unknown, and yet well known.
2 COR. vi. 9.
ARE there not moments in your life when it
seems to you as if you understood and
knew yourself through and through ? You
have listened to this clank of your machinery
so long, that you know every sound that it
makes. ..." Know myself! " you say; " in-
deed I do," grasping your own warm, hard
flesh. "Am I not this, which lives thus?
Why should I think myself mysterious?"
And then instantly, " Know myself! God
forbid! Who am I that I should enter into
the bosom of His eternal purpose, and study
there what has only there real and final being ?
Let me stand before my unknown self, and
wonder." Poor and mangled is the life which
has not thus seemed both to understand and
be ignorant about itself. It must be either
useless or visionless.
VI. 284.
But O my soul, as I thy good
And evil ways explore,
I seem to see the Christ in thee
His earthly life live o'er. . . .
Thou art that Temple where the Lord
Out-teacheth scribes of law,
Whence afterward with cords He makes
Coarse mammon priests withdraw;
Thine inmost court, a holy place,
The Lord's own glory-home,
Thine outer, sentencing Him oft
To shame and martyrdom.
DENIS WORTMAN.
DECEMBER 5. 339
Whatsoever things were written aforetime, were
written . . . that we, through patience, and com-
fort of the Scriptures, might have hope.
ROM. xv. 4.
Welcome, dear Book! soul's joy and food! the
feast
Of spirits! heaven extracted lies in thee:
Thou art life's charter, the Dove's spotless
nest,
Where souls are hatched unto eternity.
VAUGHAN.
WE circulate the Bible by the million.
Some parts of it we read as a religious
duty. But there are whole books of it teem-
ing with interest which few of us ever touch.
One sometimes feels that some day or other a
great increase of the spiritual power of the
Bible will come with what will be almost a re-
discovery of its literary attractiveness. When
people break through the strange feeling which
has gathered around it that it is dull and un-
real, and find that it is the most interesting
book in all the world, then they will be open
for its deeper power to lay hold upon their
consciences and hearts. IV. 298.
Above all, get the great spirit of the Bible
. . . the idea without which it would all drop
to pieces, that there is not one life which the
great Life-Giver ever loses out of His sight;
not one which ever sins so that He casts it
away; not one which is not so near to Him
that whatever touches it touches Him with
sorrow or with joy. I. i I0 .
340 DECEMBER 6.
THE New Testament is a biography. Make
it a mere book of dogmas, and its vital-
ity is gone. . . . Make it the history of Jesus
of Nazareth, and the world holds it in its heart
forever. Not simply His coming or His
going, not simply His birth or His death, but
the living the total life of Jesus in the
world's salvation. And the Book in which
His life shines orbed and distinct is the
world's treasure. There, as in all best bio-
graphies, two values of a marked and well-
depicted life appear. It is of value, first, be-
cause it is exceptional, and also because it is
representative. Every life is at once like and
unlike every other. Every good story of a life,
therefore, sets before those who read it some-
thing which is imitable and something which
is incapable of imitation; and thereby, come
two different sorts of stimulus and inspiration.
It gives us help like that of the stars which
guide the ship from without, and also like that
of the fire which burns beneath the engines of
the ship itself.
X. 428.
Why must He lay His infant head
In the manger where the beasts were fed ?
So that the poorest here might cry,
" My Lord was as lowly born as /."
Is there no way to Him at last
But that where His bleeding feet have passed ?
Did He not to His followers say,
11 1 am the Life, the Light, the Way " ?
PHEBE GARY.
DECEMBER 7. 341
THERE are few features in the life of Jesus
which impress me more than the way in
which His work and His growth, His effective
and receptive life went on together. . . . True,
there were times when He withdrew Himself,
and, leaving all activity behind, lay on the
mountain days and nights passive before His
Father, waiting to be more completely filled
with Him. But those were rare, exceptional
occasions. The ordinary dependence upon
God was perfectly expressed by those words
to His disciples, " My meat is to do the will
of Him that sent me! " When He gave the
sermon on the mount, when He calmed the
tempest on the lake, when He raised Lazarus
from the dead, we do not doubt that both pro-
cesses were going on, enfolded in the com-
pleteness of each of those actions. He was
saving the world, and He was becoming more
perfectly His Father's Son at once. . . .
Rest and action in the experience of the
completest soul are not antagonistic; they are
hardly distinct from one another. Action is
the most refreshing rest, and rest is in some
sense the most effective action to the soul that
lives on complete dependence and obedience
to God.
IV. 240.
But if I face with courage stout
The labor and the din,
Thou, Lord, wilt let my mind go out,
My heart with Thee stay in.
GEORGE MACDONALD.
342 DECEMBER 8.
Strengthened with all might, according to His
glorious power, unto all patience and long-suffer-
ing, with joy fulness. COL. i. n.
ONE sufferer cries, " Lord, make me
strong; " another sufferer cries, " Lord,
let me rest upon Thy strength." Do you say
they come to the same thing ? Yes, if the
doing of the task, the bearing of the pain,
is everything. Yes, if the only object is that
the ship may not founder and the back may
not break; but if, beyond this, there is hope
and purpose that the man who does the task
or bears the load shall himself become God-
like in his doing and suffering, then no mere
deposit of the strength of God can do the
work only the ever-open union of his life
with God's, which makes the two lives really
one, so that the power that is in God is not
made the man's by being transferred from
God's to him, but is his because it is God's.
III. 126.
God, whom my roads" all reach, howe'er they
run,
My Father, Friend, Beloved, dear All-One,
Thee in my soul, my soul in Thee, I feel,
Self of myself.
SIDNEY LAMER.
DECEMBER 9. 343
If this counsel or this work be of men, it will
come to naught ; but if it be of God, ye cannot over-
throw it. ACTS v. 38, 39.
T^HAT which is rooted in God must live.
1 There is no hope or peace anywhere in
the world if this is not true. Who cares
which way the fickle wind is blowing at this
minute if there be no purpose which stands
behind and governs it, no One who holds the
winds in His hands ? But if there be, who will
not labour bravely, trying to put himself into
the current of the great purpose of the world;
begging to be defeated if he mistakes the
great purpose and is helping evil when he
thinks that he is helping good; ready to wait
and work through all delays; sure of one
thing and only one, that in the end, through
every hindrance and delay, God must do
right ?
III. 262.
I do not dare to pray
For winds to waft me on my way,
But leave it to a higher Will
To stay or speed me, trusting still
That all is well, and sure that He . . .
Will land me every peril past
Within the sheltered haven at last.
Then whatsoever wind doth blow,
My heart is glad to have it so;
And blow it east, or blow it west,
The wind that blows, that wind is best.
CAROLINE A. MASON.
344 DECEMBER 10.
LIFE grows healthily from less to more. It
does not begin with its best and fade
away towards nothingness. It opens with
promises which involve incompleteness, and
goes forward with a climbing sun toward a
rich and radiant noon. ... If I am travel-
ling through a country which is sure to grow
less and less rich as I get farther on, it is inev-
itable that I shall strive at every step to gather
all of its fleeting riches that I can. ... I
shall leave no well untasted and no tree un-
plucked. I shall burden my shoulders with
the load of what I cannot eat. But if I know
that, as I pass on from field to field upon my
journey, each is to be richer than the last, I
shall be calm and patient and serene, seeing
to-day in the broader light of to-morrow;
asking to-day to give me its appropriate gift,
not demanding of it that which it is not ready
to bestow nor I to take; and going on with
faith, which is the deepest and most precious
result of every blessing.
XII. 17.
I will not wrong Thee, O To-day,
With idle longing for To-morrow;
But patient plow my field and sow
The seed of faith in every furrow.
Enough for me the loving light
That melts the cloud's repellent edges,
The still unfolding, bud by bud,
Of God's most sweet and holy pledges.
HARRIET McEwEN KIMBALL.
DECEMBER n. 345
THE evening of your abundant prosperity
arrived. The darkness gathered in
about the radiant luxurious life which you
had lived. No longer did it seem as if the
sun shone and the flowers bloomed and the
seasons came and went for you. You said,
"It is all over. I have had my day." To
some of you since you said that, there has
come a great surprise. What seemed all over
has proved to be but just begun. The day
which you thought you had had, you can see
now that you had hardly touched. Prosperity
has come to mean to you another thing. The
hours in which it meant plenty of money,
plenty of friends, seem now so thin and super-
ficial. To work, to help and to be helped, to
learn sympathy by suffering, to learn faith by
perplexity, to reach truth through wonder,
behold! this is what it is to prosper, this is
what it is to live. You did not really begin
to live till the darkening of your happiness
brought you into the knowledge of a happi-
ness which can never darken. The evening
and the morning have been your first day.
VI. 331.
Life's self, the immortal, immutable smile
Of God on the soul, in the deep heart of
Heaven,
Lives changeless, unchanged; and our morn-
ing and even
Are earth's alternations, not Heaven's.
OWEN MEREDITH.
346 DECEMBER 12.
He came unto His own. . . . To them He gave
power to become the sons of God.
JOHN i. n, 12.
THE man to whom it seems incredible that
God should have been made man is not
so likely to have been misled by a peculiar
reverence for God as by an unworthy esti-
mate of man. . . . He has taken things as he
sees them and lost sight of their ideals. He
has seen the mercenariness of friendship, the
squalor of home, the animalness of love
everything sunk down out of its nobleness;
and he has said, " There is no place for God
here. It would degrade Him to become man,
man being thus." Ah, brethren, if we could
only begin at the other end! God did become
man, and therefore manhood must be essen-
tially capacious of Divinity. He lived in a
human home, and so our homes must be capa-
ble of a Divinity they do not have. He en-
tered into friendships, and so friendship must
be sacred. He worked, and so work must be
honorable. He cared for the body that He
lived in, and so the body cannot be so vile as
men have called it and as we make it. If this
could be the way the Incarnation came to us,
then surely it must be a constant inspiration
to us that it was " His own " to whom Christ
came. VII. 27.
O soul of mine! I tell thee true,
If Christ indeed be thine,
Not more makes He himself thy kin
Than makes He thee divine.
DENIS WORTMAX.
DECEMBER 13. 347
TESUS " came unto His own." To men for-
^ getful of their godlike nature He came
to tell them that they were the sons of God;
and to men who could not do without Him
He came because they needed Him. Oh, my
dear friends, by what high warrants does the
Saviour claim us for His own! Because we
are His Father's children, and because we are
so needy, therefore our divine Brother comes.
He comes to you and says, " You called Me."
And you look up out of your worldliness and
say, " Oh no! I did not call. I do not know
You!" But He says, calmly, "You did,
although you do not know it. That power of
being godlike which is in you, crushed and un-
satisfied that summoned me; and that need
of being forgiven and renewed which you will
not own that summoned Me. And here I
am! Now wilt thou be made whole? If
thou canst believe, all things are possible to
him that believeth."
VII. 30.
I did not know that I had called Thee, Lord:
I knew not half my dearth, my sin, my
grief;
Yet gladly now I take Thee at Thy word,
Lord, I believe; help Thou my unbelief.
JOHN WORDEN.
348 DECEMBER 14.
/""^ HRIST came in answer to a most urgent
v_> and pressing call of need. That is what
it signifies when it is said that " He came unto
His own." For in a true sense everything is
a man's own which needs that man ; not every-
thing which he needs, but everything which
needs him. Do you not know what that is ?
Your child is yours not merely by the claim of
birth and nature, but by the tie of continual
dependence. He is most yours when he needs
you most. . . . He came to those who needed
Him; most of all to those who from the stricken
earth held up to Him the deepest of all needs,
the need of sin that craved forgiveness; and
that was what made them His. Certainly no
level-eyed intercourse of sinless man with sin-
less Christ could have wrought in us such a
profound and precious sense that we belong
to Him as this simple knowledge that we need
Him. Need has its sacred rights. Because
we want forgiveness and help, and He only
can forgive and help us, therefore we are His.
VII. 28, 29.
My faith burns low, my hope burns low,
Only my heart's desire cries out in me
By the deep thunder of its want and woe,
Cries out to Thee.
Lord, Thou art Life though I be dead,
Love's Fire Thou art however cold I be:
Nor heaven have I, nor place to lay my head,
Nor home, but Thee.
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.
DECEMBER 15. 349
He planteth an ash, and the rain doth nourish
it. Is. xliv. 14.
LET it not be a group of ash-trees, but a
group of men, ... a thought of God
entrusted to the earth for its embodiment and
execution. What are these dreams and visions,
these upward Teachings, these certainties of
infinite belongings, what are they, O thought
of God, but the unbroken tension of the chain
which binds the thinker to His thought for-
ever ? And what are all these earthlinesses,
these tender clingings to the things our senses
understand, . . . these calls of present duties,
this fear of dying, this love of the present,
warm, domestic earth, what are they all but
the pressure of the warm ground upon the seed
entrusted to it ? The man who does not some-
how hold the complete truth about his life
both of these truths combined in one does
not live worthily. The man who has and
holds them both, look, what a life he lives!
Look how substantially his roots are fastened
in the earth. Look how aspiringly he lifts his
branches to the sky.
V. 282, 283.
Here in Thy great world-garden, Lord, we
stand:
Keep us, for here the blossoms blight so fast!
The fruit is flawed in turning from Thy beams
To the biting east to folly and to sin.
And let all trees, the wildings of the wood
And grafts of rarest culture, waft Thee praise!
LUCY LARCOM.
350 DECEMBER 16.
THE growth of the tree is a mysterious and
spiritual power. It cannot be detected at
its labor when with a sudden stroke of the axe
you tear the tree's trunk open. Your sight is
not keen enough to catch it. And yet how
closely, how inextricably it is bound up with
the grosser elements, in connection with which
alone it does its work. There must be the
black earth and the brown seed, or nothing
comes. What growth-power ever made mani-
festation of itself, creating out of nothing,
in the air, a tree that had no history and no
progenitor ? The material is first, and then
the spiritual.
And need I even suggest to you how every
man has in his bodily constitution the physical
basis of the most subtle and transcendent parts
of his profoundest life ? Out of the very mar-
row of his bones comes something which his
finest affections never outgo, and which gives
a color to his soul's loftiest visions. . . .
There is a physical correspondent to every-
thing he thinks or fancies. There is a physical
basis to his most spiritual life.
Do honor to your bodies. Reverence your
physical natures, not simply for themselves.
Only as ends they are not worthy of it, but be-
cause in health and strength lies the true
basis of noble thought and glorious devotion.
A man thinks well and loves well and prays
well because of the rich running of his blood.
VI. 245, 246, 249.
Health of body with health of soul
This is the only worthy goal.
DECEMBER 17. 351
The Lord God formed man of the dust of the
ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of
life; and man became a living soul. GEN. ii. 7.
I DO not know, I cannot guess, what was
the nature of the historical event to which
that verse refers. But I do know that it is
absolutely true to that great order which per-
vades the universe. Everywhere the earthly
conditions offer their opportunities to the
celestial miracle. The fuel is cut in the woods
of earth; it is piled, hard and lifeless, on the
unheeding stone; and then from it the flame
arises, a live aspiring column, and lays its
fiery tribute at the feet of God. " That is
not first which is spiritual, but that which is
natural; and afterward that which is spiritual."
Would it not be good ... if these words
should be written in golden letters on the
walls of every gymnasium and also on the
walls of every school of learning and cell of
meditation in the world ? . . . As they stood
on the walls of the gymnasium, what they
declared would be the need of a strong body
for all best spiritual life. As they stood writ-
ten on the study wall, they would mean the
utter failure of the strongest body unless a
spiritual life came down from above and occu-
pied it, came out from within and clothed it
with a worthy purpose. VI. 246, 248.
Let us not always say,
" 'Spite of this flesh to-day
I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole ! "
As the bird wings and sings,
Let us cry, " All good things
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps
soul." BROWNING.
352 DECEMBER 18.
"THERE are men deeply impressed with the
* infiniteness of life. . . . There comes
great happiness to them. That happiness is
perfectly hollow unless there is a meaning be-
hind it, unless it tells of intentions some-
where, unless it means love. They know
that "Eat, drink, and be merry," is not the
end of it all. To love some one who is loving
them, that is what they want to do. "Oh,
that I could find Him ! Oh, that I could find
Him! " is their cry. Great sorrow comes.
But to them sorrow cannpt rest in broken
limbs or lost fortunes. Those again are only
symbols. The essential thing lies deeper.
. . . Then if any glimpse is offered of a
Son of God, a manifestation of the Invisible
Deity who sends happiness and sorrow and
who can forgive sin, there is no tendency to
disbelieve; there is the hunger of the heart
leaping with hope, there is the stretching out
of the arms as when they told Bartimeus,
" Jesus of Nazareth passeth by."
V. 207, 208.
'Neath some shadow oft I wait,
Like blind Bartimeus at the gate,
Assured that when my Lord draws nigh,
Sin, doubt, and darkness all shall fly;
Hence to His cross I cling the more,
Whene'er these shadows touch my door.
JOHN ORDRONAUX.
DECEMBER 19. 353
The Lord is at hand. PHIL. iv. 5.
, my dear friends, if you knew that in
the most evident of all ways, which is
by death, the Lord were coming to you to-
morrow, and if you could be perfectly free
from all base feeling, from fear and flurry,
from defiance and from dread ? . . . what
would be the condition which it would make
in you ? Would it be any elevation, refine-
ment, solemnity, and broadening of life ?
Would it be the calming of frivolity, the re-
lease of charity, the kindling of hope ? Would
it not be all of these ?
Not yet for us does that great, solemn foot-
fall sound outside the door. But none the less
is the Lord at hand. He is always at hand.
All expectation may be expectation of Him.
IV. 368.
Who shall know the Master's coming ?
Whether it be at dawn or sunset,
When night dews weigh down the wheat-ears,
Or while noon rides high in heaven,
Sleeping lies the yellow field ?
Only, may Thy voice, Good Master,
Peal above the reapers' chorus,
And the sound of sheaves slow falling,
" Gather all into My garner,
For it is My harvest time! "
DINAH MULOCH CRAIK.
354 DECEMBER 20.
THAT life which we dream of in ourselves
we see in Jesus. Where was there ever
gentleness so full of energy ? What life as
still as His was ever so pervaded with untiring
and restless power ? Who ever knew the pur-
poses for which he worked to be so sure, and
yet so labored for them as if they were uncer-
tain ? Who ever believed his truths so en-
tirely, and yet believed them so vividly as
Jesus ? Such perfect peace that never grew
listless for a moment; such perfect activity
that never grew restless or excited; these are
the wonders of the life of Him who going up
and down the rugged ways of Palestine, was
spiritually walking on "the sea of glass
mingled with fire."
As more and more we get the victory over
the beast, we too are lifted up to walk where
he walked. For this all trial, all suffering,
and all struggle are sent.
IV. 126.
Peace, perfect peace, in this dark world of
sin ?
The blood of Jesus whispers peace within.
Peace, perfect peace, by thronging duties
pressed ?
To do the will of Jesus, this is rest.
Peace, perfect peace, our future all unknown ?
Jesus we know, and He is on the throne.
E. H. BlCKERSTETH.
DECEMBER 21. 355
\ I 7 HEN Jesus had risen from the dead, you
* * remember, His disciple refused to be-
lieve till with his own hand he had felt the
wounds in the hands and feet and side. And
Jesus gently rebuking him, compares, as it
were, the methods of authority and experi-
ence, of faith and science, so to speak, to the
advantage of the former when He says,
' Thomas, because thou hast seen thou hast
believed. Blessed are they that have not seen
and yet have believed." And yet when we
come to think of it, is not His rebuke really
that Thomas had not used the method of ex-
perience enough, not that he demands it too
much ? He rebukes him that in all the years
that they had been together he had not ob-
served Him deeply enough to learn His char-
acter and understand His words. Is He not
pleading, not against science, but for a higher
science ? . . . " If I do not the works of my
Father believe me not," a direct appeal to
experience.
VI. 133.
Oh, for a faith more strong and true
Than that which doubting Thomas knew
A faith assured and clear,
To know that He who for us died
Rejected, scorned, and crucified
Lives and is with us here!
PHEBE GARY.
356 DECEMBER 22.
And a little child shall lead them. Is. xi. 6.
HE who helps a child helps humanity with
a distinctness, with an immediateness,
which no other help given to human creatures
in any other stage of their human life can pos-
sibly give again. He who puts his blessed
influence into a river blesses the land through
which that river is to flow; but he who puts
his influence into the fountain where the river
comes out puts his influence everywhere. No
land it may not reach. No ocean it may not
make sweeter. No bark it may not bear. No
wheel it may not turn. Sometimes we get at
things best by their contraries. Learn the
rich beauty of helping a child by the awful-
ness of hurting a child, hurting a child even
in his physical frame, hurting him still more
in soul and mind. The thing that made the
Divine Master indignant as He stood there in
Jerusalem was that He dreamed of seeing be-
fore Him a man who had harmed some of these
little ones, and He said of any such ruffian,
"It were better for him that he had never
been born." If it is such an awful thing
to hurt a child's life, to aid a child's life is
beautiful. X. 506.
Great hearts have largest room to bless the
small;
Strong natures give the weaker home and rest;
So Christ took little children to His breast,
And with a reverence more profound we fall
In the majestic presence, that can give
Truth's simplest message: " 'Tis by love ye
live." LUCY LARCOM.
DECEMBER 23. 357
'"FHE first truth is the essential unity of
* man's life and God's, and so the es-
sential glory of humanity. Christ came not
merely to man, but into man; and that was
possible because the manhood into which He
entered was "His own," had original and
fundamental unity with His Godhood, was
made in the image of God. Here was man,
made in God's image, separated from God,
trying spasmodically to struggle back, failing
and falling so continually that the conscious-
ness that he belonged with God was well-nigh
lost. That it might not be lost, that it might
be a real and living thing, it must be asserted
from the other side. Man and God had the
capacity of entrance into each other. Since
man would not, and, as it almost seemed now,
could not enter into God, God would enter
into man. Man had failed of being Godlike;
God, then, would be manlike, and so the first
truth that God and man belonged together
should not be lost for want of assertion. Is
not this a noble and inspiring value of the In-
carnation ? VII. 26.
Lord, if Thou grant me grace to hear and see
Thy very Self who stoopest thus to me,
I make but slight account
Of aught beside wherein to sink or mount.
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.
358 DECEMBER 24.
Because there was no room for them in the inn.
LUKE ii. 7.
RELIGION makes us feel the littleness to
which we have reduced our lives, and
then proclaims, in contrast with that littleness,
the great capacity God meant them to have.
"You have cramped your life," it seems to
say. " You have made it small and narrow.
By long unspirituality you have made its
doors so low that none but short or stooping
thoughts can enter. You have made its
rooms so mean that great truths can not live
in them. But never dare to think that this
was God's plan for your life. He drew its
architecture on a lordly scale. He designed
for you great, generous, capacious lives. He
built you to be ' temples of the Holy Ghost.'
. . . You may make your lives foul and taw-
dry and meagre; you may diminish and over-
crowd them till there is no room for a noble
thought or a pure desire; but you do it at
your peril. God made them roomy; and there
is room for His holy Son to find a nativity
within them if you will only set and keep
their chambers open."
VII. 80, 81.
Christ, He requires still, whensoe'er He comes
To feed or lodge, to have the best of rooms:
Give Him the choice; grant Him the nobler
part
Of all the house: the best of all's the heart.
HERRICK.
DECEMBER 25. 359
The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.
JOHN i. 14.
WHO is it that lies once more to-day be-
fore the world, the Son of God and Son
of man, at Bethlehem ? Mary bows down and
learns the Incarnation, and feels the solem-
nity and sublimity of the human life into
which the Divinity has entered. The wise
men come and find their King in this weak
babe. The shepherds see the hope of Israel
fulfilled, the Saviour come. Oh, on this Christ-
mas Day let us be with them all! Let us feel
thrilling through this humanity which we so
often scorn the glorifying fire of the Incarna-
tion. Let us give up our lives to Him and beg
that He will rule them. But, more than all,
let us give our souls, hungry and sinful, a
Christmas leave to go to Him who is their
Saviour, whom they will know for their Saviour
if we let them go to Him.
It is a day of joy and charity. May God
make you very rich in both by giving you
abundantly the glory of the Incarnation, the
peace of Christ's kingship, and the grace of
Christ's salvation.
VII. 96.
The heart must ring Thy Christmas bells,
Thy inward altars raise;
Its faith and hope Thy canticles,
And its obedience praise!
WHITTIER.
360 DECEMBER 26.
Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and
peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope by
the power of the Holy Ghost. ROM. xv. 13.
SUCH peace in believing is to be distinctly
a peace by Gospel faith. . . . Let me be
a thorough believer in Jesus Christ, let me,
that is, have taken Him with all the revela-
tion of humanity that there is in Him, and
where is the fellow-man with whom I shall not
be at peace ? Is it the man who domineers
over me and bullies me ? The supreme mastery
of my Lord adjusts all these lower masteries,
and compels them to keep their proper places.
When I have learned really to " fear Him who
can cast both soul and body into hell," I am
able indeed not to "fear them that can kill
the body." The martyr seeing Christ stand-
ing at the right hand of God is at full peace
with his murderers.
VI. 203, 204.
And he [St. Stephen] kneeled down, and cried
with a loud voice : Lord, lay not this sin to their
charge. And when he had said this, he fell
asleep. ACTS vii. 60.
Oh, for the vision that sufficed
That first blest martyr after Christ,
And gave a peace so deep
That while he saw with raptured eyes
Jesus with God in Paradise,
He, praying, fell asleep!
PHEBE GARY,
DECEMBER 27. 361
Thou wilt hide them in the secret of Thy pres-
ence . . . from the strife of tongues.
Ps. xxxi. 20.
THE very words are full of peace before we
hardly touch them to open their meaning.
But their meaning is deeper the more we study
it. ... Suppose that St. John should come
and talk with you, or be at your side without
a word in the midst of the wildest of our
social Babels. Would he not bring his peace
with him ? Would you not let every one else
go, and be alone with him, even in all the
crowd ? And now if it is possible, instead of
the great disciple, for God Himself to be with
you, so that His presence is real, so that He
lets you understand His thoughts and lets you
know that He understands yours; and as close
to you nay, infinitely closer than the men
who crowd you round, and whose voices are
in your ears, the unseen God is truly with
you, what then ? . . . He has blinded you to
all but Himself. He has hid you in the secret
of His presence.
I. 83, 84, 85.
Yet shall I envy blessed John ?
Nay, not so verily,
Now that Thou, Lord, both Man and God,
Dost dwell in me:
Upbuilding with Thy Manhood's might
My frail humanity;
Yea, Thy Divinehood pouring forth,
In fulness filling me.
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.
362 DECEMBER 28.
It is no little thing when a fresh soul,
And a fresh heart, with their unmeasured
scope
For good, not gravitating earthward yet, . . .
Are sent into the world, no little thing
When this unbounded possibility
Into the outer silence is withdrawn.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
WHAT is it when a child dies ? It is the
great Head-master calling that child up
into His own room, away from all the under-
teachers, to finish his education under His own
eye. The whole thought of a child's growth
and development in heaven is one of the most
exalting and bewildering on which the mind
can rest. Always the child must be there.
Always there must be something in those who
died as children to make them different to all
eternity from those who grew up to be men
here among all the temptations and hindrances
of earth. There must forever be something
in their perfect trust in the Father, something
in the peculiar nearness and innocent famili-
arity of their life with Jesus, . . . something
pure even among all the perfect purity which
we shall all have reached, something wiser
than the wisest, showing that even there there
is a revelation that can be given only to the
babes; something more perfectly triumphant
and serene to mark forever the perfected life
of those who never sinned.
IV. 149.
These are they which follow the Lamb whither-
soever He goeth. REV. xiv. 4.
DECEMBER 29. 363
It doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we
know that when He shall appear we shall be like
Him. i JOHN iii. 2.
IS life decreasing or increasing ? Is it grow-
ing richer or poorer ? The ordinary cheap
philosophies assume that life is like a fire
which speedily reaches the fulness of its heat,
and then fades and fades till it goes out. The
high philosophy which gets its light from God
believes that life, as it moves deeper and
deeper into God, must move from richness
into richness always. . . . All that we believe
is but the promise of the perfect faith. All
that we do is great with its anticipation of the
complete obedience. All that we are but
gives us suggestions of the richness which our
being will attain. Those moments make our
real, effective, enthusiastic life. They create
the fulfilment of their own hopes and dreams.
Oh, cherish them! Oh, believe that no man
lives at his best to whom life is not becoming
better and better, always aware of greater and
greater forces, capable of diviner and diviner
deeds and joys! XII. 21, 22.
Oh, sweet to live, to love, and to aspire!
To know that whatsoever we attain,
Beyond the utmost summit of desire
Heights upon heights eternally remain,
To humble us, to lift us up, to show
Into what luminous deeps we onward go.
LUCY LARCOM.
364 DECEMBER 30.
// is toward evening, and the day is far spent.
LUKE xxiv. 29.
THE year which came to us twelve months
ago, all fresh and young, is old and
weary. A new year will come to crowd him
from his place. On such a day it is not mere
habit, it is a natural and healthy instinct,
which makes us stand between the new year
and the old, between the living and the dead,
and listen to them as they speak to one another.
The old year says to the new year, " Take
this man and show him greater things than I
have been able to show him. You must be for
him a fuller, richer day of the Lord than I
could be." The new year says to the old, " I
will take him and do for him the best that
I can do. But all that I can do for him will
be possible only in virtue of the preparation
which you have made, only because of what
you have done for him already."
IV. 357-
I am fading from you,
But one draweth near,
Called the Angel-guardian
Of the coming Year.
I brought good desires,
Though as yet but seeds,
Let the New Year make them
Blossom into deeds.
ADELAIDE A. PROCTER.
DECEMBER 31. 365
Then cometh the end. i COR. xv. 24.
/ will remember the years of the right hand of
the most High. Ps. Ixxvii. 10.
TF around this instability of human life is
* wrapped the great permanence of the life
of God ... if the whole element of time
is so lost in His eternity that not the begin-
ning and the ending of experiences but their
spiritual relations to our growing characters
is everything, then is there not light upon it
all ? To value everything which comes to
me, and yet to know that not its form but its
spiritual essence is really valuable, therefore
to hasten while I have it to get out of it what
it has to give me, and to even rejoice that
some day in the loss of its formal presence I
shall be able to make myself completely sure
of the possession of its spirit, that is the true
attitude of the soul toward every good thing
that God gives, health, friends, wealth,
learning, time.
V. 369.
Why cry so many voices, choked with tears,
" The year is dead! " It rather seems to me
Full of such rich and boundless life to be,
It is a presage of the eternal years.
... So let us rather cry:
This year of grace still lives; it cannot die!
MARY G. SLOCUM.
ASH-WEDNESDAY. 367
Turn ye even unto Me with all your heart, and
with fasting. JOEL ii. 12.
TOASTING is both a symbol and a means.
Every kind of abstinence is at once an
expression of humility and an opening of the
life. What then is Lent ? Ah, if our souls
are sinful and are shut too close by many
worldlinesses against that Lord who is their
life and Saviour, what do we need ? Let us
have the symbols which belong to sin and to
repentance. . Let us at least for a few weeks,
among the many weeks of life, proclaim by
soberness and quietude of life that we know
our responsibility and how often we have been
false to it. Let us not sweep through the
whole year in buoyant exultation, as if there
were no shame upon us, nothing for us to re-
pent of, nothing for us to fear. By some
small symbols let us bear witness that we know
something of the solemnity of living, the
dreadfulness of sin, the struggle of repent-
ance. . . . Perhaps the symbol may strike in
and deepen the solemnity which it expresses.
Perhaps as we tell God of what little sorrow
for our sins we have, our sorrow for our sins
may be increased, and while we stand there
in His presence the fasting may gather a truer
reality of penitence behind it.
II. 214.
Who goeth in the way that Christ hath gone
Is much more sure to meet with Him than one
That travelleth byways.
GEORGE HERBERT.
368 GOOD FRIDAY.
// is finished. JOHN xix. 30.
OH, what a finishing that was! It is as if
eternity were crowded into the heart of
Him who spoke. All He had been forever had
consummated itself at last. The long yearn-
ing to let men know what a love waited for
them in the heart of God was satisfied. The
light was kindled on the mountain-top, and
already the quick ear of Divinity heard the
stirring in thousands of valleys, where men,
hopeless before, were gathering 'up their bur-
dens and with the inspiration of an unfamiliar
hope were starting to struggle up with them,
determined not to rest until they cast them
down into the shadow of that unseen cross.
What cry like this has the world ever heard ?
Not even that first utterance of calm creative
power, "Let there be light," had greater
meaning or sublimity than this last agony of
love that burst from the lips of the satisfied
Redeemer: " I have been lifted up. I shall
draw all men unto Me. Now it is finished."
VII. 265.
Done is the work that saves!
Once and forever done,
Finished the righteousness
That clothes the unrighteous one.
The love that blesses us below
Is flowing freely to us now.
HORATIUS BONAR.
EASTER DAY. 369
That I may know Him, and the power of His
resurrection. PHIL. iii. 10.
THE life of a true Christian seems to me to
be full of Easters; to be one perpetual
renewal of things from their lower to their
higher, from their temporal to their spiritual
shape and power. You are called upon to give
up a luxury, and you do it. The little piece
of comfortable living is quietly buried away
underground, . . . undergoes some strange
alteration in its burial, and comes out a spir-
itual quality that blesses and enriches your
soul forever. ... So the partial and imper-
fect and temporary are always being taken
away from us and buried, that the perfect and
eternal may arise out of their tombs to bless
us. . . . They are not simply taken away to
be kept the child that you saw die, the dream
that you saw fade to be kept in some future
state till you shall be fit to come and get
them; . . . they are here all the time; not to
be had by-and-by, but to be had now. They
can be had in their spiritual return to you by-
and-by only as you first have them and keep
them spiritually now. . . . The power of the
future resurrection is all along a power of
present regeneration.
What can I do, then, but invite you all to
know that power by earnest self-surrender, by
patient prayer, and by a childlike faith that
willingly takes into its loving life the willing,
living, loving Christ of Easter Day ?
VII. 277, 278, 285.
He that hath the Son, hath life. JOHN v. 12.
370 ASCENSION-DAY.
A cloud received Him out of tJieir sight.
ACTS ii. 9.
FOR a human being to go out from this
earth is a dreadful thing if it is only with
this earth that humanity has any known rela-
tion. . . . But now let us believe in the Ascen-
sion. Once a human being the best and
completest of all human beings that have ever
lived, the human being whose humanity was
perfect by its very union with Divinity has
gone, still human, out of the sight of men,
gone, evidently all alive. We can not trace
His course. The cloud received Him. But
yet we know that somewhere out beyond the
limits of our little earth that true humanity
of His has found a home. Humanity can live
beyond the earth, can keep broad live rela-
tions with the universe. The man who goes
to-day, then, goes still into the dark, but the
darkness into which he goes is pierced by a
path of light, and at its heart there is a home
of light to which he goes. The humanity of
Jesus has gone before and makes the vast un-
known not unfamiliar. Around our thought
of it our thoughts of the men we have seen
die, our thoughts of our own coming deaths,
can gather with confidence and calmness.
VII. 298.
Thou Who wast Centre of all heights on the
Mount of Beatitudes,
Grant us to sit with Thee in heavenly places.
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.
WHITSUNDAY.
He saith iinto them, Have ye received the Holy
Ghost since ye believed? ACTS xix. 2.
AND what that first Whitsunday was to all
the world, one certain day becomes to
any man, the day when the Holy Spirit comes
to him. God enters into Him and he sees all
things with God's vision. Truths which were
dead spring into life and are as real to him as
they are to God. He is filled with the Spirit
and straightway he believes; not as he used
to, coldly holding the outsides of things. He
has looked right into their hearts. His belief
in Jesus is all afire with love. His belief in
immortality is eager with anticipation. Can
any day in all his life compare with that day ?
If it were to break forth into flames of fire and
tremble with sudden and mysterious wind,
would it seem strange to him the day when
he first knew how near God was, and how true
truth was, and how deep Christ was ? O, have
we known that day ? O, careless, easy, cold
believers! if one should come and ask you,
" Have you received the Holy Ghost since you
believed ? " dare you, could you, answer him,
"Yes"? 11.227.
I bow my forehead to the dust,
I veil mine eyes for shame,
And urge, in trembling self-distrust,
A prayer without a claim.
No offering of mine own I have,
Nor works my faith to prove;
I can but give the gifts He gave,
And plead His love for love.
WHITTIER.
372 TRINITY SUNDAY.
Through Him we both have access by one Spirit
unto the Father. EPHES. ii. 18.
SEE what Godhood the soul has come to
recognize in the world. First, there is
the Creative Deity from which it sprang, and
to which it is struggling to return the divine
End, God the Father. Then there is the
Incarnate Deity, which makes that return pos-
sible by the exhibition of God's love, the
divine method, God the Son; and then there
is this Infused Deity, this divine energy in the
soul itself, taking its capacities and setting
them homeward to the Father the divine
Power of Salvation, God the Holy Spirit.
To the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit.
Let us keep the faith of the Trinity. . . .
Let us seek to come to the highest, through
the highest, by the highest. Let the end and
the method and the power of our life be all
divine. If our hearts are set on that, Jesus
will accept us for His disciples; all that He
promised to do for those who trusted Him, He
will do for us. He will show us the Father;
He will send us the Comforter; nay, what can
He do, or what can we ask that will outgo the
strong and sweet assurance of the promise:
Through Him we shall have access by one
Spirit unto the Father.
I. 243, 246.
We from Thy oneness come,
Beyond it cannot roam,
And in Thy oneness find our one eternal home.
FABKR.
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CONTENTS.
First Journey Abroad. 1865-1866.
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England and the Continent. 1877.
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England and Europe. 1885.
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