Daily Thoughts: selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife - Charles Kingsley 3 стр.

God hath showed thee what is good, . . . what is good in itself, and of itselfthe one very eternal and absolute good, which was with God and in God and from God, before all worlds, and will be for ever, without changing, or growing less or greater, eternally the same goodthe good which would be just as good and just and right and lovely and glorious if there were no world, no men, no angels, no heaven, no hell, and God were alone in His own abyss.

A difference in words is a very awful and important difference; a difference in words is a difference in things.  Words are very awful and wonderful things, for they come from the most awful and wonderful of all beings, Jesus Christ, The Word.  He puts words into mens minds.  He made all things, and He made words to express those things.  And woe to those who use the wrong words about anything.

What wisdom she had she did not pick off the hedge, like blackberries.  God is too kind to give away wisdom after that useless fashion.  So she had to earn her wisdom, and to work hard, and suffer much ere she attained it.  And in attaining she endured strange adventures and great sorrows; and yet they would not have given her the wisdom had she not had something in herself which gave her wit to understand her lessons, and skill and courage to do what they taught her.  There had been many names for that something before she was born, there have been many names for it since, but her father and mother called it the Grace of God.

The older we grow, the more we understand our own lives and histories, the more we shall see that the spirit of wisdom is the spirit of love; that the true way to gain influence over our fellow-men is to have charity towards them.  That is a hard lesson to learn; and all those who learn it generally learn it late; almostGod forgive ustoo late.

We owe much (notwithstanding their partial and Manichean idea of beauty) to the early ascetic painters.  Their works are a possession for ever.  No future school of religious art will be able to rise to eminence without learning from them their secret.  They taught artists, and priests, and laymen, too, that beauty is only worthy of admiration when it is the outward sacrament of the beauty of the soul within; they helped to deliver men from that idolatry to merely animal strength and loveliness into which they were in danger of falling in ferocious ages, and among the relics of Roman luxury.

Beware of giving way to reveries.  Have always some employment in your hands.  Look forward to the future with hope.  Build castles if you will, but only bright ones, and not too many.

It is the glory of woman that she was sent into the world to live for others rather than for herself; and therefore, I should say, let her smallest rights be respected, her smallest wrongs redressed; but let her never be persuaded to forget that she is sent into the world to teach manwhat I believe she has been teaching him all along, even in the savage state, namely, that there is something more necessary than the claiming of rights, and that is, the performing of duties; to teach him specially, in these so-called intellectual days, that there is something more than intellect, and that ispurity and virtue.

Provided we attain at last to the truly heroic and divine life, which is the life of virtue, it will matter little to us by what wild and weary ways, or through what painful and humiliating processes, we have arrived thither.  If God has loved us, if God will receive us, then let us submit loyally and humbly to His lawwhom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth.

It is sometimes said, The greater the sinner the greater the saint.  I do not believe it.  I do not see it.  It stands to reasonif a man loses his way and finds it again, he is so much the less forward on his way, surely, by all the time he has spent in getting back into the way.

And if any of you fancy you can sin without being punished, remember that the prodigal son is punished most severely.  He does not get off freely the moment he chooses to repent, as false preachers will tell you.  Even after he does repent and resolves to go back to his fathers house he has a long journey home in poverty and misery, footsore, hungry, and all but despairing.  But when he does get home; when he shows he has learnt the bitter lesson; when all he dares to ask is, Make me as one of thy hired servants,he is received as freely as the rest.

Our mightiest feelings are always those which remain most unspoken.  The most intense lovers and the greatest poets have generally, I think, written very little personal love-poetry, while they have shown in fictitious characters a knowledge of the passion too painfully intimate to be spoken of in the first person.

God grant us to be among those who wish to be really justified by faith, by being made just persons by faith,who cannot satisfy either their conscience or their reason by fancying that God looks on them as right when they know themselves to be wrong; and who cannot help trusting that union with Christ must be something real and substantial, and not merely a metaphor and a flower of rhetoric.

Ay, he muttered, sing awa, . . . wi pretty fancies and gran words, and gang to hell for it.

To hell, Mr. Mackaye?

Ay, to a verra real hell, Alton Locke, laddiea warse ane than any fiends kitchen or subterranean Smithfield that yell hear o in the pulpitsthe hell on earth o being a flunkey, and a humbug, and a useless peacock, wasting Gods gifts on your ain lusts and pleasuresand kenning itand not being able to get oot o it for the chains of vanity and self-indulgence.

Eternity does not mean merely some future endless duration, but that ever-present moral world, governed by ever-living and absolutely necessary laws, in which we and all spirits are now; and in which we should be equally, whether time and space, extension and duration, and the whole material universe to which they belong, became nothing this moment, or lasted endlessly.

What was Christs life?  Not one of deep speculations, quiet thoughts, and bright visions, but a life of fighting against evil; earnest, awful prayers and struggles within, continued labour of body and mind without; insult, and danger, and confusion, and violent exertion, and bitter sorrow.  This was Christs life.  This was St. Peters, and St. Jamess, and St. Johns life afterwards.

What was Christs life?  Not one of deep speculations, quiet thoughts, and bright visions, but a life of fighting against evil; earnest, awful prayers and struggles within, continued labour of body and mind without; insult, and danger, and confusion, and violent exertion, and bitter sorrow.  This was Christs life.  This was St. Peters, and St. Jamess, and St. Johns life afterwards.

In teaching women we must try to make our deepest lessons bear on the great purpose of unfolding Womans own calling in all agesher especial calling in this one.  We must incite them to realise the chivalrous belief of our old forefathers among their Saxon forests, that something Divine dwelt in the counsels of woman: but, on the other hand, we must continually remind them that they will attain that divine instinct, not by renouncing their sex, but by fulfilling it; by becoming true women, and not bad imitations of men; by educating their heads for the sake of their hearts, not their hearts for the sake of their heads; by claiming womans divine vocation as the priestess of purity, of beauty, and of love.

Philamon had gone forth to see the world, and he had seen it; and he had learnt that Gods kingdom was not a kingdom of fanatics yelling for a doctrine, but of willing, loving, obedient hearts.

So it is, that by every crime, folly, even neglect of theirs, men drive a thorn into their own flesh, which will trouble them for years to come, it may be to their dying day

as those who neglect their fellow-creatures will discover, by the most patent, undeniable proofs, in that last great day, when the rich and poor shall meet together, and then, at last, discover too that the Lord is the Maker of them all.

Did it ever strike you that the simple, noble, old Church Catechism, without one word about rewards and punishments, heaven or hell, begins to talk to the child, like a true English Catechism as it is, about that glorious old English key-word Duty?  It calls on the child to confess its own duty, and teaches it that its duty is something most human, simple, everydaycommonplace, if you will call it so.  And I rejoice in the thought that the Church Catechism teaches that the childs duty is commonplace.  I rejoice that in what it says about our duty to God and our neighbour, it says not one word about counsels of perfection, or those frames and feelings which depend, believe me, principally on the state of peoples bodily health, on the constitution of their nerves, and the temper of their brain; but that it requires nothing except what a little child can do as well as a grown person, a labouring man as well as a divine, a plain farmer as well as the most refined, devout, imaginative lady.

Little children may think of Christ as a child now and always.  For to them He is always the Babe of Bethlehem.  Let them not say to themselves, Christ is grown up long ago.  He is, and yet He is not.  His life is eternal in the heavens, above all change of time and space. . . .  Such is the sacred heart of Jesusall things to all.  To the strong He can be strongest, to the weak weakest of all.  With the aged and dying He goes down for ever to the grave; and yet with you children Christ lies for ever on His mothers bosom, and looks up for ever into His mothers face, full of young life and happiness and innocence, the Everlasting Christ-child, in whom you must believe, whom you must love, to whom you must offer up your childish prayers.

Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.  They rest from their laboursall their struggles, failures, past and over for ever.  But their works follow them.  The good which they did on earththat is not past and over.  It cannot die.  It lives and grows for ever, following on in their path long after they are dead, and bearing fruit unto everlasting life, not only in them, but in men whom they never saw, and in generations yet unborn.

There is a repentance too deep for wordstoo deep for all confessionals, penances, and emotions or acts of contrition; the repentance, not of the excitable, theatric Southern, unstable as water even in his most violent remorse, but of the still, deep-hearted Northern, whose pride breaks slowly and silently, but breaks once for all; who tells to God what he will never tell to man, and having told it, is a new creature from that day forth for ever.

The rationale of Fasting is to give up habitual indulgences for a time, lest they become our mastersartificial necessities.

March

Knowledge and Love are reciprocal.  He who loves knows.  He who knows loves.  Saint John is the example of the first; Saint Paul of the second.

Little do most people know how much there is to learnwhat variety of character, as well as variety of motion, may be distinguished by the practised ear in a charm of birdsfrom the wild cry of the missel-thrush, ringing from afar in the first bright days of March a passage of one or two bars repeated three or four times, and then another and another, clear and sweet and yet defiantfor the great storm-cock loves to sing when rain and wind is coming on, and faces the elements as boldly as he faces hawk and crowdown to the delicate warble of the wren, who slips out of his hole in the brown bank where he has huddled through the frost with wife and children, all folded in each others arms like human beings.  Yet even he, sitting at his house-door in the low sunlight, says grace for all mercies in a song so rapid, so shrill, so loud, and yet so delicately modulated, that you wonder at the amount of soul within that tiny body; and then stops suddenly, like a child that has said its lesson or got to the end of a sermon, gives a self-satisfied flirt of his tail, and goes in again to sleep.