Character and Conduct Part 42

SEPTEMBER 14

"Sorrow brings also a temptation to exactingness. It may be that friends are very helpful to us. Let us take care that no selfishness mingles with our love for their companions.h.i.+p, with our claims for their sympathy.

"What, for the time, at any rate, is all the world to us, can only be a small part of another's life.

"And one must struggle, as time goes on, to take what comes in one's way of sympathy, of kindness, of companions.h.i.+p, but one must also try never to exact sympathy, to allow ourselves to feel neglected, or slighted, or forgotten.

"This is a hard lesson--sometimes.

"The whole of one's nature becomes sensitive, easily wounded, easily depressed."

Canon SCOTT HOLLAND.

Bearing Sorrow

SEPTEMBER 15

"Selfishness in Sorrow is another temptation. One is so apt to become absorbed in one's Sorrow.

"It is quite possible to become almost selfish in one's spiritual life under the stress of great Sorrow.

"To see everything, every lesson, every allusion, solely from one's own point of view, to grow too fond of thinking of one's burden....

"The hard path of daily duty is the only path to tread, not because one is thinking of oneself, but because one wishes to forget oneself, and to think only of G.o.d, and of those that remain.

"Self-denial: to put self last, not out of sight, but last, that is what one is always called to do, and it is a sad bit of disloyalty to G.o.d's grace if one becomes more selfish in Sorrow."

Canon SCOTT HOLLAND.

Bearing Sorrow

SEPTEMBER 16

"A great Sorrow which changes life altogether is apt to produce a certain irritability, a sort of nervous jar.

"Very often this is an affair of nerves, of physical health, but it is well to watch--'watch and pray.'

"All sorts of things will jar and hurt us. People will do and say things with perfect unconsciousness that they are wounding us to the quick.

Some careless allusion, some chance speech, will set our nerves quivering.... The worries, the jarring incidents, the introduction of discordant topics in the very presence of death, the disappointments, are all to lead us upwards. It is a rough bit of road on which we are set to walk, and the sharp stones cut our feet, but every step brings us nearer G.o.d.

"Do not let _temper_ mar the days of Sorrow.

"There most probably will be something to try our temper. Who does not know the trials which seem peculiar to a break-up, a change in our outward life? Who has not seen real Christians giving way to peevishness, fretfulness, petty dislikes, petty jealousies of near relations, of those who may be taking the place of the one they mourn?

Perhaps there is nothing which so mars and spoils the religious life as bad temper and selfishness.

"Nothing which is so apt to make outsiders shrug their shoulders at those who make frequent Communions, and go much to Church, and who, especially in dark hours, give way to crossness. There is no better name."

Canon SCOTT HOLLAND.

The Meaning of Religion

SEPTEMBER 17

"The meaning of religion is a rule of life; it is an obligation to do well; if that rule, that obligation, is not seen, your thousand texts will be to you like the thousand lanterns to the blind man. As he goes about the house in the night of his blindness, he will only break the gla.s.s and burn his feet and fingers: and so you, as you go through life in the night of your ignorance, will only break and hurt yourselves on broken laws.

"Before Christ came, the Jewish religion had forbidden many evil things; it was a religion that a man could fulfil, I had almost said, in idleness; all he had to do was to pray and to sing psalms, and to refrain from things forbidden. Do not deceive yourselves; when Christ came, all was changed. The injunction was then laid upon us not to refrain from doing, but to do. At the last day He is to ask us not what sins we have avoided, but what righteousness we have done, what we have done for others, how we have helped good and hindered evil: what difference has it made to this world and to our country and our family and our friends, that we have lived. The man who has been only pious and not useful will stand with a long face on that great day, when Christ puts to him His questions.

"But this is not all that we must learn: we must beware everywhere of the letter that kills, seek everywhere for the spirit that makes glad and strong. For example, these questions that we have just read are again only the letter. We must study what they mean, not what they are.

We are told to visit them that are in prison. A good thing, but it were better if we could save them going there. We are told to visit the sick; it were better still, and we should so better have fulfilled the law, if we could have saved some of them from falling sick."

_The Life of R. L. Stevenson_, GRAHAM BALFOUR.

Pure Religion

SEPTEMBER 18

"Righteousness in the Old Testament is not a theological, but an ethical word, and has to do not with a person's creed, but with a person's character."

Dr. JOHN WATSON.

"In those days men were working their pa.s.sage to Heaven by keeping the Ten Commandments, and the hundred and ten other commandments which they had manufactured out of them. Christ said, I will show you a more simple way. If you do one thing, you will do these hundred and ten things, without ever thinking about them. If you love, you will unconsciously fulfil the whole law.... Love is the rule for fulfilling all rules, the new commandment for keeping all the old commandments, Christ's one secret of the Christian life."

_The Greatest Thing in the World_, HENRY DRUMMOND.

"Pure religion as taught by Jesus Christ is a life, a growth, a divine spirit within, coming out in love and sympathy, and helpfulness to our fellow-men."

H. W. THOMAS.

The Christian Law

SEPTEMBER 19

"We are often reminded that Christ left no code of commandments. It is in Him--in His Person and His work--the Law lies. He has given indeed for our instruction some applications of the negative precepts of the Decalogue to the New Order. He has added some ill.u.s.trations of positive duties, almsgiving, prayer, fasting. He has set up an ideal and a motive for life; and, at the same time, He has endowed His Church with spiritual power, and has promised that the Paraclete, sent in His Name, shall guide it into all the Truth.

(The fundamental principle of the Christian Social Union is "to claim for the Christian Law the ultimate authority to rule social practice.")

"The Christian Law, then, is the embodiment of the Truth for action in forms answering to the conditions of society from age to age. The embodiment takes place slowly, and it can never be complete. It is impossible for us to rest indolently in the conclusions of the past. In each generation the obligation is laid on Christians to bring new problems of conduct and duty into the Divine light, and to find their solution under the teaching of the Spirit. The unceasing effort to fulfil the obligation establishes the highest prerogative of man, and manifests the life of the Church. From this effort there can be no release; and the effort itself becomes more difficult as human relations grow fuller, wider, more complex."