The Project Gutenberg EBook of Beautiful Thoughts, by Henry Drummond
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Title: Beautiful Thoughts
Author: Henry Drummond
Release Date: October 8, 2004 [EBook #13677]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS ***
"Beautiful Thoughts" From Henry Drummond
Arranged by Elizabeth Cureton
{Project Gutenberg Editorial note: Many quotes from "The Greatest Thing
in the World" did not provide a page number.}
1892
The invisible things of God from the creation of the world are clearly
seen, being understood by the things that are made.--Rom. i. 20.
To My Dear Friend
Helen M. Archibald
This Book
Is Affectionately Inscribed.
Preface.
My first thought of writing out this little book of brief selections
sprang from the desire to assist a dear friend to enjoy the Author's
helpful books.
The epigrammatic style lends itself to quotation. Taste of the spring
brings the traveller back to the same fountain on a day of greater
leisure. Many times these "Beautiful Thoughts" have enlightened my
darkness, and I send them forth with a hope and prayer that they may find
echo in other hearts. E. C.
January 1st. Christianity wants nothing so much in the world as sunny
people, and the old are hungrier for love than for bread, and the Oil of
Joy is very cheap, and if you can help the poor on with a Garment of
Praise it will be better for them than blankets. The Programme of
Christianity, p. 33.
January 2d. No one who knows the content of Christianity, or feels the
universal need of a Religion, can stand idly by while the intellect of
his age is slowly divorcing itself from it. Natural Law, Preface, p. 22
January 3d. A Science without mystery is unknown; a Religion without
mystery is absurd. However far the scientific method may penetrate the
Spiritual World, there will always remain a region to be explored by a
scientific faith. Natural Law, Introduction, p. 28.
January 4th. Among the mysteries which compass the world beyond, none is
greater than how there can be in store for man a work more wonderful, a
life more God-like than this. The Programme of Christianity, p. 62.
January 5th. The Spiritual Life is the gift of the Living Spirit. The
spiritual man is no mere development of the Natural man. He is a New
Creation born from Above. Natural Law, Bio-genesis, p. 65.
January 6th. Love is success, Love is happiness, Love is life. God is
Love. Therefore LOVE. The Greatest Thing in the World.
January 7th. Give me the Charity which delights not in exposing the
weakness of others, but "covereth all things." The Greatest Thing in the
World.
January 8th. There is a sense of solidity about a Law of Nature which
belongs to nothing else in the world. Here, at last, amid all that is
shifting, is one thing sure; one thing outside ourselves, unbiassed,
unprejudiced, uninfluenced by like or dislike, by doubt or fear. . . .
This more than anything else makes one eager to see the Reign of Law
traced in the Spiritual Sphere. Natural Law, Preface, p. 23.
January 9th. With Nature as the symbol of all of harmony and beauty that
is known to man, must we still talk of the supernatural, not as a
convenient word, but as a different order of world, . . . where the Reign
of Mystery supersedes the Reign of Law? Natural Law, Introduction, p. 6.
January 10th. The Reign of Law has gradually crept into every department
of Nature, transforming knowledge everywhere into Science. The process
goes on, and Nature slowly appears to us as one great unity, until the
borders of the Spiritual World are reached. Natural Law, Introduction, p.
13.
January 11th. No single fact in Science has ever discredited a fact in
Religion. Natural Law, Introduction, p. 30.
January 12th. I shall never rise to the point of view which wishes to
"raise" faith to knowledge. To me, the way of truth is to come through
the knowledge of my ignorance to the submissiveness of faith, and then,
making that my starting-place, to raise my knowledge into faith. Natural
Law, Introduction, p. 28. Quotation from Beck: Bib. Psychol.
January 13th. If the purification of Religion comes from Science, the
purification of Science, in a deeper sense, shall come from Religion.
Natural Law, Introduction, p. 31.
January 14th. With the demonstration of the naturalness of the
supernatural, scepticism even may come to be regarded as unscientific.
And those who have wrestled long for a few bare truths to ennoble life
and rest their souls in thinking of the future will not be left in doubt.
Natural Law, Introduction, p. 32.
January 15th. The religion of Jesus has probably always suffered more
from those who have misunderstood than from those who have opposed it.
Natural Law, Bio-genesis, p. 67.
January 16th. It is impossible to believe that the amazing successions of
revelations in the domain of Nature, during the last few centuries, at
which the world has all but grown tired wondering, are to yield nothing
for the higher life. Natural Law, Introduction, p. 32.
January 17th. Is life not full of opportunities for learning love? Every
man and woman every day has a thousand of them. Greatest Thing in the
World.
January 18th. What is Science but what the Natural World has said to
natural men? What is Revelation but what the Spiritual World has said to
Spiritual men? Natural Law, Bio-genesis, p. 73.
January 19th. Life depends upon contact with Life. It cannot spring up
out of itself. It cannot develop out of anything that is not Life. There
is no Spontaneous Generation in religion any more than in Nature. Christ
is the source of Life in the Spiritual World; and he that hath the Son
hath Life, and he that hath not the Son, whatever else he may have, hath
not Life. Natural Law, Bio-genesis, p. 74.
January 20th. It is a wonderful thing that here and there in this hard,
uncharitable world, there should still be left a few rare souls who think
no evil. Greatest Thing in the World.
January 21st. The physical Laws may explain the inorganic world; the
biological Laws may account for the development of the organic. But of
the point where they meet, of that strange borderland between the dead
and the living, Science is silent. It is as if God had placed everything
in earth and heaven in the hands of Nature, but reserved a point at the
genesis of Life for His direct appearing. Natural Law, Bio-genesis, p.
69.
January 22d. Except a mineral be born "from above"--from the Kingdom just
ABOVE it--it cannot enter the Kingdom just above it. And except a man be
born "from above," by the same law, he cannot enter the Kingdom just
above him. Natural Law, Bio-genesis, p. 72.
January 23d. If we try to influence or elevate others, we shall soon see
that success is in proportion to their belief of our belief in them.
Greatest Thing in the World.
January 24th. The world is not a play-ground; it is a school-room. Life
is not a holiday, but an education. And the one eternal lesson for us all
is how better we can love. Greatest Thing in the World.
January 25th What a noble gift it is, the power of playing upon the souls
and wills of men, and rousing them to lofty purposes and holy deeds.
Greatest Thing in the World.
January 26th. The test of Religion, the final test of Religion, is not
Religiousness, but Love. Greatest Thing in the World.
January 27th. There are not two laws of Bio-genesis, one for the natural,
the other for the Spiritual; one law is for both. Where-ever there is
Life, Life of any kind, this same law holds. Natural Law, Bio-genesis, p.
75.
January 28th. The first step in peopling these worlds with the
appropriate living forms is virtually miracle. Nor in one case is there
less of mystery in the act than in the other. The second birth is
scarcely less perplexing to the theologian than the first to the
embryologist. Natural Law, Bio-genesis, p. 76.
January 29th. There may be cases--they are probably in the majority--
where the moment of contact with the Living Spirit, though sudden, has
been obscure. But the real moment and the conscious moment are two
different things. Science pronounces nothing as to the conscious moment.
If it did, it would probably say that that was seldom the real moment--
The moment of birth in the natural world is not a conscious moment--we
do not know we are born till long afterward. Natural Law, Bio-genesis, p.
93.
January 30th. The stumbling-block to most minds is perhaps less the mere
existence of the unseen than the want of definition, the apparently
hopeless vagueness, and not least, the delight in this vagueness as mere
vagueness by some who look upon this as the mark of quality in Spiritual
things. It will be at least something to tell earnest seekers that the
Spiritual World is not a castle in the air, of an architecture unknown
to earth or heaven, but a fair ordered realm furnished with many familiar
things and ruled by well-remembered Laws. Natural Law, Introduction, p.
26.
January 31st. Character grows in the stream of the world's life. That
chiefly is where men are to learn love. The Greatest Thing in the World.
February 1st. If a man does not exercise his arm he develops no biceps
muscle; and if a man does not exercise his soul, he acquires no muscle in
his soul, no strength of character, no vigour of moral fibre, nor beauty
of Spiritual growth. The Greatest Thing in the World.
February 2d. A Religion without mystery is an absurdity. Even Science has
its mysteries, none more inscrutable than around this Science of Life. It
taught us sooner or later to expect mystery, and now we enter its domain.
Let it be carefully marked, however, that the cloud does not fall and
cover us till we have ascertained the most momentous truth of Religion--
that Christ is in the Christian. Natural Law, Bio-genesis, p. 88.
February 3d. Religion in having mystery is in analogy with all around it.
Where there is exceptional mystery in the Spiritual World it will
generally be found that there is a corresponding mystery in the natural
world. Natural Law, Bio-genesis, p. 91.
February 4th. Even to earnest minds the difficulty of grasping the truth
at all has always proved extreme. Philosophically, one scarcely sees
either the necessity or the possibility of being born again. Why a
virtuous man should not simply grow better and better until in his own
right he enter the Kingdom of God is what thousands honestly and
seriously fail to understand. Natural Law, Bio-genesis, p. 80.
February 5th. Lavish Love upon our equals, where it is very difficult,
and for whom perhaps we each do least of all. The Greatest Thing in the
World.
February 6th. Spiritual Life is not something outside ourselves. The idea
is not that Christ is in heaven and that we can stretch out some
mysterious faculty and deal with Him there. This is the vague form in
which many conceive the truth, but it is contrary to Christ's teaching
and to the analogy of nature. Life is definite and resident; and
Spiritual Life is not a visit from a force, but a resident tenant in the
soul. Natural Law, Bio-genesis, p. 87.
February 7th. If we neglect almost any of the domestic animals, they will
rapidly revert to wild and worthless forms. Now, the same thing exactly
would happen in the case of you or me. Why should man be an exception to
any of the laws of nature? Natural Law, Degeneration, p. 99.
February 8th. The law of Reversion to Type runs through all creation. If
a man neglect himself for a few years he will change into a worse and a
lower man. If it is his body that he neglects, he will deteriorate into a
wild and bestial savage. . . . If it is his mind, it will degenerate into
imbecility and madness. . . . If he neglect his conscience, it will run
off into lawlessness and vice. Or, lastly, if it is his soul, it must
inevitably atrophy, drop off in ruin and decay. Natural Law,
Degeneration, p. 99.
February 9th. Three possibilities of life, according to Science, are open
to all living organisms--Balance, Evolution, and Degeneration. Natural
Law, Degeneration, p. 100.
February 10th. The life of Balance is difficult. It lies on the verge of
continual temptation, its perpetual adjustments become fatiguing, its
measured virtue is monotonous and uninspiring. Natural Law, Degeneration,
p. 101.
February 11th. More difficult still, apparently, is the life of ever
upward growth. Most men attempt it for a time, but growth is slow; and
despair overtakes them while the goal is far away. Natural Law,
Degeneration, p. 101.
February 12th. Degeneration is easy. Why is it easy? Why but that already
in each man's very nature this principle is supreme? He feels within his
soul a silent drifting motion impelling him downward with irresistible
force. Natural Law, Degeneration, p. 101.
February 13th. This is Degeneration--that principle by which the
organism, failing to develop itself, failing even to keep what it has
got, deteriorates, and becomes more and more adapted to a degraded form
of life. Natural Law, Degeneration, p. 101.
February 14th. It is a distinct fact by itself, which we can hold and
examine separately, that on purely natural principles the soul that is
left to itself unwatched, uncultivated, unredeemed, must fall away into
death by its own nature. Natural Law, Degeneration, p. 104.
February 15th. If a man find the power of sin furiously at work within
him, dragging his whole life downward to destruction, there is only one
way to escape his fate--to take resolute hold of the upward power, and be
borne by it to the opposite goal. Natural Law, Degeneration, p. 108.
February 16th. Neglect does more for the soul than make it miss
salvation. It despoils it of its capacity for salvation. Natural Law,
Degeneration, p. 110.
February 17th. Give pleasure. Lose no chance in giving pleasure. For that
is the ceaseless and anonymous triumph of a truly loving spirit. Greatest
Thing in the World.
February 18th. If there were uneasiness there might be hope. If there
were, somewhere about our soul, a something which was not gone to sleep
like all the rest; if there were a contending force anywhere; if we would
let even that work instead of neglecting it, it would gain strength from
hour to hour, and waken up, one at a time, each torpid and dishonoured
faculty, till our whole nature became alive with strivings against self,
and every avenue was open wide for God. Natural Law, Degeneration, p.
112.
February 19th. Where is the capacity for heaven to come from if it be not
developed on earth? Where, indeed, is even the smallest appreciation of
God and heaven to come from when so little of spirituality has ever been
known or manifested here? Natural Law, Degeneration, p. 116.
February 20th. Men tell us sometimes there is no such thing as an
atheist. There must be. There are some men to whom it is true that there
is no God. They cannot see God because they have no eye. They have only
an abortive organ, atrophied by neglect. Natural Law, Degeneration, p.
115.
February 21st. Escape means nothing more than the gradual emergence of
the higher being from the lower, and nothing less. It means the gradual
putting off of all that cannot enter the higher state, or heaven, and
simultaneously the putting on of Christ. It involves the slow completing
of the soul and the development of the capacity for God. Natural Law,
Degeneration, p. 117.
February 22d. If, then, escape is to be open to us, it is not to come to
us somehow, vaguely. We are not to hope for anything startling or
mysterious. It is a definite opening along certain lines which are
definitely marked by God, which begin at the Cross of Christ, and lead
direct to Him. Natural Law, Degeneration, p. 117.
February 23d. Each man, in the silence of his own soul, must work out
this salvation for himself with fear and trembling--with fear, realizing
the momentous issues of his task; with trembling, lest, before the tardy
work be done, the voice of Death should summon him to stop. Natural Law,
Degeneration, p. 118.
February 24th. So cultivate the soul that all its powers will open out to
God, and in beholding God be drawn away from sin. Natural Law,
Degeneration, p. 118.
February 25th. There is a Sense of Sight in the religious nature. Neglect
this, leave it undeveloped, and you never miss it. You simply see
nothing. But develop it and you see God. Natural Law, Degeneration, p.
118.
February 26th. Become pure in heart. The pure in heart shall see God.
Here, then, is one opening for soul-culture--the avenue through purity of
heart to the spiritual seeing of God. Natural Law, Degeneration, p. 119.
February 27th. There is a Sense of Sound. Neglect this, leave it
undeveloped, and you never miss it. Develop it, and you hear God. And the
line along which to develop it is known to us. Obey Christ. Natural Law,
Degeneration, p. 119.
February 28th He who loves will rejoice in the Truth, rejoice not in what
he has been taught to believe; not in this Church's doctrine or in that;
not in this issue, or in that issue; but "in the Truth." He will accept
only what is real; he will strive to get at facts; he will search for
Truth with a humble and unbiassed mind, and cherish whatever he finds at
any sacrifice. The Greatest Thing in the World.
March 1st. "Consider the lilies of the field how they grow." Christ made
the lilies and He made me--both on the same broad principle. Both
together, man and flower . . .; but as men are dull at studying
themselves. He points to this companion-phenomenon to teach us how to
live a free and natural life, a life which God will unfold for us,
without our anxiety, as He unfolds the flower. Natural Law, Growth, p.
123.
March 2d. Our efforts after Christian growth seem only a succession of
failures, and, instead of rising into the beauty of holiness, our life is
a daily heart-break and humiliation. Natural Law, Growth, p. 125.
March 3d. The lilies grow, Christ says, of themselves; they toil not,
neither do they spin. They grow, that is, automatically, spontaneously,
without trying, without fretting, without thinking. Natural Law, Growth,
p. 126.
March 4th. Violent efforts to grow are right in earnestness, but wholly
wrong in principle. There is but one principle of growth both for the
natural and spiritual, for animal and plant, for body and soul. For all
growth is an organic thing. And the principle of growing in grace is once
more this, "Consider the lilies how they grow." Natural Law, Growth, p.
125.
March 5th. Earnest souls who are attempting sanctification by struggle,
instead of sanctification by faith, might be spared much humiliation by
learning the botany of the Sermon on the Mount. Natural Law, Growth, p.
127.
March 6th. There is only one thing greater than happiness in the world,
and that is holiness; and it is not in our keeping; but what God HAS put
in our power is the happiness of those about us, and that is largely to
be secured by our being kind to them. The Greatest Thing in the World.
March 7th. We have all felt the brazenness of words without emotion, the
hollowness, the unaccountable unpersuasiveness of eloquence behind which
lies no love. The Greatest Thing in the World.
March 8th. Patience; kindness; generosity; humility; courtesy;
unselfishness; good-temper; guilelessness; sincerity--these make up the
supreme gift, the stature of the perfect man. The Greatest Thing in the
World.
March 9th. We hear much of love to God; Christ spoke much of love to man.
We make a great deal of peace with heaven; Christ spoke much of peace on
earth. The Greatest Thing in the World.
March 10th. If God is spending work upon a Christian, let him be still
and know that it is God. And if he wants work, he will find it there--in
the being still. Natural Law, Growth, p. 137.
March 11th. If the amount of energy lost in trying to grow were spent in
fulfilling rather the conditions of growth, we should have many more
cubits to show for our stature. Natural Law, Growth, p. 137.
March 12th. The conditions of growth, then, and the inward principle of
growth being both supplied by Nature, the thing man has to do, the little
junction left for him to complete, is to apply the one to the other. He
manufactures nothing; he earns nothing; he need be anxious for nothing;
his one duty is to be IN these conditions, to abide in them, to allow
grace to play over him, to be still and know that this is God. Natural
Law, Growth, p. 138.
March 13th. A man will often have to wrestle with his God--but not for
growth. The Christian life is a composed life. The Gospel is Peace. Yet
the most anxious people in the world are Christians--Christians who
misunderstand the nature of growth. Life is a perpetual self-condemning
because they are not growing. Natural Law, Growth, p. 139.
March 14th. All the work of the world is merely a taking advantage of
energies already there. Natural Law, Growth, p. 140.
March 15th. Religion is not a strange or added thing; but the inspiration
of the secular life, the breathing of an eternal spirit through this
temporal world. The Greatest Thing in the World.
March 16th. The stature of the Lord Jesus was not itself reached by work,
and he who thinks to approach its mystical height by anxious effort is
really receding from it. Natural Law, Growth, p. 127.
March 17th. For the Life must develop out according to its type; and
being a germ of the Christ-life, it must unfold into a Christ. Natural
Law, Growth, p. 129.
March 18th. The sneer at the godly man for his imperfections is
ill-judged. A blade is a small thing. At first it grows very near the
earth. It is often soiled and crushed and downtrodden. But it is a living
thing,. . . and "it doth not yet appear what it shall be." Natural Law,
Growth, p. 129.
March 19th. Christ's protest is not against work, but against anxious
thought. Natural Law, Growth, p. 136.
March 20th. If God is adding to our spiritual stature, unfolding the new
nature within us, it is a mistake to keep twitching at the petals with
our coarse fingers. We must seek to let the Creative Hand alone. "It is
God which giveth the increase." Natural Law, Growth, p. 137.
March 21st. Love is PATIENCE. This is the normal attitude of Love; Love
passive, Love waiting to begin; not in a hurry; calm; ready to do its
work when the summons comes, but meantime wearing the ornament of a meek
and quiet spirit. The Greatest Thing in the World.
March 22d. Have you ever noticed how much of Christ's life was spent in
doing kind things? The Greatest Thing in the World.
March 23d. I wonder why it is we are not all kinder than we are! How much
the world needs it. How easily it is done. How instantaneously it acts.
How infallibly it is remembered. How superabundantly it pays itself back
--for there is no debtor in the world so honourable, so superbly
honourable as Love. The Greatest Thing in the World.
March 24th. To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love forever
is to live forever. Hence, eternal life is inextricably bound up with
love. The Greatest Thing in the World.
March 25th. Man is a mass of correspondences, and because of these,
because he is alive to countless objects and influences to which lower
organisms are dead, he is the most living of all creatures. Natural Law,
Death, p. 155.
March 26th. All organisms are living and dead--living to all within the
circumference of their correspondences, dead to all beyond. . . . Until
man appears there is no organism to correspond with the whole
environment. Natural Law, Death, p. 155.
March 27th. Is man in correspondence with the whole environment or is he
not? . . . He is not. Of men generally it cannot be said that they are in
living contact with that part of the environment which is called the
spiritual world. Natural Law, Death, p. 156.
March 28th. The animal world and the plant world are the same world. They
are different parts of one environment. And the natural and spiritual are
likewise one. Natural Law, Death, p. 157.
March 29th. What we have correspondence with, that we call natural; what
we have little or no correspondence with, that we call Spiritual. Natural
Law, Death, p. 157.
March 30th. Those who are in communion with God live, those who are not
are dead. Natural Law, Death, p. 158.
March 31st. This earthly mind may be of noble calibre, enriched by
culture, high-toned, virtuous, and pure. But if it know not God? What
though its correspondences reach to the stars of heaven or grasp the
magnitudes of Time and Space? The stars of heaven are not heaven. Space
is not God. Natural Law, Death, p. 158.
April 1st. We do not picture the possessor of this carnal mind as in any
sense a monster. We have said he may be high-toned, virtuous, and pure.
The plant is not a monster because it is dead to the voice of the bird;
nor is he a monster who is dead to the voice of God. The contention at
present simply is that he is DEAD. Natural Law, Death, p. 159.
April 2d. What is the creed of the Agnostic, but the confession of the
spiritual numbness of humanity? Natural Law, Death, p. 160.
April 3d. The nescience of the Agnostic philosophy is the proof from
experience that to be carnally minded is Death. Natural Law, p. 161.
April 4th. The Christian apologist never further misses the mark than
when he refuses the testimony of the Agnostic to himself. When the
Agnostic tells me he is blind and deaf, dumb, torpid, and dead to the
spiritual world, I must believe him. Jesus tells me that. Paul tells me
that. Science tells me that. He knows nothing of this outermost circle;
and we are compelled to trust his sincerity as readily when he deplores
it as if, being a man without an ear, he professed to know nothing of a
musical world, or being without taste, of a world of art. Natural Law,
Death, p. 160.
April 5th. It brings no solace to the unspiritual man to be told he is
mistaken. To say he is self-deceived is neither to compliment him nor
Christianity. He builds in all sincerity who raises his altar to the
UNKNOWN God. He does not know God. With all his marvellous and complex
correspondences, he is still one correspondence short. Natural Law,
Death, p. 161.
April 6th. Only one thing truly need the Christian envy, the large, rich,
generous soul which "envieth not." The Greatest Thing in the World.
April 7th. Whenever you attempt a good work you will find other men doing
the same kind of work, and probably doing it better. Envy them not. The
Greatest Thing in the World.
April 8th. I say that man believes in a God, who feels himself in the
presence of a Power which is not himself, and is immeasurably above
himself, a Power in the contemplation of which he is absorbed, in the
knowledge of which he finds safety and happiness. Natural Law, Death, p.
162.
April 9th. What men deny is not a God. It is the correspondence. The very
confession of the Unknowable is itself the dull recognition of an
Environment beyond themselves, and for which they feel they lack the
correspondence. It is this want that makes their God the Unknown God. And
it is this that makes them DEAD. Natural Law, Death, p. 163.
April 10th. God is not confined to the outermost circle of environment,
He lives and moves and has His being in the whole. Those who only seek
Him in the further zone can only find a part. The Christian who knows not
God in Nature, who does not, that is to say, correspond with the whole
environment, most certainly is partially dead. Natural Law, Death, p.
163.
April 11th. After you have been kind, after Love has stolen forth into
the world and done its beautiful work, go back into the shade again and
say nothing about it. The Greatest Thing in the World.
April 12th. The absence of the true Light means moral Death. The darkness
of the natural world to the intellect is not all. What history testifies
to is, first the partial, and then the total eclipse of virtue that
always follows the abandonment of belief in a personal God. Natural Law,
Death, p. 167.
April 13th. The only greatness is unselfish love. . . . There is a great
difference between TRYING TO PLEASE and GIVING PLEASURE. The Greatest
Thing in the World.
April 14th. The conception of a God gives an altogether new colour to
worldliness and vice. Worldliness it changes into heathenism, vice into
blasphemy. The carnal mind, the mind which is turned away from God, which
will not correspond with God--this is not moral only but spiritual Death.
And Sin, that which separates from God, which disobeys God, which CAN not
in that state correspond with God--this is hell. Natural Law, Death, p.
169.
April 15th. If sin is estrangement from God, this very estrangement is
Death. It is a want of correspondence. If sin is selfishness, it is
conducted at the expense of life. Its wages are Death--"he that loveth
his life," said Christ, "shall lose it." Natural Law, Death, p. 170.
April 16th. Obviously if the mind turns away from one part of the
environment it will only do so under some temptation to correspond with
another. This temptation, at bottom, can only come from one source--the
love of self. The irreligious man's correspondences are concentrated upon
himself. He worships himself. Self-gratification rather than self-denial;
independence rather than submission--these are the rules of life. And
this is at once the poorest and the commonest form of idolatry. Natural
Law, p. 170.
April 17th. You will find . . . that the people who influence you are
people who believe in you. The Greatest Thing in the World.
April 18th. The development of any organism in any direction is dependent
on its environment. A living cell cut off from air will die. A seed-germ
apart from moisture and an appropriate temperature will make the ground
its grave for centuries. Human nature, likewise, is subject to similar
conditions. It can only develop in presence of its environment. No matter
what its possibilities may be, no matter what seeds of thought or virtue,
what germs of genius or of art, lie latent in its breast, until the
appropriate environment present itself the correspondence is denied, the
development discouraged, the most splendid possibilities of life remain
unrealized, and thought and virtue, genius and art, are dead. Natural
Law, p. 171.
April 19th. The true environment of the moral life is God. Here
conscience wakes. Here kindles love. Duty here becomes heroic; and that
righteousness begins to live which alone is to live forever. But if this
Atmosphere is not, the dwarfed soul must perish for mere want of its
native air. And its Death is a strictly natural Death. It is not an
exceptional judgment upon Atheism. In the same circumstances, in the same
averted relation to their environment, the poet, the musician, the
artist, would alike perish to poetry, to music, and to art. Natural Law,
p. 171.
April 20th. Every environment is a cause. Its effect upon me is exactly
proportionate to my correspondence with it. If I correspond with part of
it, part of myself is influenced. If I correspond with more, more of
myself is influenced; if with all, all is influenced. If I correspond
with the world, I become worldly; if with God, I become Divine. Natural
Law, Death, p. 171.
April 21st. You can dwarf a soul just as you can dwarf a plant, by
depriving it of a full environment. Such a soul for a time may have a
"name to live." Its character may betray no sign of atrophy. But its very
virtue somehow has the pallor of a flower that is grown in darkness, or
as the herb which has never seen the sun, no fragrance breathes from its
spirit. Natural Law, p. 173.
April 22d. I shall pass through this world but once. Any good thing,
therefore, that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any human
being, let me do it now. Let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall
not pass this way again. The Greatest Thing in the World.
April 23d. There is no happiness in having and getting, but only in
giving . . . half the world is on the wrong scent in the pursuit of
happiness. The Greatest Thing in the World.
April 24th. No form of vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold, not
drunkenness itself, does more to un-Christianize society than evil
temper. The Greatest Thing in the World.
April 25th. How many prodigals are kept out of the Kingdom of God by the
unlovely character of those who profess to be inside! The Greatest Thing
in the World.
April 26th. A want of patience, a want of kindness, a want of generosity,
a want of courtesy, a want of unselfishness, are all instantaneously
symbolized in one flash of Temper. The Greatest Thing in the World.
April 27th. Souls are made sweet not by taking the acid fluids out, but
by putting something in--a great Love, a new Spirit--the Spirit of
Christ. The Greatest Thing in the World.
April 28th. Christ, the Spirit of Christ, interpenetrating ours,
sweetens, purifies, transforms all. This only can eradicate what is
wrong, work a chemical change, renovate and regenerate, and rehabilitate
the inner man. Will-power does not change men. Time does not change men.
Christ does. The Greatest Thing in the World.
April 29th Guilelessness is the grace for suspicious people. And the
possession of it is the great secret of personal influence. You will
find, if you think for a moment, that the people who influence you are
people who believe in you. In an atmosphere of suspicion men shrivel up;
but in that atmosphere they expand, and find encouragement and educative
fellowship. The Greatest Thing in the World.
April 30th. Do not quarrel . . . with your lot in life. Do not complain
of its never-ceasing cares, its petty environment, the vexations you have
to stand, the small and sordid souls you have to live and work with. The
Greatest Thing in the World.
May 1st. The moment the new life is begun there comes a genuine anxiety
to break with the old. For the former environment has now become
embarrassing. It refuses its dismissal from consciousness. It competes
doggedly with the new Environment for a share of the correspondences. And
in a hundred ways the former traditions, the memories and passions of the
past, the fixed associations and habits of the earlier life, now
complicate the new relation. The complex and bewildered soul, in fact,
finds itself in correspondence with two environments, each with urgent
but yet incompatible claims. It is a dual soul living in a double world,
a world whose inhabitants are deadly enemies, and engaged in perpetual
civil war. Natural Law, Mortification, p. 179.
May 2d. How can the New Life deliver itself from the still-persistent
past? A ready solution of the difficulty would be TO DIE. . . . If we
cannot die altogether, . . . the most we can do is to die as much as we
can. . . . To die to any environment is to withdraw correspondence with
it, to cut ourselves off, so far as possible, from all communication with
it. So that the solution of the problem will simply be this, for the
spiritual life to reverse continuously the processes of the natural life.
Natural Law, Mortification, p. 180.
May 3d. The spiritual man having passed from Death unto Life, the natural
man must next proceed to pass from Life unto Death. Having opened the new
set of correspondences, he must deliberately close up the old.
Regeneration in short must be accompanied by Degeneration. Natural Law,
Mortification, p. 181.
May 4th. The peculiar feature of Death by Suicide is that it is not only
self-inflicted but sudden. And there are many sins which must either be
dealt with suddenly or not at all. Natural Law, Mortification, p. 183.
May 5th. If the Christian is to "live unto God," he must "die unto sin."
If he does not kill sin, sin will inevitably kill him. Recognizing this,
he must set himself to reduce the number of his correspondences--
retaining and developing those which lead to a fuller life,
unconditionally withdrawing those which in any way tend in an opposite
direction. This stoppage of correspondences is a voluntary act, a
crucifixion of the flesh, a suicide. Natural Law, Mortification, p. 182.
May 6th. Do not resent temptation; do not be perplexed because it seems
to thicken round you more and more, and ceases neither for effort nor for
agony nor prayer. That is your practice. That is the practice which God
appoints you; and it is having its work in making you patient, and
humble, and generous, and unselfish, and kind, and courteous. The
Greatest Thing in the World.
May 7th. It is a peculiarity of the sinful state, that as a general rule
men are linked to evil mainly by a single correspondence. Few men break
the whole law. Our natures, fortunately, are not large enough to make us
guilty of all, and the restraints of circumstances are usually such as to
leave a loophole in the life of each individual for only a single
habitual sin. But it is very easy to see how this reduction of our
intercourse with evil to a single correspondence blinds us to our true
position. Natural Law, Mortification, p. 186.
May 8th. One little weakness, we are apt to fancy, all men must be
allowed, and we even claim a certain indulgence for that apparent
necessity of nature which we call our besetting sin. Yet to break with
the lower environment at all, to many, is to break at this single point.
Natural Law, p. 186.
May 9th. There may be only one avenue between the new life and the old,
it may be but a small and SUBTERRANEAN PASSAGE, but this is sufficient to
keep the old life in. So long as that remains the victim is not "dead
unto sin," and therefore he cannot "live unto God." Natural Law, p. 187.
May 10th. Do not grudge the hand that is moulding the still too shapeless
image within you. It is growing more beautiful, though you see it not,
and every touch of temptation may add to its perfection. Therefore keep
in the midst of life. Do not isolate yourself. Be among men, and among
things, and among troubles, and difficulties, and obstacles. The Greatest
Thing in the World.
May 11th. Contemplate the love of Christ, and you will love. Stand before
that mirror, reflect Christ's character, and you will be changed into the
same image from tenderness to tenderness. There is no other way. You
cannot love to order. You can only look at the lovely object, and fall in
love with it, and grow into likeness to it. The Greatest Thing in the
World.
May 12th. In the natural world it only requires a single vital
correspondence of the body to be out of order to ensure Death. It is not
necessary to have consumption, diabetes, and an aneurism to bring the
body to the grave, if it have heart disease. He who is fatally diseased
in one organ necessarily pays the penalty with his life, though all the
others be in perfect health. And such, likewise, are the mysterious unity
and correlation of functions in the spiritual organism that the disease
of one member may involve the ruin of the whole. Natural Law,
Mortification, p. 187.
May 13th. To break altogether, and at every point, with the old
environment, is a simple impossibility. So long as the regenerate man is
kept in this world he must find the old environment at many points a
severe temptation. Natural Law, Mortification, p. 190.
May 14th. Power over very many of the commonest temptations is only to be
won by degrees, and however anxious one might be to apply the summary
method to every case, he soon finds it impossible in practice. Natural
Law, Mortification, p. 190.
May 15th. The ill-tempered person . . . can make very little of his
environment. However he may attempt to circumscribe it in certain
directions, there will always remain a wide and ever-changing area to
stimulate his irascibility. His environment, in short, is an inconstant
quantity, and his most elaborate calculations and precautions must often
and suddenly fail him. Natural Law, Mortification, p. 191.
May 16th. What the ill-tempered person has to deal with, . . . mainly, is
the correspondence, the temper itself. And that, he well knows, involves
a long and humiliating discipline. The case is not at all a surgical but
a medical one, and the knife is here of no more use than in a fever. A
specific irritant has poisoned his veins. And the acrid humours that are
breaking out all over the surface of his life are only to be subdued by a
gradual sweetening of the inward spirit. Natural Law, Mortification, p.
191.
May 17th. The man whose blood is pure has nothing to fear. So he whose
spirit is purified and sweetened becomes proof against these germs of
sin. "Anger, wrath, malice and railing" in such a soil can find no root.
Natural Law, Mortification, p. 192.
May 18th. The Mortification of a member . . .is based on the Law of
Degeneration. The useless member here is not cut off, but simply relieved
as much as possible of all exercise. This encourages the gradual decay of
the parts, and as it is more and more neglected it ceases to be a channel
for life at all. So an organism "mortifies" its members. Natural Law,
Mortification, p. 193.
May 19th. Man's spiritual life consists in the number and fulness of his
correspondences with God. In order to develop these he may be constrained
to insulate them, to enclose them from the other correspondences, to shut
himself in with them. In many ways the limitation of the natural life is
the necessary condition of the full enjoyment of the spiritual life.
Natural Law, Mortification, p. 195.
May 20th. No man is called to a life of self-denial for its own sake. It
is in order to a compensation which, though sometimes difficult to see,
is always real and always proportionate. No truth, perhaps, in practical
religion is more lost sight of. We cherish somehow a lingering rebellion
against the doctrine of self-denial--as if our nature, or our
circumstances, or our conscience, dealt with us severely in loading us
with the daily cross. But is it not plain after all that the life of
self-denial is the more abundant life--more abundant just in proportion
to the ampler crucifixion of the narrower life? Is it not a clear case of
exchange--an exchange, however, where the advantage is entirely on our
side? We give up a correspondence in which there is a little life to
enjoy a correspondence in which there is an abundant life. What though we
sacrifice a hundred such correspondences? We make but the more room for
the great one that is left. Natural Law, Mortification, p. 195.
May 21st. Do not spoil your life at the outset with unworthy and
impoverishing correspondences; and if it is growing truly rich and
abundant, be very jealous of ever diluting its high eternal quality with
anything of earth. Natural Law, Mortification, p. 196.
May 22d. To concentrate upon a few great correspondences, to oppose to
the death the perpetual petty larceny of our life by trifles--these are
the conditions for the highest and happiest life. . . . The penalty of
evading self-denial also is just that we get the lesser instead of the
larger good. The punishment of sin is inseparably bound up with itself.
Natural Law, Mortification, p. 196.
May 23d. Each man has only a certain amount of life, of time, of
attention--a definite measurable quantity. If he gives any of it to this
life solely it is wasted. Therefore Christ says, Hate life, limit life,
lest you steal your love for it from something that deserves it more.
Natural Law, Mortification, p. 197.
May 24th. To refuse to deny one's self is just to be left with the self
undented. When the balance of life is struck, the self will be found
still there. The discipline of life was meant to destroy this self, but
that discipline having been evaded--and we all to some extent have
opportunities, and too often exercise them, of taking the narrow path by
the shortest cuts--its purpose is baulked. But the soul is the loser. In
seeking to gain its life it has really lost it. Natural Law,
Mortification, p. 196.
May 25th. Suppose we deliberately made up our minds as to what things we
were henceforth to allow to become our life? Suppose we selected a given
area of our environment and determined once for all that our
correspondences should go to that alone, fencing in this area all round
with a morally impassable wall? True, to others, we should seem to live a
poorer life; they would see that our environment was circumscribed, and
call us narrow because it was narrow. But, well-chosen, this limited life
would be really the fullest life; it would be rich in the highest and
worthiest, and poor in the smallest and basest, correspondences. Natural
Law, Mortification, p. 199.
May 26th. The well-defined spiritual life is not only the highest life,
but it is also the most easily lived. The whole cross is more easily
carried than the half. It is the man who tries to make the best of both
worlds who makes nothing of either. And he who seeks to serve two masters
misses the benediction of both. Natural Law, Mortification, p. 199.
May 27th. You will find, as you look back upon your life, that the
moments that stand out, the moments when you have really lived, are the
moments when you have done things in a spirit of love. As memory scans
the past, above and beyond all the transitory pleasures of life, there
leap forward those supreme hours when you have been enabled to do
unnoticed kindnesses to those round about you, things too trifling to
speak about, but which you feel have entered into your eternal life. The
Greatest Thing in the World, p. 60.
May 28th. No man can become a saint in his sleep; and to fulfil the
condition required demands a certain amount of prayer and meditation and
time, just as improvement in any direction, bodily or mental, requires
preparation and care. Address yourselves to that one thing; at any cost
have this transcendent character exchanged for yours. The Greatest Thing
in the World, p. 60.
May 29th. He who has taken his stand, who has drawn a boundary line,
sharp and deep, about his religious life, who has marked off all beyond
as for ever forbidden ground to him, finds the yoke easy and the burden
light. For this forbidden environment comes to be as if it were not. His
faculties falling out of correspondence, slowly lose their sensibilities.
And the balm of Death numbing his lower nature releases him for the
scarce disturbed communion of a higher life. So even here to die is gain.
Natural Law, Mortification, p. 199.
May 30th. Remain side by side with Him who loved us, and gave Himself for
us, and you too will become a permanent magnet, a permanently attractive
force; and like Him you will draw all men unto you, like Him you will be
drawn unto all men. That is the inevitable effect of Love. Any man who
fulfils that cause must have that effect produced in him. The Greatest
Thing in the World, p. 45.
May 31st. Try to give up the idea that religion comes to us by chance, or
by mystery, or by caprice. It comes to us by natural law, or by
supernatural law, for all law is Divine. The Greatest Thing in the World,
p. 46.
June 1st. We love others, we love everybody, we love our enemies, because
He first loved us. . . . And that is how the love of God melts down the
unlovely heart in man, and begets in him the new creature, who is patient
and humble and gentle and unselfish. The Greatest Thing in the World, p.
46.
June 2d. The belief in Science as an aid to faith is not yet ripe enough
to warrant men in searching there for witnesses to the highest Christian
truths. The inspiration of Nature, it is thought, extends to the humbler
doctrines alone. And yet the reverent inquirer who guides his steps in
the right direction may find even now, in the still dim twilight of the
scientific world, much that will illuminate and intensify his sublimest
faith. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 204.
June 3d. Life becomes fuller and fuller, richer and richer, more and more
sensitive and responsive to an ever-widening Environment as we rise in
the chain of being. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 207.
June 4th. Before we reach an Eternal Life we must pass beyond that point
at which all ordinary correspondences inevitably cease. We must find an
organism so high and complex, that at some point in its development it
shall have added a correspondence which organic death is powerless to
arrest. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 213.
June 5th. Uninterrupted correspondence with a perfect Environment is
Eternal Life, according to Science. "This is Life Eternal," said Christ,
"that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou
hast sent." Life Eternal is to know God. To know God is to "correspond"
with God. To correspond with God is to correspond with a Perfect
Environment. And the organism which attains to this, in the nature of
things, must live forever. Here is "eternal existence and eternal
knowledge." Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 215.
June 6th. To find a new Environment again and cultivate relation with it
is to find a new Life. To live is to correspond, and to correspond is to
live. So much is true in Science. But it is also true in Religion. And it
is of great importance to observe that to Religion also the conception of
Life is a correspondence. No truth of Christianity has been more
ignorantly or wilfully travestied than the doctrine of Immortality. The
popular idea, in spite of a hundred protests, is that Eternal Life is to
live forever. . . . We are told that Life Eternal is not to live. This is
Life Eternal--TO KNOW. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 216.
June 7th. From time to time the taunt is thrown at Religion, not unseldom
from lips which Science ought to have taught more caution, that the
Future Life of Christianity is simply a prolonged existence, an eternal
monotony, a blind and indefinite continuance of being. The Bible never
could commit itself to any such empty platitude; nor could Christianity
ever offer to the world a hope so colourless. Not that Eternal Life has
nothing to do with everlastingness. That is part of the conception. And
it is this aspect of the question that first arrests us in the field of
Science. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 216.
June 8th. Science speaks to us indeed of much more than numbers of years.
It defines degrees of Life. It explains a widening Environment. It
unfolds the relation between a widening Environment and increasing
complexity in organisms. And if it has no absolute contribution to the
content of Religion, its analogies are not limited to a point. It yields
to Immortality, and this is the most that Science can do in any case, the
broad framework for a doctrine. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 217.
June 9th. To correspond with the God of Science, the Eternal Unknowable,
would be everlasting existence; to correspond with "the true God and
Jesus Christ," is Eternal Life. The quality of the Eternal Life alone
makes the heaven; mere everlastingness might be no boon. Even the brief
span of the temporal life is too long for those who spend its years in
sorrow. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 220.
June 10th. To Christianity, "he that hath the Son of God hath Life, and
he that hath not the Son hath not Life." This, as we take it, defines the
correspondence which is to bridge the grave. This is the clue to the
nature of the Life that lies at the back of the spiritual organism. And
this is the true solution of the mystery of Eternal Life. Natural Law,
Eternal Life, p. 227.
June 11th. The relation between the spiritual man and his Environment is,
in theological language, a filial relation. With the new Spirit, the
filial correspondence, he knows the Father--and this is Life Eternal.
Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 229.
June 12th. It takes the Divine to know the Divine--but in no more
mysterious sense than it takes the human to understand the human. The
analogy, indeed, for the whole field here has been finely expressed
already by Paul: "What man," he asks, "knoweth the things of a man, save
the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no
man, but the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the
world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that
are freely given to us of God."--I. Cor. ii. 11, 12. Natural Law, Eternal
Life, p. 229.
June 13th. To go outside what we call Nature is not to go outside
Environment. Nature, the natural Environment, is only a part of
Environment. There is another large part, which, though some profess to
have no correspondence with it, is not on that account unreal, or even
unnatural. The mental and moral world is unknown to the plant. But it is
real. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 232.
June 14th. Things are natural or supernatural simply according to where
one stands. Man is supernatural to the mineral; God is supernatural to
the man. When a mineral is seized upon by the living plant and elevated
to the organic kingdom, no trespass against Nature is committed. It
merely enters a larger Environment, which before was supernatural to it,
but which now is entirely natural. When the heart of a man, again, is
seized upon by the quickening Spirit of God, no further violence is done
to natural law. It is another case of the inorganic, so to speak, passing
into the organic. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 232.
June 15th. Correspondence in any case is the gift of Environment. The
natural Environment gives men their natural faculties; the spiritual
affords them their spiritual faculties. It is natural for the spiritual
Environment to supply the spiritual faculties; it would be quite
unnatural for the natural Environment to do it. The natural law of
Bio-genesis forbids it; the moral fact that the finite cannot comprehend
the Infinite is against it; the spiritual principle that flesh and blood,
cannot inherit the Kingdom of God renders it absurd. Natural Law, Eternal
Life, p. 233.
June 16th. Organisms are not added to by accretion, as in the case of
minerals, but by growth. And the spiritual faculties are organized in the
spiritual protoplasm of the soul, just as other faculties are organized
in the protoplasm of the body. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 233.
June 17th. It ought to be placed in the forefront of all Christian
teaching that Christ's mission on earth was to give men Life. "I am
come," He said, "that ye might have Life, and that ye might have it more
abundantly." And that He meant literal Life, literal spiritual and
Eternal Life, is clear from the whole course of His teaching and acting.
Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 235.
June 18th. The effort to detect the living Spirit must be at least as
idle as the attempt to subject protoplasm to microscopic examination in
the hope of discovering Life. We are warned, also, not to expect too
much. "Thou canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth." Natural
Law, Eternal Life, p. 237.
June 19th. Many men would be religious if they knew where to begin; many
would be more religious if they were sure where it would end. It is not
indifference that keeps some men from God, but ignorance. "Good Master,
what must I do to inherit Eternal Life?" is still the deepest question of
the age. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 237.
June 20th. The voice of God and the voice of Nature. I cannot be wrong if
I listen to them. Sometimes, when uncertain of a voice from its very
loudness, we catch the missing syllable in the echo. In God and Nature we
have Voice and Echo. When I hear both, I am assured. My sense of hearing
does not betray me twice. I recognize the Voice in the Echo, the Echo
makes me certain of the Voice; I listen and I know. Natural Law, Eternal
Life, p. 238.
June 21st. The soul is a living organism. And for any question as
to the soul's Life we must appeal to Life-science. And what does the
Life-science teach? That if I am to inherit Eternal Life, I must
cultivate a correspondence with the Eternal. Natural Law, Eternal Life,
p. 239.
June 22d. All knowledge lies in Environment. When I want to know about
minerals I go to minerals. When I want to know about flowers I go to
flowers. And they tell me. In their own way they speak to me, each in its
own way, and each for itself--not the mineral for the flower, which is
impossible, nor the flower for the mineral, which is also impossible. So
if I want to know about Man, I go to his part of the Environment. And he
tells me about himself, not as the plant or the mineral, for he is
neither, but in his own way. And if I want to know about God, I go to His
part of the Environment. And He tells me about Himself, not as a Man, for
He is not Man, but in His own way. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 239.
June 23d. Just as naturally as the flower and the mineral and the Man,
each in their own way, tell me about themselves, He tells me about
Himself. He very strangely condescends indeed in making things plain to
me, actually assuming for a time the Form of a Man that I at my poor
level may better see Him. This is my opportunity to know Him. This
incarnation is God making Himself accessible to human thought--God
opening to Man the possibility of correspondence through Jesus Christ.
Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 240.
June 24th. Having opened correspondence with the Eternal Environment, the
subsequent stages are in the line of all other normal development. We
have but to continue, to deepen, to extend, and to enrich the
correspondence that has been begun. And we shall soon find to our
surprise that this is accompanied by another and parallel process. The
action is not all upon our side. The Environment also will be found to
correspond. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 241.
June 25th. Let us look for the influence of Environment on the spiritual
nature of him who has opened correspondence with God. Reaching out his
eager and quickened faculties to the spiritual world around him, shall he
not become spiritual? In vital contact with Holiness, shall he not become
holy? Breathing now an atmosphere of ineffable Purity, shall he miss
becoming pure? Walking with God from day to day, shall he fail to be
taught of God? Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 242.
June 26th. Growth in grace is sometimes described as a strange, mystical,
and unintelligible process. It is mystical, but neither strange nor
unintelligible. It proceeds according to Natural Law, and the leading
factor in sanctification is Influence of Environment. Natural Law,
Eternal Life, p. 242.
June 27th. Will the evolutionist who admits the regeneration of the frog
under the modifying influence of a continued correspondence with a new
environment, care to question the possibility of the soul acquiring such
a faculty as that of Prayer, the marvellous breathing-function of the new
creature, when in contact with the atmosphere of a besetting God? Is the
change from the earthly to the heavenly more mysterious than the change
from the aquatic to the terrestrial mode of life? Is Evolution to stop
with the organic? If it be objected that it has taken ages to perfect the
function in the batrachian, the reply is, that it will take ages to
perfect the function in the Christian. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 244.
June 28th. We have indeed spoken of the spiritual correspondence as
already perfect--but it is perfect only as the bud is perfect. "It doth
not yet appear what it shall be," any more than it appeared a million
years ago what the evolving batrachian would be. Natural Law, Eternal
Life, p. 244.
June 29th. In a sense, all that belongs to Time belongs also to Eternity;
but these lower correspondences are in their nature unfitted for an
Eternal Life. Even if they were perfect in their relation to their
Environment, they would still not be Eternal. . . . An Eternal Life
demands an Eternal Environment. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 245.
June 30th. The final preparation . . . for the inheriting of Eternal Life
must consist in the abandonment of the non-eternal elements. These must
be unloosed and dissociated from the higher elements, And this is
effected by a closing catastrophe--Death. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p.
248.
July 1st. "Perfect correspondence," according to Mr. Herbert Spencer,
would be "perfect Life." To abolish Death, therefore, all that would be
necessary would be to abolish Imperfection. But it is the claim of
Christianity that it can abolish Death. And it is significant to notice
that it does so by meeting this very demand of Science--it abolishes
Imperfection. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 249.
July 2d. The part of the organism which begins to get out of
correspondence with the Organic Environment is the only part which is in
vital correspondence with it. Though a fatal disadvantage to the natural
man to be thrown out of correspondence with this Environment, it is of
inestimable importance to the spiritual man. For so long as it is
maintained the way is barred for a further Evolution. And hence the
condition necessary for the further Evolution is that the spiritual be
released from the natural. That is to say, the condition of the further
Evolution is Death. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 249.
July 3d. The sifting of the correspondences is done by Nature. This is
its last and greatest contribution to mankind. Over the mouth of the
grave the perfect and the imperfect submit to their final separation.
Each goes to its own--earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
Spirit to Spirit. "The dust shall return to the earth as it was; and the
Spirit shall return unto God who gave it." Natural Law, Eternal Life, p.
249.
July 4th. Few things are less understood than the conditions of the
spiritual life. The distressing incompetence of which most of us are
conscious in trying to work out our spiritual experience is due perhaps
less to the diseased will which we commonly blame for it than to
imperfect knowledge of the right conditions. It does not occur to us how
natural the spiritual is. We still strive for some strange transcendent
thing; we seek to promote life by methods as unnatural as they prove
unsuccessful; and only the utter incomprehensibility of the whole region
prevents us seeing fully--what we already half-suspect--how completely we
are missing the road. Natural Law, Environment, p. 256.
July 5th. Living in the spiritual world . . . is just as simple as living
in the natural world; and it is the same kind of simplicity. It is the
same kind of simplicity for it is the same kind of world--there are not
two kinds of worlds. The conditions of life in the one are the conditions
of life in the other. And till these conditions are sensibly grasped, as
the conditions of all life, it is impossible that the personal effort
after the highest life should be other than a blind struggle carried on
in fruitless sorrow and humiliation. Natural Law, Environment, p. 257.
July 6th. Heredity and Environment are the master-influences of the
organic world. These have made all of us what we are. These forces are
still ceaselessly playing upon all our lives. And he who truly
understands these influences; he who has decided how much to allow to
each; he who can regulate new forces as they arise, or adjust them to the
old, so directing them as at one moment to make them cooperate, at
another to counteract one another, understands the rationale of personal
development. Natural Law, Environment, p. 255.
July 7th. To seize continuously the opportunity of more and more perfect
adjustment to better and higher conditions, to balance some inward evil
with some purer influence acting from without, in a word to make our
Environment at the same time that it is making us--these are the secrets
of a well-ordered and successful life. Natural Law, Environment, p. 256.
July 8th. In the spiritual world . . . the subtle influences which form
and transform the soul are Heredity and Environment. And here especially,
where all is invisible, where much that we feel to be real is yet so ill
defined, it becomes of vital practical moment to clarify the atmosphere
as far as possible with conceptions borrowed from the natural life.
Natural Law, Environment, p. 256.
July 9th. What Heredity has to do for us is determined outside ourselves.
No man can select his own parents. But every man to some extent can
choose his own Environment. His relation to it, however largely
determined by Heredity in the first instance, is always open to
alteration. And so great is his control over Environment and so radical
its influence over him, that he can so direct it as either to undo,
modify, perpetuate, or intensify the earlier hereditary influences within
certain limits. Natural Law, Environment, p. 257.
July 10th. One might show how the moral man is acted upon and changed
continuously by the influences, secret and open, of his surroundings, by
the tone of society, by the company he keeps, by his occupation, by the
books he reads, by Nature, by all, in short, that constitutes the
habitual atmosphere of his thoughts and the little world of his daily
choice. Or one might go deeper still and prove how the spiritual life
also is modified from outside sources--its health or disease, its growth
or decay, all its changes for better or for worse being determined by the
varying and successive circumstances in which the religious habits are
cultivated. Natural Law, Environment, p. 260.
July 11th. In the spiritual world . . . he will be wise who courts
acquaintance with the most ordinary and transparent facts of Nature; and
in laying the foundations for a religious life he will make no unworthy
beginning who carries with him an impressive sense of so obvious a truth
as that without Environment there can be no life. Natural Law,
Environment, p. 264.
July 12th. There is in the spiritual organism a principle of life; but
that is not self-existent. It requires a second factor, a something in
which to live and move and have its being, an Environment. Without this
it cannot live or move or have any being. Without Environment the soul is
as the carbon without the oxygen, as the fish without the water, as the
animal frame without the extrinsic conditions of vitality. Natural Law,
Environment, p. 264.
July 13th. What is the Spiritual Environment? It is God. Without this,
therefore, there is no life, no thought, no energy, nothing---"without Me
ye can do nothing." Natural Law, Environment, p. 265.
July 14th. The cardinal error in the religious life is to attempt to live
without an Environment. Spiritual experience occupies itself, not too
much, but too exclusively, with one factor--the soul. We delight in
dissecting this much-tortured faculty, from time to time, in search of a
certain something which we call our faith--forgetting that faith is but
an attitude, an empty hand for grasping an environing Presence. Natural
Law, Environment, p 265.
July 15th. When we feel the need of a power by which to overcome the
world, how often do we not seek to generate it within ourselves by some
forced process, some fresh girding of the will, some strained activity
which only leaves the soul in further exhaustion? Natural Law,
Environment, p. 265.
July 16th. To examine ourselves is good; but useless unless we also
examine Environment. To bewail our weakness is right, but not remedial.
The cause must be investigated as well as the result. And yet, because we
never see the other half of the problem, our failures even fail to
instruct us. After each new collapse we begin our life anew, but on the
old conditions; and the attempt ends as usual in the repetition--in the
circumstances the inevitable repetition--of the old disaster. Natural
Law, Environment, p. 265.
July 17th. After seasons of much discouragement, with the sore sense upon
us of our abject feebleness, we do confer with ourselves, insisting for
the thousandth time, "My soul, wait thou only upon God." But, the lesson
is soon forgotten. The strength supplied we speedily credit to our own
achievement; and even the temporary success is mistaken for a symptom of
improved inward vitality. Once more we become self-existent. Once more we
go on living without an Environment. And once more, after days of wasting
without repairing, of spending without replenishing, we begin to perish
with hunger, only returning to God again, as a last resort, when we have
reached starvation point. Natural Law, Environment, p. 266.
July 18th. Why this unscientific attempt to sustain life for weeks at a
time without an Environment? It is because we have never truly seen the
necessity for an Environment. We have not been working with a principle.
We are told to "wait only upon God," but we do not know why. It has never
been as clear to us that without God the soul will die as that without
food the body will perish. In short, we have never comprehended the
doctrine of the Persistence of Force. Instead of being content to
transform energy we have tried to create it. Natural Law, Environment, p.
266.
July 19th. Whatever energy the soul expends must first be "taken into it
from without." We are not Creators, but creatures; God is our refuge AND
STRENGTH. Communion with God, therefore, is a scientific necessity; and
nothing will more help the defeated spirit which is struggling in the
wreck of its religious life than a common-sense hold of this biological
principle that without Environment he can do nothing. Natural Law,
Environment, p. 267.
July 20th. Who has not come to the conclusion that he is but a part, a
fraction of some larger whole? Who does not miss, at every turn of his
life, an absent God? That man is but a part, he knows, for there is room
in him for more. That God is the other part, he feels, because at times
He satisfies his need. Who does not tremble often under that sicklier
symptom of his incompleteness, his want of spiritual energy, his
helplessness with sin? But now he understands both--the void in his life,
the powerlessness of his will. He understands that, like all other
energy, Spiritual power is contained in Environment. He finds here at
last the true root of all human frailty, emptiness, nothingness, sin.
This is why "without Me ye can do nothing." Powerlessness is the normal
state, not only of this, but of every organism--of every organism apart
from its Environment. Natural Law, p. 268.
July 21st. Friendship is the nearest thing we know to what religion is.
God is love. And to make religion akin to Friendship is simply to give it
the highest expression conceivable by man. The Changed Life, p. 49.
July 22d. The entire dependence of the soul upon God is not an
exceptional mystery, nor is man's helplessness an arbitrary and
unprecedented phenomenon. It is the law of all Nature. The spiritual man
is not taxed beyond the natural. He is not purposely handicapped by
singular limitations or unusual incapacities. God has not designedly made
the religious life as hard as possible. The arrangements for the
spiritual life are the same as for the natural life. When, in their hours
of unbelief, men challenge their Creator for placing the obstacle of
human frailty in the way of their highest development, their protest is
against the order of Nature. Natural Law, p. 269.
July 23d. The organism must either depend on his environment, or be
self-sufficient. But who will not rather approve the arrangement by which
man in his creatural life may have unbroken access to an Infinite Power?
What soul will seek to remain self-luminous when it knows that "The Lord
God is a Sun?" Who will not willingly exchange his shallow vessel for
Christ's well of living water. Natural Law, p. 270.
July 24th. The New Testament is nowhere more impressive than where it
insists on the fact of man's dependence. In its view the first step in
religion is for man to feel his helplessness. Christ's first beatitude is
to the poor in spirit. The condition of entrance into the spiritual
kingdom is to possess the child-spirit--that state of mind combining at
once the profoundest helplessness with the most artless feeling of
dependence. Natural Law, p. 271.
July 25th. Fruit-bearing without Christ is not an improbability, but an
impossibility. As well expect the natural fruit to flourish without air
and heat, without soil and sunshine. How thoroughly also Paul grasped
this truth is apparent from a hundred pregnant passages in which he
echoes his Master's teaching. To him life was hid with Christ in God. And
that he embraced this, not as a theory but as an experimental truth, we
gather from his constant confession, "When I am weak, then am I strong."
Natural Law, p. 271.
July 26th. One result of the due apprehension of our personal
helplessness will be that we shall no longer waste our time over the
impossible task of manufacturing energy for ourselves. Our science will
bring to an abrupt end the long series of severe experiments in which we
have indulged in the hope of finding a perpetual motion. And having
decided upon this once for all, our first step in seeking a more
satisfactory state of things must be to find a new source of energy.
Following Nature, only one course is open to us. We must refer to
Environment. The natural life owes all to Environment, so must the
spiritual. Now the Environment of the spiritual life is God. As Nature,
therefore, forms the complement of the natural life. God is the
complement of the spiritual. Natural Law, p. 272.
July 27th. Do not think that nothing is happening because you do not see
yourself grow, or hear the whirr of the machinery. All great things grow
noiselessly. You can see a mushroom grow, but never a child. Mr. Darwin
tells us that Evolution proceeds by "numerous, successive, and slight
modifications." The Changed Life, p. 54.
July 28th. We fail to praise the ceaseless ministry of the great
inanimate world around us only because its kindness is unobtrusive.
Nature is always noiseless. All her greatest gifts are given in secret.
And we forget how truly every good and perfect gift comes from without,
and from above, because no pause in her changeless beneficence teaches us
the sad lessons of deprivation. Natural Law, p. 274.
July 29th. It is not a strange thing for the soul to find its life in
God. This is its native air. God as the Environment of the soul has been
from the remotest age the doctrine of all the deepest thinkers in
religion. How profoundly Hebrew poetry is saturated with this high
thought will appear when we try to conceive of it with this left out.
Natural Law, p. 374.
July 30th. The alternatives of the intellectual life are Christianity or
Agnosticism. The Agnostic is right when he trumpets his incompleteness.
He who is not complete in Him must be for ever incomplete. Natural Law,
p. 278.
July 31st. The problems of the heart and conscience are infinitely more
perplexing than those of the intellect. Has love no future? Has right no
triumph? Is the unfinished self to remain unfinished? The alternatives
are two, Christianity or Pessimism. But when we ascend the further height
of the religious nature, the crisis comes. There, without Environment,
the darkness is unutterable. So maddening now becomes the mystery that
men are compelled to construct an Environment for themselves. No
Environment here is unthinkable. An altar of some sort men must have--
God, or Nature, or Law. But the anguish of Atheism is only a negative
proof of man's incompleteness. Natural Law, p. 279.
August 1st. A photograph prints from the negative only while exposed to
the sun. While the artist is looking to see how it is getting on he
simply stops the getting on. Whatever of wise supervision the soul may
need, it is certain it can never be over-exposed, or that, being exposed,
anything else in the world can improve the result or quicken it. The
Changed Life, pp. 56, 57.
August 2d. What a very strange thing, is it not, for man to pray? It is
the symbol at once of his littleness and of his greatness. Here the sense
of imperfection, controlled and silenced in the narrower reaches of his
being, becomes audible. Now he must utter himself. The sense of need is
so real, and the sense of Environment, that he calls out to it,
addressing it articulately, and imploring it to satisfy his need. Surely
there is nothing more touching in Nature than this? Man could never so
expose himself, so break through all constraint, except from a dire
necessity. Natural Law, p. 279.
August 3d. What is Truth? The natural Environment answers, "Increase of
Knowledge increaseth Sorrow," and "much study is a Weariness." Christ
replies, "Learn of Me, and ye shall find Rest." Contrast the world's word
"Weariness" with Christ's word "Rest." No other teacher since the world
began has ever associated "learn" with "Rest." Learn of me, says the
philosopher, and you shall find Restlessness. Learn of Me, says Christ,
and ye shall find Rest. Natural Law, p. 280.
August 4th. Men will have to give up the experiment of attempting to live
in half an Environment. Half an Environment will give but half a Life.
. . . He whose correspondences are with this world alone has only a
thousandth part, a fraction, the mere rim and shade of an Environment,
and only the fraction of a Life. How long will it take Science to believe
its own creed, that the material universe we see around us is only a
fragment of the universe we do not see? Natural Law, p. 282.
August 5th. The Life of the senses, high and low, may perfect itself in
Nature. Even the Life of thought may find a large complement in
surrounding things. But the higher thought, and the conscience, and the
religious Life, can only perfect themselves in God. Natural Law, p. 283.
August 6th. To make the influence of Environment stop with the natural
world is to doom the spiritual nature to death. For the soul, like the
body, can never perfect itself in isolation. The law for both is to be
complete in the appropriate Environment. Natural Law, p. 283.
August 7th. Take into your new sphere of labour, where you also mean to
lay down your life, that simple charm, Love, and your life-work must
succeed. You can take nothing greater, you need take nothing less. It is
not worth while going if you take anything less. The Greatest Thing in
the World, p. 17.
August 8th. Politeness has been defined as love in trifles. Courtesy is
said to be love in little things. And the one secret of politeness is to
love. Love CANNOT behave itself unseemly. You can put the most untutored
persons into the highest society, and if they have a reservoir of Love in
their heart, they will not behave themselves unseemly. They simply cannot
do it. The Greatest Thing in the World, p. 26.
August 9th. I believe that Christ's yoke is easy. Christ's "yoke" is just
His way of taking life. And I believe it is an easier way than any other.
I believe it is a happier way than any other. The most obvious lesson in
Christ's teaching is that there is no happiness in having and getting
anything, but only in giving. The Greatest Thing in the World, p. 29.
August 10th. Half the world is on the wrong scent in the pursuit of
happiness. They think it consists in having and getting, and in being
served by others. It consists in giving, and in serving others. He that
would be great among you, said Christ, let him serve. He that would be
happy, let him remember that there is but one way--it is more blessed, it
is more happy, to give than to receive. The Greatest Thing in the World,
p. 30.
August 11th. "Love is not easily provoked." . . . We are inclined to look
upon bad temper as a very harmless weakness. We speak of it as a mere
infirmity of nature, a family failing, a matter of temperament, not a
thing to take into very serious account in estimating a man's character.
And yet here, right in the heart of this analysis of love, it finds a
place; and the Bible again and again returns to condemn it as one of the
most destructive elements in human nature. The Greatest Thing in the
World, p. 30.
August 12th. The peculiarity of ill-temper is that it is the vice of the
virtuous. It is often the one blot on an otherwise noble character. You
know men who are all but perfect, and women who would be entirely
perfect, but for an easily ruffled, quick-tempered, or "touchy"
disposition. This compatibility of ill-temper with high moral character
is one of the strangest and saddest problems of ethics. The Greatest
Thing in the World, p. 31.
August 13th. What makes a man a good artist, a good sculptor, a good
musician? Practice. . . . What makes a man a good man? Practice. Nothing
else. There is nothing capricious about religion. We do not get the soul
in different ways, under different laws, from those in which we get the
body and the mind. The Greatest Thing in the World, p. 40.
August 14th. Love is not a thing of enthusiastic emotion. It is a rich,
strong, manly, vigorous expression of the whole round Christian
character--the Christ-like nature in its fullest development. And the
constituents of this great character are only to be built up by ceaseless
practice. The Greatest Thing in the World, p. 41.
August 15th. We know but little now about the conditions of the life that
is to come. But what is certain is that Love must last. God, the Eternal
God, is Love. Covet, therefore, that everlasting gift. The Greatest Thing
in the World, p. 54.
August 16th. To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love
forever is to live forever. Hence, eternal life is inextricably bound up
with love. . . . Love must be eternal. It is what God is. The Greatest
Thing in the World, pp. 57, 58.
August 17th. When a man becomes a Christian the natural process is this:
The Living Christ enters into his soul. Development begins. The
quickening Life seizes upon the soul, assimilates surrounding elements,
and begins to fashion it. According to the great Law of Conformity to
Type this fashioning takes a specific form. It is that of the Artist who
fashions. And all through Life this wonderful, mystical, glorious, yet
perfectly definite, process, goes on "until Christ be formed" in it.
Natural Law, p. 294.
August 18th. The Christian Life is not a vague effort after
righteousness--an ill-defined, pointless struggle for an ill-defined,
pointless end. Religion is no dishevelled mass of aspiration, prayer, and
faith. There is no more mystery in Religion as to its processes than in
Biology. Natural Law, p. 294.
August 19th. There is much mystery in Biology. "We know all but nothing
of Life" yet, nothing of development. There is the same mystery in the
spiritual Life. But the great lines are the same, as decided, as
luminous; and the laws of natural and spiritual are the same, as
unerring, as simple. Will everything else in the natural world unfold its
order, and yield to Science more and more a vision of harmony, and
Religion, which should complement and perfect all, remain a chaos?
Natural Law, p. 294.
August 20th. When one attempts to sanctify himself by effort, he is
trying to make his boat go by pushing against the mast. He is like a
drowning man trying to lift himself out of the water by pulling at the
hair of his own head. Christ held up this method almost to ridicule when
He said: "Which of you by taking thought can add a cubit to his stature?"
The one redeeming feature of the self-sufficient method is this--that
those who try it find out almost at once that it will not gain the goal.
The Changed Life, p. 11.
August 21st. The Image of Christ that is forming within us--that is
life's one charge. Let every project stand aside for that. "Till Christ
be formed," no man's work is finished, no religion crowned, no life has
fulfilled its end. The Changed Life, p. 62.
August 22d. Our companionship with Him, like all true companionship, is a
spiritual communion. All friendship, all love, human and Divine, is
purely spiritual. It was after He was risen that He influenced even the
disciples most. The Changed Life, p. 38.
August 23d. Make Christ your most constant companion. Be more under His
influence than under any other influence. Ten minutes spent in His
society every day, ay, two minutes if it be face to face, and heart to
heart, will make the whole day different. Every character has an inward
spring, let Christ be it. Every action has a key-note, let Christ set it.
The Changed Life, p. 40.
August 24th. Under the right conditions it is as natural for character to
become beautiful as for a flower; and if on God's earth there is not some
machinery for effecting it, the supreme gift to the world has been
forgotten. This is simply what man was made for. With Browning: "I say
that Man was made to grow, not stop." The Changed Life, p. 10.
August 25th. How can modern men today make Christ, the absent Christ,
their most constant companion still? The answer is that Friendship is a
spiritual thing. It is independent of Matter, or Space, or Time. That
which I love in my friend is not that which I see. What influences me in
my friend is not his body but his spirit. The Changed Life, p. 37.
August 26th. Love should be the supreme thing--because it is going to
last; because in the nature of things it is an Eternal Life. It is a
thing that we are living now, not that we get when we die; that we shall
have a poor chance of getting when we die unless we are living now. The
Greatest Thing in the World, p. 58.
August 27th. When will it be seen that the characteristic of the
Christian Religion is its Life, that a true theology must begin with a
Biology? Theology is the Science of God. Why will men treat God as
inorganic? Natural Law, p. 297.
August 28th. We should be forsaking the lines of nature were we to
imagine for a moment that the new creature was to be formed out of
nothing. Nothing can be made out of nothing. Matter is uncreatable and
indestructible; Nature and man can only form and transform. Hence when a
new animal is made, no new clay is made. Life merely enters into already
existing matter, assimilates more of the same sort and rebuilds it. The
spiritual Artist works in the same way. He must have a peculiar kind of
protoplasm, a basis of life, and that must be already existing. Natural
Law, p. 297.
August 29th. However active the intellectual or moral life may be, from
the point of view of this other Life it is dead. That which is flesh is
flesh. It wants, that is to say, the kind of Life which constitutes the
difference between the Christian and the not-a-Christian, It has not yet
been "born of the Spirit." Natural Law, p. 299.
August 30th. The protoplasm in man has a something in addition to its
instincts or its habits. It has a capacity for God. In this capacity for
God lies its receptivity; it is the very protoplasm that was necessary.
The chamber is not only ready to receive the new Life, but the Guest is
expected, and, till He comes, is missed. Till then the soul longs and
yearns, wastes and pines, waving its tentacles piteously in the empty
air, feeling after God if so be that it may find Him. This is not
peculiar to the protoplasm of the Christian's soul. In every land and in
every age there have been altars to the Known or Unknown God. Natural
Law, p. 300.
August 31st. It is now agreed as a mere question of anthropology that the
universal language of the human soul has always been "I perish with
hunger." This is what fits it for Christ. There is a grandeur in this cry
from the depths which makes its very unhappiness sublime. Natural Law, p.
300.
September 1st. In reflecting the character of Christ, it is no real
obstacle that we may never have been in visible contact with Himself.
Many men know Dante better than their own fathers. He influences them
more. As a spiritual presence he is more near to them, as a spiritual
force more real. Is there any reason why a greater than . . . Dante
should not also instruct, inspire, and mould the characters of men? The
Changed Life, pp. 38, 52.
September 2d. Mark this distinction. . . . Imitation is mechanical,
reflection organic. The one is occasional, the other habitual. In the one
case, man comes to God and imitates Him; in the other, God comes to man
and imprints Himself upon him. It is quite true that there is an
imitation of Christ which amounts to reflection. But Paul's term includes
all that the other holds, and is open to no mistake. "Whom having not
seen, I love." The Changed Life, p. 39.
September 3d. In paraphrase: We all reflecting as a mirror the character
of Christ are transformed into the same Image from character to
character--from a poor character to a better one, from a better one to
one a little better still, from that to one still more complete, until by
slow degrees the Perfect Image is attained. Here the solution of the
problem of sanctification is compressed into a sentence: Reflect the
character of Christ and you will become like Christ. The Changed Life, p.
24.
September 4th. Not more certain is it that it is something outside the
thermometer that produces a change in the thermometer, than it is
something outside the soul of man that produces a moral change upon him.
That he must be susceptible to that change, that he must be a party to
it, goes without saying; but that neither his aptitude nor his will can
produce it is equally certain. The Changed Life, p. 20.
September 5th. Just as in an organism we have these three things--
formative matter, formed matter, and the forming principle or life; so in
the soul we have the old nature, the renewed nature, and. the
transforming Life. Natural Law, p. 302.
September 6th. Is it hopeless to point out that one of the most
recognizable characteristics of life is its unrecognizableness, and that
the very token of its spiritual nature lies in its being beyond the
grossness of our eyes? Natural Law, p. 302.
September 7th. According to the doctrine of Bio-genesis, life can only
come from life. It was Christ's additional claim that His function in the
world, was to give men Life. "I am come that ye might have Life, and that
ye might have it more abundantly." This could, not refer to the natural
life, for men had that already. He that hath the Son hath another Life.
"Know ye not your own selves how that Jesus Christ is in you." Natural
Law, p. 303.
September 8th. The recognition of the Ideal is the first step in the
direction of Conformity. But let it be clearly observed that it is but a
step. There is no vital connection between merely seeing the Ideal and
being conformed to it. Thousands admire Christ who never become
Christians. Natural Law, p. 306.
September 9th. For centuries men have striven to find out ways and means
to conform themselves to the Christ Life. Impressive motives have been
pictured, the proper circumstances arranged, the direction of effort
defined, and men have toiled, struggled, and agonized to conform
themselves to the Image of the Son. Can the protoplasm CONFORM ITSELF to
its type? Can the embryo FASHION ITSELF? Is Conformity to Type produced
by the matter OR BY THE LIFE, by the protoplasm or by the Type? Is
organization the cause of life or the effect of it? It is the effect of
it. Conformity to Type, therefore, is secured by the type. Christ makes
the Christian. Natural Law, p. 307.
September 10th. O preposterous and vain man, thou who couldest not make a
fingernail of thy body, thinkest thou to fashion this wonderful,
mysterious, subtle soul of thine after the ineffable Image? Wilt thou
ever permit thyself TO BE conformed to the Image of the Son? Wilt thou,
who canst not add a cubit to thy stature, submit TO BE raised by the
Type-Life within thee to the perfect stature of Christ Natural Law, p.
308.
September 11th. Men will still experiment "by works of righteousness
which they have done" to earn the Ideal life. The doctrine of Human
Inability, as the Church calls it, has always been objectionable to men
who do not know themselves. Natural Law, p. 309.
September 12th. Let man choose Life; let him daily nourish his soul; let
him forever starve the old life; let him abide continuously as a living
branch in the Vine, and the True-Vine Life will flow into his soul,
assimilating, renewing, conforming to Type, till Christ, pledged by His
own law, be formed in him. Natural Law, p. 312.
September 13th. The work begun by Nature is finished by the Supernatural
--as we are wont to call the higher natural. And as the veil is lifted by
Christianity it strikes men dumb with wonder. For the goal of Evolution
is Jesus Christ. Natural Law, p. 314.
September 14th. The Christian life is the only life that will ever be
completed. Apart from Christ the life of man is a broken pillar, the race
of men an unfinished pyramid. One by one in sight of Eternity all human
Ideals fall short, one by one before the open grave all human hopes
dissolve. Natural Law, p. 314.
September 15th. I do not think we ourselves are aware how much our
religious life is made up of phrases; how much of what we call Christian
experience is only a dialect of the Churches, a mere religious
phraseology with almost nothing behind it in what we really feel and
know. Pax Vobiscum, p. 12.
September 16th. The ceaseless chagrin of a self-centred life can be
removed at once by learning Meekness and Lowliness of heart. He who
learns them is forever proof against it. He lives henceforth a charmed
life. Pax Vobiscum, p. 29.
September 17th. Great trials come at lengthened intervals, and we rise to
breast them; but it is the petty friction of our everyday life with one
another, the jar of business or of work, the discord of the domestic
circle, the collapse of our ambition, the crossing of our will or the
taking down of our conceit, which makes inward peace impossible. Pax
Vobiscum, p. 28.
September 18th. There are people who go about the world looking out for
slights, and they are necessarily miserable, for they find them at every
turn--especially the imaginary ones. One has the same pity for such men
as for the very poor. They are the morally illiterate. They have had no
real education, for they have never learned how to live. Pax Vobiscum, p.
31.
September 19th. Christ never said much in mere words about the Christian
graces. He lived them, He was them. Yet we do not merely copy Him. We
learn His art by living with Him. Pax Vobiscum, p. 32.
September 20th. Christ's invitation to the weary and heavy-laden is a
call to begin life over again upon a new principle--upon His own
principle. "Watch My way of doing things," He says. "Follow Me. Take life
as I take it. Be meek and lowly, and you will find Rest." Pax Vobiscum,
p. 32.
September 21st. If a man could make himself humble to order, it might
simplify matters, but we do not find that this happens. Hence we must all
go through the mill. Hence death, death to the lower self, is the nearest
gate and the quickest road to life. Pax Vobiscum, p. 35.
September 22d. Whatever rest is provided by Christianity for the children
of God, it is certainly never contemplated that it should supersede
personal effort. And any rest which ministers to indifference is immoral
and unreal--it makes parasites and not men. Natural Law, p. 335.
September 23d. Just because God worketh in him, as the evidence and
triumph of it, the true child of God works out his own salvation--works
it out having really received it--not as a light thing, a superfluous
labour, but with fear and trembling as a reasonable and indispensable
service. Natural Law, p. 335.
September 24th. Christianity, as Christ taught, is the truest philosophy
of life ever spoken. But let us be quite sure when we speak of
Christianity, that we mean Christ's Christianity. Pax Vobiscum, p. 47.
September 25th. So far from ministering to growth, parasitism ministers
to decay. So far from ministering to holiness, that is to wholeness,
parasitism ministers to exactly the opposite. One by one the spiritual
faculties droop and die, one by one from lack of exercise the muscles of
the soul grow weak and flaccid, one by one the moral activities cease. So
from him that hath not, is taken away that which he hath, and after a few
years of parasitism there is nothing left to save. Natural Law, p. 336.
September 26th. The natural life, not less than the eternal, is the gift
of God. But life in either case is the beginning of growth and not the
end of grace. To pause where we should begin, to retrograde where we
should advance, to seek a mechanical security that we may cover inertia
and find a wholesale salvation in which there is no personal
sanctification--this is Parasitism. Natural Law, p. 336.
September 27th. Could we investigate the spirit as a living organism, or
study the soul of the backslider on principles of comparative anatomy, we
should have a revelation of the organic effects of sin, even of the mere
sin of carelessness as to growth and work, which must revolutionize our
ideas of practical religion. There is no room for the doubt even that
what goes on in the body does not with equal certainty take place in the
spirit under the corresponding conditions. Natural Law, p. 345.
September 28th. It is the beautiful work of Christianity everywhere to
adjust the burden of life to those who bear it, and them to it. It has a
perfectly miraculous gift of healing. Without doing any violence to human
nature it sets it right with life, harmonizing it with all surrounding
things, and restoring those who are jaded with the fatigue and dust of
the world to a new grace of living. Pax Vobiscum, p. 46.
September 29th. The penalty of backsliding is not something unreal and
vague, some unknown quantity which may be measured out to us
disproportionately, or which, perchance, since God is good, we may
altogether evade. The consequences are already marked within the
structure of the soul. So to speak, they are physiological. The thing
effected by our in difference or by our indulgence is not the book of
final judgment, but the present fabric of the soul. Natural Law, p. 346.
September 30th. The punishment of degeneration is simply degeneration--
the loss of functions, the decay of organs, the atrophy of the spiritual
nature. It is well known that the recovery of the backslider is one of
the hardest problems in spiritual work. To reinvigorate an old organ
seems more difficult and hopeless than to develop a new one; and the
backslider's terrible lot is to have to retrace with enfeebled feet each
step of the way along which he strayed; to make up inch by inch the
leeway he has lost, carrying with him a dead-weight of acquired
reluctance, and scarce knowing whether to be stimulated or discouraged by
the oppressive memory of the previous fall. Natural Law, p. 346.
October 1st. He who abandons the personal search for truth, under
whatever pretext, abandons truth. The very word truth, by becoming the
limited possession of a guild, ceases to have any meaning; and faith,
which can only be founded on truth, gives way to credulity, resting on
mere opinion. Natural Law, p. 352.
October 2d. It is more necessary for us to be active than to be orthodox.
To be orthodox is what we wish to be, but we can only truly reach it by
being honest, by being original, by seeing with our own eyes, by
believing with our own heart. Natural Law. p. 364.
October 3d. Better a little faith dearly won, better launched alone on
the infinite bewilderment of Truth, than perish on the splendid plenty of
the richest creeds. Such Doubt is no self-willed presumption. Nor, truly
exercised, will it prove itself, as much doubt does, the synonym for
sorrow. Natural Law, p. 365.
October 4th. Christianity removes the attraction of the earth; and this
is one way in which it diminishes men's burden. It makes them citizens of
another world. Pax Vobiscum, p. 47.
October 5th. Then the Christian experiences are our own making? In the
same sense in which grapes are our own making, and no more. All fruits
GROW--whether they grow in the soil or in the soul; whether they are the
fruits of the wild grape or of the True Vine. No man can MAKE things
grow. He can GET THEM TO GROW by arranging all the circumstances and
fulfilling all the conditions. But the growing is done by God. Pax
Vobiscum, p. 56.
October 6th. Men may not know how fruits grow, but they do know that they
cannot grow in five minutes. Some lives have not even a stalk on which
fruits could hang, even if they did grow in five minutes. Some have never
planted one sound seed of Joy in all their lives; and others who may have
planted a germ or two have lived so little in sunshine that they never
could come to maturity. Pax Vobiscum, p. 51.
October 7th. There is no mystery about Happiness whatever. Put in the
right ingredients and it must come out. He that abideth in Him will bring
forth much fruit; and bringing forth much fruit is Happiness. The
infallible receipt for Happiness, then, is to do good; and the infallible
receipt for doing good is to abide in Christ. Pax Vobiscum, p. 56.
October 8th. Spend the time you have spent in sighing for fruits in
fulfilling the conditions of their growth. The fruits will come, must
come. . . . About every other method of living the Christian life there
is an uncertainty. About every other method of acquiring the Christian
experiences there is a "perhaps." But in so far as this method is the way
of nature, it cannot fail. Pax Vobiscum, p. 58.
October 9th. The distinctions drawn between men are commonly based on the
outward appearance of goodness or badness, on the ground of moral beauty
or moral deformity--is this classification scientific? Or is there a
deeper distinction between the Christian and the not-a-Christian as
fundamental as that between the organic and the inorganic? Natural Law,
p. 374.
October 10th What is the essential difference between the Christian and
the not-a-Christian, between the spiritual beauty and the moral beauty?
It is the distinction between the Organic and the Inorganic. Moral beauty
is the product of the natural man, spiritual beauty of the spiritual man.
Natural Law, p. 380.
October 11th. The first Law of biology is: That which is Mineral is
Mineral; that which is Flesh is Flesh; that which is Spirit is Spirit.
The mineral remains in the inorganic world until it is seized upon by a
something called Life outside the inorganic world; the natural man
remains the natural man, until a Spiritual Life from without the natural
life seizes upon him, regenerates him, changes him into a spiritual man.
Natural Law, p. 381.
October 12th Suppose now it be granted for a moment that the character of
the not-a-Christian is as beautiful as that of the Christian. This is
simply to say that the crystal is as beautiful as the organism. One is
quite entitled to hold this; but what he is not entitled to hold is that
both in the same sense are living. "He that hath the Son hath Life, and
he that hath not the Son of God hath not Life." Natural Law, p. 382.
October 13th. Man is a moral animal, and can, and ought to, arrive at
great natural beauty of character. But this is simply to obey the law of
his nature--the law of his flesh; and no progress along that line can
project him into the spiritual sphere. Natural Law, p. 382.
October 14th. If any one choose to claim that the mineral beauty, the
fleshly beauty, the natural moral beauty, is all he covets, he is
entitled to his claim. To be good and true, pure and benevolent in the
moral sphere, are high and, so far, legitimate objects in life. If he
deliberately stop here, he is at liberty to do so. But what he is not
entitled to do is to call himself a Christian, or to claim to discharge
the functions peculiar to the Christian life. Natural Law, p. 382.
October 15th. In dealing with a man of fine moral character, we are
dealing with the highest achievement of the organic kingdom. But in
dealing with a spiritual man we are dealing with THE LOWEST FORM OF LIFE
IN THE SPIRITUAL WORLD. To contrast the two, therefore, and marvel that
the one is apparently so little better than the other, is unscientific
and unjust. Natural Law, p. 385.
October 16th. The spiritual man is a mere unformed embryo, hidden as yet
in his earthly chrysalis-case, while the natural man has the breeding and
evolution of ages represented in his character. But what are the
possibilities of this spiritual organism? What is yet to emerge from this
chrysalis-case? The natural character finds its limits within the organic
sphere. But who is to define the limits of the spiritual? Even now it is
very beautiful. Even as an embryo it contains some prophecy of its future
glory. But the point to mark is, that "it doth not yet appear what it
shall be." Natural Law, p. 386.
October 17th. The best test for Life is just LIVING. And living consists,
as we have formerly seen, in corresponding with Environment. Those
therefore who find within themselves, and regularly exercise, the
faculties for corresponding with the Divine Environment, may be said to
live the Spiritual Life. Natural Law, p. 390.
October 18th. That the Spiritual Life, even in the embryonic organism,
ought already to betray itself to others, is certainly what one would
expect. Every organism has its own reaction upon Nature, and the reaction
of the spiritual organism upon the community must be looked for. In the
absence of any such reaction, in the absence of any token that it lived
for a higher purpose, or that its real interests were those of the
Kingdom to which it professed to belong, we should be entitled to
question its being in that Kingdom. Natural Law, p. 390.
October 19th. Man's place in Nature, or his position among the Kingdoms,
is to be decided by the characteristic functions habitually discharged by
him. Now, when the habits of certain individuals are closely observed,
when the total effect of their life and work, with regard to the
community, is gauged, . . . there ought to be no difficulty in deciding
whether they are living for the Organic or for the Spiritual; in plainer
language, for the world or for God. Natural Law, p. 391.
October 20th. No matter what may be the moral uprightness of man's life,
the honourableness of his career, or the orthodoxy of his creed, if he
exercises the function of loving the world, that defines his world--he
belongs to the Organic Kingdom. He cannot in that case belong to the
higher Kingdom. "If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not
in him." After all, it is by the general bent of a man's life, by his
heart-impulses and secret desires, his spontaneous actions and abiding
motives, that his generation is declared. Natural Law, p. 393.
October 21st. The imperious claim of a Kingdom upon its members is not
peculiar to Christianity. It is the law in all departments of Nature that
every organism must live for its Kingdom. And in defining living FOR the
higher Kingdom as the condition of living in it, Christ enunciates a
principle which all Nature has prepared us to expect. Natural Law, p.
395.
October 22d. Christianity marks the advent of what is simply a new
Kingdom. Its distinctions from the Kingdom below it are fundamental. It
demands from its members activities and responses of an altogether novel
order. It is, in the conception of its Founder, a Kingdom for which all
its adherents must henceforth exclusively live and work, and which opens
its gates alone upon those who, having counted the cost, are prepared to
follow it if need be to the death. The surrender Christ demanded was
absolute. Every aspirant for membership must seek FIRST the Kingdom of
God. Natural Law, p. 394.
October 23d. Until even religious men see the uniqueness of Christ's
society, until they acknowledge to the full extent its claim to be
nothing less than a new Kingdom, they will continue the hopeless attempt
to live for two Kingdoms at once. And hence the value of a more explicit
Classification. For probably the most of the difficulties of trying to
live the Christian life arise from attempting to half-live it. Natural
Law, p. 396.
October 24th. Two Kingdoms, at the present time, are known to Science--
the Inorganic and the Organic. The spiritual life does not belong to the
Inorganic Kingdom, because it lives. It does not belong to the Organic
Kingdom, because it is endowed with a kind of Life infinitely removed
from either the vegetable or animal. Where, then, shall it be classed? We
are left without an alternative. There being no Kingdom known to Science
which can contain it, we must construct one. Or, rather, we must include
in the programme of Science a Kingdom already constructed, but the place
of which in Science has not yet been recognized. That Kingdom is the
KINGDOM OF GOD. Natural Law, p. 397.
October 25th. The goal of the organisms of the Spiritual World is nothing
less than this--to be "holy as He is holy, and pure as He is pure." And
by the Law of Conformity to Type, their final perfection is secured. The
inward nature must develop out according to its Type, until the
consummation of oneness with God is reached. Natural Law, p. 403.
October 26th. Christianity defines the highest conceivable future for
mankind. It satisfies the Law of Continuity. It guarantees the necessary
conditions for carrying on the organism successfully, from stage to
stage. It provides against the tendency to Degeneration. And finally,
instead of limiting the yearning hope of final perfection to the
organisms of a future age--an age so remote that the hope for thousands
of years must still be hopeless--instead of inflicting this cruelty on
intelligences mature enough to know perfection and earnest enough to wish
it, Christianity puts the prize within immediate reach of man. Natural
Law, p. 404.
October 27th. No worse fate can befall a man in this world than to live
and grow old alone, unloving and unloved. To be lost is to live in an
unregenerate condition, loveless and unloved; and to be saved is to love;
he that dwelleth in love dwelleth already in God. For God is Love. The
Greatest Thing in the World, p. 59.
October 28th. "Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love
vaunteth not itself." Get these ingredients into your life. Then
everything that you do is eternal. It is worth doing. It is worth giving
time to. The Greatest Thing in the World, p. 60.
October 29th. The final test of religion at that great Day is not
religiousness, but Love; not what I have done, not what I have believed,
not what I have achieved, but how I have discharged the common charities
of life. The Greatest Thing in the World, p. 62.
October 30th. The words which all of us shall one Day hear sound not of
theology but of life, not of churches and saints, but of the hungry and
the poor, not of creeds and doctrines, but of shelter and clothing, not
of Bibles and prayer-books, but of cups of cold water in the name of
Christ. The Greatest Thing in the World, p. 63.
October 31st. The world moves. And each day, each hour, demands a further
motion and re-adjustment for the soul. A telescope in an observatory
follows a star by clockwork, but the clockwork of the soul is called the
Will. Hence, while the soul in passivity reflects the Image of the Lord,
the Will in intense activity holds the mirror in position lest the
drifting motion of the world bear it beyond the line of vision. To
"follow Christ" is largely to keep the soul in such position as will
allow for the motion of the earth. And this calculated counteracting of
the movements of a world, this holding of the mirror exactly opposite to
the Mirrored, this steadying of the faculties unerringly, through cloud
and earthquake; fire and sword, is the stupendous cooperating labour of
the Will. The Changed Life, p. 60.
November 1st. All around us Christians are wearing themselves out in
trying to be better. The amount of spiritual longing in the world--in the
hearts of unnumbered thousands of men and women in whom we should never
suspect it; among the wise and thoughtful; among the young and gay, who
seldom assuage and never betray their thirst--this is one of the most
wonderful and touching facts of life. It is not more heat that is needed,
but more light; not more force, but a wiser direction to be given to very
real energies already there. Pax Vobiscum, p. 14.
November 2d. Men sigh for the wings of a dove, that they may fly away and
be at Rest. But flying away will not help us. "The Kingdom of God is
WITHIN YOU." We aspire to the top to look for Rest; it lies at the
bottom. Water rests only when it gets to the lowest place. So do men.
Hence, be lowly. Pax Vobiscum, p. 30.
November 3d. The kingdom of God is righteousness, peace, joy.
Righteousness, of course, is just doing what is right. Any boy who does
what is right has the kingdom of God within him. Any boy who, instead of
being quarrelsome, lives at peace with the other boys, has the kingdom of
God within him. Any boy whose heart is filled with joy because he does
what is right, has the kingdom of God within him. The kingdom of God is
not going to religious meetings, and hearing strange religious
experiences: the kingdom of God is doing what is right--living at peace
with all men, being filled with joy in the Holy Ghost. First, p. 11.
November 4th. The man who has no opinion of himself at all can never be
hurt if others do not acknowledge him. Hence, be meek. He who is without
expectation cannot fret if nothing comes to him. It is self-evident that
these things are so. The lowly man and the meek man are really above all
other men, above all other things. Pax Vobiscum, p. 30.
November 5th. Keep religion in its place, and it will take you straight
through life, and straight to your Father in heaven when life is over.
But if you do not put it in its place, you may just as well have nothing
to do with it. Religion out of its place in a human life is the most
miserable thing in the world. There is nothing that requires so much to
be kept in its place as religion, and its place is what? second? third?
"First." Boys, carry that home with you today--FIRST the kingdom of God.
Make it so that it will be natural to you to think about that the very
first thing. First, pp. 15, 16.
November 6th. The change we have been striving after is not to be
produced by any more striving after. It is to be wrought upon us by the
moulding of hands beyond our own. As the branch ascends, and the bud
bursts, and the fruit reddens under the cooperation of influences from
the outside air, so man rises to the higher stature under invisible
pressures from without. The Changed Life, p. 21.
November 7th. Every man's character remains as it is, or continues in the
direction in which it is going, until it is compelled by IMPRESSED FORCES
to change that state. Our failure has been the failure to put ourselves
in the way of the impressed forces. There is a clay, and there is a
Potter; we have tried to get the clay to mould the clay. The Changed
Life, p. 21.
November 8th. Character is a unity, and all the virtues must advance
together to make the perfect man. This method of sanctification,
nevertheless, is in the true direction. It is only in the details of
execution that it fails. The Changed Life, p. 14.
November 9th. We all reflecting as a mirror the character of Christ are
transformed into the same Image from character to character--from a poor
character to a better one, from a better one to one a little better
still, from that to one still more complete, until by slow degrees the
Perfect Image is attained. Here the solution of the problem of
sanctification is compressed into a sentence: Reflect the character of
Christ, and you will become like Christ. The Changed Life, p. 24.
November 10th. There are some men and some women in whose company we are
always at our best. While with them we cannot think mean thoughts or
speak ungenerous words. Their mere presence is elevation, purification,
sanctity. All the best stops in our nature are drawn out by their
intercourse, and we find a music in our souls that was never there
before. The Changed Life, p. 33.
November 11th. Take such a sentence as this: African explorers are
subject to fevers which cause restlessness and delirium. Note the
expression, "cause restlessness." RESTLESSNESS HAS A CAUSE. Clearly,
then, any one who wished to get rid of restlessness would proceed at once
to deal with the cause. Pax Vobiscum, p. 20.
November 12th. What Christian experience wants is THREAD, a vertebral
column, method. It is impossible to believe that there is no remedy for
its unevenness and dishevelment, or that the remedy is a secret. The
idea, also, that some few men, by happy chance or happier temperament,
have been given the secret--as if there were some sort of knack or trick
of it--is wholly incredible. Religion must ripen fruit for every
temperament; and the way even into its highest heights must be by a
gateway through which the peoples of the world may pass. Pax Vobiscum, p.
15.
November 13th. Nothing that happens in the world happens by chance. God
is a God of order. Everything is arranged upon definite principles, and
never at random. The world, even the religious world, is governed by law.
Character is governed by law. Happiness is governed by law. The Christian
experiences are governed by law. Pax Vobiscum, p. 17.
November 14th. We ARE CHANGED, as the Old Version has it--we do not
change ourselves. No man can change himself. Throughout the New Testament
you will find that wherever these moral and spiritual transformations are
described the verbs are in the passive. Presently it will be pointed out
that there is a rationale in this; but meantime do not toss these words
aside as if this passivity denied all human effort or ignored
intelligible law. What is implied for the soul here is no more than is
everywhere claimed for the body. The Changed Life, p. 19.
November 15th. Rain and snow do drop from the air, but not without a long
previous history. They are the mature effects of former causes. Equally
so are Rest, and Peace, and Joy. They, too, have each a previous history.
Storms and winds and calms are not accidents, but are brought about by
antecedent circumstances. Rest and Peace are but calms in man's inward
nature, and arise through causes as definite and as inevitable. Pax
Vobiscum, p. 18.
November 16th. Few men know how to live. We grow up at random, carrying
into mature life the merely animal methods and motives which we had as
little children. And it does not occur to us that all this must be
changed; that much of it must be reversed; that life is the finest of the
Fine Arts; that it has to be learned with life-long patience, and that
the years of our pilgrimage are all too short to master it triumphantly.
Pax Vobiscum, p. 31.
November 17th. Christ's life outwardly was one of the most troubled lives
that was ever lived: Tempest and tumult, tumult and tempest, the waves
breaking over it all the time till the worn body was laid in the grave.
But the inner life was a sea of glass. The great calm was always there.
At any moment you might have gone to Him and found Rest. Pax Vobiscum, p.
35.
November 18th. The creation of a new heart, the renewing of a right
spirit is an omnipotent work of God. Leave it to the Creator. "He which
hath begun a good work in you will perfect it unto that day." The Changed
Life, p. 57.
November 19th. To become like Christ is the only thing in the world worth
caring for, the thing before which every ambition of man is folly, and
all lower achievement vain. Those only who make this quest the supreme
desire and passion of their lives can even begin to hope to reach it. The
Changed Life, p. 57.
November 20th. A religion of effortless adoration may be a religion for
an angel but never for a man. Not in the contemplative, but in the
active, lies true hope; not in rapture, but in reality, lies true life;
not in the realm of ideals, but among tangible things, is man's
sanctification wrought. The Changed Life, p. 58.
November 21st. Nothing ever for a moment broke the serenity of Christ's
life on earth. Misfortune could not reach Him; He had no fortune. Food,
raiment, money--fountain-heads of half the world's weariness--He simply
did not care for; they played no part in His life; He "took no thought"
for them. It was impossible to affect Him by lowering His reputation; He
had already made Himself of no reputation. He was dumb before insult.
When He was reviled, He reviled not again. In fact, there was nothing
that the world could do to Him that could ruffle the surface of His
spirit. Pax Vobiscum, p. 36.
November 22d. Life is the cradle of eternity. As the man is to the animal
in the slowness of his evolution, so is the spiritual man to the natural
man. Foundations which have to bear the weight of an eternal life must be
surely laid. Character is to wear forever; who will wonder or grudge that
it cannot be developed in a day? The Changed Life, p. 55.
November 23d. To await the growing of a soul is an almost Divine act of
faith. How pardonable, surely, the impatience of deformity with itself,
of a consciously despicable character standing before Christ, wondering,
yearning, hungering to be like that? Yet must one trust the process
fearlessly, and without misgiving. "The Lord the Spirit" will do His
part. The tempting expedient is, in haste for abrupt or visible progress,
to try some method less spiritual, or to defeat the end by watching for
effects instead of keeping the eye on the Cause. The Changed Life, p. 56.
November 24th. The Image of Christ that is forming within us--that is
life's one charge. Let every project stand aside for that. "Till Christ
be formed," no man's work is finished, no religion crowned, no life has
fulfilled its end. Is the infinite task begun? When, how, are we to be
different? Time cannot change men. Death cannot change men. Christ can.
Wherefore PUT ON CHRIST. The Changed Life, p. 62.
November 25th. Christ saw that men took life painfully. To some it was a
weariness, to others a failure, to many a tragedy, to all a struggle and
a pain. How to carry this burden of life had been the whole world's
problem. It is still the whole world's problem. And here is Christ's
solution. "Carry it as I do. Take life as I take it. Look at it from My
point of view. Interpret it upon My principles. Take My yoke and learn of
Me, and you will find it easy. For My yoke is easy, works easily, sits
right upon the shoulders, and THEREFORE My burden is light." Pax
Vobiscum, p. 44.
November 26th. There is a disease called "touchiness"--a disease which,
in spite of its innocent name, is one of the gravest sources of
restlessness in the world. Touchiness, when it becomes chronic, is a
morbid condition of the inward disposition. It is self-love inflamed to
the acute point. . . The cure is to shift the yoke to some other place;
to let men and things touch us through some new and perhaps as yet unused
part of our nature; to become meek and lowly in heart while the old
nature is becoming numb from want of use. Pax Vobiscum, pp. 45, 46.
November 27th. Christ's yoke is simply His secret for the alleviation of
human life, His prescription for the best and happiest method of living.
Men harness themselves to the work and stress of the world in clumsy
and unnatural ways. The harness they put on is antiquated. A rough,
ill-fitted collar at the best, they make its strain and friction past
enduring, by placing it where the neck is most sensitive; and by mere
continuous irritation this sensitiveness increases until the whole nature
is quick and sore. Pax Vobiscum, p. 45.
November 28th. No one can get Joy by merely asking for it. It is one of
the ripest fruits of the Christian life, and, like all fruits, must be
grown. Pax Vobiscum, p. 50.
November 29th Christ is the source of Joy to men in the sense in which He
is the source of Rest. His people share His life, and therefore share its
consequences, and one of these is Joy. His method of living is one that
in the nature of things produces Joy. When He spoke of His Joy remaining
with us He meant in part that the causes which produced it should
continue to act. His followers, that is to say, by repeating His life
would experience its accompaniments. His Joy, His kind of Joy, would
remain with them. Pax Vobiscum, p. 54.
November 30th. Think of it, the past is not only focussed there, in a
man's soul, it IS there. How could it be reflected from there if it were
not there? All things that he has ever seen, known, felt, believed of the
surrounding world are now within him, have become part of him, in part
are him--he has been changed into their image. He may deny it, he may
resent it, but they are there. They do not adhere to him, they are
transfused through him. He cannot alter or rub them out. They are not in
his memory, they are in HIM. His soul is as they have filled it, made it,
left it. The Changed Life, p. 27.
December 1st. Temper is significant, not in what it is alone but in what
it reveals. . . . It is a test for love, a symptom, a revelation of an
unloving nature at bottom. It is the intermittent fever which bespeaks
unintermittent disease within; the occasional bubble escaping to the
surface which betrays some rottenness underneath; a sample of the most
hidden products of the soul dropped involuntarily when off one's guard;
IN A WORD, the lightning form of a hundred hideous and un-Christian sins.
The Greatest Thing in the World, p. 34.
December 2d. You will find, as you look back upon your life, that the
moments that stand out, the moments when you have really lived, are the
moments when you have done things in a spirit of love. As memory scans
the past, above and beyond all the transitory pleasures of life there
leap forward those supreme hours when you have been enabled to do
unnoticed kindnesses to those round about you, things too trifling to
speak about, but which you feel have entered into your eternal life. The
Greatest Thing in the World, p. 60.
December 3d. If events change men, much more persons. No man can meet
another on the street without making some mark upon him. We say we
exchange words when we meet; what we exchange is souls. And when
intercourse is very close and very frequent, so complete is this exchange
that recognizable bits of the one soul begin to show in the other's
nature, and the second is conscious of a similar and growing debt to the
first. The Changed Life, p. 30.
December 4th. In the natural world we absorb heat, breathe air, draw on
Environment all but automatically for meat and drink, for the nourishment
of the senses, for mental stimulus, for all that, penetrating us from
without, can prolong, enrich, and elevate life. But in the spiritual
world we have all this to learn. We are new creatures, and even the bare
living has to be acquired. Natural Law, p. 267.
December 5th. The great point in learning to live the spiritual life is
to live naturally. As closely as possible we must follow the broad, clear
lines of the natural life. And there are three things especially which it
is necessary for us to keep continually in view. The first is that the
organism contains within itself only one-half of what is essential to
life; the second is that the other half is contained in the Environment;
the third, that the condition of receptivity is simple union between the
organism and the Environment. Natural Law, p. 268.
December 6th. To say that the organism contains within itself only
one-half of what is essential to life, is to repeat the evangelical
confession, so worn and yet so true to universal experience, of the utter
helplessness of man. Natural Law, p. 268.
December 7th. Who has not come to the conclusion that he is but a part, a
fraction of some larger whole? Who does not miss at every turn of his
life an absent God? That man is but a part, he knows, for there is room
in him for more. That God is the other part, he feels, because at times
He satisfies his need. Who does not tremble often under that sicklier
symptom of his incompleteness, his want of spiritual energy, his
helplessness with sin? But now he understands both--the void in his life,
the powerlessness of his will. He understands that, like all other
energy, spiritual power is contained in Environment. He finds here at
last the true root of all human frailty, emptiness, nothingness, sin.
This is why "without Me ye can do nothing." Powerless is the normal state
not only of this but of every organism--of every organism apart from its
Environment. Natural Law, p. 268.
December 8th. To seize continuously the opportunity of more and more
perfect adjustment to better and higher conditions, to balance some
inward evil with some purer influence acting from without, in a word to
make our Environment at the same time that it is making us--these are the
secrets of a well-ordered and successful life. Natural Law, p. 256.
December 9th. In the spiritual world the subtle influences which form and
transform the soul are Heredity and Environment. And here especially,
where all is invisible, where much that we feel to be real is yet so
ill-defined, it becomes of vital practical moment to clarify the
atmosphere as far as possible with conceptions borrowed from the natural
life. Natural Law, p. 256.
December 10th. These lower correspondences are in their nature unfitted
for an Eternal Life. Even if they were perfect in their relation to their
Environment, they would still not be Eternal. However opposed,
apparently, to the scientific definition of Eternal Life, it is yet true
that perfect correspondence with Environment is not Eternal Life. . . .
An Eternal Life demands an Eternal Environment. Natural Law, p. 245.
December 11th. On what does the Christian argument for Immortality really
rest? It stands upon the pedestal on which the theologian rests the whole
of historical Christianity--the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Natural
Law, p. 234.
December 12th. The soul which has no correspondence with the spiritual
environment is spiritually dead. It may be that it never possessed . . .
the spiritual ear, or a heart which throbbed in response to the love of
God. If so, having never lived, it cannot be said to have died. But not
to have these correspondences is to be in the state of Death. To the
spiritual world, to the Divine Environment, it is dead--as a stone which
has never lived is dead to the environment of the organic world. Natural
Law, p. 177.
December 13th. The humanity of what is called "sudden conversion" has
never been insisted on as it deserves. . . . While growth is a slow and
gradual process, the change from Death to Life, alike in the natural and
spiritual spheres, is the work of the moment. Whatever the conscious hour
of the second birth may be--in the case of an adult it is probably
defined by the first real victory over sin--it is certain that on
biological principles the real turning-point is literally a moment.
Natural Law, p. 184.
December 14th. Christ says we must hate life. Now, this does not apply to
all life. It is "life in this world" that is to be hated. For life in
this world implies conformity to this world. It may not mean pursuing
worldly pleasures, or mixing with worldly sets; but a subtler thing than
that--a silent deference to worldly opinion; an almost unconscious
lowering of religious tone to the level of the worldly-religious world
around; a subdued resistance to the soul's delicate promptings to greater
consecration, out of deference to "breadth" or fear of ridicule. These,
and such things, are what Christ tells us we must hate. For these things
are of the very essence of worldliness. "If any man love the world," even
in this sense, "the love of the Father is not in him." Natural Law, p.
197.
December 15th. To correspond with the God of Science, the Eternal
Unknowable, would be everlasting existence; to correspond with "the true
God and Jesus Christ," is Eternal Life. The quality of the Eternal Life
alone makes the heaven; mere everlastingness might be no boon. Even the
brief span of the temporal life is too long for those who spend its years
in sorrow. Natural Law, p. 220.
December 16th. The relation between the spiritual man and his Environment
is, in theological language, a filial relation. With the new Spirit, the
filial correspondence, he knows the Father--and this is Life Eternal.
This is not only the real relation, but the only possible relation:
"Neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever
the Son will reveal Him." And this on purely natural grounds. Natural
Law, p. 229.
December 17th. Communion with God--can it be demonstrated in terms of
Science that this is a correspondence which will never break? We do not
appeal to Science for such a testimony. We have asked for its conception
of an Eternal Life; and we have received for answer that Eternal Life
would consist in a correspondence which should never cease, with an
Environment which should never pass away. And yet what would Science
demand of a perfect correspondence that is not met by this, THE KNOWING
OF GOD? There is no other correspondence which could satisfy one at least
of the conditions. Not one could be named which would not bear on the
face of it the mark and pledge of its mortality. But this, to know God,
stands alone. Natural Law, p. 220.
December 18th. The misgiving which will creep sometimes over the
brightest faith has already received its expression and its rebuke: "Who
shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or
distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?"
Shall these "changes in the physical state of the environment" which
threaten death to the natural man, destroy the spiritual? Shall death, or
life, or angels, or principalities, or powers, arrest or tamper with his
eternal correspondences? "Nay, in all these things we are more than
conquerors through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither
death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things
present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other
creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in
Christ Jesus our Lord." Rom. viii, 35-39. Natural Law, p. 230.
December 19th. "We find that man, or the spiritual man, is equipped with
two sets of correspondences." One set possesses the quality of
everlastingness, the other is temporal. But unless these are separated by
some means the temporal will continue to impair and hinder the eternal.
The final preparation, therefore, for the inheriting of Eternal Life must
consist in the abandonment of the non-eternal elements. These must be
unloosed and dissociated from the higher elements. And this is effected
by a closing catastrophe--Death. Natural Law, p. 248.
December 20th. Heredity and Environment are the master-influences of the
organic world. These have made all of us what we are. These forces are
still ceaselessly playing upon all our lives. And he who truly
understands these influences; he who has decided how much to allow to
each; he who can regulate new forces as they arise, or adjust them to the
old, so directing them as at one moment to make them cooperate, at
another to counter act one another, understands the rationale of personal
development. Natural Law, p. 255.
December 21st. It is the Law of Influence that WE BECOME LIKE THOSE WHOM
WE HABITUALLY ADMIRE. Through all the range of literature, of history,
and biography this law presides. Men are all mosaics of other men. There
was a savour of David about Jonathan and a savour of Jonathan about
David. Jean Valjean, in the masterpiece of Victor Hugo, is Bishop
Bienvenu risen from the dead. Metempsychosis is a fact. The Changed Life,
p. 31.
December 22d. Can we shut our eyes to the fact that the religious
opinions of mankind are in a state of flux? And when we regard the
uncertainty of current beliefs, the war of creeds, the havoc of
inevitable as well as of idle doubt, the reluctant abandonment of early
faith by those who would cherish it longer if they could, is it not plain
that the one thing thinking men are waiting for is the introduction of
Law among the Phenomena of the Spiritual World? When that comes we shall
offer to such men a truly scientific theology. And the Reign of Law will
transform the whole Spiritual World as it has already transformed the
Natural World. Natural Law, Preface, p. ix.
December 23d. We have Truth in Nature as it came from God. And it has to
be read with the same unbiassed mind, the same open eye, the same faith,
and the same reverence as all other Revelation. All that is found there,
whatever its place in Theology, whatever its orthodoxy or heterodoxy,
whatever its narrowness or its breadth, we are bound to accept as
Doctrine from which on the lines of Science there is no escape. Natural
Law, Preface, p. xi.
December 24th. In Nature generally, we come upon new Laws as we pass from
lower to higher kingdoms, the old still remaining in force, the newer
Laws which one would expect to meet in the Spiritual World would so
transcend and overwhelm the older as to make the analogy or identity,
even if traced, of no practical use. The new Laws would represent
operations and energies so different, and so much more elevated, that
they would afford the true keys to the Spiritual World. Natural Law, p.
47.
December 25th. The visible is the ladder up to the invisible; the
temporal is but the scaffolding of the eternal. And when the last
immaterial souls have climbed through this material to God, the
scaffolding shall be taken down, and the earth dissolved with fervent
heat--not because it was base, but because its work is done. Natural Law,
p. 57.
December 26th. The natural man belongs essentially to this present order
of things. He is endowed simply with a high quality of the natural animal
Life. But it is Life of so poor a quality that it is not Life at all. He
that hath not the Son hath not Life; but he that hath the Son hath Life--
a new and distinct and supernatural endowment. He is not of this world.
He is of the timeless state, of Eternity. IT DOTH NOT YET APPEAR WHAT HE
SHALL BE. Natural Law, p. 82.
December 27th. The gradualness of growth is a characteristic which
strikes the simplest observer. Long before the word Evolution was coined
Christ applied it in this very connection--"First the blade, then the
ear, then the full corn in the ear." It is well known also to those who
study the parables of Nature that there is an ascending scale of slowness
as we rise in the scale of Life. Growth is most gradual in the highest
forms. Man attains his maturity after a score of years; the monad
completes its humble cycle in a day. What wonder if development be tardy
in the Creature of Eternity? A Christian's sun has sometimes set, and a
critical world has seen as yet no corn in the ear. As yet? "As yet," in
this long Life, has not begun. Grant him the years proportionate to his
place in the scale of Life. "The time of harvest is NOT YET." Natural
Law, p. 92.
December 28th. Salvation is a definite process. If a man refuse to submit
himself to that process, clearly he cannot have the benefits of it. "As
many as received Him to them gave He power to become the sons of God." He
does not avail himself of this power. It may be mere carelessness or
apathy. Nevertheless the neglect is fatal. He cannot escape because he
will not. Natural Law, p. 109.
December 29th. The end of Salvation is perfection, the Christ-like mind,
character, and life. Morality is on the way to this perfection; it may go
a considerable distance toward it, but it can never reach it. Only Life
can do that. . . . Morality can never reach perfection; Life MUST. For
the Life must develop out according to its type; and being a germ of the
Christ-life, it must unfold into A CHRIST. Natural Law, p. 138.
December 30th. Perfect life is not merely the possessing of perfect
functions, but of perfect functions perfectly adjusted to each other, and
all conspiring to a single result, the perfect working of the whole
organism. It is not said that the character will develop in all its
fulness in this life. That were a time too short for an Evolution so
magnificent. In this world only the cornless ear is seen: sometimes only
the small yet still prophetic blade. Natural Law, p. 129.
December 31st. The immortal soul must give itself to something that is
immortal. And the only immortal things are these: "Now abideth faith,
hope, love, but the greatest of these is love." Some think the time may
come when two of these three things will also pass away--faith into
sight, hope into fruition. Paul does not say so. We know but little now
about the conditions of the life that is to come. But what is certain is
that Love must last. God, the Eternal God, is Love. Covet therefore that
everlasting gift. The Greatest Thing in the World, pp. 54, 55.
Henry Drummond's Works.
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