Part 15
"The true felicity of life is to be free from perturbations; to understand our duties towards God and man; to enjoy the present without any serious dependence upon the future. Not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears, but to rest satisfied with what we have. The great blessings of mankind are within our reach; but we shut our eyes, and, like people in the dark, we fall foul upon the very thing we search for, without finding it. Tranquillity is the state of human perfection, it raises us as high as we can go, and makes every man his own supporter; whereas he that is borne up by anything else may fall. He that judges right and perseveres in it, enjoys a perpetual calm; he takes a true prospect of things; he observes an order, measure, a decorum in all his actions; he has a benevolence in his nature; and squares his life according to reason, and draws to himself love and admiration. Without a certain and unchangeable judgment, all the rest is but fluctuation. Liberty and serenity of mind must necessarily ensue upon the mastering of those things which either allure or affright us, when, instead of those flashy pleasures we shall find ourselves possessed of joys transporting and everlasting."
SENECA.
"Nothing can bring you peace but yourself, nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principle."
EMERSON.
Discontent
NOVEMBER 16
"Discontent is want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will."
EMERSON.
"To repel one's cross is to make it heavier."
_Amiel's Journal._
"She had that rare sense which discerns what is unalterable; and submits to it without murmuring."
GEORGE ELIOT.
"But for me, What good I see, humbly I seek to do, And live obedient to the Law, in trust That what will come and shall come, must come well."
_The Light of Asia_, E. ARNOLD.
Magnifying Troubles
NOVEMBER 17
"Another weight is the cares of life. We keep so many which we might shake off, that it is more than pitiful. We encourage fears for our life, our future, our wealth, till all our days are harassed out of peace, till the very notion of trust in God is an absurdity. We waste life away in petty details, spending infinite trouble on transient things, magnifying the gnats of life into elephants, tormenting ourselves and others over household disturbances, children, servants, little losses, foolish presentiments, our state of health, our finances,--till every one around us is infected with our disease of fret and worry. This is indeed to weight our soul. Our life with God, our work for man, are dragged to earth."
_The Gospel of Joy_, STOPFORD BROOKE.
"I pack my troubles in as little compass as I can for myself, and never let them annoy others."
SOUTHEY.
Bearing Trouble
NOVEMBER 18
"Once open the door to trouble, and its visits are three-fold; first, anticipation; second, in actual presence; third, in living it over again. Therefore never anticipate trouble, make as little of its presence as possible, forget it as soon as past."
"It is better to employ our minds in bearing the ills we have, than in providing against those which may never befall us."
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.
"Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come."
LOWELL.
"If you want to be cheerful, jes' set yer mind on it an' do it. Can't none of us help what traits we start out in life with, but we kin help what we end up with. When things first got to goin' wrong with me, I says, 'Oh, Lord, whatever comes, keep me from gettin' sour.'... Since then I've made it a practice to put all my worries down in the bottom of my heart, then set on the lid an' smile."
_Lovey Mary_, ALICE HEGAN RICE.
The Secret of the Joy of Living
NOVEMBER 19
"We live not in our moments or our years-- The Present we fling from us like the rind Of some sweet Future, which we after find Bitter to taste, or bind that in with fears, And water it beforehand with our tears-- Vain tears for that which never may arrive: Meanwhile the joy whereby we ought to live, Neglected or unheeded, disappears. Wiser it were to welcome and make ours Whate'er of good, tho' small, the present brings-- Kind greetings, sunshine, song of birds, and flowers, With a child's pure delight in little things; And of the griefs unborn to rest secure, Knowing that mercy ever will endure."
Archbishop TRENCH.
"The secret of the joy of living is the proper appreciation of what we actually possess."
Causes of Thankfulness
NOVEMBER 20
"I sleep, I eat and drink, I read and meditate, I walk in my neighbour's pleasant fields, and see the varieties of natural beauties, and delight in all that in which God delights--that is, in virtue and wisdom, in the whole creation, and in God Himself. And he that hath so many causes of joy, and so great, is very much in love with sorrow and peevishness, who loses all these pleasures, and chooses to sit down upon his little handful of thorns."
JEREMY TAYLOR.
"Where much is given, much shall be required. There are never privileges to enjoy without corresponding duties to fulfil in return."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
"Thou that hast given so much to me, Give one thing more--a grateful heart."
GEORGE HERBERT.
Causes of Thankfulness
NOVEMBER 21
ON LEAVING A HOME FOR INCURABLES
"It didn't seem much to be able to walk away, to look back, to remember what we had seen; and yet how is it that we are not on our knees in gratitude and thankfulness for every active motion of the body, every word we speak, every intelligent experience and interest that passes through our minds?"
Miss THACKERAY.
"Nothing raises the price of a blessing like its removal; whereas, it was its continuance which should have taught us its value."
HANNAH MORE.
"O God, animate us to cheerfulness! May we have a joyful sense of our blessings, learn to look on the bright circumstances of our lot, and maintain a perpetual contentedness."
CHANNING.
Grumbling
NOVEMBER 22
"His eyes were bright with intelligence and trained powers of observation; and they were beautiful with kindliness, and with the well-bred habit of giving complete attention to other people and their affairs when he talked with them. He had a rare smile ... but the real beauty of such mouths as his comes from the lips being restrained into firm and sensitive lines, through years of self-control and fine sympathies.... Under-bred and ill-educated women are, as a general rule, much less good-looking than well-bred and highly-educated ones, especially in middle life; not because good features and pretty complexions belong to one class more than to another, but because nicer personal habits and stricter discipline of the mind do.... And if, into the bargain, a woman has nothing to talk about but her own and her neighbour's everyday affairs, and nothing to think about to keep her from continually talking, life, my dear child, is so full of little rubs, that constant chatter of this kind must almost certainly be constant grumbling. And constant grumbling makes an ugly under-lip, a forehead wrinkled with frowning, and dull eyes that see nothing but grievances."
_A Bad Habit_, Mrs. EWING.
Grumbling
NOVEMBER 23
"Cultivate the habit of never putting disagreeables into words, even if it be only the weather which is in question; also of never drawing other people's attention to words or things which will irritate them."
LUCY SOULSBY.
"A cucumber is bitter--Throw it away.--There are briars in the road--Turn aside from them.--This is enough. Do not add, And why were such things made in the world?"
MARCUS AURELIUS.
"Patience under adverse circumstances will often bring about favourable results, while complaint only accentuates and fixes the cause of complaint. Avoid mention of the disagreeable things that may come into your life. If you cannot be patient you can at least be silent. The secret of success lies not so much in knowing what to say as in what to avoid saying."
Grumbling
NOVEMBER 24
"If you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have a headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, I beseech you by all the angels to hold your peace, and not pollute the morning, to which all the housemates bring serene and pleasant thoughts, by corruptions and groans."
EMERSON.
"Walk thy way greatly! So do thou endure Thy small, thy narrow, dwarfed and cankered life, That soothing Patience shall be half the cure For ills that lesser souls keep sore with strife."
C. GREENE.
"Our personal interests, by the force of their importunity, exclude all larger sympathies if these are not already matured before the conflict begins. In the press of the world we lose sight of life, if the life is not within us."
Bishop WESTCOTT.
Grumblers
NOVEMBER 25
"There is a sect, unfortunately known to most in this land, under the denomination of Grumblers, whose fundamental maxim is--whatever is, is wrong. Wherever they are found, and they are found almost everywhere, they operate as a social poison; and though they contrive to embitter the enjoyments of everybody about them, they perpetually assume that themselves are the only aggrieved persons, and with such art as to be believed, till thoroughly known. They have often some excellent qualities, and the appearance of many amiable ones; but rank selfishness is their chief characteristic, accompanied by inordinate pride and vanity. They have a habit of laying the consequences of their own sins, whether of omission or of commission, upon others; and, covered with faults, they flatter themselves they 'walk blameless.' Where their selfishness, pride, or vanity are interested, they exhibit signs of boundless zeal, attention, and affection, to which those who are not aware of their motives, are the dupes; but the very moment their predominant feelings are offended, they change from April to December. They have smiles and tears at command for their holiday humour; but in 'the winter of their discontent,' there is no safety from the bitterest blasts. Their grievances are seldom real, or if real, are grossly exaggerated, and are generally attributed to themselves; for, absorbed in their own feelings, they are wonderful losers of opportunities. In conclusion, I think it would be for their advantage, as it certainly would be for that of the rest of the world, if they were made subject to some severe discipline; and I would suggest for the first, second, and third offence, bread and water and the treadmill, for one, two, and three months respectively; for the fourth offence, transportation for seven years to Boothia Felix, or some such climate; and any subsequent delinquency I would make capital, and cause the criminal to be shut up with some offender in equal degree, there to grumble each other to death."
_The Original_, THOMAS WALKER.
Cheerfulness
NOVEMBER 26
"'Tis a Dutch proverb that 'paint costs nothing,' such are its preserving qualities in damp climates. Well, sunshine costs less, yet is finer pigment. And so of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more of it remains."
EMERSON.
"Mirth is like a flash of lightning that breaks through a gloom of clouds and glitters for a moment. Cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity."
ADDISON.
"Always laugh when you can; it is a cheap medicine. Merriment is a philosophy not well understood. It is the sunny side of existence."
BYRON.
"Fortune will call at the smiling gate."
Japanese Proverb.
Humour
NOVEMBER 27
"The sense of humour is the oil of life's engine. Without it, the machinery creaks and groans. No lot is so hard, no aspect of things is so grim, but it relaxes before a hearty laugh."
G. S. MERRIAM.
"It was a novel with a purpose, and its purpose was to show that it is only by righteousness that men and nations prevail; also that there is much that is humorous in life as well as much that is holy, and that healing virtue lies in laughter as well as in prayers and tears."
_Isabel Carnaby_, ELLEN THORNEYCROFT FOWLER.
"I dare not tell you how high I rate humour, which is generally most fruitful in the highest and most solemn human spirits. Dante is full of it, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and almost all the greatest have been pregnant with this glorious power. You will find it even in the Gospel of Christ."
_Tennyson--a Memoir_, by his Son.
Humour
NOVEMBER 28
"Gird up the loins of your mind, be sober."
1 PETER i. 13.
"A merry heart doeth good like a medicine."
PROV. xvii. 22.
"Gravity ... I mean simply that grave and serious way of looking at life which, while it never repels the true light-heartedness of pure and trustful hearts, welcomes into a manifest sympathy the souls of men who are oppressed and burdened, anxious and full of questions which for the time at least have banished all laughter from their faces.... Gravity has a delicate power of discrimination. It attracts all that it can help, and it repels all that could harm it or be harmed by it. It admits the earnest and simple with a cordial welcome. It shuts out the impertinent and insincere inexorably.
"The gravity of which I speak is not inconsistent with the keenest perception of the ludicrous side of things. It is more than consistent with--it is even necessary to--humour. Humour involves the perception of the true proportions of life.... It has softened the bitterness of controversy a thousand times. You cannot encourage it too much. You cannot grow too familiar with the books of all ages which have in them the truest humour, for the truest humour is the bloom of the highest life. Read George Eliot and Thackeray, and, above all, Shakespeare. They will help you to keep from extravagances without fading into insipidity. They will preserve your gravity while they save you from pompous solemnity."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
Beauties of Nature
NOVEMBER 29
"There are few of us that are not rather ashamed of our sins and follies as we look out on the blessed morning sunlight, which comes to us like a bright-winged angel beckoning us to quit the old path of vanity that stretches its dreary length behind us."
GEORGE ELIOT.
"That man is blessed who every day is permitted to behold anything so pure and serene as the western sky at sunset, while revolutions vex the world."
THOREAU.
"So then believe that every bird that sings, And every flower that stars the elastic sod, And every thought the happy summer brings To the pure spirit is a word of God."
COLERIDGE.
Sense of the Beautiful
NOVEMBER 30
"No man receives the true culture of a man in whom the sensibility to the beautiful is not cherished; and I know of no condition in life from which it should be excluded. Of all luxuries this is cheapest and the most to hand; and it seems to me to be the most important to those conditions where coarse labour tends to give a grossness to the mind. From the diffusion of the sense of beauty in ancient Greece, and of the taste for music in modern Germany, we learn that the people at large may partake of refined gratifications which have hitherto been thought to be necessarily restricted to a few."
CHANNING.
"Music--there is something very wonderful in music. Words are wonderful enough, but music is more wonderful. It speaks not to our thoughts as words do, it speaks straight to our hearts and spirits, to the very core and root of our souls. Music soothes us, stirs us up; it puts noble feelings into us; it melts us to tears, we know not how; it is a language by itself, just as perfect, in its way, as speech, as words; just as divine, just as blessed. Music has been called the speech of angels; I will go farther, and call it the speech of God Himself.
"The old Greeks, the wisest of all the heathen, made a point of teaching their children music, because, they said, it taught them not to be self-willed and fanciful, but to see the beauty of order, the usefulness of rule, the divineness of law."
_Good News of God Sermons_, CHARLES KINGSLEY.
The Gospel of Beauty
DECEMBER 1
"Beauty is far too much neglected. It never belongs to criticism; it ought by right to be always bound up with creation. What it is, is hard to define; but, whenever anything in nature or in the thoughts and doings of man awakens a noble desire of seeing more of it; kindles pure love of it; seems to open out before us an infinite of it which allures us into an endless pursuit; stimulates reverence, and makes the heart leap with joy--there is beauty, and with it always is imagination, the shaping power.
"The capacity for seeing beauty with the heart is one of the first necessities for such a life in a living world as I now urge upon you. When you see it, you always see more and more of it. And the more you see it, the more love and reverence you will feel in your heart; and the less you will care to criticise, and the more you will care to create. The world needs it now, and the glory of it, more almost than anything else, for nearly all the world has lost the power of seeing it. The monied men want it; the scientific men want it; the artists themselves have of late betrayed it; the business men want it. The middle-class and the aristocracy are almost destitute of it; the working men abide in conditions in which its outward forms are absent. To give them the power to see all that is lovely in nature, in human thought, in art, and in the noble acts of men--that is a great part of your work, and you should realise it, and shape it day by day."
_The Gospel of Joy_, STOPFORD BROOKE.
Nature
DECEMBER 2
"To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal, and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney, comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself."
EMERSON.
"Nature is loved by what is best in us."
EMERSON.
"Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means waste of time."
Lord AVEBURY.
Nature
DECEMBER 3
"The unobtrusive influences of earth, sea, and sky do their work. They pass imperceptibly and unsought into the soul."
"... Outdoor sights Sweep gradual gospels in."
"Bid me work, but may no tie Keep me from the open sky" (Barnes).
_The Making of Character_, Professor MACCUNN.
"The cheerfulness of heart which springs up in us from the survey of Nature's works, is an admirable preparation for gratitude. The mind has gone a great way towards praise and thanksgiving that is filled with such a secret gladness: a grateful reflection on the Supreme Cause who produces it, sanctifies the soul, and gives it its proper value. Such an habitual disposition of mind consecrates every field and wood, turns an ordinary walk into a morning or evening sacrifice, and will improve those transient gleams of joy, which naturally brighten up and refresh the soul on such occasions, into an inviolable and perpetual state of bliss and happiness."
ADDISON.
Holidays
DECEMBER 4
"There are only two rules for a successful holiday; the first is to earn it, the second is to have just enough holiday to make the prospect of work pleasant. Periods of rest we all need, but labour and not rest is the synonym of life. From these periods of rest we should return with a new appetite for the duties of common life. If we return dissatisfied, enervated, without heart for work, we may be sure our holiday has been a failure. If we return with the feeling that it is good to plunge into the mid-stream of life again, we may know by this sign that we are morally braced and strengthened by our exodus. The wise man will never allow his holiday to be a time of mere idleness. He will turn again to the books that interest him, he will touch the fringe of some science for which his holiday gives him opportunity, or he will plunge into physical recreation, and shake off the evil humours of the body in active exercise. The failure of holidays lies very much in the fact that nothing of this sort is attempted. The holiday is simply a series of aimless days, and the natural result is _ennui_. The supreme purpose of a holiday should be to regain possession of ourselves. He who does this comes back from his holiday as from a sanctuary."
W. J. DAWSON.
Books
DECEMBER 5
"But what strange art, what magic can dispose The troubled mind to change its native woes? Or lead us willing from ourselves, to see Others more wretched, more undone than we? This, Books can do;--nor this alone, they give New views to life, and teach us how to live; They soothe the grieved, the stubborn they chastise, Fools they admonish, and confirm the wise: Their aid they yield to all: they never shun The man of sorrow, nor the wretch undone: Unlike the hard, the selfish and the proud, They fly not sullen from the suppliant crowd; Nor tell to various people various things, But show to subjects, what they show to kings."
_The Library_, CRABBE.
Books
DECEMBER 6
"Narrowness may be met by recourse to the larger life revealed in Literature. There is no stronger plea for Biography, Drama, or Romance, or for any imaginative expansion of interests, than that founded upon the need for them as counteractives of the pitiable contractedness of outlook begotten of Division of Labour."
_The Making of Character_, Professor MACCUNN.
"When I consider what some books have done for the world, and what they are doing, how they keep up our hope, awaken new courage and faith, soothe pain, give an ideal life to those whose hours are cold and hard, bind together distant ages and foreign lands, create new worlds of beauty, bring down truth from heaven; I give eternal blessings for this gift, and thank God for books."
JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE.
Reading
DECEMBER 7
"Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again they will not give us strength and nourishment."
LOCKE.
"In the course of our reading we should lay up in our minds a store of goodly thoughts in well-wrought words, which should be a living treasure of knowledge always with us, and from which, at various times, and amidst all the shifting of circumstances, we might be sure of drawing some comfort, guidance, and sympathy."
HELPS.
The Object of Education
DECEMBER 8
"We shall be agreed, I assume, that the object of Education is to train for life, and not for a special occupation; to train the whole man for all life, for life seen and unseen, for the unseen through the seen and in the seen; to train _men_ in a word and not _craftsmen_, to train citizens for the Kingdom of God. As we believe in God and the world to come, these must be master thoughts.
"We shall be agreed further that with this object in view, education must be so ordered as to awaken, to call into play, to develop, to direct, to strengthen powers of sense and intellect and spirit, not of one but of all: to give alertness and accuracy to observation: to supply fulness and precision to language: to arouse intelligent sympathy with every form of study and occupation: to set the many parts and aspects of the world before the growing scholar in their unity: to open the eyes of the heart to the eternal of which the temporal is the transitory sign.
"We shall be agreed again that the elements of restraint alike and of personal development which enter into education will be used to harmonise the social and individual instincts, and to inspire the young, when impressions are most easy and most enduring, with the sense of fellowship and the passion for service.