Character and Conduct Part 23

MAY 22

"One false note will spoil the finest piece of music, and one little sin, as we deem it, may ruin the most promising character, involving it in a network of unforeseen consequences out of which there may be no escape."

_Life Here and Hereafter_, Canon MACCOLL.

"There is a physical demonstration of sin as well as a religious; and no sin can come in among the delicate faculties of the mind, or among the coa.r.s.er fibres of the body, without leaving a stain, either as a positive injury to the life, or, what is equally fatal, as a predisposition to commit the same sin again. This predisposition is always one of the most real and appalling accompaniments of the stain of sin. There is scarcely such a thing as an isolated sin in a man's life.

Most sins can be accounted for by what has gone before. Every sin, so to speak, has its own pedigree, and is the result of the acc.u.mulated force, which means the acc.u.mulated stain of many a preparatory sin."

_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.

Temptation

MAY 23

"Two things a genuine Christian never does. He never makes light of any known sin, and he never admits it to be invincible."

Canon LIDDON.

"We always meet the temptation which is to expose us when we least expect it."

_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.

"It is of the essence of temptation that it should come on us unawares."

_Pastor Pastorum_, HENRY LATHAM.

"If we cannot at once rise to the sanct.i.ties of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations."

EMERSON.

Sin

MAY 24

"We judge of sins, as we judge of most things, by their outward form. We arrange the vices of our neighbours according to a scale which society has tacitly adopted, placing the more gross and public at the foot, the slightly less gross higher up, and then by some strange process the scale becomes obliterated. Finally it vanishes into s.p.a.ce, leaving lengths of itself unexplored, its sins unnamed, unheeded, and unshunned.

But we have no balance to weigh sins. Coa.r.s.er and finer are but words of our own. The chances are, if anything, that the finer are the lower. The very fact that the world sees the coa.r.s.er sins so well is against the belief that they are the worst. The subtle and unseen sin, that sin in the part of the nature most near to the spiritual, ought to be more degrading than any other. Yet for many of the finer forms of sin society has yet no brand."

_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.

"Tried by final tests, and reduced to its essential elements, sin is the preference of self to G.o.d, and the a.s.sertion of the human will against the Will of G.o.d. With Jesus, from first to last, sin is selfishness."

_The Mind of the Master_, Dr. JOHN WATSON.

Sin

MAY 25-26

"We deceive ourselves in another way, namely, by seeking for all manner of excuses and palliations. The strength of the temptation, or the suddenness of it, or the length of it; our own weakness, our natural tendency to that particular sort of sin; our wishes to be better, the excellence of our feelings, the excellence of our desires; the peculiarity of our circ.u.mstances, the special disadvantages which make us worse off than others; all these we put before our minds as excuses for having done wrong, and persuade ourselves too often that wrong is not really wrong, and that though the deed was sinful the doer of it was not. I do not mean that these palliations are never worth anything, nor do I mean that in every case the same deed is the same sin. There are no doubt infinite varieties of guilt in what appears outwardly the same deed, and G.o.d will distinguish between them and will judge justly. But the habit of mind which leads us to palliate our sins and find good excuses for them, has this dangerous tendency, that it blinds us to the evil of evil. We slip into the delusion that we are better than we seem, that our faults look worse than they are, that inside we have good dispositions, and good desires, and warm feelings, and religious emotions, and that it is only the outside that is marked by those evil stains. This _is_ a delusion and a grievous delusion. You cannot _be_ good and _do_ wrong. You cannot _be_ righteous and _do_ unrighteousness.

Granted that you may slip once into a sin which notwithstanding is not really a part of your nature. Still, this cannot happen several times over. Make no mistake. If you _do_ wrong the deed is a real part of your life, and cannot be removed out of it by any fancy of yours that it is on your circ.u.mstances, your temptations, your peculiar disadvantages that the blame can be cast, still less by any wishes or emotions or feelings even of the most religious kind."

Bishop TEMPLE.

"The strength of a man's virtue is not to be measured by the efforts he makes under pressure, but by his ordinary conduct."

PASCAL.

Sins of the Spirit

MAY 27

"We must remember that it is by the mercy of Christ that we are saved from being what we might have been. 'There goes John Bradford, but for the grace of G.o.d,' said a good man when he saw a criminal being led to execution. We are too apt to take the credit to ourselves for our circ.u.mstances. Imagine that you were born of poor parents out of work in Whitechapel, and had to pick up your living in the docks, or that you were a working girl in Bethnal Green, trying to keep your poor parents or nurse a sick brother out of making match-boxes at 2d. a gross, and then thank G.o.d you were spared the temptation to a bad life, which they have to undergo. So, again, we must remember that sins of the spirit are quite as bad in the eyes of Christ as sins of the flesh; He never spoke a hard word of the publican and sinner, but He lashed with His scorn the 'Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.' The sins that we respectable people commit lightly every day, of pride and indolence and indifference to the sufferings of the poor, may be worse in His sight than the most flagrant sins of those who know no better."

_Friends of the Master_, Bishop WINNINGTON INGRAM.

Sin

MAY 28

"I have often observed in the course of my experience of human life, that every man, even the worst, has something good about him; though often nothing else than a happy temperament of const.i.tution, inclining him to this or that virtue. For this reason, no man can say in what degree any other person besides himself can be, with strict justice, called wicked. Let any one with the strictest character for regularity of conduct among us, examine impartially how many vices he has never been guilty of, not from any care or vigilance, but for want of opportunity, or some accidental circ.u.mstances intervening; how many of the weaknesses of mankind he has escaped because he was out of the line of such temptation; and--what often, if not always, weighs more than all the rest--how much he is indebted to the world's good opinion because the world does not know all: I say, any man who can thus think will scan the failings, nay, the faults and crimes of mankind with a brother's eye."

BURNS.

"Very late in life, and only after many experiences, does a man learn, at the sight of a fellow-creature's real failing or weakness, to sympathise with him, and help him without a secret self-congratulation at his own virtue and strength, but on the contrary, with every humility and comprehension of the naturalness, almost the inevitableness of sin."

_An Unhappy Girl_, IVAN TURGENEV.

Sin

MAY 29

"Remove from us the protection, the encompa.s.sing safeguards and shelters we enjoy; withdraw the influences for good that are daily and weekly dropped on us like gentle dew from heaven, and have dropped ever since we had any being; deprive us of the comforts and interests, the innocent subst.i.tutes for forbidden pleasures; expose us to the loneliness, the vacancy, the dreary monotony, the hopeless struggle, the despair in which the majority of the men and women who fall find themselves immersed; and bring before us, thus exposed and bereft, what temptation you will--uncleanness, intemperance, theft, lying, blasphemy--and not one in ten of ordinary Christian people, I believe, would stand before it."

R. W. BARBOUR.

"Looking within myself, I note how thin A plank of station, chance, or prosperous fate, Doth fence me from the clutching waves of sin;-- In my own heart I find the worst man's mate, And see not dimly the smooth-hinged gate That opes to those abysses Where ye grope darkly,--ye who never knew On your young hearts love's consecrating dew Or felt a mother's kisses, Or home's restraining tendrils round you curled; Ah, side by side with heart's-ease in this world, The fatal night-shade grows and bitter rue!"