Character and Conduct Part 24

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

Conscience

MAY 30

"Conscience is harder than our enemies, Knows more, accuses with more nicety, Nor needs to question Rumour if we fall Below the perfect model of our thought."

GEORGE ELIOT.

"If a man has nothing to reproach himself with, he can bear anything."

PHILLIPS BROOKS.

"Character is the ground of trust and the guarantee for good living, and that character only is sound which rests upon a good conscience and a clean heart and a strong will."

Dr. JOHN WATSON.

Repentance

MAY 31

"What is true contrition? Sorrow for sin in itself, not for sin's consequences."

_The Guided Life_, Canon BODY.

"Remorse and repentance are two very different things. Repentance leads back to life; but remorse ends often in the painless apathy and fatal mortification of despair."

Dean FARRAR.

"Penitence is like the dawn.... It is the breaking of the light in the soul,--dark enough sometimes no doubt, but a darkness giving place steadily to the growing light."

Bishop WALSHAM HOW.

Heredity

JUNE 1

"The father says of his profligate son whom he has never done one wise or vigorous thing to make a n.o.ble and pure-minded man: 'I cannot tell how it has come. It has not been my fault. I put him into the world and this came out.' The father whose faith has been mean and selfish says the same of his boy who is a sceptic. Everywhere there is this cowardly casting off of responsibilities upon the dead circ.u.mstances around us.

It is a very hard treatment of the poor, dumb, helpless world which cannot answer to defend itself. It takes us as we give ourselves to it.

It is our minister fulfilling our commissions for us upon our own souls.

If we say to it, 'Make us n.o.ble,' it does make us n.o.ble. If we say to it, 'Make us mean,' it does make us mean. And then we take the n.o.bility and say, 'Behold, how n.o.ble I have made myself.' And we take the meanness and say, 'See how mean the world has made me.'"

PHILLIPS BROOKS.

"Speaking of ancestors--'What right have I to question them, or judge them, or bring them forward in my life as being responsible for my nature? If I roll back the responsibility to them, had they not fathers?

and had not their fathers fathers? and if a man rolls back his deeds upon those who are his past, then where will responsibility be found at all, and of what poor cowardly stuff is each of us?"

_The Mettle of the Pasture_, JAMES LANE ALLEN.

Heredity

JUNE 2

"This tracing of the sin to its root now suggests this further topic--its cure. Christianity professes to cure anything. The process may be slow, the discipline may be severe, but it can be done. But is not temper a const.i.tutional thing? Is it not hereditary, a family failing, a matter of temperament, and can _that_ be cured? Yes, if there is anything in Christianity. If there is no provision for that, then Christianity stands convicted of being unequal to human need. What course then did the father take, in the case before us, to pacify the angry pa.s.sions of his ill-natured son? Mark that he made no attempt in the first instance to reason with him! To do so is a common mistake, and utterly useless both with ourselves and others. We are perfectly convinced of the puerility of it all, but that does not help us in the least to mend it. The malady has its seat in the affections, and therefore the father went there at once. Reason came in its place, and the son was supplied with valid arguments--stated in the last verse of the chapter--against his conduct, but he was first plied with love."

_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.

Heredity

JUNE 3

"Any insistence on heredity would have depreciated responsibility, and Jesus held every man to his own sin. Science and theology have joined hands in magnifying heredity and lowering individuality, till a man comes to be little more than the resultant of certain forces, a projectile shot forth from the past, and describing a calculated course.

Jesus made a brave stand for each man as the possessor of will-power, and master of his life. He sadly admitted that a human will might be weakened by evil habits of thought, He declared gladly that the Divine Grace reinforced the halting will: but, with every qualification, decision still rested in the last issue with the man. 'If Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean,' as if his cure hinged on the Divine Will. Of course, I am willing, said Jesus, and referred the man back to his inalienable human rights. Jesus never diverged into metaphysics, even to reconcile the freedom of the human will with the sovereignty of the Divine. His function was not academic debate, it was the solution of an actual situation. Logically, men might be puppets; consciously, they were self-determinating, and Jesus said with emphasis, 'Wilt thou?'"

_The Mind of the Master_, Dr. JOHN WATSON.

"Even natural disposition, of which we make so much when we speak of heredity, is only a tendency till habit takes it and sets it and hardens it and drives it to a settled goal."

HUGH BLACK.

Bearing Criticism

JUNE 4

"When people detect in us what are actually imperfections and faults, it is clear that they do us no wrong, since it is not they who cause them; and it is clear, too, that they do us a service, inasmuch as they help us to free ourselves from an evil, namely, the ignorance of these defects. We should not be angry because they know them and despise us, for it is right that they should know us for what we are, and that they should despise us if we are despicable.

"Such are the feelings which would rise in a heart filled with equity and justice. What then should we say of our own heart when we see in it a quite contrary frame of mind? For is it not a fact that we hate the truth and those who tell it us, that we love those who deceive themselves in our favour, and that we wish to be esteemed by them as other than we really are?"

PASCAL.

"A man should never be ashamed to say he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser to-day than he was yesterday."

POPE.

Faults