Part 12

"I can only say that I sympathise with your grief, and if faith means anything at all it is trusting to those instincts, or feelings, or whatever they may be called, which assure us of some life after this."

_Tennyson--a Memoir_, by his Son.

"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, close at his feet. The whole thought of a child's growth and development in heaven instead of here on earth, is one of the most exalting and bewildering on which the mind can rest."

PHILLIPS BROOKS.

Death of Young Children

SEPTEMBER 5

"Nothing is left or lost, nothing of good Or lovely; but whatever its first springs Has drawn from God, returns to Him again."

_On an Early Death_, TRENCH.

"When one comes to the loss of young children--a sad perplexity--let it not be forgotten that they were given. If in the hour of bitterest grief it were asked of a bereaved mother whether she would prefer never to have possessed in order that she might never have lost--her heart would be very indignant. No little child has ever come from God and stayed a brief while in some human home--to return again to the Father--without making glad that home and leaving behind some trace of heaven. A family had counted themselves poorer without those quaint sayings, those cunning caresses, that soft touch, that sudden smile. This short visit was not an incident: it was a benediction. The child departs, the remembrances, the influence, the associations remain. If one should allow us to have Sarto's Annunciation for a month, we would thank him: when he resumed it for his home he would not take everything, for its loveliness of maid and angel is now ours for ever. And if God recalls the child He lent, then let us thank Him for the loan, and consider that what made that child the messenger of God--its purity, modesty, trustfulness, gladness--has passed into our soul."

_The Potter's Wheel_, Dr. JOHN WATSON.

The Dead

SEPTEMBER 6

"The dead abide with us! Though stark and cold Earth seems to grip them, they are with us still:-- They have forged our chains of being for good or ill And their invisible hands these hands yet hold. Our perishable bodies are the mould In which their strong imperishable will-- Mortality's deep yearning to fulfil-- Hath grown incorporate through dim time untold.

"Vibrations infinite of life in death, As a star's travelling light survives its star! So may we hold our lives, that when we are The fate of those who then will draw this breath, They shall not drag us to their judgment bar, And curse the heritage which we bequeath."

MATHILDE BLIND.

"We are learning, by the help of many teachers, the extent and the authority of the dominion which the dead exercise over us, and which we ourselves are shaping for our descendants.

"We feel, as perhaps it was impossible to feel before, how at every moment influences from the past enter our souls, and how we in turn scatter abroad that which will be fruitful in the distant future. It is becoming clear to us that we are literally parts of others and they of us."

Bishop WESTCOTT.

The Dead

SEPTEMBER 7

"I with uncovered head Salute the sacred dead, Who went and who return not. Say not so!

* * * * *

We rather seem the dead that stayed behind. Blow, trumpets, all your exaltations blow! For never shall their aureoled presence lack: I see them muster in a gleaming row, With ever-youthful brows that nobler show; We find in our dull road their shining track: In every nobler mood We feel the orient of their spirit glow, Part of our life's unalterable good, Of all our saintlier aspiration: They come transfigured back, Secure from change in their high-hearted ways, Beautiful evermore, and with the rays Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation."

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

The Dead

SEPTEMBER 8

"And yet, dear heart! remembering thee, Am I not richer than of old? Safe in thy immortality, What change can reach the wealth I hold? What chance can mar the pearl and gold Thy love hath left in trust for me? And while in life's long afternoon, Where cool and long the shadows grow, I walk to meet the night that soon Shall shape and shadow overflow, I cannot feel that thou art far, Since near at need the angels are; And when the sunset gates unbar, Shall I not see thee waiting stand, And, white against the evening star, The welcome of thy beckoning hand?"

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER.

The Dead

SEPTEMBER 9

"Lord, make me one with Thine 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; At one with all who throng the crystal sea, And wait the setting of our moons and suns. Ah, my beloved ones gone on before, Who looked not back with hand upon the plough! If beautiful to me while still in sight, How beautiful must be your aspects now; Your unknown, well-known aspects in that light, Which clouds shall never cloud for evermore!"

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI.

Death

SEPTEMBER 10

"Most persons have died before they expire--died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion. The fact of the tranquillity with which the great majority of dying persons await this locking of those gates of life through which its airy angels have been coming and going from the moment of the first cry, is familiar to those who have been often called upon to witness the last period of life. Almost always there is a preparation made by Nature for unearthing a soul, just as on the smaller scale there is for the removal of a milk tooth. The roots which hold human life to earth are absorbed before it is lifted from its place. Some of the dying are weary, and want rest, the idea of which is almost inseparable, in the universal mind, from death. Some are in pain, and want to be rid of it, even though the anodyne be dropped, as in the legend, from the sword of the Death-Angel. And some are strong in faith and hope, so that, as they draw near the next world, they would fain hurry toward it, as the caravan moves faster over the sands when the foremost travellers send word along the file that water is in sight. Though each little party that follows in a foot-track of its own will have it that the water to which others think they are hastening is a mirage, not the less has it been true in all ages, and for human beings of every creed which recognised a future, that those who have fallen, worn out by their march through the Desert, have dreamed at least of a River of Life, and thought they heard its murmurs as they lay dying."

_The Professor at the Breakfast Table_, O. W. HOLMES.

Crossing the Bar

September 11

"Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar, When I put out to sea.

"But such a tide as moving seems asleep, Too full for sound and foam, When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home.

"Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark! And may there be no sadness of farewell When I embark;

"For, tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crost the bar."

TENNYSON.

Life after Death

SEPTEMBER 12

"If the immediate life after death be only sleep, and the spirit between this life and the next should be folded like a flower in a night slumber, then the remembrance of the past might remain, as the smell and colour do in the sleeping flower; and in that case the memory of our love would last as true, and would live pure and whole within the spirit of my friend until after it was unfolded at the breaking of the morn, when the sleep was over."

_Tennyson--a Memoir_, by his Son.

"Life! I know not what thou art, But know that thou and I must part; And when, or how, or where we met, I own to me's a secret yet.

"Life! we have been long together, Through pleasant and through cloudy weather; 'Tis hard to part when friends are dear; Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear;-- Then steal away, give little warning, Choose thine own time; Say not Good Night, but in some brighter clime Bid me Good Morning!"

A. L. BARBAULD.

Bearing Sorrow

SEPTEMBER 13

"It is dangerous to abandon oneself to the luxury of grief; it deprives one of courage, and even of the wish for recovery."

_Amiel's Journal._

"Its way of suffering is the witness which a soul bears to itself."

_Amiel's Journal._

"We must bury our dead joys And live above them with a living world."

GEORGE ELIOT.

Bearing Sorrow

SEPTEMBER 14

"Sorrow brings also a temptation to exactingness. It may be that friends are very helpful to us. Let us take care that no selfishness mingles with our love for their companionship, with our claims for their sympathy.

"What, for the time, at any rate, is all the world to us, can only be a small part of another's life.

"And one must struggle, as time goes on, to take what comes in one's way of sympathy, of kindness, of companionship, but one must also try never to exact sympathy, to allow ourselves to feel neglected, or slighted, or forgotten.

"This is a hard lesson--sometimes.

"The whole of one's nature becomes sensitive, easily wounded, easily depressed."

Canon SCOTT HOLLAND.

Bearing Sorrow

SEPTEMBER 15

"Selfishness in Sorrow is another temptation. One is so apt to become absorbed in one's Sorrow.

"It is quite possible to become almost selfish in one's spiritual life under the stress of great Sorrow.

"To see everything, every lesson, every allusion, solely from one's own point of view, to grow too fond of thinking of one's burden....

"The hard path of daily duty is the only path to tread, not because one is thinking of oneself, but because one wishes to forget oneself, and to think only of God, and of those that remain.

"Self-denial: to put self last, not out of sight, but last, that is what one is always called to do, and it is a sad bit of disloyalty to God's grace if one becomes more selfish in Sorrow."

Canon SCOTT HOLLAND.

Bearing Sorrow

SEPTEMBER 16

"A great Sorrow which changes life altogether is apt to produce a certain irritability, a sort of nervous jar.

"Very often this is an affair of nerves, of physical health, but it is well to watch--'watch and pray.'

"All sorts of things will jar and hurt us. People will do and say things with perfect unconsciousness that they are wounding us to the quick. Some careless allusion, some chance speech, will set our nerves quivering.... The worries, the jarring incidents, the introduction of discordant topics in the very presence of death, the disappointments, are all to lead us upwards. It is a rough bit of road on which we are set to walk, and the sharp stones cut our feet, but every step brings us nearer God.

"Do not let _temper_ mar the days of Sorrow.

"There most probably will be something to try our temper. Who does not know the trials which seem peculiar to a break-up, a change in our outward life? Who has not seen real Christians giving way to peevishness, fretfulness, petty dislikes, petty jealousies of near relations, of those who may be taking the place of the one they mourn? Perhaps there is nothing which so mars and spoils the religious life as bad temper and selfishness.

"Nothing which is so apt to make outsiders shrug their shoulders at those who make frequent Communions, and go much to Church, and who, especially in dark hours, give way to crossness. There is no better name."

Canon SCOTT HOLLAND.

The Meaning of Religion

SEPTEMBER 17

"The meaning of religion is a rule of life; it is an obligation to do well; if that rule, that obligation, is not seen, your thousand texts will be to you like the thousand lanterns to the blind man. As he goes about the house in the night of his blindness, he will only break the glass and burn his feet and fingers: and so you, as you go through life in the night of your ignorance, will only break and hurt yourselves on broken laws.

"Before Christ came, the Jewish religion had forbidden many evil things; it was a religion that a man could fulfil, I had almost said, in idleness; all he had to do was to pray and to sing psalms, and to refrain from things forbidden. Do not deceive yourselves; when Christ came, all was changed. The injunction was then laid upon us not to refrain from doing, but to do. At the last day He is to ask us not what sins we have avoided, but what righteousness we have done, what we have done for others, how we have helped good and hindered evil: what difference has it made to this world and to our country and our family and our friends, that we have lived. The man who has been only pious and not useful will stand with a long face on that great day, when Christ puts to him His questions.

"But this is not all that we must learn: we must beware everywhere of the letter that kills, seek everywhere for the spirit that makes glad and strong. For example, these questions that we have just read are again only the letter. We must study what they mean, not what they are. We are told to visit them that are in prison. A good thing, but it were better if we could save them going there. We are told to visit the sick; it were better still, and we should so better have fulfilled the law, if we could have saved some of them from falling sick."

_The Life of R. L. Stevenson_, GRAHAM BALFOUR.

Pure Religion

SEPTEMBER 18

"Righteousness in the Old Testament is not a theological, but an ethical word, and has to do not with a person's creed, but with a person's character."

Dr. JOHN WATSON.

"In those days men were working their passage to Heaven by keeping the Ten Commandments, and the hundred and ten other commandments which they had manufactured out of them. Christ said, I will show you a more simple way. If you do one thing, you will do these hundred and ten things, without ever thinking about them. If you love, you will unconsciously fulfil the whole law.... Love is the rule for fulfilling all rules, the new commandment for keeping all the old commandments, Christ's one secret of the Christian life."

_The Greatest Thing in the World_, HENRY DRUMMOND.

"Pure religion as taught by Jesus Christ is a life, a growth, a divine spirit within, coming out in love and sympathy, and helpfulness to our fellow-men."

H. W. THOMAS.

The Christian Law

SEPTEMBER 19

"We are often reminded that Christ left no code of commandments. It is in Him--in His Person and His work--the Law lies. He has given indeed for our instruction some applications of the negative precepts of the Decalogue to the New Order. He has added some illustrations of positive duties, almsgiving, prayer, fasting. He has set up an ideal and a motive for life; and, at the same time, He has endowed His Church with spiritual power, and has promised that the Paraclete, sent in His Name, shall guide it into all the Truth.

(The fundamental principle of the Christian Social Union is "to claim for the Christian Law the ultimate authority to rule social practice.")

"The Christian Law, then, is the embodiment of the Truth for action in forms answering to the conditions of society from age to age. The embodiment takes place slowly, and it can never be complete. It is impossible for us to rest indolently in the conclusions of the past. In each generation the obligation is laid on Christians to bring new problems of conduct and duty into the Divine light, and to find their solution under the teaching of the Spirit. The unceasing effort to fulfil the obligation establishes the highest prerogative of man, and manifests the life of the Church. From this effort there can be no release; and the effort itself becomes more difficult as human relations grow fuller, wider, more complex."

_Christian Social Union Addresses_, Bishop WESTCOTT.

The Christian Law

SEPTEMBER 20

"The sanction of this Law (the Christian Law) is not fear of punishment, but that self-surrender to an ever-present Lord, of those who are His slaves at once and His friends, which is perfect freedom. This Law animates the heart of him who receives it with the invigorating truth that character is formed rather by what we do than by what we refrain from doing. It requires that every personal gift and possession should minister to the common welfare, not in the way of ransom, or as a forced loan, but as an offering of love. It reaches to the springs of action, and gives to the most mechanical toil the dignity of a divine service. It makes the strong arm co-operate in one work with the warm heart and the creative brain. It constrains the poet and the artist to concentrate their magnificent powers on things lovely and of good report, to introduce us to characters whom to know is a purifying discipline, and to fill the souls of common men with visions of hidden beauty and memories of heroic deeds. It enables us to lift up our eyes to a pattern of human society which we have not yet dared to contemplate, a pattern which answers to the constitution of man as he was made in the Divine image to gain the Divine likeness. It forbids us to seek repose till, as far as lies in us, all labour is seen to be not a provision for living, but a true human life; all education a preparation for the vision of God here and hereafter; all political enterprise a conscious hastening of the time when the many nations shall walk in the light of the holy city, and the kings of the earth bring their glory into it."

_Christian Social Union Addresses_, Bishop WESTCOTT.

Trustees

SEPTEMBER 21

"For the Christian there can be but one ideal, the perfect development of every man for the occupation of his appointed place, for the fulfilment of his peculiar office in the 'Body of Christ'; and as a first step towards this, we are all bound as Christians to bring to our country the offering of our individual service in return for the opportunities of culture and labour which we receive from its organisation. We are all as Christians trustees and stewards of everything which we possess, of our time, our intellect, our influence, no less than of our riches. We ourselves are not our own: still less can we say of that which we inherit or acquire, 'It is my own.' We all belong, in the fulness of life 'in Christ,' to our fellow-citizens, and our nation belongs to mankind. What we hold for a time is to be administered for the relief of distresses, and for the elevation of those among whom we are placed. Personal and social egoism are equally at variance with this conception of humanity. The repression of individuality and the individual appropriation of the fruits of special vigour and insight equally tend to impoverish the race. Service always ready to become sacrifice is the condition of our growth, and the condition of our joy."

_Christian Social Union Addresses_, Bishop WESTCOTT.

"Not to Destroy, but to Fulfil"

SEPTEMBER 22

"Christ took the world as He found it, He left it as it was. He had no quarrel with existing institutions. He did not overthrow the Church--He went to Church. He said nothing against politics--He supported the government of the country. He did not denounce society--His first public action was to go to a marriage. His great aim, in fact, outwardly, and all along, was to be as normal, as little eccentric as possible. The true fanatic always tries the opposite. The spirit alone was singular in Jesus; a fanatic always spoils his cause by extending it to the letter. Christ came not to destroy, but to fulfil. A fanatic comes not to fulfil, but to destroy. If we would follow the eccentricity of our Master, let it not be in asceticism, in denunciation, in punctiliousness, and scruples about trifles, but in largeness of heart, singleness of eye, true breadth of character, true love to men, and heroism for Christ."

_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.

"Religion has been treated as if it were a special exercise of a special power, not as if it were the possible loftiness of everything that a man could think or be or do."

PHILLIPS BROOKS.

Religion in Daily Life

SEPTEMBER 23

"If we want to get religion into life, or anything whatever in us into life, we are bound to have no contentment, no rest, no dreaming, no delays, till we get thought into shape, feeling into labour, some conviction, some belief, some idea, into form without us, among the world of men. This is the main principle, and it applies to every sphere of human effort. So much for the habit whereby we gain power to bring religion into daily life.

"Righteousness, shaped from within to without in the world of men, is justice, and the doing of justice. This is the first need of commonwealths, the first duty of individuals, and the practical religion of both. A still higher form into which we may put our religion in life is in doing the things which belong to love; and love is the higher form because it secures justice. These are the things we should shape into life because we love them. To be faithful always to that which we believe to be true; to be faithful to our principles and our conscience when trial comes, or when we are tempted to sacrifice them for place or pelf; to be faithful to our given word; to keep our promises when we might win favour by eluding or breaking them; to cling to intellectual as well as to moral truth; to so live among men that they may know where we are; to fly our flag in the storm as well as in the calm. It is to pass by with contempt the dark cavern where men worship Mammon; to fix our thought and effort on the attainment of righteousness in public and in private homes, to have the courage to attempt what seems impossible through love of the ideals of truth and beauty, and to prefer to die on the field of work and self-devotion rather than to live in idleness and luxury."

STOPFORD BROOKE.

Unfelt Creeds

SEPTEMBER 24

"There are also some who forget that the laws of the spiritual world are no less inflexible and inviolable than those of the physical world; that conduct is everything; and that the faith which saves, and which, working by love, makes conduct, is something much deeper and more substantial than the muttering of an unfelt creed, or than the melancholy presumption that to think ourselves saved is by itself a passport into the everlasting habitations."

Bishop THOROLD.

"Holiness is an infinite compassion for others: Greatness is to take the common things of life and walk truly among them: Happiness is a great love and much serving."

"Heaven does not make holiness, but holiness makes heaven."

PHILLIPS BROOKS.

Fasting

SEPTEMBER 25

"It makes me half afraid, half angry, to see the formal, mechanical way in which people do what they call their 'Lenten Penances,' and then rush off, only with increased ardour, to their Easter festivities. Literal fasting does not suit me--it makes me irritable and uncomfortable, and certainly does not spiritualise me; so I have always tried to keep my Lents in the nobler and more healthful spirit of Isaiah lviii. I have kept them but poorly, after all; still, I am sure _that_ is the true way of keeping them."

_Letters from_ Bishop Fraser's _Lancashire Life_, Archdeacon DIGGLE.

"God does not call us to give up some sin or some harmful self-indulgence in Lent that we may resume it at Easter."

_The Guided Life_, Canon BODY.

Fasting

SEPTEMBER 26