Daily Thoughts: selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife - Charles Kingsley 4 стр.

Random shots are dangerous and cruel, likely to hit the wrong person and hurt his feelings unnecessarily.  It is very easy to say a hard thing, but not so easy to say it to the right person at the right time.

I believe not only in special providences, but in the whole universe as one infinite complexity of special providences.

The grain of dust is a thought of God; Gods power made it; Gods wisdom gave it whatsoever properties or qualities it may possess.  Gods providence has put it in the place where it is now, and has ordained that it should be in that place at that moment, by a train of causes and effects which reaches back to the very creation of the universe.  The grain of dust can no more go from Gods presence or flee from Gods Spirit than you or I can.

Strive daily and hourly to be calm; to stop yourself forcibly and recall your mind to a sense of what you are, where you are going, and whither you ought to be tending.  This is most painful discipline, but most wholesome.

What a strange mystery is that of mutual self-sacrifice! to exist for one moment for another! the perfection of human bliss!  And does not love teach us two things?  First, that self-sacrifice, the living for others, is the law of our perfect being, and next, that by and in self-sacrifice alone can we attain to the perfect apprehension of ourselves, our own personality, our own duty, our own bliss.  So that the mystics are utterly wrong when they fancy that self-sacrifice can be attained by self-annihilation.  Self-sacrifice, instead of destroying the sense of personality, perfects it.

I believe with Dante, se tu segui la tua Stella, that He who ordained my star will not lead me into temptation but through it.  Without Him all places and methods of life are equally dangerous, with Him all equally safe.

This is the age of books.  And we should reverence books.  Consider! except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a booka message to us from the dead, from human souls whom we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away, and yet in those little sheets of paper speak to us, amuse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers!

We ought to reverence books, to look at them as awful and mighty things.  If they are good and true, whether they are about religion or politics, trade or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the Maker of all things, the Teacher of all truth, which He has put into the heart of some men to speak.  And at the last day, be sure of it, we shall have to render an accounta strict accountof the books which we have read, and of the way in which we have obeyed what we read, just as if we had had so many prophets or angels sent to us.

As for the things which God has prepared for those who love Him, the Bible tells me that no man can conceive them, and therefore I believe that I cannot conceive them.  God has conceived them; God has prepared them; God is our Father.  That is enough.

I grudge the epithet of secular to any matter whatsoever.  But more; I deny it to anything which God has made, even to the tiniest of insects, the most insignificant grain of dust.  To those who believe in God, and try to see all things in God, the most minute natural phenomenon cannot be secular.  It must be divine, I say deliberately, divine, and I can use no less lofty word.

My friends, whether you will be the happier for any knowledge of physical science, or for any other knowledge whatsoever, I cannot tell.  That lies in the decision of a higher Power than I; and, indeed, to speak honestly, I do not think that any branch of physical science is likely, at first at least, to make you happy.  Neither is the study of your fellow-men.  Neither is religion itself.  We were not sent into the world to be happy, but to be rightat least, poor creatures that we areas right as we can be, and we must be content with being right, and not happy. . . .  And we shall be made truly wise if we be made content; content, too, not only with what we can understand, but content with what we do not understandthe habit of mind which theologians call (and rightly) faith in God, true and solid faith, which comes often out of sadness and out of doubt.

Each man can learn something from his neighbour; at least he can learn thisto have patience with his neighbour, to live and let live.

Peace! peace!  Anything which is not wrong for the sake of heaven-born Peace!

A blessed thing it is for any man or woman to have a friend, one human soul whom we can trust utterly, who knows the best and worst of us, and who loves us in spite of all our faults; who will speak the honest truth to us, while the world flatters us to our face, and laughs at us behind our back; who will give us counsel and reproof in the days of prosperity and self-conceit; but who, again, will comfort and encourage us in the day of difficulty and sorrow, when the world leaves us alone to fight our battle as we can.

It is only the great-hearted who can be true friends: the mean and cowardly can never know what true friendship means.

What is the commonest, and yet the least remembered form of heroism?  The heroism of an average mother.  Ah! when I think of that broad fact I gather hope again for poor humanity, and this dark world looks bright, this diseased world looks wholesome to me once more, because, whatever else it is or is not full of, it is at least full of mothers.

There is little hope that we shall learn the lessons God is for ever teaching us in the events of life till we get rid of our secret Atheism, till we give up the notion that God only visits now and then to disorder and destroy His own handiwork, and take back the old scriptural notion that God is visiting all day long for ever, to give order and life to His own work, to set it right where it goes wrong, and re-create it whenever it decays.

If we really love God and long to do good and work for God, if we really love our neighbours and wish to help them, we shall have no heart to quarrel about how the good is to be done, provided it is done.  Master, said St. John, we saw one casting out devils in Thy name, and he followeth not us; wilt Thou that we forbid him?  And Jesus said, Forbid him not.

There is little hope that we shall learn the lessons God is for ever teaching us in the events of life till we get rid of our secret Atheism, till we give up the notion that God only visits now and then to disorder and destroy His own handiwork, and take back the old scriptural notion that God is visiting all day long for ever, to give order and life to His own work, to set it right where it goes wrong, and re-create it whenever it decays.

If we really love God and long to do good and work for God, if we really love our neighbours and wish to help them, we shall have no heart to quarrel about how the good is to be done, provided it is done.  Master, said St. John, we saw one casting out devils in Thy name, and he followeth not us; wilt Thou that we forbid him?  And Jesus said, Forbid him not.

Christianity alone deprives old age of its bitterness, making it the gate of heaven.  Our bodies will fade and grow weak and shapeless, just when we shall not want them, being ready and in close expectation of that resurrection of the flesh which is the great promise of Christianity (no miserable fancies about pure souls escaped from matter, but)of bodies, our bodies, beloved, beautiful, ministers to us in all our joys, sufferers with us in all our sorrowsyea, our very own selves raised up again to live and love in a manner inconceivable from its perfection.

Man is not, as the poet said, the noblest study of mankind.  God is the noblest study of man, and Him we can study in three ways.  1st. From His image as developed in Christ the Ideal, and in all good mengreat good men.  2dly. From His works.  3dly. From His dealings in history; this is the real philosophy of history.

An eclectic, if it mean anything, means thisone who in any branch of art or science refuses to acknowledge Bacons great law, that Nature is only conquered by obeying her; who will not take a full and reverent view of the whole mass of facts with which he has to deal, and from them deducing the fundamental laws of his subject, obey them whithersoever they may lead; but who picks and chooses out of them just so many as may be pleasant to his private taste, and then constructs a partial system which differs from the essential ideas of Nature in proportion to the number of facts which he has determined to discard.

Duty, be it in a small matter or a great, is duty still; the command of Heaven; the eldest voice of God.  And it is only they who are faithful in a few things who will be faithful over many things; only they who do their duty in everyday and trivial matters who will fulfil them on great occasions.

Brother, said the abbot, make ready for me the divine elements, that I may consecrate them.  And he asking the reason therefor, the saint replied, That I may partake thereof with all my brethren before I depart hence.  For know assuredly that within the seventh day I shall migrate to the celestial mansions.  For this night stood by me in a dream those two women whom I love, and for whom I pray, the one clothed in a white, the other in a ruby-coloured garment, and holding each other by the hand, who said to me, That life after death is not such a one as you fancy: come, therefore, and behold what it is like.

Nothing is more expensive than penuriousness; nothing more anxious than carelessness; and every duty which is bidden to wait returns with seven fresh duties at its back.

We talk of education now.  Are we more educated than were the ancient Greeks?  Do we know anything about education, physical, intellectual, æsthetic (religious education in our sense of the word of course they had none), of which they have not taught us at least the rudiments?  Are there not some branches of education which they perfected once and for ever, leaving us northern barbarians to follow or not to follow their example?  To produce health, that is, harmony and sympathy, proportion and grace, in every faculty of mind and bodythat was their notion of education.

Ah! the waste of health and strength in the young!  The waste, too, of anxiety and misery in those who love and tend them!  How much of it might be saved by a little rational education in those laws of nature which are the will of God about the welfare of our bodies, and which, therefore, we are as much bound to know and to obey as we are bound to know and to obey the spiritual laws whereon depend the welfare of our souls.

Exalt me with Thee, O Lord, to know the mystery of life, that I may use the earthly as the appointed expression and type of the heavenly, and, by using to Thy glory the natural body, may be fit to be exalted to the use of the spiritual body.  Amen.

Let us pray for that greatI had almost said that crowning grace and virtue of Moderation, what St. Paul calls sobriety and a sound mind.  Let us pray for moderate appetites, moderate passions, moderate honours, moderate gains, moderate joys; and if sorrows be needed to chasten us, moderate sorrows.  Let us not long violently after, or wish too eagerly to rise in life.

True poetry, like true charity, my laddie, begins at home. . . .  Hech! is there no the heaven above them there, and the hell beneath them? and God frowning, and the devil grinning?  No poetry there!  Is no the verra idea of the classic tragedy defined to be man conquered by circumstance? canna ye see it there?  And the verra idea of the modern tragedy, man conquering circumstance? and Ill show ye that tooin many a garret where no eye but the good Gods enters to see the patience, and the fortitude, and the self-sacrifice, and the love stronger than death, thats shining in those dark places of the earth.

Ah, poetrys grandbut fact is grander; God and Satan are grander.  All around ye, in every gin-shop and costermongers cellar, are God and Satan at death-grips; every garret is a haill Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained.

Yes.  Life is meant for work, and not for ease; to labour in danger and in dread, to do a little good ere the night comes when no man can work, instead of trying to realise for oneself a paradise; not even Bunyans shepherd-paradise, much less Fouriers casino-paradise, and perhaps, least of all, because most selfish and isolated of all, our own art-paradise, the apotheosis of loafing, as Claude calls it.