Daily Thoughts: selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife - Charles Kingsley

Charles Kingsley

Daily Thoughts: selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife

July 10, 1884.

January

Now, and at no other time: in this same nineteenth century lies our work.  Let us thank God that we are here now, and joyfully try to understand where we are, and what our work is here.  As for all superstitions about the good old times, and fancies that they belonged to God, while this age belongs only to man, blind chance, and the evil one, let us cast them from us as the suggestions of an evil lying spirit, as the natural parents of laziness, pedantry, fanaticism, and unbelief.  And therefore let us not fear to ask the meaning of this present day, and of all its different voicesthe pressing, noisy, complex present, where our workfield lies, the most intricate of all states of society, and of all schools of literature yet known.

Let us forward.  God leads us.  Though blind, shall we be afraid to follow?  I do not see my way: I do not care to: but I know that He sees His way, and that I see Him.

Live in the present that you may be ready for the future.

God demands not sentiment but justice.  The Bible knows nothing of the religious sentiments and emotions whereof we hear so much talk nowadays.  It speaks of Duty.  Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought to love one another.

If thou art living a righteous and useful life, doing thy duty orderly and cheerfully where God has put thee, then thou in thy humble place art humbly copying the everlasting harmony and melody which is in heaven; the everlasting harmony and melody by which God made the world and all that therein isand behold it was very goodin the day when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy over the new-created earth, which God had made to be a pattern of His own perfection.

Fear not.  Christ has the keys of death and hell.  He has been through them and is alive for evermore.  Christ is the first, and was loving and just and glorious and almighty before there was any death or hell.  And Christ is the last, and will be loving and just and glorious and almighty as ever, in that great day when all enemies shall be under His feet, and death shall be destroyed, and death and hell shall be cast into the lake of fire.

Here and there, among rich and poor, there are those whose heart and flesh, whose conscience and whose intellect, cry out for the Living God, and will know no peace till they have found Him.  For till then they can find no explanation of the three great human questionsWhere am I?  Whither am I going?  What must I do?

Of all the blessings which the study of Nature brings to the patient observer, let none, perhaps, be classed higher than this, that the farther he enters into those fairy gardens of life and birth, which Spenser saw and described in his great poem, the more he learns the awful and yet comfortable truth, that they do not belong to him, but to One greater, wiser, lovelier than he; and as he stands, silent with awe, amid the pomp of Natures ever-busy rest, hears as of old, The Word of the Lord God walking among the trees of the garden in the cool of the day.

Oh!  Love!  Love!  Love! the same in peasant and in peer!  The more honour to you, then, old Love, to be the same thing in this world which is common to peasant and to peer.  They say that you are blind, a dreamer, an exaggeratora liar, in short!  They just know nothing about you, then.  You will not see people as they seemas they have become, no doubt; but why?  Because you see them as they ought to be, and are in some deep way eternally, in the sight of Him who conceived and created them!

We must live nobly to love nobly.

Never was the young Abbot heard to speak harshly of any human being.  When thou hast tried in vain for seven years, he used to say, to convert a sinner, then only wilt thou have a right to suspect him of being a worse man than thyself.  That there is a seed of good in all men, a divine word and spirit striving with all men, a gospel and good news which would turn the hearts of all men, if abbots and priests could but preach it aright, was his favourite doctrine, and one which he used to defend, when at rare intervals he allowed himself to discuss any subject, from the writings of his favourite theologian, Clement of Alexandria.

Above all, Abbot Philamon stopped by stern rebuke any attempt to revile either heretics or heathens.  On the Catholic Church alone, he used to say, lies the blame of all heresy and unbelief; for if she were but for one day that which she ought to be, the world would be converted before nightfall.

Watch against any fallacies in your ideas which may arise, not from disingenuousness, but from allowing yourself in moments of feeling to think vaguely, and not to attach precise meaning to your words.  Without any cold caution of expression, it is a duty we owe to Gods truth, and to our own happiness and the happiness of those around us, to think and speak as correctly as we can.  Almost all heresy, schism, and misunderstandings, between either churches or individuals who ought to be one, have arisen from this fault of an involved and vague style of thought.

I dont want to possess a faith, I want a faith which will possess me.

Eternally, and for ever, in heaven, says St. John, Christ says and is and does what prophets prophesied of Him that He would say and be and do.  I am the Root and the Offspring of David, the bright Morning Star.  And let him that is athirst, come: and whosoever will, let him take of the Water of Life freely.  For ever Christ calls to every anxious soul, every afflicted soul, to every man who is ashamed of himself, and angry with himself, and longs to live a gentler, nobler, purer, truer, and more useful life, Come, and live for ever the eternal life of righteousness, holiness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit, which is the one true and only salvation bought for us by the precious blood of Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Ah, glorious twenty-one, with your inexhaustible powers of doing and enjoying, eating and hungering, sleeping and sitting up, reading and playing!  Happy are those who still possess you, and can take their fill of your golden cup, steadied, but not saddened, by the remembrance that for all things a good and loving God will bring them to judgment!

Happier still those who (like a few) retain in body and soul the health and buoyancy of twenty-one on to the very verge of forty, and, seeming to grow younger-hearted as they grow older-headed, can cast off care and work at a moments warning, laugh and frolic now as they did twenty years ago, and say with Wordsworth

If a man is busy, and busy about his duty, what more does he require for time or for eternity?

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful.  Beauty is Gods handwritinga way-side sacrament; welcome it in every fair face, every fair sky, every fair flower, and thank Him for it, who is the Fountain of all loveliness, and drink it in simply and earnestly with all your eyes; it is a charmed draught, a cup of blessing.

With Christianity came in the thought that domination meant responsibility, that responsibility demanded virtue.  The words which denoted Rank came to denote, likewise, high moral excellencies.  The nobilis, or man who was known, and therefore subject to public opinion, was bound to behave nobly.  The gentle-mangentile-manwho respected his own gens, or family, or pedigree, was bound to be gentle.  The courtier who had picked up at court some touch of Roman civilisation from Roman ecclesiastics was bound to be courteous.  He who held an honour, or edel of land, was bound to be honourable; and he who held a weorthig, or worthy, thereof, was bound himself to be worthy.

A merely indulgent God would be an unjust God, and a cruel God likewise.  If God be just, as He is, then He has boundless pity for those who are weak, but boundless wrath for the strong who misuse the weak.  Boundless pity for those who are ignorant, misled, and out of the right way; but boundless wrath for those who mislead them and put them out of the right way.

It is such utterances as these which have given for now many hundred years their priceless value to the little Book of Psalms ascribed to the shepherd outlaw of the Judean hills, which have sent the sound of his name into all lands throughout all the world.  Every form of human sorrow, doubt, struggle, error, sinthe nun agonising in the cloister; the settler struggling for his life in Transatlantic forests; the pauper shivering over the embers in his hovel and waiting for kind death; the man of business striving to keep his honour pure amid the temptations of commerce; the prodigal son starving in the far country and recollecting the words which he learnt long ago at his mothers knee; the peasant boy trudging afield in the chill dawn and remembering that the Lord is his Shepherd, therefore he will not wantall shapes of humanity have found, and will find to the end of time, a word said here to their inmost hearts. . . .

Death, beautiful, wise, kind Death, when will you come and tell me what I want to know?  I courted you once and many a time, brave old Death, only to give rest to the weary.  That was a cowards wishand so you would not come. . . .  I was not worthy of you.  And now I will not hunt you any more, old Death.  Do you bide your time, and I mine. . . .  Only when you come, give me not rest but work.  Give work to the idle, freedom to the chained, sight to the blind!

Safe!  There is no safety but from God, and that comes by prayer and faith.

I believe that the union of those who have loved here will in the next world amount to perfect identity, that they will look back on the expressions of affection here as mere meagre strugglings after and approximation to the union which then will be perfect.  Perfect!