contradictory pairs, pairs of poles, which, however, do not really
contradict, or even limit, each other, but are only correlatives, the
existence of the one making the existence of the other necessary,
explaining each other, and giving each other a real standing ground and
equilibrium.  Such an antinomic pair are, "He that loveth not knoweth not
God," and "If a man hateth not his father and mother he cannot be My
disciple."

_Letters and Memories_.  1848.

False Refinement.  July 16.

God's Word, while it _alone_ sanctifies rank and birth, says to all
_equally_, "Ye are brethren, _work_ for each other."  Let us then be
above rank, and look at men as men, and women as women, and all as God's
children.  There is a "refinement" which is the invention of that sensual
mind, which looks only at the outward and visible sign.

_MS. Letter_.  1843.

Music's Meaning.  July 17.

Some quick music is inexpressibly mournful.  It seems just like one's own
feelings--exultation and action, with the remembrance of past sorrow
wailing up, yet without bitterness, tender in its shrillness, through the
mingled tide of present joy; and the notes seem thoughts--thoughts pure
of words; and a spirit seems to call to me in them and cry, "Hast thou
not felt all this?"  And I start when I find myself answering
unconsciously, "Yes, yes, I know it all!  Surely we are a part of all we
see and hear!"  And then, the harmony thickens, and all distinct sound is
pressed together and absorbed in a confused paroxysm of delight, where
still the female treble and the male bass are distinct for a moment, and
then one again--absorbed into each other's being--sweetened and
strengthened by each other's melody. . . .

_Letters and Memories_.  1842.

Vagueness of Mind.  July 18.

By allowing vague inconsistent habits of mind, almost persuaded by every
one you love, when you are capable by one decided act of _leading_ them,
you may be treading blindfold a terrible path to your own misery.

_MS. Letter_.  1842.

A Faith for Daily Life.  July 19.

That is not faith, to see God only in what is strange and rare; but this
is faith, to see God in what is most common and simple, to know God's
greatness not so much from disorder as from order, not so much from those
strange sights in which God seems (but only seems) to break His laws, as
from those common ones in which He fulfils His laws.

_Town and Country Sermons_.

Charms of Monotony.  July 20.

I delight in that same monotony.  It saves curiosity, anxiety,
excitement, disappointment, and a host of bad passions.  It gives a man
the blessed, invigorating feeling that he is at home; that he has roots
deep and wide struck down into all he sees, and that only the Being who
can do nothing cruel or useless can tear them up.  It is pleasant to look
down on the same parish day after day, and say I know all that is
beneath, and all beneath know me.  It is pleasant to see the same trees
year after year, the same birds coming back in spring to the same shrubs,
the same banks covered by the same flowers.

_Prose Idylls_.  1857.

How to attain.  July 21.

If our plans are not for time but for eternity, our knowledge, and
therefore our love to God, to each other, to everything, will progress
for ever.  And the attainment of this heavenly wisdom requires neither
ecstacy nor revelation, but prayer and watchfulness, and observation, and
deep and solemn thought.

Two great rules for its attainment are simple enough--Never forget what
and where you are, and grieve not the Holy Spirit, for "If a man will do
God's will he shall know of the doctrine."

_Letters and Memories_.  1842.

The Divine Discontent.  July 22.

I should like to make every one I meet discontented with themselves; I
should like to awaken in them, about their physical, their intellectual,
their moral condition, that divine discontent which is the parent first
of upward aspiration and then of self-control, thought, effort to fulfil
that aspiration even in part.  For to be discontented with the divine
discontent, and to be ashamed with the noble shame, is the very germ and
first upgrowth of all virtue.

_Lecture on Science of Health_.  1872.

Dra et labora.  July 23.

"Working is praying," said one of the holiest of men.  And he spoke
truth; if a man will but do his work from a sense of duty, which is for
the sake of God.

_Sermons_.

Distrust and Anarchy.  July 24.

Over the greater part of the so-called civilised world is spreading a
deep distrust, a deep irreverence of every man towards his neighbour, and
a practical unbelief in every man whom you do see, atones for itself by a
theoretic belief in an ideal human nature which you do not see.  Such a
temper of mind, unless it be checked by that which alone can check it,
namely, the grace of God, must tend towards sheer anarchy.  There is a
deeper and uglier anarchy than any mere political anarchy,--which the
abuse of the critical spirit leads to,--the anarchy of society and of the
family, the anarchy of the head and of the heart, which leaves poor human
beings as orphans in the wilderness to cry in vain, "What can I know?
Whom can I love?"

_The Critical Spirit_.  1871.

A Future Life of Action.  July 25.

Why need we suppose that heaven is to be one vast lazy retrospect?  Why
is not eternity to have action and change, yet both like God, compatible
with rest and immutability?  This earth is but one minor planet of a
minor system.  Are there no more worlds?  Will there not be incident and
action springing from these when the fate of this world is decided?  Has
the evil one touched this alone?  Is it not self-conceit which makes us
think the redemption of this earth the one event of eternity?

_Letters_.  1842.

An Ideal Aristocracy.  July 26.

We may conceive an Utopia governed by an aristocracy that should be
really democratic, which should use, under developed forms, that method
which made the mediaeval priesthood the one great democratic institution
of old Christendom; bringing to the surface and utilising the talents and
virtues of all classes, even the lowest.

_Lectures on Ancien Regime_.  1867.

Our Weapons.  July 27.

God, who has been very good to us, will be more good, if _we allow Him_!
Worldly-minded people think they can manage so much better than God.  We
must _trust_.  Our weapons must be prayer and faith, and our only
standard the Bible.  As soon as we leave these weapons and take to
"knowledge of the world," and other people's clumsy prejudices as our
guides, we must inevitably be beaten by the World, which knows how to use
its own arms better than we do.  What else is meant by becoming as a
little child?

_MS. Letter_.  1843.

Uneducated Women.  July 28.

Take warning by what you see abroad.  In every country where the women
are uneducated, unoccupied; where their only literature is French novels
or translations of them--in every one of those countries the women, even
to the highest, are the slaves of superstition, and the puppets of
priests.  In proportion as women are highly educated, family life and
family secrets are sacred, and the woman owns allegiance and devotion to
no confessor or director, but to her own husband or her own family.

_Lecture on Thrift_.  1860.

Pardon and Cure.  July 29.

After the forgiveness of sin must come the cure of sin.  And that cure,
like most cures, is a long and a painful process.

But there is our comfort, there is our hope--Christ the great Healer, the
great Physician, can deliver us, and will deliver us, from the remains of
our old sins, the consequences of our own follies.  Not, indeed, at once,
or by miracle, but by slow education in new and nobler motives, in purer
and more unselfish habits.

_All Saints' Day Sermons_.  1861.

Eternal Law.  July 30.

The eternal laws of God's providence are still at work, though we may
choose to forget them, and the Judge who administers them is the same
yesterday, to-day, and for ever, even Jesus Christ the Lord, the
Everlasting Rock, on which all morality and all society is founded.
Whosoever shall fall on that Rock, in repentance and humility, shall
indeed be broken, but of him it is written, "A broken and a contrite
heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise."

_Discipline and other Sermons_.  1866.

God's Mercy or Man's?  July 31.

"He fought till he could fight no more, and then died like a hero, with
all his wounds in front; and may God have mercy on his soul."

"That last was a Popish prayer, Master Frank," said old Mr. Carey.

"Most worshipful sir, you surely would not wish God _not_ to have mercy
on his soul?"

"No--Eh?  Of course not, for that's all settled by now, for he is dead,
poor fellow!"

"And you can't help being a little fond of him still?"

"Eh?  Why, I should be a brute if I were not.  Fond of him? why, I would
sooner have given my forefinger than that he should have gone to the
dogs."

"Then, my dear sir, if _you_ feel for him still, in spite of all his
faults, how do you know that God may not feel for him in spite of all his
faults?  For my part," said Frank, in his fanciful way, "without
believing in that Popish purgatory, I cannot help holding with Plato that
such heroical souls, who have wanted but little of true greatness here,
are hereafter, by strait discipline, brought to a better mind."

_Westward Ho_! chap. v.  1854.

The Chrysalis State.

You ask, "What is the Good?"  I suppose God Himself is the Good; and it
is this, in addition to a thousand things, which makes me feel the
absolute certainty of a resurrection, and a hope that this, our present
life, instead of being an ultimate one, which is to decide our fate for
ever, is merely some sort of chrysalis state in which man's faculties are
so narrow and cramped, his chances (I speak of the millions, not of
units) of knowing the Good so few, that he may have chances hereafter,
perhaps continually fresh ones, to all eternity.

_Letters and Memories_.  1852.

SAINTS' DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS.

JULY 25.
St. James, Apostle and Martyr.

And they will know his worth
Years hence . . .
And crown him martyr; and his name will ring
Through all the shores of earth, and all the stars
Whose eyes are sparkling through their tears to see
His triumph, Preacher and Martyr. . .
. . . . .
. . . It is over; and the woe that's dead,
Rises next hour a glorious angel.

_Santa Maura_.

August.

"I cannot tell what you say, green leaves,
   I cannot tell what you say;
But I know that there is a spirit in you,
   And a word in you this day.

"I cannot tell what ye say, rosy rocks,
   I cannot tell what ye say;
But I know that there is a spirit in you,
   And a word in you this day.

"I cannot tell what ye say, brown streams,
   I cannot tell what ye say;
But I know, in you too, a spirit doth live,
   And a word in you this day."

"Oh! rose is the colour of love and youth,
And green is the colour of faith and truth,
   And brown of the fruitful clay.
The earth is fruitful and faithful and young,
And her bridal morn shall rise erelong,
And you shall know what the rocks and streams
   And the laughing green woods say."

_Dartside_, _August_ 1849.

Sight and Insight.  August 1.

Do the work that's nearest,
Though it's dull at whiles,
Helping, when you meet them,
Lame dogs over stiles;
See in every hedgerow
Marks of angels' feet,
Epics in each pebble
Underneath our feet.

_The Invitation_.  1857.

Genius and Character.  August 2.

I have no respect for genius (I do not even acknowledge its existence)
where there is no strength and steadiness of character.  If any one
pretends to be more than a man he must begin by proving himself a man at
all.

_Two Years Ago_, chap. xv.

Nature's Student.  August 3.

The perfect naturalist must be of a reverent turn of mind--giving Nature
credit for an inexhaustible fertility and variety, which will keep him
his life long, always reverent, yet never superstitious; wondering at the
commonest, but not surprised by the most strange; free from the idols of
sense and sensuous loveliness; able to see grandeur in the minutest
objects, beauty in the most ungainly: estimating each thing not carnally,
as the vulgar do, by its size, . . . but spiritually, by the amount of
Divine thought revealed to him therein. . . .

_Glaucus_.  1855.

The Masses.  August 4.

Though permitted evils should not avenge themselves by any political
retribution, yet avenge themselves, if unredressed, they surely will.
They affect masses too large, interests too serious, not to make
themselves bitterly felt some day. . . .  We may choose to look on the
masses in the gross as objects for statistics--and of course, where
possible, for profits.  There is One above who knows every thirst, and
ache, and sorrow, and temptation of each slattern, and gin-drinker, and
street-boy.  The day will come when He will require an account of these
neglects of ours--not in the gross.

_Miscellanies_.  1851.

We sit in a cloud, and sing like pictured angels,
And say the world runs smooth--while right below
Welters the black, fermenting heap of life
On which our State is built.

_Saint's Tragedy_, Act ii. Scene v.

Love and Knowledge.  August 5.

He who has never loved, what does he know?

_MS._

Siccum Lumen.  August 6.

How shall I get true knowledge?  Knowledge which will be really useful,
really worth knowing.  Knowledge which I shall know accurately and
practically too, so that I can use it in daily life, for myself and
others?  Knowledge too, which shall be clear knowledge, not warped or
coloured by my own fancies, passions, prejudices, but pure and calm and
sound; Siccum Lumen, "Dry Light," as the greatest of philosophers called
it of old.

To all such who long for light, that by the light they may live, God
answers through His only begotten Son: "Ask and ye shall receive, seek
and ye shall find."

_Westminster Sermons_.  1873.

This World.  August 7.

What should the external world be to those who truly love, but the garden
in which they are placed, not so much for sustenance or enjoyment of
themselves and each other, as to dress it and to keep it--_it_ to be
their subject-matter, not they its tools!  In this spirit let us pray
"Thy kingdom come."

_MS._  1842.

The Life of the Spirit.  August 8.

The old fairy superstition, the old legends and ballads, the old
chronicles of feudal war and chivalry, the earlier moralities and
mysteries--these fed Shakespeare's youth.  Why should they not feed our
children's?  That inborn delight of the young in all that is marvellous
and fantastic--has that a merely evil root?  No, surely! it is a most
pure part of their spiritual nature; a part of "the heaven which lies
about us in our infancy;" angel-wings with which the free child leaps the
prison-walls of sense and custom, and the drudgery of earthly life.  It
is a God-appointed means for keeping alive what noble Wordsworth calls
those

         ". . . . obstinate questionings,
   . . . . . .
      Blank misgivings of a creature
   Moving about in worlds not realised."

_Introductory Lecture_, _Queen's College_.
1848.

A Quiet Depth.  August 9.

The deepest affections are those of which we are least conscious--that
is, which produce least _startling_ emotion, and most easy and
involuntary practice.

_MS._  1843.

Acceptable Sacrifices.  August 10.

Every time we perform an act of kindness to any human being, ay, even to
a dumb animal; every time we conquer our worldliness, love of pleasure,
ease, praise, ambition, money, for the sake of doing what our conscience
tells us to be our duty,--we are indeed worshipping God the Father in
spirit and in truth, and offering Him a sacrifice which He will surely
accept for the sake of His beloved Son, by whose Spirit all good deeds
and thoughts are inspired.

_All Saints' Day Sermons_.  1871.

Chivalry.  August 11.

Chivalry; an idea which, perfect or imperfect, God forbid that mankind
should ever forget till it has become the possession--as it is the God-
given right--of the poorest slave that ever trudged on foot; and every
collier lad shall have become

   "A very gentle, perfect knight."

_Lectures on Ancien Regime_.  1867.

God waits for Man.  August 12.

Patiently, nobly, magnanimously, God waits; waits for the man who is a
fool, to find out his own folly; waits for the heart that has tried to
find pleasure in everything else, to find out that everything else
disappoints, and to come back to Him, the fountain of all wholesome
pleasure, the well-spring of all life, fit for a man to live.

God condescends to wait for His creature; because what He wants is not
His creature's fear, but His creature's love; not only his obedience, but
his heart; because He wants him not to come back as a trembling slave to
his master, but as a son who has found out at last what a father he has
still left him, when all beside has played him false.  Let him come back
thus.

_Discipline and other Sermons_.

Thrift.  August 13.

The secret of thriving is thrift; saving of force; to get as much work as
possible done with the least expenditure of power, the least jar and
obstruction, the least wear and tear.  And the secret of thrift is
knowledge.  In proportion as you know the laws and nature of a subject,
you will be able to work at it easily, surely, rapidly, successfully,
instead of wasting your money or your energies in mistaken schemes,
irregular efforts, which end in disappointment and exhaustion.

_Lecture on Thrift_.  1869.

Revelations.  August 14.

Only second-rate hearts and minds are melancholy.  When we become like
little children, our very playfulness tells that we are _seeing deep_,
when we see that God is love in His _works_ as well as in Himself, and we
look at Nature as a baby does, as a beautiful mystery which we scarcely
wish to solve.  And therefore deep things, which the intellect in vain
struggles after, will reveal themselves to us.

_MS._  1842.

Christ comes in many ways.  August 15.

Often Christ comes to us in ways in which the world would never recognise
Him--in which perhaps neither you nor I shall recognise _Him_; but it
will be enough, I hope, if we but hear His message, and obey His gracious
inspiration, let Him speak through whatever means He will.  He may come
to us by some crisis in our life, either for sorrow or for bliss.  He may
come to us by a great failure; by a great disappointment--to teach the
wilful and ambitious soul that not in _that_ direction lies the path of
peace; or He may come in some unexpected happiness to teach that same
soul that He is able and willing to give abundantly beyond all that we
can ask or think.

_MS. Sermon_.  1874.

Lesson of the Cross.  August 16.

On the Cross God has sanctified suffering, pain, and sorrow, and made
them holy; as holy as health and strength and happiness are.

_National Sermons_.  1851.

The Ideal Unity.  August 17.

"Oh, make us one."  All the world-generations have but one voice!  "How
can we become One? at harmony with God and God's universe!  Tell us this,
and the dreary, dark mystery of life, the bright, sparkling mystery of
life, the cloud-chequered, sun-and-shower mystery of life, is solved! for
we shall have found one home and one brotherhood, and happy faces will
greet us wherever we move, and we shall see God! see Him everywhere, and
be ready to wait for the Renewal, for the Kingdom of Christ perfected!  We
came from Eden, all of us: show us how we may return, hand in hand,
husband and wife, parent and child, gathered together from the past and
the future, from one creed and another, and take our journey into a far
country, which is yet this earth--a world-migration to the heavenly
Canaan, through the Red Sea of Death, back again to the land which was
given to our forefathers, and is ours even now, could we but find it!"

_Letters and Memories_.  1843.

Body and Soul.  August 18.

The mystics considered the soul, _i.e._ the intellect, as the "_moi_" and
the body as the "_non moi_;" and this idea that the body is not _self_,
is the fundamental principle of mysticism and asceticism, and
diametrically opposed to the whole doctrines and practice of Scripture.
Else why is there a resurrection of the body? and why does the Eucharist
"preserve our body and soul to everlasting life?"

_MS._  1843.

Childlikeness.  August 19.

If you wish to be "a little child," study what a little child could
understand--Nature; and do what a little child could do--love.  Feed on
Nature.  It will digest itself.  It did so when you were a little child
the first time.

Keep a common-place book, and put into it not only facts and thoughts,
but observations on form, and colour, and nature, and little sketches,
even to the form of beautiful _leaves_.  They will all have their charm .
. . all do their work in consolidating your ideas.  Put everything into
it. . . .

_Letters and Memories_.  1842.

Inspiration.  August 20.

Every good deed comes from God.  His is the idea, His the inspiration,
and His its fulfilment in time; and therefore no good deed but lives and
grows with the everlasting life of God Himself.

_MS._

Lifting of the Veil.  August 21.

I seldom pass those hapless loungers who haunt every watering-place
without thinking sadly how much more earnest, happier, and better men and
women they might be if the veil were but lifted from their eyes, and they
could learn to behold that glory of God which is all around them like an
atmosphere, while they, unconscious of what and where they are, wrapt up
each in his little selfish world of vanity and interest, gaze lazily
around them at earth, sea, and sky--

   And have no speculation in those eyes
   Which they do glare withal

_Glaucus_.  1855.

The Cross--its meaning.  August 22.

To take up the cross means, in the minds of most persons, to suffer
patiently under affliction.  It is a true and sound meaning, but it means
more.  Why did Christ take up the cross?  Not for affliction's sake, or
for the cross's sake, as if suffering were a good thing in itself.  No.
But that He might thereby _do good_.  That the world through Him might be
saved.  That He might do good at whatever cost or pain to Himself.

_Sermons_.

The Crucifix.  August 23.

If I had an image in my room it should be one of Christ _glorified_,
sitting at the right hand of God.  The crucifix has been THE image,
because the idea of torture and misery has been THE idea in the
melancholy and the ferocious (for the two ultimately go together),. . .
and thus ascetics became inquisitors. . . .

_MS._  1843.

Love to God proved.  August 24.

Our love to God does not depend upon the emotions of the moment.  If you
fancy you do not love Him enough, above all when Satan tempts you to look
inward, go immediately and minister to others; visit the sick, perform
some act of self-sacrifice or thanksgiving.  Never mind how _dull_ you
may feel while doing it; the fact of your feeling excited proves nothing;
the fact of your _doing_ it proves that your will, your spiritual part,
is on God's side, however tired or careless the poor flesh may be.  The
"flesh" must be brought into harmony with the spirit, not only by
physical but by intellectual mortification.

_MS. Letter_.  1843.

Training of Beauty.  August 25.

There is many a road into our hearts besides our ears and brains; many a
sight and sound and scent even, of which we have never _thought_ at all,
sinks into our memory and helps to shape our characters; and thus
children brought up among beautiful sights and sweet sounds will most
likely show the fruits of their nursing by thoughtfulness and affection
and nobleness of mind, even by the expression of the countenance.

_True Words to Brave Men_.  1848.

Ignorance of the Cynic.  August 26.

Be sure that no one knows so little of his fellow-men as the cynical,
misanthropic man, who walks in darkness because he hates his brother.  Be
sure that the truly wise and understanding man is he who by sympathy puts
himself in his neighbours' place; feels with them and for them; sees with
their eyes, hears with their ears; and therefore understands them, makes
allowances for them, and is merciful to them, even as his Father in
heaven is merciful.

_Westminster Sermons_.  1872.

Penitential Prayer.  August 27.

Faith in God it is which has made the fifty-first Psalm the model of all
true penitence for evermore.  Penitential prayers in all ages have too
often wanted faith in God, and therefore have been too often prayers to
avert punishment.  This, this--the model of all true penitent prayers--is
that of a man who is to be punished, and is content to take his
punishment, knowing that he deserves it, and far more besides.

_Sermons on David_.  1866.

A Real Presence.  August 28.

Believe the Holy Communion is the sign of Christ's perpetual presence;
that when you kneel to receive the bread and wine, Christ is as near
you--spiritually, indeed, and invisibly, but really and truly as near you
as those who are kneeling by your side.

And if it be so with Christ, then is it so with those who are Christ's,
with those whom we love. . . .  Surely, like Christ, they may come and go
even now, though unseen.  Like Christ they may breathe upon our restless
hearts and say, "Peace be unto you," and not in vain.  For what they did
for us when they were on earth they can more fully do now that they are
in heaven.

_All Saints' Day Sermons_.  1862.

A Living God.  August 29.

Man would never have even dreamed of a Living God had not that Living God
been a reality, who did not leave the creature to find his Creator, but
stooped from heaven, at the very beginning of our race, to find His
creature.

_Sermons on David_.  1866.

Thine, not mine.  August 30.

Whensoever you do a thing which you know to be right and good, instead of
priding yourself upon it as if the good in it came from you, offer it up
to your Heavenly Father, from whom all good things come, and say, "Oh,
Lord! the good in this is Thine and not mine; the bad in it is mine and
not Thine.  I thank Thee for having made me do right, for without Thy
help I should have done nothing but wrong.  For mine is the laziness, and
the weakness, and the selfishness, and the self-conceit; and Thine is the
kingdom, for Thou rulest all things; and the power, for Thou doest all
things; and the glory, for Thou doest all things well, for ever and ever.
Amen."

_Sermons_.

The Unquenchable Fire.  August 31.

A fire which cannot be quenched, a worm which cannot die, I see existing,
and consider them among the most blessed revelations of the gospel.  I
fancy I see them burning and devouring everywhere in the spiritual world,
as their analogues do in the physical.  I know that they have done so on
me, and that their operation, though exquisitely painful, is most
healthful.  I see the world trying to quench and kill them; I know too
well that I often do the same ineffectually.  But, in the comfort that
the worm cannot die and the fire cannot be quenched, I look calmly
forward through endless ages to my own future, and the future of that
world whereof it is written, "He shall reign until He hath put all
enemies under His feet, and death and hell shall be cast into the lake of
fire."

The Day of the Lord will be revealed in flaming fire, not merely to give
new light and a day-spring from on high to those who sit in darkness and
the shadow of death, but to burn up out of sight, and off the universe,
the chaff, hay, and stubble which men have built on the One Living
Foundation, Christ, in that unquenchable fire, of which it is written
that _Death_ and _Hell_ shall one day be cast into it also, to share the
fate of all other unnatural and abominable things, and God's universe
be--what it must be some day--_very good_.

Because I believe in a God of absolute and unbounded love, therefore I
believe in a loving anger of His, which will and must devour and destroy
all which is decayed, monstrous, abortive, in His universe, till all
enemies shall be put under His feet, to be pardoned surely, if they
confess themselves in the wrong and open their eyes to the truth.  And
God shall be All in All.  Those last are wide words.

_Letters and Sermons_.  1856.

SAINTS' DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS.

AUGUST 24.
St. Bartholomew, Apostle and Martyr.

Blessed are they who once were persecuted for righteousness' sake, for
theirs is the kingdom of heaven.  Great indeed is their reward, for it is
no less than the very beatific vision to contemplate and adore that
supreme moral beauty, of which all earthly beauty, all nature, all art,
all poetry, all music, are but phantoms and parables, hints and hopes,
dim reflected rays of the clear light of everlasting day.

_All Saints' Day Sermons_.

September.

That poet knew but little of either streams or hearts who wrote--

   "Nor ever had the breeze of passion
   Stirred her heart's clear depths."

The lonely fisher, the lover of streams and living fountains, knows that
when the stream stops it is turbid.  The deep pools and still flats are
always brown--always dark--the mud lies in them, the trout _sleep_ in
them.  When they are clearest they are still tinged brown or gray with
some foreign matter held in solution--the brown of selfish sensuality or
the gray of morbid melancholy.  But when they are free again! when they
hurry over rock and weed and sparkling pebble-shallow, then they are
clear!  Then all the foreign matter, the defilement which earth pours
into them, falls to the ground, and into them the trout work up for life
and health and food; and through their swift yet yielding
eddies--_moulding themselves to every accident_, _yet separate and
undefiled_--shine up the delicate beauties of the subaqueous world, the
Spirit-glories which we can only see in this life through the medium of
another human soul, but which we can never see unless that soul is
stirred by circumstance into passion and motion and action strong and
swift.  Only the streams which have undergone long and _severe struggles_
from their very fountain-head have clear pools.

_MS._  1843.

Goodness.  September 1.

Always say to yourself this one thing, "Good I will become, whatever it
cost me; and in God's goodness I trust to make me good, for I am sure He
wishes to see me good more than I do myself."  And you will find that,
because you have confessed in that best and most honest of ways that God
is good, and have so given Him real glory, and real honour, and real
praise, He will save you from the sins which torment you, and you shall
never come, either in this world or the world to come, to that worst
misery, the being ashamed of yourself.

_Sermons for the Times_.  1855.

Be good to do Good.  September 2.

What we wish to do for our fellow-creatures we must do first for
ourselves.  We can give them nothing save what God has already given us.
We must become good before we can make them good, and wise before we can
make them wise.

_All Saints' Day Sermons_.  1867.

The Undying I.  September 3.

The youngest child, by faith in God his Father, may look upon all heaven
and earth and say, "Great and wonderful and awful as this earth and those
skies may be, I am more precious in the sight of God than sun and moon
and stars; for they are things, but I am a person, a spirit, an immortal
soul, made in the likeness of God, redeemed into the likeness of God.
This great earth was here thousands and thousands of years before I was
born, and it will be here perhaps millions of years after I am dead.  But
it cannot harm _Me_, it cannot kill _Me_.  When earth, and sun, and stars
have passed away I shall live for ever, for I am the immortal child of an
immortal Father, the child of the everlasting God."

_Sermons for the Times_.  1855.

Love and Time.  September 4.

Love proves its spiritual origin by rising above time and space and
circumstance, wealth and age, and even temporary beauty, at the same time
that it alone can perfectly _use_ all those material adjuncts.  Being
spiritual, it is Lord of matter, and can give and receive from it glory
and beauty when it will, and yet live without it.

_MS._  1843.

Common Duties.  September 5.

The only way to regenerate the world is to do the duty which lies nearest
us, and not to hunt after grand, far-fetched ones for ourselves.  If each
drop of rain _chose_ where it should fall, God's showers would not fall
as they do now, on the evil and the good alike.  I know from the
experience of my own heart how galling this doctrine is--how, like
Naaman, one goes away in a rage, because the prophet has not bid us do
some great thing, but only to go wash in the nearest brook and be clean.

_Letters and Memories_.  1854.

Despair--Hope.  September 6.

Does the age seem to you dark?  Do you feel, as I do at times, the awful
sadness of that text, "The time shall come when you shall desire to see
one of the days of the Lord, and shall not see it"?  Then remember that

   The night is never so long
   But at last it ringeth for matin song.

. . . Even now the dawn is gilding the highest souls, and _we_ are in the
night only because we crawl below.

_Prose Idylls_.  1850.

The Critical Spirit.  September 7.

"Judge nothing before the time."  This is a hard saying.  Who can hear
it?  There never was a time in which the critical spirit was more
thoroughly in the ascendant.  Every man now is an independent critic.  To
accept fully, or as it is now called, to follow blindly; to admire
heartily, or as it is now called, fanatically--these are considered signs
of weakness or credulity.  To believe intensely; to act unhesitatingly;
to admire passionately; all this, as the latest slang phrases it, is "bad
form"; a proof that a man is not likely to win in the race of this world
the prize whereof is, the greatest possible enjoyment with the least
possible work.

_The Critical Spirit_.  1871.

Toil and Rest.  September 8.

Remember always, toil is the condition of our being.  Our sentence is to
labour from the cradle to the grave.  But there are Sabbaths allowed for
the mind as well as the body, when the intellect is stilled, and the
emotions alone perform their gentle and involuntary functions.

_Letters and Memories_.  1842.

Storm and Calm.  September 9.

Then Amyas told the last scene; how, when they were off the Azores, the
storms came on heavier than ever, with terrible seas breaking short and
pyramid-wise, till, on the 9th of September, the tiny _Squirrel_ nearly
foundered, and yet recovered, and the General (Sir Humphrey Gilbert),
sitting abaft with a book in his hand, cried out to us in the _Hind_, "We
are as near heaven by sea as by land," reiterating the same speech well
be-seeming a soldier resolute in Jesus Christ, as I can testify he was.

_Westward Ho_! chap. xiii.

On the Heights.  September 10.

It is good for a man to have holy and quiet thoughts, and at moments to
see into the very deepest meaning of God's word and God's earth, and to
have, as it were, heaven opened before his eyes; and it is good for a man
sometimes actually to _feel_ his heart overpowered with the glorious
majesty of God--to _feel_ it gushing out with love to his blessed
Saviour; but it is not good for him to stop there any more than for the
Apostles in the Mount of Transfiguration.

_Village Sermons_.  1849.

In the Valley.  September 11.

The disciples had to come down from the Mount and do Christ's work, and
so have we.  Believe me, one word of warning spoken to keep a little
child out of sin,--one crust of bread given to a beggar-man because he is
your brother, for whom Christ died,--one angry word checked on your lips
for the sake of Him who was meek and lowly of heart; any the smallest
endeavour to lessen the amount of evil which is in yourselves and those
around you,--is worth all the speculations, and raptures, and visions,
and frames, and feelings in the world; for these are the good fruits of
faith, whereby alone the tree shall be known whether it be good or evil.

_Village Sermons_.  1849.

Self-Conceit.  September 12.

Self-conceit is the very daughter of self-will, and of that loud crying
out about _I_, and me, and mine, which is the very bird-call for all
devils, and the broad road which leads to death.

_Westward Ho_! chap. i.

Facing Fact.  September 13.

It is good for a man to be brought once, at least, in his life, face to
face with _fact_, ultimate fact, however horrible it may be, and to have
to confess to himself shuddering, what things are possible on God's
earth, when man has forgotten that his only welfare is in living after
the likeness of God.

_Miscellanies_.  1858.

The Heroical Rest.  September 14.

Right, lad; the best reward for having wrought well already is to have
more to do; and he that has been faithful over a few things must find his
account in being made ruler over many things.  That is the true and
heroical rest which only is worthy of gentlemen and sons of God.  As for
those who either in this world or in the world to come look for idleness,
and hope that God will feed them with pleasant things, as it were with a
spoon, Amyas, I count them cowards and base, even though they call
themselves saints and elect.

_Westward Ho_! chap. vii.  1855.

Body and Soul.  September 15.

Remember that St. Paul always couples with the resurrection and ascension
of our bodies in the next life the resurrection and ascension of our
souls in this life, for without that, the resurrection of our bodies
would be but a resurrection to fresh sin, and therefore to fresh misery
and ruin.

_All Saints' Day Sermons_.  1870.

Love in Absence.  September 16.

Absence quickens love into consciousness.

_MS._

The baby sings not on its mother's breast;
Nor nightingales who nestle side by side;
Nor I by thine: but let us only part,
Then lips which should but kiss, and so be still,
As having uttered all, must speak again.

_Sonnet_.  1851.

Special Providence.  September 17.

If I did not believe in a special Providence, in a perpetual education of
men by evil as well as good, by small things as well as great, I could
believe nothing.

_Letters and Memories_.

Love of Work.  September 18.

"Can you tell me, my pastor, what part of God's likeness clings to a man
longest and closest and best?  No?  Then I will tell you.  It is the love
of employment.  God in heaven must create Himself a universe to work on
and love.  And now we sons of Adam, the sons of God, cannot rest without
our _mundus peculiaris_ of some sort--our world subjective, as Doctor
Musophilus has it.  But we can create too, and make our little sphere
look as large as a universe."

_MS. Novel_.  1844.

Fret not.  September 19.

Fret not, neither be anxious.  What God intends to do He will do.  And
what we ask believing we shall receive.  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.

_MS._  1843.

Peace!  Why these fears?
Life is too short for mean anxieties:
Soul! thou must work, though blindfold.

_Saint's Tragedy_, Act ii. Scene x.

Battle before Victory.  September 20.

Whenever you think of our Lord's resurrection and ascension, remember
always that the background of His triumph is a tomb.  Remember that it is
the triumph over suffering; a triumph of One who still bears the prints
of the nails in His sacred hands and feet, and the wound of the spear in
His side; like many a poor soul who has followed Him, triumphant at last,
and yet scarred, and only not maimed in the hard battle of life.

_All Saints' Day Sermons_.  1870.

Night and Growth.  September 21.

As in the world of Nature, so it is in the world of men.  The night is
peopled not merely with phantoms and superstitions and spirits of evil,
but under its shadow all sciences, methods, social energies, are taking
rest, and growing, and feeding, unknown to themselves.

_Prose Idylls_.  1850.

Passion.  September 22.

Self-sacrifice!  What is love worth that does not show itself in action?
and more, which does not show itself in _passion_ in the true sense of
that word: namely, in suffering? in daring, in struggling, in grieving,
in agonising, and, if need be, in dying for the object of its love?  Every
mother will give but one answer to that question.

_Westminster Sermons_.  1870.

Worth of Beauty.  September 23.

It is a righteous instinct which bids us welcome and honour beauty,
whether in man or woman, as something of real worth--divine, heavenly,
ay, though we know not how, in a most deep sense Eternal; which makes our
reason give the lie to all merely logical and sentimental maunderings of
moralists about "the fleeting hues of this our painted clay;" and tell
men, as the old Hebrew Scriptures told them, that physical beauty is the
deepest of all spiritual symbols; and that though beauty without
discretion be the jewel of gold in the swine's snout, yet the jewel of
gold it is still, the sacrament of an inward beauty, which ought to be,
perhaps hereafter may be, fulfilled in spirit and in truth.

_Hypatia_, chap. xxvi.  1852.

Empty Profession.  September 24.

What is the sin which most destroys all men and nations?  High religious
profession, with an ungodly, selfish life.  It is the worst and most
dangerous of all sins; for it is like a disease which eats out the heart
and life without giving pain, so that the sick man never suspects that
anything is the matter with him till he finds himself, to his
astonishment, at the point of death.

_National Sermons_.  1851.

True Poetry.  September 25.

Let us make life one poem--not of dreams or sentiments--but of actions,
not done Byronically as proofs of genius, but for our own self-education,
alone, in secret, awaiting the crisis which shall call us forth to the
battle to do just what other people do, only, perhaps, by an utterly
different self-education.  That is the life of great spirits, after,
perhaps, many many years of seclusion, of silent training in the lower
paths of God's vineyard, till their hearts have settled into a still,
deep, yet swift current, and those who have been faithful over a few
things are made rulers over many things.

_MS. Letter_.  1842.

Office of the Clergy.  September 26.

There is a Christian as well as political liberty quite consistent with
High Church principles, which makes the clergy our teachers--not the
keepers of our _consciences_ but of our _creeds_.

_Letters and Memories_.  1842.

Opinions are not Knowledge.  September 27.

. . . As to self-improvement, the true Catholic mode of learning is to
"prove all things," as far as we can, without sin or the danger of it, to
"hold fast that which is good."  Let us never be afraid of trying
anything new, learnt from people of different opinions to our own.  And
let us never be afraid of changing our opinions.  The unwillingness to go
back from once declared opinion is a form of pride which haunts some
powerful minds: but it is not found in great childlike geniuses.  Fools
may hold fast to their scanty stock through life, and we must be very
cautious in drawing them from it--for where can they supply its place?

_Letters and Memories_.  1843.

The Worst Punishment.  September 28.

God reserves many a sinner for that most awful of all punishments
(here)--impunity.

_Sermons_.

The Divine Order.  September 29.

Ah, that God's will were but done on earth as it is in the material
heaven overhead, in perfect order and obedience, as the stars roll in
their courses, without rest, yet without haste--as all created things,
even the most awful, fire and hail, snow and vapour, wind and storm,
fulfil God's word, who hath made them sure for ever and ever, and given
them a law which shall not be broken.  But above them; above the divine
and wonderful order of the material universe, and the winds which are
God's angels, and the flames of fire which are His messengers; above all,
the prophets and apostles have caught sight of another divine and
wonderful order of _rational_ beings, of races loftier and purer than
man--angels and archangels, thrones and dominions, principalities and
powers, fulfilling God's will in heaven as it is not, alas! fulfilled on
earth.

_All Saints' Day Sermons_.  1867.

True Resignation.  September 30.

. . . Christianity heightens as well as deepens the human as well as the
divine affections.  I am happy, for the less hope, the more faith. . . .
God knows what is best for us; we do not.  Continual resignation, at last
I begin to find, is the secret of continual strength.  "Daily _dying_,"
as Boehmen interprets it, is the path of daily _living_. . . .

_Letters and Memories_.  1843.

SAINTS' DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS.

SEPTEMBER 21.
St. Matthew, Apostle, Evangelist, and Martyr.

There is something higher than happiness.  There is blessedness; the
blessedness of being good and doing good, of being right and doing right.
That blessedness we may have at all times; we may be blest even in
anxiety and in sadness; we may be blest, even as the martyrs of old were
blest, in agony and death.

_Water of Life Sermons_.

SEPTEMBER 29.
Feast of St. Michael and All Angels.

The eternal moral law which held good for the sinless Christ, who, though
He were a Son, yet learned obedience by the things which He suffered,
must hold good of you and me, and all moral and rational beings--yea, for
the very angels in heaven.  They have not sinned.  That we know; and we
do not know that they have ever suffered.  But this at least we know,
that they have submitted.  They have obeyed, and have given up their own
wills to be ministers of God's will.  In them is neither self-will nor
selfishness; and, therefore, by faith, that is, by trust and loyalty,
they stand.  And so, by consenting to lose their individual life of
selfishness, they have saved their eternal life in God, the life of
blessedness and holiness, just as all evil spirits have lost their
eternal life by trying to save their selfish life and be something in
themselves and of themselves without respect to God.

_All Saints' Day Sermons_.

October.

A beautiful October morning it was; one of those in which Dame Nature,
healthily tired with the revelry of summer, is composing herself, with a
quiet satisfied smile, for her winter's sleep.  Sheets of dappled cloud
were sliding slowly from the west; long bars of hazy blue hung over the
southern chalk downs, which gleamed pearly gray beneath the low south-
eastern sun.  In the vale below, soft white flakes of mist still hung
over the water meadows, and barred the dark trunks of the huge elms and
poplars, whose fast-yellowing leaves came showering down at every rustle
of the western breeze, spotting the grass below.  The river swirled
along, glassy no more, but dingy gray with autumn rains and rotting
leaves.  All beyond the garden told of autumn, bright and peaceful even
in decay; but up the sunny slope of the garden itself, and to the very
window-sill, summer still lingered.  The beds of red verbena and geranium
were still brilliant, though choked with fallen leaves of acacia and
plane; the canary plant, still untouched by frost, twined its delicate
green leaves, and more delicate yellow blossoms, through the crimson lace-
work of the Virginia creeper; and the great yellow noisette swung its
long canes across the window, filling all the air with fruity fragrance.

_Two Years Ago_, chap. i.

Blessing of Daily Work.  October 1.

Thank God every morning when you get up that you have something to do
that day which must be done whether you like it or not.  Being forced to
work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance and self-
control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a
hundred virtues which the idle will never know.

_Town and Country Sermons_.  1861.

The Forming Form.  October 2.

As the acorn, because God has given it "a forming form," and life after
its kind, bears within it not only the builder oak but shade for many a
herd, food for countless animals, and at last the gallant ship itself,
and the materials of every use to which Nature or Art can put it, and its
descendants after it, throughout all time, so does every good deed
contain within itself endless and unexpected possibilities of other good,
which may and will grow and multiply for ever, in the genial light of Him
whose eternal mind conceived it, and whose eternal spirit will for ever
quicken it, with that life of which He is the Giver and the Lord.

_Preface to Tauler's Sermons_.  1854.

Special Providences.  October 3.

And as for special Providences.  I believe that every step I take, every
person I meet, every thought which comes into my mind--which is not
sinful--comes and happens by the perpetual Providence of God watching for
ever with Fatherly care over me, and each separate thing that He has
made.

_MS. Letter_.

Virtue.  October 4.

Nothing, nothing can be a substitute for purity and virtue.  Man will
always try to find substitutes for it.  He will try to find a substitute
in superstition, in forms and ceremonies, in voluntary humility and
worship of angels, in using vain repetitions, and fancying he will be
heard for his much speaking; he will try to find a substitute in
intellect, and the worship of intellect and art and poetry, . . . but let
no man lay that flattering unction to his soul.

_Sermons on David_.  1866.

God-likeness.  October 5.

"We can become like God--only in proportion as we are of use," said ---.
"I did not see this once.  I tried to be good, not knowing what good
meant.  I tried to be good, because I thought it would pay me in the
world to come.  But at last I saw that all life, all devotion, all piety,
were only worth anything, only Divine, and God-like and God-beloved, as
they were means to that one end--to be of use."

_Two Years Ago_, chap. xix.  1856.

The Refiner's Fire.  October 6.

"Not quite that," said Amyas.  "He was a meeker man latterly than he used
to be.  As he said himself once, a better refiner than any whom he had on
board had followed him close all the seas over, and purified him in the
fire.  And gold seven times tried he was when God, having done His work
in him, took him home at last."

_Westward Ho_! chap. xiii.

The Prayer of Faith.  October 7.

With the prayer of faith we can do anything.  Look at Mark xi. 24--a text
that has saved more than one soul from madness in the hour of sorrow; and
it is so _simple_ and _wide_--wide as eternity, simple as light, true as
God Himself.  If we are to do great things it must be in the spirit of
that text.  Verily, when the Son of God cometh shall He find faith in the
earth?

_Letters and Memories_.  1843.

Mountain-Ranges.  October 8.

We fancy there are many independent sciences, because we stand half-way
up on different mountain-peaks, calling to each other from isolated
stations.  The mists hide from us the foot of the range beneath us, the
depths of primary analysis to which none can reach, or we should see that
all the peaks were but offsets of one vast mountain-base, and in their
inmost root but One!  And the clouds which float between us and the
heaven shroud from us the sun-lighted caps themselves--the perfect issues
of synthetic science, on which the Sun of Righteousness shines with
undimmed lustre--and keep us from perceiving that the complete practical
details of our applied knowledge is all holy and radiant with God's
smile.  And so, half-way up, on the hillside, beneath a cloudy sky, we
build up little earthy hill-cairns of our own petty synthesis, and fancy
them Babel-towers whose top shall reach to heaven!

_MS. Note-book_.  1843.

The Temper for Success in Life.  October 9.

The men whom I have seen succeed best in life have always been cheerful
and hopeful men, who went about their business with a smile on their
faces, and took the changes and chances of this mortal life like men,
facing rough and smooth alike as it came, and so found the truth of the
old proverb that "good times and bad times and all times pass over."

_MS._

Want of Simplicity.  October 10.

Faith and prayer are simple things, . . . but when we begin to want
faith, and to assist prayer by our own inventions and to explain away
God's providence, then faith and prayer become intricate and uncertain.
We cannot serve God and mammon.  We must either utterly depend on God
(and therefore on our own reason enlightened by His spirit after prayer),
or we must utterly depend on the empirical maxims of the world.  Choose!

_MS. Letter_.

True Rest.  October 11.

What is true rest?  To rest from sin, from sorrow, from doubt, from care;
this is true rest.  Above all, to rest from the worst weariness of
all--knowing one's duty and not being able to do it.  That is true rest;
the rest of God who works for ever, and yet is at rest for ever; as the
stars over our heads move for ever, thousands of miles a day, and yet are
at perfect rest, because they move orderly, harmoniously, fulfilling the
law which God has given them.  Perfect rest in perfect work; that surely
is the rest of blessed spirits till the final consummation of all things.

_Water of Life Sermons_.  1867.

God's Image.  October 12.

. . . "Honour all men."  Every man should be honoured as God's image, in
the sense in which Novalis says--that we touch Heaven when we lay our
hand on a human body! . . .  The old Homeric Greeks, I think, felt that,
and acted up to it, more than any nation.  The Patriarchs too seem to
have had the same feeling. . . .

_Letters and Memories_.  1843.

Woman's Work.  October 13.

Let woman never be persuaded to forget that her calling is not the lower
and more earthly one of self-assertion, but the higher and diviner one of
self-sacrifice; and let her never desert that higher life which lives in
and for others, like her Redeemer and her Lord.

_Lecture on Thrift_.  1869.

Self-Enjoyment.  October 14.

"How do ye expect," said Sandy, "ever to be happy, or strong, or a man at
a', as long as ye go on only looking to enjoy yersel--_yersel_?  Mony was
the year I looked for nought but my ain pleasure, and got it too, when it
was a'

   "'Sandy Mackaye, bonny Sandy Mackaye,
   There he sits singing the lang simmer day;
      Lassies gae to him,
      And kiss him, and woo him--
      Na bird is so merry as Sandy Mackaye.'

An' muckle good cam' o't.  Ye may fancy I'm talking like a sour,
disappointed auld carle.  But I tell ye nay.  I've got that's worth
living for, though I am downhearted at times, and fancy a's wrong, and
there's na hope for us on earth, we be a' sic liars--a' liars, I
think--I'm a great liar often mysel, especially when I'm praying."

_Alton Locke_, chap. vii.

Temptations of Temperament.  October 15.

A man of intense sensibilities, and therefore capable, as is but too
notorious, of great crimes as well as of great virtues.

_Sermons on David_.

The more delicate and graceful the organisation, the more noble and
earnest the nature, the more certain it is, I fear, if neglected, to go
astray.

_Lecture on Thrift_.  1869.

Egotism of Melancholy.  October 16.

Morbid melancholy results from subjectivity of mind.  The
self-contemplating mind, if it be a conscientious and feeling one, must
be dissatisfied with what it sees within.  Then it begins unconsciously
to flatter itself with the idea that it is not the "_moi_" but the "_non
moi_," the world around, which is evil.  Hence comes Manichaeism,
Asceticism, and that morbid tone of mind which is so accustomed to look
for sorrow that it finds it even in joy--because it will not confess to
itself that sorrow belongs to _sin_, and that sin belongs to _self_; and
therefore it vents its dissatisfaction on God's earth, and not on itself
in repentance and humiliation.

The world looks dark.  Shall we therefore be dark too?  Is it not our
business to bring it back to light and joy?

_MS. Letter_.  1843.

Poetry of Doubt.  October 17.

The "poetry of doubt" of these days, however pretty, would stand us in
little stead if we were threatened by a second Armada.

_Miscellanies_.  1859.

Work of the Physician.  October 18.

The question which is forcing itself more and more on the minds of
scientific men is not how many diseases _are_, but how few are _not_, the
consequences of men's ignorance, barbarism, folly, self-indulgence.  The
medical man is felt more and more to be necessary in health as he is in
sickness, to be the fellow-workman not merely of the clergyman, but of
the social reformer, the political economist, and the statesman; and the
first object of his science to be prevention, and not cure.

_National Sermons_.  1851.

Love Many-sided.  October 19.

There are many sides to love--admiration, reverence, gratitude, pity,
affection; they are all different shapes of that one great spirit of
love--the only feeling which will bind a man to do good, not once in a
way but habitually.

_National Sermons_.  1851.

The only Path to Light.  October 20.

The path by which some come to see the Light, to find the Rock of Ages,
is the simple path of honest self-knowledge, self-renunciation,
self-restraint, in which every upward step towards right exposes some
fresh depth of inward sinfulness, till the once proud man, crushed down
by the sense of his own infinite meanness, becomes a little child once
more, and casts himself simply on the generosity of Him who made him.  And
then there may come to him the vision, dim, perhaps, and fitting ill into
clumsy words, but clearer, surer, nearer to him than the ground on which
he treads, or than the foot which treads it--the vision of an Everlasting
Spiritual Substance, most Human and yet most Divine, who can endure; and
who, standing beneath all things, can make their spiritual substance
endure likewise, though all worlds and eons, birth and growth and death,
matter and space and time, should melt indeed--

   And like the baseless fabric of a vision,
   Leave not a rack behind.

_Preface to Tauler's Sermons_.  1854.

Proverbs False and True.  October 21.

There is no falser proverb than that devil's beatitude, "Blessed is he
who expecteth nothing, for he shall never be disappointed."  Say rather,
"Blessed is he who expecteth everything, for he enjoys everything once at
least, and if it falls out true, twice also."

_Prose Idylls_.  1857.

True Sisters of Mercy.  October 22.

Ah! true Sisters of Mercy! whom the world sneers at as "old maids," if
you pour out on cats and dogs and parrots a little of the love that is
yearning to spend itself on children of your own.  As long as such as you
walk this lower world one needs no Butler's _Analogy_ to prove to us that
there is another world, where such as you will have a fuller and a fairer
(I dare not say a juster) portion.

_Two Years Ago_, chap. xxv.  1856.

The Divine Fire.  October 23.

Well spoke the old monks, peaceful, watching life's turmoil,
"Eyes which look heavenward, weeping still we see:
God's love with keen flame purges, like the lightning flash,
Gold which is purest, purer still must be."

_Saint's Tragedy_, Act iii. Scene i.
1847.

The Cross a Token.  October 24.

Have patience, have faith, have hope, as thou standest at the foot of
Christ's Cross, and holdest fast to it, the anchor of the _soul_ and
_reason_, as well as of the _heart_.  For, however ill the world may go,
or seem to go, the Cross is the everlasting token that God so loved the
world that He spared not His only-begotten Son, but freely gave Him for
it.  Whatsoever else is doubtful, that at least is sure--that good must
conquer, because God is good, that evil must perish, because God hates
evil, even to the death.

_Westminster Sermons_.  1870.

The True Self-Sacrifice.  October 25.

What can a man do more than _die_ for his countrymen?

_Live_ for them.  It is a longer work, and therefore a more difficult and
a nobler one.

_Two Years Ago_, chap. xix.  1856.

Now as Then.  October 26.

Men can be as original now as ever, if they had but the courage, even the
insight.  Heroic souls in old times had no more opportunities than we
have; but they used them.  There were daring deeds to be done then--are
there none now?  Sacrifices to be made--are there none now?  Wrongs to be
redrest--are there none now?  Let any one set his heart in these days to
do what is right, and nothing else; and it will not be long ere his brow
is stamped with all that goes to make up the heroical expression--with
noble indignation, noble self-restraint, great hopes, great sorrows;
perhaps even with the print of the martyr's crown of thorns.

_Two Years Ago_, chap. vii.  1856.

One Anchor.  October 27.

In such a world as this, with such ugly possibilities hanging over us
all, there is but one anchor which will hold, and that is utter trust in
God; let us keep that, and we may yet get to our graves without _misery_
though not without _sorrow_.

_Letters and Memories_.  1871.

Self-Control.  October 28.

Settle it in your minds, young people, that the first and the last of all
virtues and graces which God can give is Self-Control, as necessary for
the saint and the sage lest they become fanatics and pedants, as for the
young in the hey-day of youth and health.

_Sermons on David_.  1866.

Nature's Permanence.  October 29.

We abolish many things, good and evil, wisely and foolishly, in these
fast-going times; but, happily for us, we cannot abolish the blue sky,
and the green sea, and the white foam, and the everlasting hills, and the
rivers which flow out of their bosoms.  They will abolish themselves when
their work is done, but not before.  And we, who, with all our boasted
scientific mastery over Nature, are, from a merely mechanical and carnal
point of view, no more than a race of minute parasitic animals burrowing
in the fair Earth's skin, had better, instead of boasting of our empire
over Nature, take care lest we become too troublesome to Nature, by
creating, in our haste and greed, too many great black countries, and too
many great dirty warrens of houses, miscalled cities, peopled with
savages and imps of our own mis-creation; in which case Nature, so far
from allowing us to abolish her, will by her inexorable laws abolish us.

_MS. Presidential Address_.  1871.

The Only Refuge.  October 30.

Prayer is the only refuge against the Walpurgis-dance of the witches and
the fiends, which at hapless moments whirl unbidden through a mortal
brain.

_Two Years Ago_, chap. xix.  1856.

England's Forgotten Worthies.  October 31.

Among the higher-hearted of the early voyagers, the grandeur and glory
around them had attuned their spirits to itself and kept them in a lofty,
heroical, reverent frame of mind; while they knew as little about what
they saw in an "artistic" or "critical" point of view as in a scientific
one. . . .  They gave God thanks and were not astonished.  God was great:
but that they had discovered long before they came into the tropics.

Noble old child-hearted heroes, with just romance and superstition enough
about them to keep from that prurient hysterical wonder and enthusiasm
which is simply, one often fears, a product of our scepticism!  We do not
trust enough in God, we do not really believe His power enough, to be
ready, as they were, as every one ought to be on a God-made earth, for
anything and everything being possible; and then when a wonder is
discovered we go into ecstasies and shrieks over it, and take to
ourselves credit for being susceptible of so lofty a feeling--true index,
forsooth, of a refined and cultivated mind!!

Smile if you will: but those were days (and there never were less
superstitious ones) in which Englishmen believed in the living God, and
were not ashamed to acknowledge, as a matter of course, His help, and
providence, and calling, in the matters of daily life, which we now, in
our covert atheism, term "secular and carnal."

_Westward Ho_! chap. xxiii.

SAINTS' DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS.

OCTOBER 18.
St. Luke, Physician and Evangelist.

It is good to follow Christ in one thing and to follow Him utterly in
that.  And the physician has set his mind to do one thing--to hate
calmly, but with an internecine hatred, disease and death, and to fight
against them to the end.  In his exclusive care for the body the
physician witnesses unconsciously yet mightily for the soul, for God, for
the Bible, for immortality.  Is he not witnessing for God when he shows
by his acts that he believes God to be a God of life, not of death; of
health, not of disease; of order, not of disorder; of joy and strength,
not of misery and weakness?  Is he not witnessing for Christ when, like
Christ, he heals all manner of sickness and disease among the people, and
attacks physical evil as the natural foe of man and of the Creator of
man?

"_Water of Life_," _and other Sermons_.

OCTOBER 28.
St. Simon and St. Jude, Apostles and Martyrs.

He that loseth his life shall save it.  The end and aim of our life is
not happiness but goodness.  If goodness comes first, then happiness may
come after; but if not, something better than happiness may come, even
blessedness.

Oh! sad hearts and suffering! look to the Cross.  There hung your King!
The King of sorrowing souls; and more, the King of Sorrows.  Ay, pain and
grief, tyranny and desertion, death and hell,--He has faced them one and
all, and tried their strength and taught them His, and conquered them
right royally.  And since He hung upon that torturing Cross sorrow is
divine,--godlike, as joy itself.  All that man's fallen nature dreads and
despises God honoured on the Cross, and took unto Himself, and blest and
consecrated for ever. . . .  And now--Blessed are tears and shame,
blessed are agony and pain; blessed is death, and blest the unknown
realms where souls await the Resurrection-day.

_National Sermons_.

November.

"The giant trees are black and still, the tearful sky is dreary gray.  All
Nature is like the grief of manhood in its soft and thoughtful sternness.
Shall I lend myself to its influence, and as the heaven settles down into
one misty shroud of 'shrill yet silent tears,' as if veiling her shame in
a cloudy mantle, shall I, too, lie down and weep?  Why not? for am I not
'a part of all I see'?  And even now, in fasting and mortification, am I
not sorrowing for my sin and for its dreary chastisement?  But shall I
then despond and die?

"No! Mother Earth, for then I were unworthy of thee and thy God!  We may
weep, Mother Earth, but we have Faith--faith which tells us that above
the cloudy sky the bright clear sun is shining, and will shine.  And we
have Hope, Mother Earth--hope, that as bright days have been, so bright
days soon shall be once more!  And we have Charity, Mother Earth, and by
it we can love all tender things--ay, and all rugged rocks and dreary
moors, for the sake of the glow which _has_ gilded them, and the
fertility which will spring even from their sorrow.  We will smile
through our tears, Mother Earth, for we are not forsaken!  We have still
light and heat, and till we can bear the sunshine we will glory in the
shade!"

_MS._  1842.

Sympathy of the Dead.  November 1.

Believe that those who are gone are nearer us than ever; and that if (as
I surely believe) they do sorrow over the mishaps and misdeeds of those
whom they leave behind, they do not sorrow in vain.  Their sympathy is a
further education for them, and a pledge, too, of help--I believe of
final deliverance--for those on whom they look down in love.

_Letters and Memories_.  1852.

Nature's Parable.  November 2.

There is a devil's meaning to everything in nature, and a God's meaning
too.  As I read nature's parable to-night I find nothing in it but hope.
What if there be darkness, the sun will rise to-morrow; what if there
seem chaos, the great organic world is still living and growing and
feeding, unseen by us all the night through; and every phosphoric atom
there below is a sign that in the darkest night there is still the power
of light, ready to flash out wherever and however it is stirred.

_Prose Idylls_.  1849.

Passing Onward.  November 3.

Liturgies are but temporary expressions of the Church's heart.  The Bible
is the immutable story of her husband's love.  _She_ must go on from
grace to grace, and her song must vary from age to age, and her ancient
melodies become unfitted to express her feelings; but He is the same for
ever.

_MS._  1842.

See how the autumn leaves float by decaying,
   Down the wild swirls of the dark-brimming stream;
So fleet the works of men back to their earth again--
   Ancient and holy things pass like a dream.

_A Parable_.  1848.

The Divine Intention.  November 4.

I am superstitious enough, thank God, to believe that not a stone or a
handful of mud gravitates into its place without the will of God; that it
was ordained, ages since, into what particular spot each grain of gold
should be washed down from an Australian quartz reef, that a certain man
might find it at a certain moment and crisis of his life.

_Science Lectures_.

Christ Weeping over Jerusalem.  November 5.

That which is true of nations is true of individuals, of each separate
human brother of the Son of man.  Is there one young life ruined by its
own folly--one young heart broken by its own wilfulness--or one older
life fast losing the finer instincts, the nobler aims of youth, in the
restlessness of covetousness, of fashion, of ambition?  Is there one such
poor soul over whom Christ does not grieve?  One to whom, at some supreme
crisis of their lives, He does not whisper--"Ah, beautiful organism--thou
too art a thought of God--thou too, if thou wert but in harmony with
thyself and God, a microcosmic _City of God_!  Ah! that thou hadst
known--even thou--at least in this thy day--the things which belong to
thy peace"?

_MS. Sermon_.  1874.

Love Expansive.  November 6.

The mystics think it wrong to love any created thing, because our whole
love should be given to God.  But as flame increases by being applied to
many objects, so does love.  He who loves God most loves God's creatures
most, and them for God's sake, and God for their sake.

_MS. Note-book_.  1843.

Still the same.  November 7.

Those who die in the fear of God and in the faith of Christ do not really
taste death; to them there is no death, but only a change of place, a
change of state; they pass at once into some new life, with all their
powers, all their feelings, unchanged; still the same living, thinking,
active beings which they were here on earth.  I say active.  Rest they
may, rest they will, if they need rest.  But what is true rest?  Not
idleness, but peace of mind.

_Water of Life Sermons_.  1862.

An absolutely Good God.  November 8.

Fix in your minds--or rather ask God to fix in your minds--this one idea
of an absolutely good God; good with all forms of goodness which you
respect and love in man; good, as you, and I, and every honest man,
understand the plain word good.  Slowly you will acquire that grand and
all-illuminating idea; slowly and most imperfectly at best: for who is
mortal man that he should conceive and comprehend the goodness of the
infinitely good God!  But see, then, whether, in the light of that one
idea, all the old-fashioned Christian ideas about the relation of God to
man--whether Providence, Prayer, Inspiration, Revelation, the
Incarnation, the Passion, and the final triumph of the Son of God--do not
seem to you, not merely beautiful, not merely probable, but rational, and
logical, and necessary, moral consequences from the one idea of an
Absolute and Eternal Goodness, the Living Parent of the universe?

_Westminster Sermons_.  1873.

Nature's Lesson.  November 9.

Learn what feelings every object in Nature expresses, but do not let them
mould the tone of your mind; else, by allowing a melancholy day to make
you melancholy, you worship the creature more than the Creator.

_MS. Letter_.  1842.

Morals and Mind.  November 10.

Not upon mind, not upon mind, but upon morals, is human welfare founded.
The true subjective history of man is not the history of his thought, but
of his conscience: the true objective history of man is not that of his
inventions, but of his vices and his virtues.  So far from morals
depending upon thought, thought, I believe, depends on morals.  In
proportion as a nation is righteous--in proportion as common justice is
done between man and man, will thought grow rapidly, securely,
triumphantly; will its discoveries be cheerfully accepted and faithfully
obeyed, to the welfare of the whole common weal.

_Inaugural Lecture_, _Cambridge_.  1860.

Fastidiousness.  November 11.

Do not let us provoke God (though that is _really_ impossible) by
complaining of His gifts because they do not come just in the form _we_
should have wished. . . .

_MS. Letter_.  1844.

Unconscious Faith.  November 12.

For the rest, Amyas never thought about thinking or felt about feeling;
and had no ambition whatsoever beyond pleasing his father and mother,
getting by honest means the maximum of "red quarrenders" and mazard
cherries, and going to sea when he was big enough.  Neither was he what
would be nowadays called by many a pious child, for though he said his
Creed and Lord's Prayer night and morning, and went to service at the
church every forenoon, and read the day's Psalms with his mother every
evening, and had learnt from her and his father that it was infinitely
noble to do right and infinitely base to do wrong, yet he knew nothing
more of theology or of his own soul than is contained in the Church
Catechism.

_Westward Ho_! chap. i.  1855.

Silence.  November 13.

There are silences more pathetic than all words.

_MS._

The Nineteenth Century.  November 14.

. . . What so maddening as the new motion of our age--the rush of the
express train, when the live iron pants and leaps and roars through the
long chalk cutting, and white mounds gleam cold a moment against the sky
and vanish; and rocks and grass and bushes fleet by in dim blended lines;
and the long hedges revolve like the spokes of a gigantic wheel; and far
below meadows and streams and homesteads, with all their lazy old-world
life, open for an instant, and then flee away; while awestruck, silent,
choked with the mingled sense of pride and helplessness, we are swept on
by that great pulse of England's life-blood rushing down her iron veins;
and dimly out of the future looms the fulfilment of our primeval mission
to conquer and subdue the earth, and space too, and time, and all
things--even hardest of all tasks, yourselves, my cunning brothers; ever
learning some fresh lesson, except the hardest one of all, that it is the
Spirit of God which giveth you understanding?

Yes, great railroads, and great railroad age, who would exchange you,
with all your sins, for any other time?  For swiftly as rushes matter,
more swiftly rushes mind; more swiftly still rushes the heavenly dawn up
the eastern sky.  "The night is far spent, the day is at hand."  "Blessed
is the servant whom his Lord, when He cometh, shall find watching."

_Prose Idylls_.

Unreality.  November 15.

Those who have had no real sorrows can afford to play with imaginary
ones.

_MS._

The indwelling Light.  November 16.

The doctrine of Christ in every man, as the indwelling Word of God, the
Light who lights every one who comes into the world, is no peculiar tenet
of the Quakers, but one which runs through the whole of the Old and New
Testaments, and without which they would both be unintelligible, just as
the same doctrine runs through the whole history of the Early Church for
the first two centuries, and is the only explanation of them.

_Theologica Germanica_.  1854.

Woman's Calling.  November 17.

What surely is a woman's calling but to teach man? and to teach him what?
To temper his fiercer, coarser, more self-assertive nature by the contact
of her gentleness, purity, self-sacrifice.  To make him see that not by
blare of trumpets, not by noise, wrath, greed, ambition, intrigue,
puffery, is good and lasting work to be done on earth; but by wise self-
distrust, by silent labour, by lofty self-control, by that charity which
hopeth all things, believeth all things, endureth all things; by such an
example, in short, as women now in tens of thousands set to those around
them; such as they will show more and more, the more their whole
womanhood is educated to employ its powers without waste and without
haste in harmonious unity.

_Lecture on Thrift_.  1869.

Waste.  November 18.

Thrift of the heart, thrift of the emotions--how are they wasted in these
days in reading sensation novels! while British literature--all that the
best hearts and intellects among our forefathers have bequeathed to us--is
neglected for light fiction, the reading of which is the worst form of
intemperance--dram-drinking and opium-eating, intellectual and moral.

_Lecture on Thrift_.

True Penance.  November 19.

"Senor," said Brimblecombe, "the best way to punish oneself for doing ill
seems to me to go and do good; and the best way to find out whether God
means you well is to find out whether He will help you to do well."

_Westward Ho_! chap. xxv.

Political Economy of the Future.  November 20.

I can conceive a time when, by improved chemical science, every foul
vapour which now escapes from the chimney of a manufactory, polluting the
air, destroying the vegetation, shall be seized, utilised, converted into
some profitable substance, till the black country shall be black no
longer, the streams once more crystal clear, the trees once more
luxuriant, and the desert, which man has created in his haste and greed,
shall in literal fact once more blossom as the rose.  And just so can I
conceive a time when by a higher civilisation, formed on a political
economy more truly scientific, because more truly according to the will
of God, our human refuse shall be utilised like our material refuse; when
man as man, down to the weakest and most ignorant, shall be found (as he
really is) so valuable that it will be worth while to preserve his
health, to develop his capabilities, to save him alive, body, intellect,
and character, at any cost; because men will see that a man is, after
all, the most precious and useful thing on the earth, and that no cost
spent on the development of human beings can possibly be thrown away.

_All Saints' Day Sermons_.  1870.

God's Pleasure.  November 21.

The world was not made for man: but man, like all the world, was made for
God.  Not for man's pleasure merely, not for man's use, but for God's
pleasure all things are, and for God's pleasure they were, created.

_All Saints' Day Sermons_.  1869.

The Hospital Nurse.  November 22.

Fearless, uncomplaining, she "trusted in God and made no haste."  She did
her work and read her Bible; and read, too, again and again at stolen
moments of rest, a book which was to her as the finding of an unknown
sister--Longfellow's "Evangeline."

_Two Years Ago_, chap. xxviii.

Let us learn to look on hospitals not as acts of charity, supererogatory
benevolences of ours towards those to whom we owe nothing, but as
confessions of sin, and worthy fruits of penitence; as poor and late and
partial compensation for misery which _we_ might have prevented.

_National Sermons_.  1851.

No Work Lost.  November 23.

If you lose heart about your work, remember that none of it is
_lost_--that the good of every good deed remains and breeds and works on
for ever, and that all that fails and is lost is the outside shell of the
thing, which, perhaps, might have been better done; but better or worse
has nothing to do with the real spiritual good which you have done to
men's hearts.

_Letters and Memories_.  1862.

True Temperance.  November 24.

What we all want is inward rest; rest of heart and brain; the calm,
strong, self-contained, self-denying character, which needs no
stimulants, for it has no fits of depression; which needs no narcotics,
for it has no fits of excitement; which needs no ascetic restraints, for
it is strong enough to use God's gifts without abusing them; the
character, in a word, which is truly temperate, not in drink and food
merely, but in all desires, thoughts, and actions.

_Essays_.  1873.

A Present Veil.  November 25.

What is there in this world worth having without religion?  Do you not
feel that true religion, even in its most imperfect stage, is not merely
an escape from hell after death but the only _real state_ for a man--the
only position to live in in this world--the only frame of mind which will
give anything like happiness here.  I cannot help feeling at moments--if
there were _no Christ_, everything, even the very flowers and insects,
and every beautiful object, would be hell _now_--dark, blank, hopeless.

_MS. Letter_.  1843.

Cowardice.  November 26.

There is but one thing which you have to fear in earth or heaven--being
untrue to your better selves, and therefore untrue to God.  If you will
not do the thing you know to be right, and say the thing you know to be
true, then indeed you are weak.  You are a coward; you desert God.

_True Words for Brave Men_.

Blind Faith.  November 27.

In Him--"The Father"--I can trust, in spite of the horrible things I see
happen, in spite of the fact that my own prayers are not answered.  I
believe that He makes all things work together for the good of the human
race, and of me among the rest, as long as I obey His will.  I believe He
will answer my prayer, not according to the letter, but according to the
spirit of it; that if I desire good, I shall find good, though not _the_
good I longed for.

_MS. Letter_.  1862.

Small and Great.  November 28.

Begin with small things--you cannot enter into the presence of another
human being without finding there more to do than you or I or any soul
will ever learn to do perfectly before we die.  Let us be content to do
little if God sets us little tasks.  It is but pride and self-will which
says, "Give me something huge to fight and I shall enjoy that--but why
make me sweep the dust?"

_Letters and Memories_.  1854.

True and False.  November 29.

We must remember that dissatisfaction at existing evil (the feeling of
all young and ardent minds), the struggle to escape from the
"circumstance" of the evil world, has a carnal counterfeit--the love of
novelty, and self-will, and self-conceit, which may thrust us down into
the abysses of misrule and uncertainty; as it has done such men as
Shelley and Byron; trying vainly every loophole, beating against the
prison bars of an imperfect system; neither degraded enough to make
themselves a fool's paradise within it, nor wise enough to escape from it
through Christ, "the door into the sheepfold," to return when they will,
and bring others with them into the serene empyrean of spiritual
truth--truth which explains, and arranges, and hallows, and subdues
everything.

_Letters and Memories_.  1842.

The Mind of Christ.  November 30.

How can we attain to the blessed and noble state of mind--the mind of
Christ, who must needs be about His Father's business, which is doing
good?  Only by prayer and practice.  There is no more use in praying
without practising than there is in practising without praying.  You
cannot learn to walk without walking; no more can you learn to do good
without trying to do good.

_Sermons for the Times_.  1855.

SAINTS' DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS.

NOVEMBER 1.
All Saints' Day.
Commemoration of the Blessed Dead.

"If any man serve Me, him will My Father honour," said the Blessed One.
And if God honours His servants, shall not we honour them likewise?  We
may not, as our forefathers did blindly, though lovingly, worship them as
mediators and lesser gods, and pray to them instead of to their Father in
heaven to whose throne of grace we may all come boldly through Christ
Jesus, or believe that their relics will work miracles in our behalf,
thus honouring the creature instead of the Creator.  This we may not do,
but we may honour the Creator in His creature, and honour God in those
who have lived godly and God-like lives; and when they have passed away
from among us--souls endued by God with manifold virtues and precious
gifts of grace--we may give thanks and say, These, O God, are the fruits
of Thy Spirit.  Thou honourest them in heaven with Thy approving smile.
We will honour them on earth, not merely with our lips, but in our lives.
What they were we too might be, if we were as true as they to the
inspiration of Thy Spirit.  Help us to honour their memories, as Thou and
they would have us do, by following their example; by setting them before
us, and not only them, but every holy and noble personage of whom we have
ever heard, as dim likenesses of Christ--even as Christ is the likeness
of Thee.  Amen.

_MS. Sermon_.

NOVEMBER 30.
St. Andrew, Apostle and Martyr.

Form your own notions about angels and saints in heaven--as you will, . .
. but bear this in mind: that if the saints in heaven live the
everlasting life, they must be living a life of usefulness, of love, and
of good works.  The everlasting life cannot be a selfish, idle life,
spent only in individual happiness.

_Good News of God Sermons_.

December.

It chanced upon the merry, merry Christmas eve,
   I went sighing past the Church across the moorland dreary:
"Oh! never sin and want and woe this earth will leave,
   And the bells but mock the wailing sound, they sing so cheery.
How long, O Lord! how long before Thou come again?
   Still in cellar and in garret, and on moorland dreary,
The orphans moan, and widows weep, and poor men toil in vain:
   Till earth is sick of hope deferred, though Christmas bells be
cheery."

Then arose a joyous clamour from the wild-fowl on the mere,
   Beneath the stars across the snow, like clear bells ringing,
And a voice within cried, "Listen!  Christmas carols even here!
   Though thou be dumb, yet o'er their work the stars and snows are
singing.
Blind!  I live, I love, I reign, and all the nations through
   With the thunder of my judgments even now are ringing;
Do thou fulfil thy work but as yon wild-fowl do,
   Thou wilt heed no less the wailing, yet hear through it the angels'
singing."

_A Christmas Carol_.

The Final Victory.  December 1.

I believe that the ancient creed, the eternal gospel, will stand and
conquer, and prove its might in this age, as it has in every other for
eighteen hundred years, by claiming and subduing and organising those
young anarchic forces which now, unconscious of their parentage, rebel
against Him to whom they owe their being.

_Yeast_, Preface.  1851.

Drifting away.  December 2.

   They drift away--Ah, God! they drift for ever.
   . . . . . .
   I watch them drift--the old familiar faces,
   Till ghosts, not men, fill old beloved places.
   . . . . . .
   Shores, landmarks, beacons drift alike.
   Yet overhead the boundless arch of heaven
   Still fades to night, still blazes into day.
Ah, God!  My God!  _Thou_ wilt not drift away!

_A Fragment_.  1867.

Our Father.  December 3.

Take your sorrows not to man, but to your Father in heaven.  If that
name, Father, mean anything, it must mean that He will not turn away from
His wandering child in a way in which you would be ashamed to turn away
from yours.  If there be pity, lasting affection, patience in _man_, they
must have come from Him.  They, above all things, must be His likeness.
Believe that God possesses them a million times more fully than any human
being.

_Letters and Memories_.

Circumstance.  December 4.

Our wanton accidents take root, and grow
To vaunt themselves God's laws, until our clothes,
Our gems, and gaudy books, and cushioned litters
Become ourselves, and we would fain forget
There live who need them not.

_Saint's Tragedy_, Act ii. Scene v.
1847.

Duty.  December 5.

When a man has once said _honestly_ to himself, "It is my duty;" when
that glorious heavenly thought has risen upon his soul, like the sun upon
the earth, warming his heart and enlightening it, and making it bring
forth all good and noble fruits, then that man will feel a strength come
to him and a courage come from God which will conquer all his fears, his
selfish love of ease and pleasure, and enable him to bear pain and
poverty and death itself, provided he can do what is right, and be found
by God working His will where He has put him.

_Sermons_.

Humanity and the Bible.  December 6.

He who has an intense perception of humanity must know that Christianity
is divine, because it is the only religion which has a perfect perception
of human relations, wants, and feelings.  None but He who made the heart
could have written the Bible.

_MS. Note-book_.  1843.

Music.  December 7.

There is music in heaven, because in music there is no self-will.  Music
goes on certain laws and rules.  Man did not make those laws of music, he
has only found them out, and if he be self-willed and break them, there
is an end of his music instantly; all he brings out is discord and ugly
sounds.

Music is fit for heaven.  Music is a pattern and type of heaven, and of
the everlasting life of God which perfect spirits live in heaven; a life
of melody and order in themselves; a life of harmony with each other and
with God.

_Good News of God Sermons_.  1859.

Waiting.  December 8.

Ay--stay awhile in peace.  The storms are still.
Beneath her eider robe the patient earth
Watches in silence for the sun: we'll sit
And gaze up with her at the changeless heaven,
Until this tyranny be overpast.

_Saint's Tragedy_, Act iii. Scene iii.
1847.

True or False Toleration?  December 9.

"One thing at least I have learnt," he said, "in all my experiments on
poor humanity--never to see a man do a wrong thing without feeling I
could do the same in his place.  I used to pride myself on that once,
fool that I was, and call it comprehensiveness.  I used to make it an
excuse for sitting by and seeing the devil have it all his own way, and
call that toleration.  I will see now whether I cannot turn the said
knowledge to a better account, as common sense, patience, and charity,
and yet do work of which neither I nor my country need be ashamed."

_Two Years Ago_, chap. xxiii.  1856.

Success and Defeat.  December 10.

In many things success at first is dangerous, and _defeat_ an excellent
medicine for testing people's honesty--for setting them honestly to work
to see what they want, and what are the best modes of attaining it.  Our
sound thrashing, as a nation, in the first French war was the making of
our armies; and it is good for an idea, as well as for a man, to bear the
yoke in his youth.

_Lectures on Ancien Regime_.  1867.

Passing Emotions.  December 11.

Beware of depending on your own _emotions_, which are often but the
fallings and risings of the frail flesh, and mistaking them for spiritual
feelings and affections!

Think less of what you _feel_--even of trying _to be_ anything.  Look out
of yourself at God.  Pray and praise, and God will give you His Spirit
often when you feel most dull.

_MS. Letter_.  1842.

Christ's Church.  December 12.

. . . What a thought it is that there is a God! a Father, a King! a
Husband not of individuals, that is a Popish fancy, which the Puritans
have adopted--but of the Church--of collective humanity.  Let us be
content to be members; let us be, if we may, the feet, lowest, hardest
worked, trodden on, bleeding, brought into harshest contact with the evil
world!  Still we are members of Christ's Church! . . .

_Letters and Memories_.  1843.

Confound me not.  December 13.

Have charity, have patience, have mercy.  Never bring a human being,
however silly, ignorant, or weak, above all, any little child, to shame
and confusion of face.  Never by petulance, by suspicion, by ridicule,
even by selfish and silly haste, never, above all, by indulging in the
devilish pleasure of a sneer, crush what is finest, and rouse up what is
coarsest in the heart of any fellow-creature.

_Westminster Sermons_.  1872.

The Divine Hunger and Thirst.  December 14.

God grant us to be among "those who really hunger and thirst after
righteousness," and who therefore long to know what righteousness is,
that they may copy it--those who long to be freed not merely from the
punishment of sin after they die, but from sin itself while they live on
earth, and who therefore wish to know what sin is that they may avoid it.

_Preface to Tauler's Sermons_.  1854.

Religion or Godliness?  December 15.

This is the especial curse of our day, that religion does not mean, as it
used, the service of God--the being like God and showing forth God's
glory.  No, religion means nowadays the art of getting to heaven when we
die, and saving our own miserable souls, and getting God's wages without
doing God's work--as if that was godliness, as if that was anything but
selfishness, as if selfishness was any the better for being everlasting
selfishness!

_Village Sermons_.  1849.

Christ's Coming.  December 16.

Christ may come to us when we are fierce and prejudiced, with that still
small voice--so sweet and yet so keen, "Understand those who
misunderstand thee.  Be fair to those who are unfair to thee.  Be just
and merciful to those whom thou wouldst like to hate.  Forgive and thou
shalt be forgiven."  He comes to us surely, when we are selfish and
luxurious, in every sufferer who needs our help, and says, "If you do
good to one of these, my brethren, you do it unto Me."

_Last Sermon_.  _MS._  1874.

God's Nature.  December 17.

When will men open their eyes to the plain axiom that nothing is
impossible with God, save that He should transgress His own nature by
being unjust and unloving?

_Preface to Tauler_.  1854.

Educators of Men.  December 18.

There are those who consider--and I agree with them--that the education
of boys under the age of twelve years ought to be entrusted, as much as
possible, to women.  Let me ask--of what period of youth and manhood does
it not hold true?  I pity the ignorance and conceit of the man who
fancies that he has nothing left to learn from cultivated women.  I
should have thought that the very mission of woman was to be, in the
highest sense, the educator of man, from infancy to old age; that that
was the work towards which all the God-given capacities of women pointed.

_Lecture on Thrift_.  1869.

The Earthly Body.  December 19.

Let us remember that if the body does feel a burden now (as it must at
moments), what a happiness it is to have a body at all: how lonely, cold,
barren, would it be to be a "disembodied spirit."  As St. Paul says, "Not
that we desire to be unclothed, but to be clothed upon"--to have a
spiritual, deathless, griefless life instilled into the body.

_MS. Letter_.  1842.

Home at Last.  December 20.

When all the world is old, lad,
   And all the trees are brown,
And all the sport is stale, lad,
   And all the wheels run down;
Creep home and take your place there,
   The spent and maimed among:
God grant you find one face there
   You loved when all was young.

_The Water Babies_.  1862.

The Bible.  December 21.

The hearts and minds of the sick, the poor, the sorrowing, the truly
human, all demand a living God who has revealed Himself in living acts; a
God who has taught mankind by facts, not left them to discover Him by
theories and sentiments; a Judge, a Father, a Saviour, an Inspirer; in a
word, their hearts demand the historic truth of the Bible--of the Old
Testament no less than the New.

_Sermons on Pentateuch_.  1863.

Shaking of Heaven and Earth.  December 22.

"Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but heaven" (Hebrews xii. 26-
29).  This is one of the royal texts of Scripture.  It declares one of
those great laws of the kingdom of God which may fulfil itself once and
again at many eras and by many methods; which fulfilled itself most
gloriously in the first century after Christ; again in the fifth century;
again at the time of the Crusades; and again at the great Reformation in
the sixteenth century,--and is fulfilling itself again at this very day.

_Westminster Sermons_.  1872.

Self-Respect the Voice of God.  December 23.

Never hurt any one's self-respect.  Never trample on any soul, though it
may be lying in the veriest mire; for that last spark of self-respect is
as its only hope, its only chance; the last seed of a new and better
life; the voice of God which still whispers to it, "You are not what you
ought to be, and you are not what you can be.  You are still God's child,
still an immortal soul.  You may rise yet, and fight a good fight yet,
and conquer yet, and be a man yet, after the likeness of God who made
you, and Christ who died for you."  Oh! why crush that voice in any
heart?  If you do the poor creature is lost, and lies where he or she
falls, and never tries to rise again.

_Good News of God Sermons_.  1859.

Christmas Eve.  December 24.

We will have no sad forebodings on the eve of the blessed Christmas-tide.
He lives, He loves, He reigns; and all is well; for we are His and He is
ours.

_Two Years Ago_, Introduction.  1856.

The Miracle of Christmas Night.  December 25.

After the crowning miracle of this most blessed night all miracles are
possible.  The miracle of Christmas night was possible because God's love
was absolute, infinite, unconquerable, able to condescend to anything
that good might be done. . . .  This Christmas night is the one of all
the year which sets a physicist on facing the fact of miracle, and which
delivers him from the bonds of sense and custom by reminding him of God
made Man.

_Letters and Memories_.  1858.

Redemption.  December 26.

All things are blessed now, but sin; for all things, excepting sin, are
redeemed by the life and death of the Son of God.  Blessed are wisdom and
courage, joy and health and beauty, love and marriage, childhood and
manhood, corn and wine, fruit and flowers, for Christ redeemed them by
His life. . . .  Blessed is death, and blest the unknown realms where
souls await the Resurrection Day, for Christ redeemed them by His death.
Blessed are all days, dark as well as bright, for all are His, and He is
ours; and all are ours, and we are His for ever.

_National Sermons_.  1848.

Fellow-workers with Christ.  December 27.

To abolish the superstition, the misrule, the vice, the misery of this
world.  That is what Christ will do in the day when He has put all
enemies under His feet.  That is what Christ has been doing, step by
step, ever since that day when first He came to do His Father's will on
earth in great humility.  Therefore, that is what we must do, each in our
place and station, if we be indeed His subjects, fellow-workers with Him
in the improvement of the human race, fellow-soldiers with Him in the
battle against evil.

_All Saints' Day Sermons_.  1867.

The bright Pathway.  December 28.

There is a healthy ferment of mind in which one struggles through chaos
and darkness, by means of a few clues and threads of light--and--of one
great bright pathway, which I find more and more to be _the_ only escape
from infinite confusion and aberration, _the_ only explanation of a
thousand human mysteries--I mean the Incarnation of our Lord--the fact
that there really is--a God-Man!

_MS. Letter_.  1844.

New Worship.  December 29.

Blessed, thrice blessed, is it to find that hero-worship is not yet
passed away! that the heart of man still beats young and fresh; that the
old tales of David and Jonathan, Damon and Pythias, Socrates and
Alcibiades, Shakespeare and his nameless friend, of love "passing the
love of woman," ennobled by its own humility, deeper than death and
mightier than the grave, can still blossom out, if it be but in one heart
here and there, to show man still how, sooner or later, "he that loveth
knoweth God, for God is love."

_Miscellanies_.  1850.

Links in the Chain.  December 30.

The heart will cry out at times, Oh! blissful future!  Oh, dreary
present!  But let us not repine.  What is dreary need not be barren.
Nothing need be barren to those who view all things in their real light,
as links in the great chain of progression both for themselves and for
the Universe.  To us all Time should seem so full of life: every moment
the grave and the father of unnumbered events and designs in heaven and
earth, and the mind of our God Himself--all things moving smoothly and
surely in spite of apparent checks and disappointments towards the
appointed end.

_Letters and Memories_.  1844.

Past, Present, Future.  December 31.

Surely as the years pass on they ought to have made us better, more
useful, more worthy.  We may have been disappointed in our lofty ideas of
what ought to be done, but we may have gained more clear and practical
notions of what can be done.  We may have lost in enthusiasm, and yet
gained in earnestness.  We may have lost in sensibility, yet gained in
charity, activity, and power.  We may be able to do far less, and yet
what we do may be far better done.  And our very griefs and
disappointments--have they been useless to us?  Surely not.  We shall
have gained instead of lost by them if the Spirit of God has been working
in us.  Our sorrows will have wrought in us patience, our patience
experience, and that experience hope--hope that He who has led us thus
far will lead us farther still, that He who has taught us in former days
precious lessons--not only by sore temptations but most sacred joys--will
teach us in the days to come fresh lessons by temptations, which we shall
be more able to endure; and by joys which, though unlike those of old
times, are no less sacred, but sent as lessons to our souls by Him from
whom all good gifts come.

_Water of Life Sermons_.

Out of God's boundless bosom, the fount of life, we came; through
selfish, stormy youth, and contrite tears--just not too late; through
manhood, not altogether useless; through slow and chill old age, we
return whence we came, to the bosom of God once more--to go forth again,
it may be, with fresh knowledge and fresh powers, to nobler work.  Amen.

_The Air Mothers_.  1869.

SAINTS' DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS.

DECEMBER 21.
St. Thomas, Apostle and Martyr.

The spirits of just men made perfect, freed from the fetters of the gross
animal body, and now somewhere in that boundless universe in which this
earth is but a tiny speck, doing God's will as they longed to do it on
earth, with clearer light, fuller faith, deeper love, mightier powers of
usefulness!  Ah, that we were like unto them!

_All Saints' Day and other Sermons_.

DECEMBER 25.
Christmas Day.

Thank God, that One was born, at this same time,
Who did our work for us: we'll talk of Him:
We shall go mad with thinking of ourselves--
We'll talk of Him, and of that new-made star,
Which, as He stooped into the Virgin's side,
From off His finger, like a signet-gem,
He dropped in the empyrean for a sign.
But the first tear He shed at this His birth-hour,
When He crept weeping forth to see our woe,
Fled up to Heaven in mist, and hid for ever
Our sins, our works, and that same new-made star.

_Saint's Tragedy_, Act iv. Scene iv.

DECEMBER 26.
St. Stephen, the Martyr.

These are the holy ones--the heroes of mankind, the elect, the
aristocracy of grace.  They are those who carry the palm branch of
triumph, who have come out of great tribulation, who have dared and
fought and suffered for God and truth and right; who have resisted unto
blood, striving against sin.  What should easy-going folk like you and me
do but place ourselves with all humility, if but for an hour, where we
can look afar off upon our betters, and see what they are like and what
they do.

_All Saints' Day and other Sermons_.

DECEMBER 27.
St. John, Apostle and Evangelist.

And what do they do, these blessed beings?  They longed for, toiled for,
it may be died for, the true, the beautiful, and the good; they entered
while on earth into the mystery and glory of self-sacrifice, and now they
find their bliss in gazing on the one perfect and eternal sacrifice, and
rejoicing in the thought that it is the cause and ground of the whole
universe, even the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world.

_All Saints' Day and other Sermons_.

DECEMBER 28
Holy Innocents' Day.

Christ comes to us in many ways.  But most surely does Christ come to us,
and often most happily, and most clearly does He speak to us--in the face
of a little child, fresh out of heaven.  Ah, let us take heed that we
despise not one of these little ones, lest we despise our Lord Himself.
For as often as we enter into communion with little children, so often
does Christ come to us.  So often, as in Judaea of old, does He take a
little child and set him in the midst of us, that from its simplicity,
docility, and trust--the restless, the mutinous, and the ambitious may
learn the things which belong to their peace--so often does He say to us,
"Except ye be changed and become as this little child, ye shall in no
wise enter into the kingdom of heaven.  Take my yoke upon you and learn
of me.  For I am meek and lowly of heart, and ye shall find rest unto
your souls."

_MS. Last Sermon_,
_Westminster Abbey_, _Nov._ 30, 1874.

INDEX.

ABSENCE, 209

Acorn, 223

Action, 146, 167

Affections, 79, 179, 217, 279

Age, old, 63, 285

--reverence for, 81

Anarchy, 165

Angels, 175, 217, 218, 219, 269

Anger, God's loving, 195

Animals, dumb, 81, 181

Antinomies, 159

Anxiety, 211

Aristocracy, ideal, 167

Art, 31, 71, 119, 141, 151

Ascension, 93, 123, 211

Asceticism, 185, 189, 233, 263

Ascetic painters, 39

Atonement, the, 83

Attitude, language of, 155

Augustine, St., 155

Autumn, 51, 221

BARBARISM, 109

Beatific Vision, 73, 196, 295

Beauty, 15, 39, 73, 101, 175, 196, 213

--moral, 196, 213

--spiritual, 159

Bible, the, 103, 141, 167, 249, 259, 275, 285

Birds, 53, 77, 99, 101, 103, 125, 127, 137, 271

Blessedness, 218, 245

Body, sacredness of, 63, 67, 185, 229, 244, 285

--the spiritual, 159

Books, 57, 85, 169, 259

Book-learning, 151

Butler's Analogy, 237

CALMNESS, 55, 263

Character, 98, 175, 191

Charity, 37, 281

Cheerfulness, 149, 223, 227

Childhood and wonder, 179

Childlikeness, 31, 183, 187, 235

Children, 48, 109, 295

Chivalry, 139, 153, 179, 181

Christ-child, the, 48

Christ's life, 45, 97, 267

--Church, 121

--compassion, 251

--descent into hell, 98

--resurrection, 95, 98, 211

--the Word, 37, 127

Christianity, Divine, 273

Christmas, 271, 287, 289, 294

Chrysalis state, 171

Church, the, 75, 77, 121, 157

--Catechism, 47, 255

Civilisation, 105, 155, 261

Clergy, the, 215

Coming of Christ, 21, 23, 183, 283, 295

Communion of saints, 141, 193

--Holy, 193

Contemplation, 87, 146

Content, 59

Courage, 275

Cowardice, 207, 265

Creeds, the, 141, 151, 215, 273

Critical spirit, 165, 203

Cross, the, 83, 96, 97, 122, 185, 189, 237, 245

Crucifix, the, 123, 189

Custom, 31

Cynicism, 191

DARK days, 19, 201, 211, 233, 249, 289

Day of the Lord, 3, 195

Dead, the blessed, 21, 49, 95, 139, 193, 249, 253, 289

--prayers for, 24, 81

--work of, 95, 139, 249

Death, 17, 113, 135, 253

--sudden, 89

--and hell, 7, 195

Defeat, 279

Dignity, 137

Discontent, Divine, 165

Disease, 233, 244

Distrust, 165

Doctrines, 157

Doubt, poetry of, 233

Drifting away, 273

Duty, 5, 13, 65, 105, 129, 147, 165, 181, 201, 275

Dying, to live, 13, 55, 93, 97, 117, 217, 295

EARNESTNESS, 35, 139, 293

Earth, God's, 101, 149, 153, 247

Earthly and heavenly, 179

Easter, 93, 98

Eclecticism, 65

Education, 67

--of character, 85

--Divine, 91, 133, 135, 149, 209

--self, 215

--of boys, 283

--after death, 171, 249

Emotions, 5, 49, 79, 85, 179, 189, 203, 259, 279

Enthusiasm, 35

Epiphany, 24

Eternal life, 11, 43

Eternity, 43, 69, 167

Eucharist, the, 21, 65, 185

Excitement, 79, 163

FACTS of life, 103, 113, 207, 285

Failure, 143

Faith, 11, 59, 85, 127, 163, 191, 199, 227, 229

Fasting, 49

Fatherhood of God, 103, 107, 115, 133, 135, 149, 181, 223, 265, 273

Fear, 137, 265, 275

Fellowship of sorrow, 109, 111, 279

Fire of God, 195

--cleansing, 195, 225, 237

Flesh and spirit, 189

Flowers, 15, 99, 101, 105, 127, 151, 221

Fool's paradise, 111, 267

Forgiveness, 169

Forward, 3

Francis, St., 103

Friendship, 19, 61, 291

Future, the, 129, 195

--identity, 19, 253

--life, 57, 65, 71, 81, 113, 171, 237, 253, 293

GENIUS, 105, 175, 215

Gifts, 83, 111, 129

Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 203

God, the Living, 7, 101, 103, 111, 133, 193, 243, 285

--the Ideal, 73

--an indulgent, 15

--of Nature, 103, 131, 151, 183

God's character, 33, 87, 111, 181, 195, 253, 273, 283

--countenance, 131

Godliness, 91, 281

Good, the eternal, 35, 171, 253

Good in all, 9, 287

Good deeds, 187, 263

Good Friday, 93, 97

Goodness, 5, 105, 113, 199, 245

Gratitude, 89

Greeks, the old, 67, 107, 133, 155, 229

HAPPINESS, 29, 59, 245, 265

Harmony, 5, 67, 83, 127, 161, 277

Hearts and streams, 119, 197

Heaven, 109, 167

Hell, 96, 98, 109, 195, 265

--keys of, 7

--a present, 43

Hero worship, 291

Heroism, 41, 61, 71, 207, 239, 294

History, philosophy of, 63

Hope, 39, 111, 145, 149, 237, 247

Hospitals, 263

Humanity, 275

Humility, 13, 41, 169, 193

I AM I, 55, 89, 185, 199

Ideal, the, 63, 73, 117

Ideals, high, 77

Idleness, 91, 157, 207

Impunity, 217

Incarnation, the, 146, 253, 291

Influence, silent, 139, 259

Intermediate state, 98, 245, 289

JOHN the Baptist, 147

John, St., 45, 53, 63, 113

Justification, 43

KINDNESS, 181, 205

Kingdom, coming, 21, 179; of God, 45, 185

Knowledge, 53, 79, 131, 135, 163, 177, 183

LAMP race, 133

Laws of God, 98, 117, 163, 169, 229, 277, 287

Lesson of life, 61, 293

Liberty, 215

Life everlasting, 11, 113, 219, 277

--long, 133

--value of, 61

Light, 33, 177, 249, 291

Liturgies, 249

Love, 9, 37, 41, 53, 55, 79, 117, 201, 209, 235, 251, 289, 219

--Divine, 117

--and beauty, 201

MAN in God's image, 89, 127, 199, 229

March, 51, 53

Martyrs, 17, 98, 172, 218, 294, 295

Masses, the, 177

May, 99

Melancholy, 137, 183, 233, 253

Melody, 5, 127, 277

Men and women, 39, 91, 93, 153, 259, 283

Metre, 119

Midsummer, 125

Miracles, 31, 99, 289

Moderation, 69

Monotony, 163

Morality, 29, 147, 255

Morbid mind, 233

Morning, 19, 125, 201, 249

Mother earth, 247

Mothers, 61, 74, 213

Music, 23, 107, 127, 161, 277

Mystery of life, 117, 155, 185, 291

Mystics, 55, 185, 251

NATURALIST, 175

Nature, 141, 183, 187, 221, 241, 247, 253

--study of, 7, 105, 131, 141, 175, 183, 187

Nature's worship, 131

Night, 201, 211

Nineteenth century, 3, 151, 257

Noble life, 5, 9

Noble studies, 63

North-east wind, 1

Novel reading, 85, 169, 259

OCTOBER, 221

Old truths, 151

Opinions, 215

Originality, 239

Orthodox, 141

PAINTERS, 39, 71, 141, 159

Parables, Nature's, 5, 99, 101, 127, 173, 175, 196, 197, 249

Passion, 35, 197, 213

--Week, 95

Patience, 59, 143, 237, 277, 281

Paul, St., 25, 53, 207

Peace, 23, 59, 193

Penitence, 191

Penuriousness, 67

Peter, St., 45, 148

Philamon, 9, 45

Physician, 233, 244

Pictures, 39, 71, 141

Plato, 171

Poetry, 23, 41, 69, 215

Political economy, 115, 261

Practice, 143, 267

Prayer, 89, 119, 163, 167, 227, 229, 241, 267

--the Lord's, 31

--unselfish, 31

Prayers for dead, 81

Present time, 3, 5

Presentiments, 143

Pride and humility, 193, 215, 235, 267

Problem of life, 135, 291

Profession, empty, 157, 213

Progress, 101, 163, 257, 291

Proverbs, 235

Providence, 115, 169, 243

--special, 55, 159, 209, 251

Psalms, 17, 191

Public opinion, 77

Punishment, 41, 135, 159, 191, 261, 281

Purgatory, 171

RAILROADS, 257

Rank, 15, 161

Reason, 35, 111, 143, 237

Redemption of earth and man, 153

Refinement, false, 161

Reformers, 77

Religion, 103, 265, 281

Renewal, the, 71, 81, 127, 185

Repentance, 41, 49, 157

Resignation, 117, 211, 217

Rest, 21, 49, 229, 253, 263

Resurrection, 63, 81, 93, 95, 98, 141, 145, 171, 185, 207

Retribution, 47, 81, 113, 135, 177

Reverence, 81, 175, 243

Reveries, 39

Righteousness, 117, 255, 281

Rights and duties, 39

Rock of Ages, 169, 235

Romance, 127

Rules of life, 83, 107, 163

Ruth, 79

SACRAMENTALISM, 15, 39, 101, 119, 213

Sacraments, 21, 146

Safety, 17, 57

Saints' Days, 24

Saints, the, 24, 98, 122, 141, 193, 268, 269, 294, 295

Salvation, 135

Sanitary science, 29, 261

Science, 33, 59, 115, 151, 227, 233, 261

Secular, 59

Self, 31, 233

Selfishness, 159, 219, 231, 281

Self-conceit, 205

Self-control, 165, 223, 241, 259, 263

Self-improvement, 215

Self-indulgence, 91, 275

Self-respect, 287

Self-sacrifice, 13, 21, 55, 71, 79, 95, 117, 146, 148, 189, 213, 231, 295

Security, false, 115

Sensuality, 133

Sentiment, 5

Shakespeare, 179

Shame, 199

Shelley, 267

Silence, 41, 139, 257, 259

Sin, 41, 135, 159, 169, 213, 233, 281

Sisters of Mercy, 237

Sneering, 281

Sorrow, 145, 183, 185, 227, 273

Spirit, the Holy, 146

Spiritual world, 179

Spring, 27, 51, 99, 101

Starlings, 51

Stream and shower, 119, 197

Strength, 263

Substitutes, 225

Success, 139, 227, 279

Summer days, 125, 129, 131, 137, 149

Superstition, 3, 137, 169, 175

Suspicion, 281

Symbols, 99, 101, 105, 127, 131, 151, 173, 196

Sympathy, 103, 151, 153

TACT, 35, 53, 113

Temperament, 231

Temperance, true, 223, 263

Temptation, 57

Theology, 87

Thrift, 131, 183, 259

Toleration, 63, 141, 277

Training, God's, 115, 129, 215

Transfiguration, the, 205

Trinity, the, 146

Trust, 239, 265

UNITY, 185

Usefulness, 225

Utopia, 167

VAGUENESS, 11, 161

Vineyards, 121

Violence, 139

Virgin, Blessed, 74

Virtue, 29, 41, 225

Visitation of God, 61

Voyagers, early, 243

WAITING, 135, 277

--of God, 181

War tragedies, 107

Water, 29, 119, 197

Welfare, 145, 255

Winter, 1, 27, 99

Wisdom, 37, 83, 105, 107, 163

Woman, 45, 153, 87

Woman's work, 39, 45, 79, 93, 231, 259

Women, educated, 85, 169

Word Christ, the, 7, 37

--the indwelling, 259

Words, 37, 113

--hard, 53

--of God, 141

Work, 71, 83, 133, 143, 157, 165, 175, 203, 209, 223, 263

World, the, 167

Worm, the undying, 195

Worship, 131

YOUTH, 13, 129

Footnotes:

{3}  The paper edition of this book has blank pages where the owner can
write diary notes, etc.  This is why the page numbers in the eText often
miss out numbers.--DP.

{97}  Lines written under a pen and ink drawing of a stormy shoreless
sea, with two human beings lashed to a cross floating on the crest of the
waves.