Part 13
"Fasting comes by nature when a man is sad, and it is in consequence the natural token of sadness: when a man is very sad, for the loss of relations or the like, he loses all inclination for food. But every outward sign that can be displayed at will is liable to abuse, and so men sometimes fasted when they were not really sad, but when it was decorous to appear so. Moreover a kind of merit came to be attached to fasting as betokening sorrow for transgressions; and at last it came to be regarded as a sort of self-punishment which it was thought the Almighty would accept in lieu of inflicting punishment Himself. Our Lord does not decry stated fasts or any other Jewish practices, they had their uses and would last their times; only He points men to the underlying truth which was at the bottom of the ordinance."
_Pastor Pastorum_, HENRY LATHAM.
The Great Law of Love
SEPTEMBER 27
"Those who go to Christ and not to custom for their view of that which is essential in religion, know the infinitesimal value of profession and ceremonies, beside the great law of love to our neighbour."
F. W. FARRAR.
"Not only the happiness but the efficiency of the passive virtues, love as a power, as a practical success in the world, is coming to be recognised. The fact that Christ led no army, that He wrote no book, built no church, spent no money, but that He loved, and so conquered, this is beginning to strike men. And Paul's argument is gaining adherents, that when all prophecies are fulfilled, and all our knowledge is obsolete, and all tongues grow unintelligible, this thing, Love, will abide and see them all out one by one into the oblivious past. This is the hope for the world, that we shall learn to love, and in learning that, unlearn all anger and wrath and evil-speaking and malice and bitterness."
_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
Soldiers of the same Army
SEPTEMBER 28
"To him, as to so many, truth is so infinitely great that all we can do with our poor human utterances is to try and clothe it in such language as will make it clear to ourselves, and clear to those to whom God sends us with a message; but meanwhile above us and our thoughts--above our broken lights--God in His mercy, God in His love, God in His infinite nature is greater than all."
_Tennyson--a Memoir_, by his Son.
"Are not all true men that live, or that ever lived, soldiers of the same army, enlisted under heaven's captaincy, to do battle against the same enemy--the empire of darkness and wrong? Why should we mis-know one another, fight not against the enemy, but against ourselves, from mere difference of uniform?"
CARLYLE.
By their Works
SEPTEMBER 29
"Call him not heretic whose works attest His faith in goodness by no creed confessed. Whatever in love's name is truly done To free the bound and lift the fallen one Is done to Christ. Whoso in deed and word Is not against Him labours for our Lord. When He, who, sad and weary, longing sore For love's sweet service, sought the sisters' door, One saw the heavenly, one the human guest, But who shall say which loved the Master best?"
WHITTIER.
"Hast thou made much of words, and forms, and tests, And thought but little of the peace and love,-- His Gospel to the poor? Dost thou condemn Thy brother, looking down, in pride of heart, On each poor wanderer from the fold of Truth?... Go thy way!-- Take Heaven's own armour for the heavenly strife, Welcome all helpers in thy war with sin ... And learn through all the future of thy years To form thy life in likeness of thy Lord's!"
PLUMPTRE.
Faith
SEPTEMBER 30
"Faith is the communication of the Divine Spirit by which Christ as the revealed God dwells in our heart. It is the awakening of the Spirit of Adoption whereby we cry, 'Abba Father.'"
T. H. GREEN.
"He thought with Arthur Hallam, that 'the essential feelings of religion subsist in the utmost diversity of forms,' that 'different language does not always imply different opinions, nor different opinions any difference in _real_ faith.' 'It is impossible,' he said, 'to imagine that the Almighty will ask you, when you come before Him in the next life, what your particular form of creed was; but the question will rather be, "Have you been true to yourself and given in My name a cup of cold water to one of these little ones?"'"
_Tennyson--a Memoir_, by his Son.
"Religion consists not in knowledge, but in a holy life."
Bishop TAYLOR.
A New Creed
October 1
"Imagine a body of Christians who should take their stand on the Sermon of Jesus, and conceive their creed on His lines. Imagine how it would read, 'I believe in the Fatherhood of God; I believe in the words of Jesus; I believe in the clean heart; I believe in the service of love; I believe in the unworldly life; I believe in the Beatitudes; I promise to trust God and follow Christ, to forgive my enemies, and to seek after the righteousness of God.' Could any form of words be more elevated, more persuasive, more alluring? Do they not thrill the heart and strengthen the conscience? Liberty of thought is allowed; liberty of sinning is alone denied."
_The Mind of the Master_, Dr. JOHN WATSON.
THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT
has been called
"The text-book of duty."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
"The Magna Charta of the Kingdom of God."
NEANDER.
"Christ's manifesto, and the constitution of Christianity."
Dr. JOHN WATSON.
"The great proclamation, which by one effort lifted mankind on to that new and higher ground on which it has been painfully struggling ever since, but on the whole with sure but slow success, to plant itself, and maintain sure foothold."
T. HUGHES.
The Programme of Christianity
OCTOBER 2
"There may be Worship without Words."
LONGFELLOW.
"All the world is the temple of God. Its worship is ministration. The commonest service is Divine service."
GEORGE MACDONALD.
THE PROGRAMME OF CHRISTIANITY.
"To preach good tidings unto the meek:
To build up the broken-hearted:
To proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound:
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God:
To comfort all that mourn:
To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them--
Beauty for Ashes,
The Oil of Joy for Mourning,
The Garment of Praise for the Spirit of Heaviness."
HENRY DRUMMOND.
The Lord's Supper
OCTOBER 3
"The Lord's Supper, the right and need of every man to feed on God, the bread of divine sustenance, the wine of divine inspiration offered to every man, and turned by every man into what form of spiritual force the duty and the nature of each man required, how grand and glorious its mission might become! No longer the mystic source of unintelligible influence; no longer, certainly, the test of arbitrary orthodoxy; no longer the initiation rite of a selected brotherhood; but the great sacrament of man!... There is no other rallying place for all the good activity and worthy hopes of man. It is in the power of the great Christian Sacrament, the great human sacrament, to become that rallying place. Think how it would be, if some morning all the men, women, and children in this city who mean well, from the reformer meaning to meet some giant evil at the peril of his life to the school-boy meaning to learn his day's lesson with all his strength, were to meet in a great host at the table of the Lord, and own themselves His children, and claim the strength of His bread and wine, and then go out with calm, strong, earnest faces to their work. How the communion service would lift up its voice and sing itself in triumph, the great anthem of dedicated human life! Ah, my friends, that, nothing less than that, is the real Holy Communion of the Church of the living God."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
Nominal Christians
OCTOBER 4
"The bane of the Church of God, the dishonour of Christ, the laughing-stock of the world, is in that far too numerous body of half-alive Christians who choose their own cross, and shape their own standard, and regulate their own sacrifices, and measure their own devotions; whose cross is very unlike the Saviour's, whose standard is not that of as much holiness as they can attain, but of as little holiness as they can safely be content with to be saved; whose sacrifices do not deprive them from one year's end to another of a single comfort, or even a real luxury, and whose devotions can never make their dull hearts burn with love of Christ."
Bishop THOROLD.
"Men find Christ through their fellow-men, and every glimpse they get of Him is a direct message from Himself."
HENRY DRUMMOND.
Manifestations of God
OCTOBER 5
"The distinguishing mark of religion is not so much liberty as obedience, and its value is measured by the sacrifices which it can extract from the individual."
_Amiel's Journal._
"There is perhaps no human soul which never hungers after God. Men's unbelief in lies is often quoted against them, by the liar especially. But we believe--not when we are told about, but when we are shown--Christ."
_Turkish Bonds_, MAY KENDALL.
"Let your lives preach."
GEORGE FOX.
Manifestations of God
OCTOBER 6
"For how, as a matter of fact, do we grow to know God? Let me refer you to Professor Flint's book on Theism for the best answer I know. We begin to know God as we begin to know our fellow-man--through His manifestations. We may be tempted to think that we cannot know what we cannot see, but in a perfectly true sense we never see our fellow-man: we see his manifestations; we see his outward appearance. We hear what he says; we notice what he does, and we infer from all this what his unseen character is like, what the man is in himself; so similarly and as surely we learn to know God. We see what He has done in nature and in history; we see what He is doing to-day; we read what He has conveyed to us for our instruction 'in sundry times and in divers manners'; and so we learn to listen for and to love 'the still small voice' in which He speaks to our hearts. One knowledge is as gradual and yet as sure and certain and logical as the other."
_Work in Great Cities_, Bishop WINNINGTON INGRAM.
Manifestations of God
OCTOBER 7
"It is human character or developed humanity that conducts us to our notion of the character Divine.... In proportion as the mysteries of man's goodness unfold themselves to us, in that proportion do we obtain an insight into God's."
J. B. MOZLEY.
"If you want your neighbour to know what the Christ spirit will do for him, let him see what it has done for you."
HENRY WARD BEECHER.
"When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn."
EMERSON.
Prayer
OCTOBER 8
"'We do not present our supplications before Thee for our righteousness, but for Thy great mercies. O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive; O Lord, hearken and do.'--Dan. ix. 18, 19.
"Every true prayer has its background and its foreground. The foreground of prayer is the intense, immediate desire for a certain blessing which seems to be absolutely necessary for the soul to have; the background of prayer is the quiet earnest desire that the will of God, whatever it may be, should be done. What a picture is the perfect prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane! In front burns the strong desire to escape death and to live; but, behind, there stands, calm and strong, the craving of the whole life for the doing of the will of God.... Leave out the foreground--let there be no expression of the wish of him who prays--and there is left a pure submission which is almost fatalism. Leave out the background--let there be no acceptance of the will of God--and the prayer is only an expression of self-will, a petulant claiming of the uncorrected choice of him who prays. Only when the two, foreground and background, are there together,--the special desire resting on the universal submission, the universal submission opening into the special desire,--only then is the picture perfect and the prayer complete!"
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
Prayer
OCTOBER 9
"About prayer he said: 'The reason why men find it hard to regard prayer in the same light in which it was formerly regarded is that _we_ seem to know more of the unchangeableness of Law. But I believe that God reveals Himself in each individual soul. Prayer is, to take a mundane simile, like opening a sluice between the great ocean and our little channels when the great sea gathers itself together and flows in at full tide.' 'Prayer on our part is the highest aspiration of the soul.'"
"A Breath that fleets beyond this iron world And touches Him who made it."
"Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet-- Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet."
And
"More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of."
_Tennyson--a Memoir_, by his Son.
Prayer
OCTOBER 10
"There can be no objection to praying for certain special things. God forbid! I cannot help doing it, any more than a child in the dark can help calling for its mother. Only it seems to me that when we pray, 'Grant this day that we run into no kind of danger,' we ought to lay our stress on the 'run' rather than on the 'danger,' to ask God not to take away the danger by altering the course of nature, but to give us light and guidance whereby to avoid it."
CHARLES KINGSLEY.
"Special prayer is based upon a fundamental instinct of our nature. And in the fellowship which is established in prayer between man and God, we are brought into personal union with Him in Whom all things have their being.
"In this lies the possibility of boundless power; for when the connection is once formed, who can lay down the limits of what man can do in virtue of the communion of his spirit with the Infinite Spirit?"
Bishop WESTCOTT.
Prayer
October 11
"It is abundantly clear that answered prayer encourages faith and personal relations in a way which broad principles only cannot effect. As the _Spectator_ put it many years ago, much that would be positively bad for us if given without prayer, is good if sent in answer. We feel (do we not?) that all the evil of the world springs from mistrust of God. Nothing can recover us from this state of alienated unrest like answered prayer."
_Life of F. W. Crossley_, RENDEL HARRIS.
"Prayer will in time make the human countenance its own divinest altar; years upon years of true thoughts, like ceaseless music shut up within, will vibrate along the nerves of expression until the lines of the living instrument are drawn into correspondence, and the harmony of visible form matches the unheard harmonies of the mind."
_The Choir Invisible_, JAMES LANE ALLEN.
Prayer
OCTOBER 12
"Pray, till prayer makes you forget your own wish, and leave it or merge it in God's will. The divine wisdom has given us prayer, not as a means whereby to obtain the good things of earth, but as a means by which we learn to do without them; not as a means whereby we escape evil, but as a means whereby we become strong to meet it. 'There appeared an angel unto Him from heaven, strengthening Him.' This was the true reply to the prayer of Christ."
F. W. ROBERTSON.
"Never let us get into the common trick of calling unbelief--resignation; of asking, and then because we have not faith to believe, putting in a 'Thy will be done' at the end. Let us make God's Will our will, and so say 'Thy will be done.'"
CHARLES KINGSLEY.
Prayer
OCTOBER 13
"Accustom yourself gradually to let your mental prayer spread over all your daily external occupations. Speak, act, work quietly, as though you were praying, as indeed you ought to be.
"Do everything without excitement, simply in the spirit of grace. So soon as you perceive natural activity gliding in, recall yourself quietly into the Presence of God. Hearken to what the leadings of grace prompt, and say and do nothing but what God's Holy Spirit teaches. You will find yourself infinitely more quiet, your words will be fewer and more effectual, and while doing less, what you do will be more profitable. It is not a question of a hopeless mental activity, but a question of acquiring a quietude and peace in which you readily advise with your Beloved as to all you have to do."
FÉNÉLON.
"A blessing such as this our hearts might reap, The freshness of the garden they might share, Through the long day an heavenly freshness keep, If, knowing how the day and the day's glare Must beat upon them, we would largely steep And water them betimes with dews of Prayer."
TRENCH.
Self-examination
OCTOBER 14
"It is my custom every night to run all over the words and actions of the past day; for why should I fear the sight of my errors when I can admonish and forgive myself? I was a little too hot in such a dispute: my opinion might have been as well spared, for it gave offence, and did no good at all. The thing was true; but all truths are not to be spoken at all times."
SENECA.
RESOLVES.
"To try to be thoroughly poor in spirit, meek, and to be ready to be silent when others speak.
"To learn from every one.
"To try to feel my own insignificance.
"To believe in myself and the powers with which I am entrusted.
"To try to make conversation more useful, and therefore to store my mind with facts, but to guard against a wish to shine.
"To try to despise the principle of the day 'every man his own trumpeter,' and to feel it a degradation to speak of my own doings, as a poor braggart.
"To speak less of self and to think less.
"To contend one by one against evil thoughts.
"To try to fix my thoughts in prayer without distraction.
"To watch over a growing habit of uncharitable judgment."
_F. W. Robertson's Life._
Confession of Sin
OCTOBER 15
"An immense quantity of modern confession of sin, even when honest, is merely a sickly egotism which will rather gloat over its own evil than lose the centralisation of its interest in itself."
_Ethics of the Dust_, JOHN RUSKIN.
"The fit of low spirits which comes to us when we find ourselves overtaken in a fault, though we flatter ourselves to reckon it a certain sign of penitence, and a set-off to the sin itself which God will surely take into account, is often nothing more than vexation and annoyance with ourselves, that, after all our good resolutions and attempts at reformation, we have broken down again."
_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
"And be you sure that sorrow without resolute effort at amendment is one of the most contemptible of all human frailties; deserving to be despised by men, and certain to be rejected by God."
Bishop TEMPLE.
Morbid Introspectiveness
OCTOBER 16
"Plainly there is one danger in all self-discipline which has to be most carefully watched and guarded against, that, namely, of valuing the means at the expense of the end, and so falling into either self-righteousness or formalism, and very probably into uncharitableness also. If we esteem our obedience to rule, and self-imposed restraints, for their own sake, we effectually destroy their power to train and elevate. I suppose this is the real mistake of a false asceticism, which sees the merit rather in the amount of discipline undergone than in the character and self-conquest to be gained by it."
Bishop WALSHAM HOW.
"... It is a clear view of higher motives, which at once reveals and defeats our meaner impulses; which assists the discipline of _proper_ self-searching, by making it healthy and hopeful; and resists any habit of morbid introspectiveness with its fatal tendency to paralyse activity of character."
Canon KNOX LITTLE.
Introspection
OCTOBER 17
"Beware of despairing about yourself."
ST. AUGUSTINE.
"Any man who is good for anything, if he is always thinking about himself, will come to think himself good for nothing very soon. It is only a fop or a fool who can bear to look at himself all day long, without disgust. And so the first thing for a man to do, who wants to use his best powers at their best, is to get rid of self-consciousness, to stop thinking about himself and how he is working, altogether."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
"On somehow. To go back Were to lose all."
TENNYSON.
Our True Selves and Our Traditional Selves
OCTOBER 18
"I have sometimes thought that this facility of men in believing that they are still what they once meant to be--this undisturbed appropriation of a traditional character which is often but a melancholy relic of early resolutions, like the worn and soiled testimonial to soberness and honesty carried in the pocket of a tippler whom the need of a dram has driven into peculation--may sometimes diminish the turpitude of what seems a flat, barefaced falsehood. It is notorious that a man may go on uttering false assertions about his own acts till he at last believes in them: is it not possible that sometimes in the very first utterance there may be a shade of creed-reciting belief, a reproduction of a traditional self which is clung to against all evidence? There is no knowing all the disguises of the lying serpent.
"When we come to examine in detail what is the sane mind in the sane body, the final test of completeness seems to be a security of distinction between what we have professed and what we have done; what we have aimed at and what we have achieved; what we have invented and what we have witnessed or had evidenced to us; what we think and feel in the present and what we thought and felt in the past."
GEORGE ELIOT.
Un-self-consciousness
OCTOBER 19
"An unconscious, easy, selfish person shocks less and is more easily loved than one who is laboriously and egotistically unselfish. There is at least no fuss about the first; but the other parades his sacrifices, and so sells his favours too dear. Selfishness is calm, a force of nature: you might say the trees are selfish. But egoism is a piece of vanity; it must always take you into its confidence; it is uneasy, troublesome, searching; it can do good, but not handsomely; it is uglier, because less dignified, than selfishness itself."
"If a man has self-surrender pressed incessantly upon him, this keeps the idea of self ever before his view. Christ does not cry down _self_, but He puts it out of a man's sight by giving him something better to care for, something which shall take full and rightful possession of his soul. The Apostles, without ever having any consciousness of sacrificing self, were brought into a habit of self-sacrifice by merging all thoughts for themselves in devotion to a Master and a cause, and in thinking what they could do to serve it themselves."
_Pastor Pastorum_, HENRY LATHAM.
Un-self-consciousness
OCTOBER 20
"Think as little as possible about any good in yourself; turn your eyes resolutely from any view of your acquirement, your influence, your plan, your success, your following: above all, speak as little as possible about yourself. The inordinateness of our self-love makes speech about ourselves like the putting of the lighted torch to the dried wood which has been laid in order for the burning. Nothing but duty should open our lips upon this dangerous theme, except it be in humble confession of our sinfulness before our God. Again, be specially upon the watch against those little tricks by which the vain man seeks to bring round the conversation to himself, and gain the praise or notice which the thirsty ears drink in so greedily; and even if praise comes unsought, it is well, whilst men are uttering it, to guard yourself by thinking of some secret cause for humbling yourself inwardly to God; thinking into what these pleasant accents would be changed if all that is known to God, and even to yourself, stood suddenly revealed to man."
Bishop WILBERFORCE.