= Ps\ ' i President White Library Cornell University Cornell University Library arV16801 Thoughts for daily living ; 3 1924 031 447 273 olin,anx The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031447273 THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING FROM THE SPOKEN AND WRITTEN WORDS OF ROBERT COLLYER Selected and arranged by IMOGEN CLARK BOSTON AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 191 1 For the privilege of reprinting the selections appearing in this volume the Editor thanks Messrs. Lee & Shepard and -Messrs. E. P. Dutton & Co. CONTENTS TRUST . THE NEARNESS TO HEAVEN THE WAY TO PEACE THE ADVENTURE OF FAITH THE DAY'S WORK DISCONTENT LACK OF FAITH JUST FILLING OUR PLACE PUSHING TO THE FRONT GOD'S WORLD . EACH AND ALL SELF RELIANCE THE PARABLE OF LOT'S WIFE CHRIST-LIKENESS THE WITNESS OF A LIFE CONTENTMENT . PLAYING THE GAME . GOD'S POOR STEWARDSHIP THE GOSPEL OF CHEERFULNESS SILENT TESTIMONY IN HIS PROVIDENCE . OUR FATHER . JOY IN THE THORN . THE WORD WITH POWER "LET YOUR LIGHT SHINE" OIL WITH THE LAMP . Page 1 3 3 3 4 5 6 6 7 8 8 9 10 10 11 11 12 13 14 14 16 16 IT 18 THE FITNESS OF THINGS WORTH BELIEVING THE GREAT DIVINE SERMON THE CERTAIN END CHEERFULNESS WHO IS MY BROTHER? BEGINNING AGAIN GOD'S ANSWER . AS YE SOW THE KEY-NOTE OF THE GOSPELS PATIENCE OF HOPE GLORY OF THE COMMONPLACE KINSHIP THROUGH KINDNESS THE PATTERN FOR US ALL . OPPORTUNITY THE FATHER OF LIGHTS THE RICH AND THE POOR NEW SONGS RESTING NOT IDLING . ANOTHER CHANCE DOING ONE'S BEST WHEN GOLD IS GOOD PATIENCE FAITH AND HOPE NO ROOM FOR ANXIETY THE SILENT CALL A SONG OF TRUST ASCENDING ANGELS THE LOGIC OF FAITH NO HARM IN LOVING THE WORLD TRANSMUTATION THE STANDARD FOR ALL STRIVING Page 21 22 23 25 26 27 27 27 28 30 31 31 33 33 34, 35 36 37 38 40 40 40 42 43 43 44 46 46 47 48 FOR NONE OF US LIVETH TO HIMSELF THE PARABLE OF THE RESERVES PREPARATION FOR A GOOD OLD AGE OUR IDEA OF GOD USEFULNESS AN UNFAILING INSPIRATION BEAUTY OF ASPIRATION THE FORE-ELDERS OF HOPE LIFE TRANSFIGURED . HOW THE SOUL'S STRENGTH IS WON THE SOUL'S TRUE ATTITUDE THE ABUNDANT LIFE , MINISTERING ANGELS , RESOLUTION A LIGHT ON THE WAY SYMPATHY WITH OUR KIND " SURSUM CORDA " THE WAY TO WIN FAITHFULNESS FIRST . HEAVEN'S ESTIMATE . THE DISCERNING WILL TO CHOOSE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS . THE SLOW, SURE JUDGMENT OF GOD RESTING IN GOD GOD'S HARVEST STORMING HEAVEN THE TOUCHSTONE GO FORWARD LOVE-THE TEACHER . FANCY AND FATALISM . LETTING THINGS MAKE THE BEST OF US HOPING AND WAITING Page 49 49 51 52 53 54 65 56 57 58 58 60 61 61 62 63 63 64 64 65 66 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 73 74 75 THE PERFECT FAITH . REST YE AWHILE TO-DAY'S RESOLVE A WINTER'S THOUGHT BOUNDLESSNESS OF GOD'S PURPOSES "PRAY DEVOUTLY, HAMMER STOUTLY" PREPAREDNESS SUCCESS OR FAILURE OUR PART THE MINISTRY OF THE THORN THE TRUE STANDPOINT LOOKING TOWARD THE LIGHT THE WORTH OF ' I WILL ' IN GOD'S HANDS SLOW AND SURE HOW TO ATTAIN A HAPPY LIFE SELF DEPENDENCE THE SECRET IMPATIENCE THE OVERPLUS OF BLOSSOMS EVERY MAN HIS PENNY THE LIVING WORD ALWAYS DOING BETTER IN TUNE WITH THE INFINITE COMPENSATION HOLD FAST TO FAITH . A POSSESSION WORTH HAVING MAKING DUTY A DELIGHT NEVER WEARY OF WELL-DOING A HABIT WORTH FORMING , THE TRUE CHOICE KEEP YOUR GRIT Page 76 77 77 77 78 79 79 80 81 81 82 83 84 84 85 88 88 88 89 90 91 93 93 94 95 95 95 97 97 99 99 100 " LIKE A LITTLE CHILD " FACE THE SUN THE PARABLE OF THE GRAIN OPULENCE THROUGH GROWTH THE MEANING AND VALUE OF LIFE THE TRIUMPH OF HOPE HOW TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM GOD KNOWETH BEST . NOTHING EVER LOST . "DEEDS NOT CREEDS" GOD'S WAY— OR OURS . "THE DEAR LIGHTS OF HOME" THANKSGIVING AND THANKSLIVING THE HEART OF THE SHADOW THE LESSON OF SORROW LOVE THE TRUE PRAYER CONSCIENTIOUSNESS . "MORE THAN MANY SPARROWS" THE BOND OF NEIGHBORHOOD ONE'S REAL NAME A NOBLE ANGER THE SECRET OF SUCCESS TRYING AND FAILING NO CAUSE FOR DISCOURAGEMENT THE DAILY DRILL THE WAY TO SING THE KEY-NOTE OF LIFE NOW IS THE ACCEPTED TIME . A CO-WORKER WITH GOD THE ESSENCE OF WELL-DOING A GOLDEN RULE Page 101 102 102 104 104 104 105 107 108 109 110 111 111 113 113 114 115 115 116 117 117 118 120 121 122 123 124 124 124 126 126 127 THE RIGHT AND THE WRONG WAY . GETTING READY THE OPEN MIND . . . . THE LESSON OF THE BACKGROUND A RESTFUL THOUGHT THE SPIRIT OF THE DAY THE MESSAGE OF THE SNOW THE PROBLEM OF LIFE WHAT IS WORTH WHILE AT THE END OF THE DAY INSEPARABLENESS OF WORK AND RELIGION A DIVINE PERSISTENCE THE DAY OF REST STRENGTH THROUGH WEAKNESS THE DESIRED HAVEN THE POWER OF FAITH DOING AND KNOWING THE MEASURE OF GOODNESS . THE TRUE TEST FITNESS PREDESTINATION OF GOD'S LOVE A DISTORTED VIEW "THE PATIENT ANGEL" STEADFASTNESS . MAKING THE BEST OF WHAT WE HAVE THE FOUR EVANGELISTS MATTHEW— THE FRIEND OF THE POOR THE PICTURES OF MARK THE GOSPEL OF HUMAN SYMPATHY . ACCORDING TO ST. JOHN Page 128 128 130 131 131 131 133 133 134 134 134 135 136 137 138 138 139 139 140 141 142 144 145 146 147 148 148 152 154 158 THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING TRUST The prime condition of a life ever found is a life ever lost. There are times when we all feel poor and bare and sad for our losses, and wonder whether it was not all wrong when the treasure was taken away. But I tell you if we are poor because we stand true to life and duty we are poor only as the sower is poor because he has to cast his wheat into the furrow and then wait for the sheaves of harvest. Our poverty, then, is our wealth and our loss our gain. If our life is as God will, yet is bare, it is only as the granary is bare in June. That very bareness is the prophecy of plenty; and fulness alone in June might bring grave reason to fear that there might be sparseness and hunger in January. When I sow my good treasure broadcast as Christ did; when I give myself with what I am giving, — then as the earth never fails of her harvest, but in the Old World, or the New, will surely bring in our daily bread, so the soul can never fail of her divine returns. Here, or yonder, in the full time, comes the full blessing; the flower flashing out glory, the fields laughing with plenty, [l] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING THE NEARNESS TO HEAVEN It is not true that the angels never come in these days; the trouble is we do not look for them where they are. We look for them to sweep down through the opening heavens when they have come down already, and are hidden in the bluebells at our feet. We want them to appear like the great angels of An- gelo; they are looking at us out of the dreamy, wondering eyes of the babe born yesterday. THE WAY TO PEACE If I cannot pray because I see no reason, then that bended figure on Olivet is my rea- son. If I cannot distinguish between fate and providence, let me rejoice that he can, and that my blindness can make no difference to his blessing. So, under this Captain of my salvation, I shall be more than conqueror; and, while the mournful outcry is rising about me, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," in my heart shall be the confidence that all things work together for good, " And nothing walks with aimless feet, And not one life shall be destroyed, Or cast as rubbish to the void When God has made the pile complete." [2] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING THE ADVENTURE OF FAITH There is no greater mistake than to sup- pose that the divine fire of faith in the heart is to be kindled Indian-fashion by rubbing two dry sticks together in a meeting-house. I must have faith in my faith, — believe that if my convictions in religion, in civil policy, in morals, and in life altogether, could go wide and deep, they would make new heavens and a new earth; and then go to work and make them go wide and deep. THE DAY'S WORK God help us if, as we are growing older, we do not grow better, and do not nourish our souls on the most generous thoughts and aspirations. DISCONTENT I think discontent is as good a thing in its place as life has in its treasury. If you are young, there is probably hope for you in something like the measure of your discon- tent; and if you are not young, that discon- tent is always good which can bring you into larger activity. I know not but it is good to [3] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING be always a little discontented. It is a sign, as when the dove fluttered to the window of the ark that there are olive leaves outside for the plucking. LACK OF FAITH There is a trick of humility in some men I cannot believe to be good. It is that which makes them so very humble that they cannot try to do a thing worth the notice of earth or heaven. Believe me that is not a posses- sion, but a destitution. It is not because I have humility when I feel like that, but be- cause I want faith. I can see nothing noble in myself because I have not the evidence of things not seen. Well may any man be hum- ble in a fair, manly, and manful humility; but I tell you the humility that will lead me to believe myself a nobody, a cypher, a stick, in this great destiny-laden world and time, is no better than a delusion and a snare. What I can do with my single arm may be mean enough; but that is not the question. The thing to consider is what I can do with God to help me. And the difference of the one and the other way is just the difference be- [4] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING tween a man trying to push a train of cars up grade by his single puny strength, and the same man on a locomotive, with the steam up, moving the whole mass by a turn of the wrist. The man at the rear of the train can do nothing — how should he? But give him the lever, and the faith which is the evidence of things not seen, and all things are possible ; because then, in what his hand finds to do there is hidden a treasure of power unspeak- ably greater than his own. JUST FILLING OUR PLACE The question for most of us to solve is, not: Am I fruit? but Am I leaf? I take it if we are to be fruit we shall be so by some deep predestination; and what we shall have to do in that case will be to keep as sound as we can to the core. But if I am not fruit, then I am leaf; and leaf is fruit in its own order. Do I cast a mite of shadow, do I beautify ever so small a piece of blank bar- renness, do I help along, in the measure of my one leaf power, in forming if not fruit then timber? Because this question an- swered right I have answered every other. [5] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING Let me make this sure, and then I may be sure of this also, that the nipping frosts of the autumn when they come will be as divine to me as the dewy splendors of June. A fall- ing leaf, I shall fall honorably; and the spirit, returning to the God who gave it, will again be set to do the greatest and by conse- quence the most blessed thing it can do ; while this frame, the faded leaf, will wait for the morning of its resurrection. PUSHING TO THE FRONT The fine conclusions between hope and fru- ition can no more come by our mere waiting, even on God, than the great harvests have come this year on the land, or the great pic- tures that win the world's heart to the gal- leries. It is to be made good by no happy chance, or by waiting for something to be done for us; we must do for ourselves, and still for ourselves. GOD'S WORLD This is God's world and as it stands to- day he needs men in it to run with a fire en- gine, as certainly as he needs men to preach [6] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING in pulpits, or to set broken limbs; to do the rough work as surely as the fine work. And as men are made they are pretty sure to take a tang from the nature of the work they have to do, or to bring one with them as the con- dition of their taking hold just as Esau was a wild man and a hunter, and Jacob a very tame man and kept sheep. This is God's world and he needs all kinds and will have them. And when we come to look on his world with th<§ wide and gracious glance out of the heart of Christ we shall not be over- troubled about what is going to happen to- morrow if we manage to do our part to-day. It was in his hands before we came, and it will be in his hands when we have gone away ; and his tender mercies are over all his works and all his children. EACH AND ALL Here, as everywhere, there is no broken link in the chain that binds all things God has made fast to his throne, no step lost out of the ladder stretching from earth to heaven — no dry place in the river of life. From the atom to the angel, in Him we live, and move, [7] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING and have our being, and He is not far from every one of us. SELF RELIANCE Only as we rise to our true and proper manhood, look right into the face of what- ever may befall us, and hear in our own hearts the voice which bids us rise up, be men, and not mere things, can we receive the message Heaven waits to reveal. THE PARABLE OF LOT'S WIFE The main trouble with Lot's wife, as I think of her, was this : that, with so much in her of the truest worth in its own way, she was not a whole woman when the call came to reveal the best a woman can do, the high truth, and the deep, our great Teacher in- sists on when he mentions her name, of utter loss through saving, and of all gain through losing. The demand was this: that she should set her face toward Zoar, which, be- ing interpreted, means smallness, and turn her face away from Sodom, when all she had was there, except that which is best worth having; and so she was petrified through [8] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING clinging to the lower life, when the higher life was the watchword of her one momen- tous day. So it seems clear to me that this story is a parable drawn from one human life, touch- ing the worth of Paul's great word, when he bids us leave the things which are behind, and reach toward the things which are before. It shadows out to us the danger which lurks in clinging too close to what is touched with dis- solution, and hints how, through this cling- ing to the past, we, also, may become as pet- rifactions to the whole wealth of hope and joy which lies in the future for every one who will still push out, and when fate and fortune have done their worst, cry with Mrs. Brown- ing, "Here's the true thing to do : let Heaven see to the rest." CHRIST-LIKENESS Loyalty to Christ's spirit and work is the best commentary, and the only one that can make Christ altogether clear to us. Go about the Father's business as he did. Send his gospel far and wide; be ye saviours in your degree; take Christ into your hearts, [9] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING and then there will be very little trouble about him in your minds. THE WITNESS OF A LIFE I am here for some true use or I should not be here in the divine economy; and the one thing I know is that I must be my own true self, and then there will be a better for me, climbing always toward the best. The one thing I must not do is to grow sour, and sad, and hang my head, until it is soiled with mud, or let the thorns have it all their own way, for how many men and women I have seen who have lost their chance through this deliberate downward dip. And how many I have seen beset with thorns, obscure, and of no account to the world, who were still sweet and good at the heart when you once got at them, with gleams of the very grace of heaven shining in and through them, wild witnesses for God in the thick of harsh and evil surroundings where he wants wild wit- nesses. CONTENTMENT This is the lesson Nature teaches, so [10] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING kindly if we mind her, so harshly if we neglect her — that there is no juggling any- where for those who will attain to a true suc- cess, no gambling, no short cuts, no haste, and no delay, when we once enter into the soul of things as God has made them, but just a wise and quiet persistence in the line of the law by which we have to live, ending — if not in for- tune, then in character which is still the noblest fortune; and that all this hectic haste to go ahead and be something, or do some- thing in advance of their slow and sure growth holds in itself the seeds of disaster. PLAYING THE GAME What we have to do is to make the best of the corner of the vineyard the Master has given us, and then to believe that he will see to the rest and will not let it run to waste. GOD'S POOR I know of nothing in the Bible more sweet and tender than its pleadings for the poor. They seem to be its adopted children. When there is no help for them anywhere else, its notes are good for shelter and food and fire, [li] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING waiting to be honored by those who have something to spare; and, when every other current of blessing sets away from their doors, the steady stream of the pity of God in pitiful human hearts still turns that way, and flows through their kitchens and cham- bers as a great benediction. STEWARDSHIP It is the simplest truth we can take to our hearts when we begin where the Master be- gan for proof and evidence in the low-lying light. It shines on the farm and the work shop, and on all we have to do, no matter how near it may lie to the base line of our life, and no matter how high it may reach toward the stars ; and here men see our good works and glorify our Father which is in heaven. So is it hand work? Very well. Or work the world calls noble? Very well. Or humble ? Very well. The day's work of the carpenter's son, Cyprian reports, at ox- yokes and ploughs? Very well. Or the ser- mon on the Mount? Still very well. Here is the law and the testimony he made good in his own life, that we shall mind the light [12] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING where our life lies and our work in the world. And again we shall do this for our own sakes, because, as the hand we never see and always see clasps the oil, the glass, and the flame the man must mind in that low-lying light-house on the coast, or he loses his rank and number, so we must let our light shine, God's hand clasps, lest we lose ours. And as the man ordained by the Republic to mind the light can never quite tell what worth lies in the clear shining, no more can we, save by faith in his faithful endeavor and as we stand true to this trust. THE GOSPEL OF CHEERFULNESS We read the books or hear the discourses of those who are forever looking in toward the shadows, — but there is no rest in them, or help in trouble, or light, or joy. We seek bread and find a stone ; break the egg, and it holds a scorpion. We do not take such things to our sick that they may be healed, or pick the kernel out of them for our children. We know where to find the helpful things in the words of those who have seen the light strike through the mystery, and take these for the [13] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING need we all strike soon or late. The men and women who stand in the front rank of our religious teachers and thinkers — not to sects alone but to the nations — are those always who look out toward the light and hold it in their hearts. Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Channing, Parker, Bel- lows, Beecher, Clarke, and a host besides, to speak only of the noble dead, — it is one golden chain from Alpha to Omega. The words which bring their own benediction come home to us from those who have stood in the holy place and seen the light strike through, to find this as the last great word: God is light, and in him is no darkness at all; and God is love. SILENT TESTIMONY We can live so nobly, not in despite of the great sorrows and bereavements, but because of them, that our life shall be a gospel though we can never write or frame one with our lips. IN HIS PROVIDENCE If I feel, as well I may, that there is a wild [14] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING quality in my own nature and condition, and that I am of the wilderness rather than the garden, common and unnoted, in the way sometimes, and beset by the thorns of harsh and evil circumstances, and so disheartened at my poor, low place, and at the little I can do to amend things, let me think of these wild things in the pasture on Mount Tabor, with the thorns about them, and how they manage somehow, after all, to keep sweet about the heart and to maintain the upward look, and the color which gleams like a glimpse of heaven; and then listen for the word of Christ, "Consider the lilies," and so believe that I am very near and very dear to God, when all is said and done; and I can do my best, and be my best, can keep the touch of sweetness in my heart, and the upward look from among the thorns, and be patient and not over-troubled about what is going to happen to me, for the wilderness is God's land as certainly as the garden, and is better beyond all telling, even for wild things, than it could be as a blank desolation. [15] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING OUR FATHER We may well take this for the first truth we can lay to our hearts when we would find the true attitude of the soul before the God and Father of us all. We must not crouch and tremble with our faces in the dust; for then we do what lies in our power to show we are not children, but slaves — shall I say? While as all good and gracious fathers love to have their children stand up well and hold their own before them in a true fashion, and feel sure in their hearts that, while he is so dear to them, they are also dear to him be- cause they are his very own, so I would be- lieve for his sake as well as for my own, that it cannot displease him, the God and Father of us all, to see me stand on my feet, and look up to him in all reverence frankly and sweetly, and order my cause before him in the faith that he is my Father and I am his son. JOY IN THE THORN We touch, right here, the element in the strength that Paul had while he had the thorn — the trouble itself, whatever it was, [16] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING held the new power. He found it was as much more to his life, as Calvary is more than Cana to the life of the world, and then he gave up all idea of getting rid of the thorn. So, as we can see that not the weddings, but the crucifixions are the mighty things of his- tory; not the festivals, but the battles; not the ovations, but the martyrdoms, — we find the first grace that can come from heaven to help us bear our thorn in the flesh, whatever it be, — a personal misfortune ; inability to be all that we feel we ought to be; the posses- sion of a passion we have to watch with un- slumbering care; pain that defies all doctors; darkness of the spirit, against which there is no argument; the sore of a bitter old sin; a home in which there is no light of a true love; a great and incurable disappointment; or the death of our brightest a'nd best — I say these may be the very conditions of the grace which is made "perfect in our weakness." THE WORD WITH POWER The Sermon on the Mount has come un- scathed through the fires of time, clothing itself in purer meanings and winning nobler [17] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING interpretations. Our little systems have grown and ripened, and left their seed to be sown again for finer harvests ; but this abides as it was gathered from those who had treas- ured it in good and honest hearts, sincere and sweet forevermore, as the bread which com- eth down from heaven. "LET YOUR LIGHT SHINE" The argument which goes right home to the heart where all words fail is the argu- ment of the light shining clear through the windows of sincere and true souls, — yours, or mine — when we keep the glass sweet and fair. Then, as I listen again, I see that gra- cious look, my holy preacher casts on those who hear him and still note the emphasis he hides in the words "let your light shine;" and then it is as if he had said to them what he would say to us also. You will go home from hearing this word of mine to your fishing and farming, your vines and olives, and flocks of sheep, or your business in the town over yon- der; and for the most of you this is all you can do, or ever will do while you live on the earth. And now the truth I would tell you [18] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING is this: that you can let your light so shine there on the land or the water, in your homes, and in the business you have to mind, that you may live to pay your way like honest men and true, and good women and true, — so shine that there will be a divine worth in it for the world you live in, and for all time to come; and then the word shall be said to you when your work is done: "Well done, thou good and faithful servant! enter thou into the joy of thy Lord." Very little you may be able to do as you think of it, beyond what you must take hold of tomorrow, and the kindly and neighborly service, also, which comes with the day by day. But this world and your life, these are in your Father's hands as surely as the innermost and the ut- termost heavens are; and you serve him then as surely as the angels of the presence which stand about the throne. Therefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them." This is the law and the prophets. And if ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your chil- dren, how much more shall your Father in heaven give good gifts to them that ask him ! [19] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING — this is your faith. And behold the fowls of the air, who sow not, nor reap, nor gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feedeth them; while not a sparrow falleth to the ground without his will, and ye are more than many sparrows, — this is your trust. And blessed are the lowly of heart, and bless- ed those that mourn, and blessed the meek, and blessed the merciful, and blessed the pure in heart, for they shall see God, — these are your beatitudes. And a good tree cannot bear evil fruit, — this is your evidence. And now go home and let your light so shine be- fore men. OIL WITH THE LAMP The reserves of life mean more than mere living. They mean what the Master hinted at, — an enduring brightness breaking into joy, because the man who has the most life, and still knows how to use and store it, has usually the most worth of life. The grace and glamour of existence come of the overplus of oil. Show me a man who is run- ning forever on a close margin, and I will show you a man who has more than his share [20] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING of dark, grimy days, one to whom the beauty of the spring, the glory of the summer, the ripeness of the fall, and the white splendor of winter often come on bootless errands. The reserves mean not mere living, then, but what gives life worth in this simple and natural sense; and we may all cry, who have these empty lamps, to our sorrow, — " ' Tis life of which our nerves are scant, Life, and not death, for which we pant, More life, and fuller still, we want." THE FITNESS OF THINGS The old pious conclusion that what is uni- versal must be best is as good here as any- where. It cannot be that corn and trees are, as a rule, all right, and men and women all wrong. If it were better that we should see clear through from the hither to the other side, then to see would be the rule ; and only not to see the exception. No doctrine can be more divine, did we know it, than this of the fitness of things — the essential harmony of the world and life with some vast purpose of the Maker. God is righteous (right wise) [21] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING in all his ways. I do not envy either the phil- osophy, or the faith, that can give evil such a dreadful advantage over good, as to con- cede to it any power beyond what pleases God. And no dilemma in the doctrine that this is the best possible world can ever be so cruel as that which follows forever, steady as its own shadow, the doctrine that it is the worst. WORTH BELIEVING It is the everlasting gospel of the grace of God which touches our whole life. Not a plant or flower in his garden just like an- other, and no best without a better hanging in the heavens we must capture and bring down. And the soil, how harsh and poor it is for some ! and the sun, how late he shines for some ! and the things that stab and sting, how cruel they are to root and stalk in some ! And then we say, "What a wreck!" But this is God's husbandry as well as ours. "All souls are mine," saith the Lord; and if we will but turn to him as the flower turns to what sun there is, and make the best of the harsh and poor soil in which our life may be [22] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING set to grow, then there shall be a seed saved and sown again for the " Immortal life in never failing worlds, For mortal creatures conquered and secure." THE GREAT DIVINE SERMON Thomas Hughes says preachers should cal- culate their sermons, as the astronomer makes his almanacs, to the meridian of the people and the place they are intended for; but the Sermon on the Mount, to my own mind, is true to all the meridians, because its noon and night find their parallel always on the lines where the Lord God is the sun. And so it is as true to my soul's windows as to any, and as true to any as to mine, running through all the latitudes and longitudes Paul thinks of when he says God, who made the world and all things therein, is not far from every one of us, seeing that in him we live, and move, and have our being. THE CERTAIN END Fortune and position, weight for weight, with what faculty the Maker has given him, are just as sure to come to a man in this coun- [23] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING try as the crop to the farmer and the web to the weaver, if he will only let patience have her perfect work. The bee does not more surely lay up her honey, or the squirrel his nuts in store enough to last until May brings the new bloom, and the tender shoots break forth in the woods, than a man, with the same temperate and enduring patience, can lay up life enough and all life needs, to last him from the time when the frost seals his faculties to the new spring that waits where the Lord is the sun. But what multitudes want to do is to trust themselves in some short cut across the dominion of the sworn enemy of this angel of patience. CHEERFULNESS Does my life, as I must live it, trouble me? and my fortune? Are these all a muddle, as poor Stephen says in the story? Then I must lay this truth well to my heart: that the men who win are seldom those who are always peering and pondering on the dark side. They are those who get heaven and the sun for the background to their own best striving; and then the fairest fortune pos- [24] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING sible to us comes through that wholesome light. To lose this is to lose my strongest ally, and I put a cheerful courage on when I stand with my face to the sun. The success- ful men in the long fight with fortune are the cheerful men, or those, certainly, who find this fair background of faith and hope. Columbus but for this had never found our New World, or men like Sam Adams struck the bell for the Revolution in the great old days. Is there trouble again with that which lies deeper? Are my health and strength in peril? Well, I think there can be little doubt of this : that those who are forever looking on the dark side of their illnesses and ailments, peer- ing in toward the shadows when they should face the light, toss away the finest chances left them to get well again; while those who strive for a cheerful background of faith and hope either win health, or if this is not to be, win some high blessing which may come by sickness. WHO IS MY BROTHER? If He who came to preach the gospel to [25] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING the poor taught us one truth above another we must never forget, it was this of a real human brotherhood, founded on the holy truth that the Lord is not only the Maker, he is also the Father of us all. BEGINNING AGAIN I know how hard it is to begin again and meet life cheerfully and hopefully, when you are shorn of that which gave life its bloom and glory; to begin again and throw out new tendrils from the heart and climb again toward the sun. But this must be done if we will save through our losing. We also must look forward and step out in the faith that death has only dissolved what we could cling to through these dear entanglements of time and sense; but, after this, death has no more dominion, and life begins again. And we must do this because there is no hope and no help, but only hurt, in this lingering over that which turns to bitterness and hardness in so many forlorn men and women we have known. [26] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING GOD'S ANSWER When we remember that this life each man and woman is living, is to the liver by far the most precious thing he can have to do with; how its experiences, lessons, and re- sults enter into the very substance of the soul; we must not wonder if some things we have at heart do not come to pass so readily as we may think they ought, being so surely the gift of Heaven, but lag and linger after all our longing, and the endeavor which is in itself a prayer, as if Heaven is determined in- deed we shall not have them, or is deaf to our cry. It is possible that the very magnitude and worth of the thing we want may be the reason why it is delayed, as well as that the things which come into our possession in waiting for it and striving for it, are quite as good to have and to hold as the thing itself. AS YE SOW We only get out of any endeavor a worth in proportion to that we put into it. THE KEY-NOTE OF THE GOSPELS When we find our way to the heart of the [27] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING Sermon on the Mount we love to believe that a divine inspiration has given to it the place it holds as the key-note of the Gospels. It is so full of good cheer that, when we take it to our own hearts, we find our life is shorn of very many of the troubles we go half-way to meet, and so full of the divine truth and grace that it comes home to the sincere soul in some such way as a sum well done comes home to a man with a good head for figures ; while if we believed and accepted the truth it tells us, there would be no more trouble or dismay, either about the way of life or its consummation, and no painful surmise about the doctrines and dogmas which lie outside its sunny boundaries, because the inward life and light we may find there would make the whole earth luminous to the hearer as it was to the preacher, and as much of heaven as we need see through the veil. PATIENCE OF HOPE Do I speak to some who are in the heart of the drought, and to whom the plants, the flowers of the former years seem to be blighted past all hope of refreshing, and the [28] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING investments we made in life and life's worth in the brave May-days, turning to dust as we fear? I must — you must — we must — be faithful and hopeful; and then I know what will befall you who are still in the springtime of your life. The time will come when you will regret, as I do now, that you ever lost a morning brooding over the dryness and the dust. And what shall we do who are in the after- noon or the eventide of life ? We must hold on to our faith and our hope in the life that now is, and in that which is to come, nurtured and made strong by the mother milk of love for whatsoever things are true, and lovely, and of a good report, lift hand and face still to the promise of the new morning and then these last years will be to the first what the harvest has been to the sowing and planting. Be anxious for nothing save this: that our faith shall grow forever stronger in the brooding, and our hope soar higher and send down stronger notes, so that the last years may clasp hands with those we remember with a most tender love. [29] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING GLORY OF THE COMMONPLACE My own true day's duty is the most blessed thing for me in all the world. Have I been dreaming to my loss and theirs who look to me, and done treason through my dreams to God and his Christ and to my own soul? Here are the first conditions of a truer manhood waiting in my sorrow and shame in my day's nearest duty. Am I in trouble, feeling that all the stanchions and safeguards on earth and in heaven have given way? The first stroke I can make for a new and nobler reality lies for me also in the day's instant and imperative duty. Do the great mysteries touch me with their pain of life, and death, and the life to come? I must not go running hither and yonder to have them solved. They will open to me while I stand by my duty week-day, or Sun- day, and my day's work for God and man. Is there some grander destiny waiting for me, as there was for Simon Peter? I can win out of my very sin and shame and by rug- ged ways and hard as they were for him. The princedom, the throne, and the crown rest still and forever on the simple and true [30] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING day's duty and the good day's work, though it be no more there and then than this Simon Peter held in his heart when he said, "I go a-fishing;" for still " The path of duty is the way to glory." KINSHIP THROUGH KINDNESS I can teach God really just so far as I am good. Christ will be divine greatly by my divinity. I am my own proof, before let- ters, of the intrinsic worth of human nature. I shall not have much trouble in proving to a man God is our Father, if I can prove to him I am his brother. THE PATTERN FOR US ALL There, enthroned in the heavens, sits one whose life is the light of men, because, beyond all men, there came into his heart, as he stood at the carpenter's bench, the faith that he had a divine work to do in this world for God and for his hu- man family. And so he went forth on his divine errand, with faith and hope and love burning in his heart. He was despised and [31] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING rejected of men, but they bore him through that. There was one day we know of, when he cried, "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" but they bore him through that day. The divine destiny he had believed in never seemed such an utter failure as when he was dying on the cross; but they bore him through that day. He died that he might live to a diviner purpose, in the very rose bloom of his life; but they were there with him on the tree. And so, men and women working for God, working with God, for his truth and life, it is almost natural, when you see what appalling forces of evil you have to encounter, and how slowly the truth seems to win its way, that you should be ready sometimes to say, What is the use lifting the face and the hand toward the heavens, and waiting for the downpour of His blessed rains on the plants of His grace? We will mind the day's work we must mind, and let the rest go. But no, no, I say. I must have faith in my faith, then, and the hope that is not seen, and the love which beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things, and never faileth; for so [32] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING shall we help and strive toward the new heavens and the new earth — the kingdom of God. OPPORTUNITY They are wide pages the angel opens in the book of life at Christmas and when we do our best, we cannot do it quicker than he can write it down. THE FATHER OF LIGHTS Do we say I am of this sect, or the other, a follower of Fox, the apostle of this in- ward light, or Wesley, or Channing? Well enough, I answer; but if that is all, you are only a reflector of another man's light, and good as this may be, it is not the best. The best for you is yours, the best for me is mine, if I look to the lamp and keep clean and fair the glass. This light which shone so strong and clear from the Master's heart as he sat on the hillside, and still shines so strong and clear, came to him from the fountain of light, the Father of lights, the primal source, the sun which lights the suns and tips the glow- worm with its lambent lamp, and thence [33] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING comes our light, or should come; and we only follow him truly when we follow him to the fountain, the Father, the eternal, im- mortal, and invisible, who is light and in him is no darkness at all. THE RICH AND THE POOR They told me once when I went to Niagara that, when they would bridge the great chasm, they sent a kite over first and that drew a string. And the string drew a cable which held up a man, who got things started for the superb Suspension Bridge, which helps to clasp the continent together, and holds us all who see it in the spell of its beauty. And so from these fine threads of human sympathy, these unwindings of the heart-strings, and the purse-strings, these wings of a true and tender concern which take us across the chasm between the rich and the poor, we can reach those who, by na- ture or fortune, have yet to be where they be- long, and win them to believe that any true gospel to them stands, first of all, for the good human brotherhood, and then this must follow as the spring follows the winter. That [34] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING those we can reach in this way will be touched by the truth that there is not only a better and nobler life waiting their striving and winning on the earth and in the heavens, but right friendly hearts to feel this sweet concern for them, with hands to clasp theirs and to hide holy meanings they could not dream of in those words as true as they are imperative, — " The rich and the poor meet together ; The Lord is the maker of them all." WEW SONGS Are we looking backward toward the ten- der light of a day that is dead? Believe me when I say a new song can be born of that backward glance, and then the days will not be dead. They will rise again and plume their wings, soaring and singing of God's eternal day. Or are we in the thick of the fight so many must make in these times against what we must deem to be our evil fortune (let the years be my authority) and a fortune as sad, sometimes, as can well fall to our lot? Yet, I say, we may hide a song in its heart which will compel that wheel we [35] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING hear of to turn to our singing as it will never turn to our sad complaints. And I know when I say this how easy it may be to sing them in the youth-time, the strong prime, or the ripe old age, in which all is well with us in life and fortune; and to this I say Amen. But is not this true, that a nobler song may come through the shadows than can ever come through the light, as they tell me the sweetest bird-songs are caught in a darkened cage, and as we know the songs of "In Me- moriam" that go most sweetly to the heart in our time were sung over the dust of the poet's dearest friend? RESTING NOT IDLING Beautiful is the activity which works for good, and beautiful the stillness which waits for good; blessed the self-sacrifice of the one, and blessed the self-forgetfulness of the other. There are times, I think, when we should all be glad because we are quiet ; when both the strong motion and the strong emo- tion of existence should be over and done with for a spell, and all things be as nought to us in the presence of a pure stillness [36] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING which, like the great sea I saw, only drinks in the sun and glasses his brightness with the whole heart. ANOTHER CHANCE We think of those poor damsels turning away from the closed doors, but still saying, as they go home: We have learned our les- son, we will never be caught again. We will see to the reserves henceforth, and enter with the rest into the light and joy. It is but the suggestion of the way the infinite tender pity and love must open toward hapless human souls left down here in the dark, — the faith we love to cherish who dare, that life is a school in which we learn by failing as well by as succeeding; the faith that no man need sit down in despair even here and say, That was my last chance, or have those who care for him say, What he was down here he will be forever. I can tolerate no such conception of the love of God. Only this can be true, I say, that our extremity is the divine oppor- tunity, no matter where we are; and when one door shuts, another opens, is as good an axiom heavenward as it ever can be earth- [37] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING ward. We must submit to the sorrow and loss; but we shall learn the lesson, and enter at last into the joy. The battle cry of the regiment when they must again meet the foe was the name of a fight which had covered them with shame and confusion of face ; and when this new day closed, they had burned out the disgrace, set the smoke of the old shame itself ablaze by their valor, came home with the light burning high and clear, and were met with great sobs of joy by men who thought they had forgot- ten the secret of tears. And we can all do this, by God's help and blessing, so that no man need despair here; while this is the grander and diviner truth, — that no man will be permitted to despair hereafter when he has well learned the lesson of the oil in the vessel with the lamp. DOING ONE'S BEST It is not for a moment my idea that be- cause the great Husbandman will certainly make the best of the multitudes that are like the wild fruit of the wilderness, and of those that are like the smaller and more ordinary [38] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING growth of the field and forest, and of all the rest we have been in the habit of leaving out of the measure of good fruit to God, — we are to be satisfied with anything short of the ut- termost goodness, largeness, and ripeness we can possibly attain to. It is always the dan- ger of our confidence in God's providence, that we shall come to think it will be satis- fied with our improvidence. Only as we make the best of what we have, and so become the best we can be, shall we win the great "well done;" and no man or woman ought ever to be satisfied with anything less than to try for it. Patience, perseverance, good endeavor through storm and shine, the uplifted heart, the pure life, the large sympathy, the faith that was in Christ, and the truth, and the love, — these will bring into my own life an ever-ripening perfection, and save me from the poor perversity of thinking that God has not an infinite store of fruit as good as mine, or better. " So will I gather strength and hope anew, For I do know God's patient love perceives, Not what we did, but what we tried to do ; And though the ripened ears be sadly few, He will accept our sheaves." [39] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING WHEN GOLD IS GOOD Money to a man is like water to a plant, only useful as long as it promotes growth. Like water in fountain, or tank, keep it flow- ing and it blesses, keep it stagnant and it kills. PATIENCE Patience must have her perfect work in our whole relation to our fellow men. It is very sad to read of the shameful things that have been done in the name of Religion, for the sake of conformity; how the fagot has burned, and the rack has wrung. We cannot believe that we could ever do that, and very likely we never should; yet we are, most of us, inquisitors in our way, and want to force human beings into conformity with the idea we have of fitness, though it may not be theirs at all. FAITH AND HOPE Faith, hope, and love will all clasp hands to bear us over the dry and dusty times, I say, in our life; and while faith inspects, hope will expect, faith will look inward, and hope will [40] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING look upward, and the light in the eyes of faith will grow strong, while the light in the eyes of hope will grow clear, soaring above the mists that lie on our earthward lot. Faith will be quiet in possession, while hope will grow eager in expectation, singing her matin and her vesper songs ; and then faith will be the evidence of things not seen, while hope will be the evidence of things foreseen, and both together will be nurtured and made strong on the mother milk of love. Yes; and when your faith or mine must still lie low, just able to brood and flutter, — shall I say? — and no more, and the wings of our hope are heavy and cannot make good the poet's line, — " The music soars within the linte lark, And so the lark soars." let us then lift the face and the hand toward the blessed heavens, and say with good dame Winthrop in the story, "If we do our part, Master Warner, it is not to be believed as them that are above will come short of theirn ; and so we must trusten, Master War- ner, we must trusten." [41] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING NO ROOM FOR ANXIETY I will rest me in the parable of the over- plus of blossom. I will say I am more than many trees. I will stand within the law of their life, and they shall stand within the law of mine. I will not be troubled or dismayed overmuch because this poverty has come where I look for wealth. With these unat- tained desires and these withered aspirations I will not be over-troubled, I will not give way to despair. I will say to my soul: "If that bush afire with the spring splendor could so storm one poor halting man in Midian that it seemed as if God spake verily to him out of the bush, and the fruit of that blos- soming was for the deliverance of a nation and the help of the world, then my fair hopes and aspirations, which have come to such scant fruitage as I look at them now, may have been fruit in their own time to others who needed just such a pulse of inspiration and aspiration to help them on their way as I had in my nature when it was all radiant with the blossoming of my spring." God knows beyond all my knowing, and he alone can measure the lapse between the blossom [42] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING and the fruit. Let me stay sweet and trust- ful then, and do the best I may on to the fall of my year. THE SILENT CALL Now believe me, God hides some ideal in every human soul. At some time in our life we feel a trembling, fearful longing to do some good thing. Life finds its noblest spring of excellence in this hidden impulse to do our best. There is a time when we are not content to be such merchants, or doctors, or lawyers as we see on the dead level or be- low it. The woman longs to glorify her womanhood as sister, wife, or mother. . . . Here is God, — God standing silently at the door all day long, — God whispering to the soul, that to be pure and true is to succeed in life, and whatever we get short of that will burn up like stubble, though the whole world try to save it. A SONG OF TRUST There is a bird, it is said, that will never learn the song his master will have him sing while his cage is full of light. He listens and [43] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING learns a snatch of this, a trill of that, a poly- glot of all the songs in the grove, but never a separate and entire melody of his own. But the master covers the cage, makes the way all dark about him, then he will listen to the one song he has to sing, and try and try again until at the last his heart is full of it; then when he has caught the melody the cage is uncovered. ASCENDING ANGELS It is wonderful to notice what a great part these angels that ascend play in the develop- ment of the life and truth as it is in Jesus; or it would be wonderful, if we did not see all about us now, how clear it is, that when a life has trued itself to divine standards fairly, then whatever comes to it is somehow trans- muted into fine gold for its service. To me the shadow in the life of Jesus is only less in- estimable than the light; the most adverse things seem to be as indispensable as the most felicitous. His homelessness, his loneliness, his hindrances, his sufferings — all come trooping from below, hard, black, forbid- ding in the distance; but when they light on [44] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING him they are angels. We love him more be- cause he had not where to lay his head, than if he had been lodged in the palace of the Herods. We could never have had some of the most priceless things in the Gospels but for the fierce bigotry of Scribe and Pharisee vexing his righteous soul. The very Prodi- gal is made minister to the most pregnant illustration in the Gospels of God's great mercy, while the lost woman stands for the most touching instance of his own great hu- manity. Nay, the heartless priest and Levite cannot escape the mighty transmutation; and the darkest, saddest, most deplorable event in time — his agony and cruel death — is the most significant, the very central circum- stance in the history of man. Now these things — and all things like them, as they come up about the Son of Man, are com- pelled into a divine service. Whatever the thing may be it is no matter; when once it touches him it becomes an angel. From the lowest to the highest, from above and below, their nature always waits to be revealed in the nature of the man to whom they come. [45] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING THE LOGIC OF FAITH Why will men not be as full of faith in the meaning and purpose of their lives as of their flowers ? Is man alone the neglected step-child? are his fortunes alone misfor- tunes? are we much worse than the lilies? Or is it not of all things true, that as man rises nearest of all on this earth to the image of the Infinite, so he is nearest of all on this earth to the Providence that enfolds and blesses all? NO HARM IN LOVING THE WORLD I have got hold of a lop-sided truth when I make earth naught and heaven everything. This earth is my home now as certainly as heaven will be, and the life that now is is a blessing as surely as that which is to come. This life is not a vapor, the flash of a shuttle through the loom, a tale that is told, a with- ered grass blade — and the truest seer that ever looked into its heart — Jesus Christ — never said it was. It is the most solid and certain thing I know of in this universe after the life of God. Is it a cross? It is also a crown? Is it a burden? It is a blessing. [46] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING Are there thorns in it? — there are also roses. Do mortal poisons grow in it? Let me find out their secret and I can make them divine medicines. I am quoting Job sitting in his ashes when I say hard things about life — not Jesus sitting on the Mount, or by the shore. Let me be true in my living; then I shall re- joice that I live and shall not fear to die. A great German has said that "to the blessed eternity itself there is no other handle than this instant." Do I think of God in his heaven? He is here, or he is not there. Of angels? Angels are all about me. Do I be- lieve in heaven as somewhere to go? It is first something to be. Heaven is a temper, then a place. TRANSMUTATION If you really love at all — if you love a dog, you have that in your heart which may grow to be as mighty as the love of the first arch- angel. If I can love that I do love with the love which is life, with a true heart fervently, as I open my heart to the grace and goodness of loving, the breath of heaven will draw through and fan the flame, kindling this way [47] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING and that, until the whole soul is on fire with a love that warms and energizes whatever it touches like the sun. It is a divine life, but its kindling is in a human love. THE STANDARD FOR ALL STRIVING To my own heart and mind the Sermon on the Mount is the holy and perfect truth touching my life I am to strive after always and with all my heart. It is to be the inspira- tion and the standard for my striving, but never the despair when its words seem to challenge me to meet their august demand at once and forever, or I shall go to the wall. I know that this is of no more use than if I was learning to become an architect, and An- gelo should rise from the dead, and say to me, "Now go to work at once, and build a cathedral equal to mine yonder in Rome, or quit the business." Tell me I must attain to this perfection in life and life's worth the first time I try, and then I cannot even try, poor creature as I am, any more than I would try to lift the great Krupp gun ; but tell me this is the standard to which I may attain, that I find in my sermon [48] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING the challenge, the inspiration, and the incen- tive, the mark and prize of my high calling I shall hold in my heart, and never dare to say this is good enough so long as I fall short of its light and leading, and that this is not to be done by my own lone self, but that all heaven is on my side, and is bound to see me win soon or late. Then I shall begin to find the true meaning and purpose of the Ser- mon on the Mount. The divine worth of it for me will lie in my steadfast purpose to be so perfect, and in the way I set my face and step out; for let this be settled once for all, and then there may be better men than I am in this attainment, yet they shall not be so good, because I may be pushing forward while they are falling back. FOR NONE OF US LIVETH TO HIMSELF Humanity and kindness are the leading strings of the human heart. THE PARABLE OF THE RESERVES The sadder doom may come of a shattered hope and a heart like stone. No haunting any more of the light of a new dawn. No [49] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING warm pulse toward earth or heaven. Cold ashes only where the fire was and no more fuel. Dead already, while I still have a name to live. Paralysis in the centres of the soul, — the saddest sight in all the world. The surmise that things can be no worse, and I don't care, just dead hopes, heedless of any- thing life can give me beyond the dead line. This may come to me when there is no oil in the vessel with the lamp, hopes which rest only on things which perish in the using, and a love which has never penetrated beyond the senses. There are no reserves in a life like this to meet the demand. I must still be able to fall back on what is unseen and eternal, or here and now I cannot enter into the light and joy. The men and women you find in this sore strait and stress are those to whom what we call a good time is the great purpose of their life. But the cry comes we must all answer. The oil is not forthcoming; and here on earth is the end. They wist not that these cannot be the final conditions of our faith and hope and love, that there is a soul within the senses to which we must cleave. No reserves [50] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING are laid up in these shallow, hand-to-mouth ways; and so at last it is as if we heard Azrael, the angel, cry, "Put out the light, and then — put out the light." But the men and women whose faith sends down roots into the unseen and eternal, and whose love, while it fills the eye with light and the ear with music, still loves the vison more than the sight, — and the soul time cannot alter save to make more beautiful, or death touch except to glorify, — these do not turn hard and cold and say, I will hope and love no more. There is oil in the vessel with the lamp; and heaven and earth may pass away, but the reserves shall not pass away. PREPARATION FOR A GOOD OLD AGE Duty well done, for its own sake, for God's sake, and for the sake of the common- wealth of men. When a man works only for himself he gets neither rest here, nor re- ward hereafter. When I work for myself and live for myself, I exhaust myself; but when I work for others, wisely and well, I work for God too; and for my work I get that bread which cometh down from heaven. [51] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING And duty can find an infinite outcome. It can nurse a sick child, or teach a healthy one. It can be John Pounds, or John Milton. It can found the firms and factories that are the roots of civilization, and the schools and churches and libraries that are its life's blood. In all these ways, and all others, the preparation for a good old age is my duty unselfishly done, trusting to God, and living purely. OUR IDEA OF GOD The glass through which we see God is darkened by our own breath, some shadow of the dark or bright we cast of our own free will. But more than all that is this primitive mysterious shadow of the race — the shadow cast by blood, and climate, and circumstance, determining for all men — save it may be one in a thousand — whether their Supreme shall be revealed in the thunders of Sinai, or the sorrows of Olivet, or the glories of Zion — a power that waits on our birth to take us up and mould us and which smiles to hear us say, What I will be, I will. For as you find the Soldanella Alpina piercing through the snows [52] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING upon the lower Alps, leaning its frail purple blossom over the fearful, icy cliff, and the Victoria Regia in the hot lagoons of the South, opening her vast shining petals to glisten in the sun, but never the great lily on the mountain, or the blue-bell in the lake, so the idea of God is moulded more or less by the great ranges of race, and the intimate life- blood of the country. USEFULNESS Are you in the store or the work-shop, the market or on the farm, in the home, in the study, in the studio, in the school? Is it a poem through which the light will shine, a picture, a book, a lesson, an invention, a ledger, a wagon-wheel, a horse well shod, a stone wall, a business that touches both the poles, everything, anything which creates and does not waste and destroy. Labor is prayer. The light shines in and from what we do, when the loyal heart is in it, and the faithful hand; and the Lord and Master only set his seal on the divine sermon as it stands in the Gospel for all men to read, be- cause he made the truth he tells, and the light [53] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING that shines in and through it all on the noblest and best we can be and do real to us, and true as the way, the truth, and the life. AN UNFAILING INSPIRATION The Sermon on the Mount is not the de- spair, but the inspiration for your life and mine. Had it not been possible for us to reach upward toward its holy bidding and meet its holy claims, it would never have been preached. The preacher never wastes his words as we do. Very often they may mean more than he could pack into that poor folk speech he had to use, but they never mean less. He is sincere with us as the day. . . . When I want to find some sure word of God to help and inspire me, when my life is full of trouble and dismay, and heart and flesh fail, I will sun myself in the Beatitudes, or if I would touch the very nerve of clean- ness or of gentleness or of the love which never faileth. If I want to give so that it shall be like God's own giving, or would pray so that the answer shall abide within the ask- ing, or to trust in the eternal love which clasps my life all about and the eternal provi- [54] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING dence which holds me fast, let me take the sermon to my heart; and it shall be with me as when Luther saw the small birds swinging on the spray in the gloaming, and flying forth in the morning, singing their song, and quite sure of their provision for the day, because they were sure of themselves. BEAUTY OF ASPIRATION As in the spring-time on the trees all about us there are ten blossoms that will bloom through their brief day and then just shower down in the wind, to one which will set and ripen into good fruit, so on the tree of my life may there not be ten beautiful aspira- tions to one good fruition? and yet may not these aspirations themselves be very sweet and good in their own way and be counted as the blossoms are in the glory of the year? Surely it must be true that they come, as the blossoms come, out of the overplus of the divine grace and of our own abounding life, not to dishearten us and lead us to doubt, but rather to believe in this good Providence as insuring us a grand good margin; to believe that God feels toward us as we feel toward [55] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING our children when we are good enough and wise enough to be content with such simple and scant fruition as they can attain to, never reckoning with them over-sharply as to what has become of their wealth of good inten- tions, but listening still with a large and ten- der interest to the endless story of what they mean to do, and glad to hear about it be- cause the aspiration is very beautiful to us and very good, even when we know all the time they will forget ten of these intentions where they will carry one out clear to the end and make it bring forth good fruit. THE FORE-ELDERS OF HOPE " Tribulation worketh patience, and patience experi- ence, and experience hope.' 1 '' — Rom. v: 3, 4. This is the truth the apostle will tell, who spake as he was moved by the Holy Ghost, — that Hope does not stand first in the divine order or in the lessons we have to learn as he had learned them when he wrote this letter. She is not the foremother from whose heart all that is noblest and best comes to us, as we are apt to imagine, but is the great grand- child, shall I say, in the heaven-born succes- [56] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING sion. Born of Experience, Experience of Pa- tience, and Patience of Tribulation, while the last born is still the best, never going back- ward, but always forward, upward and never downward, while each is essential to the other in the whole sum and product, and points toward this conclusion: that, if we fall on Tribulation, we must bear ourselves nobly, or we can never know the true worth of Pa- tience; then we must let Patience have her perfect work, or she can never round and ripen into Experience, the essence of all true wisdom; and nurse and treasure this in its turn, or we may never find through these three the last and choicest boon of Hope. LIFE TRANSFIGURED Here is the truth we find in our Bible, the book which helps us as no other book can help us, — the word of God, — when we once find the key. The men in there who help and inspire us to the best purpose are those who cannot and will not be content to believe in the shadows, but will have God's presence and his divine providence, — himself in a word, — for a background for the design; [57] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING and for this they will struggle and strive if they must, and wait for the mists to rise and the heavens to grow clear, and then, in Psalm and Prophecy, in Gospel and Epistle, they say and sing these things we hold as the choicest treasure that ever came forth from the human soul. HOW THE SOUL'S STRENGTH IS WON The great German said, "Man is not the creature of circumstances, but the architect, and can use them nobly or basely in the up- building of his manhood," and I would say that, when this is our plan and purpose, the Scripture will be fulfilled, "He shall give his angels charge over thee to keep thee in all thy ways." THE SOUL'S TRUE ATTITUDE I think that the steady insistence of those who hold self-abasement is the truest atti- tude of the soul, drives many who want still to maintain their self-respect into what those who call themselves by evil names before Heaven and the Most High brand as infi- delity. They will not abase themselves be- [58] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING fore their fellow-men, nor will they before God, and, it may be, prefer to think over-well of themselves rather than so ill, and say in their hearts: If I must do this as the price of the divine favor, I will not pay the price- let who will fall down in the dust, I will stand on my feet ; and then, if I cannot be what you call a Christian, I will be content to be a man. Need I say that this is the truth which lies within the heart of the Gospels, and espe- cially in the matchless revelation of the father's love in the parable of the prodigal, when the poor fellow returns from the har- lots and the swine? He is heart full of this determination to fall down with his face in the dust, and has quite made up his mind what he will say : I am no more worthy to be called thy son; make me as one of thy hired servants. And well he might for here was the true humility and reverence bathed in tears. But the father will hear of no such abase- ment as the son would commit. He stops him midway in his story and his purpose to fall down in the dust. This is his son; and so he falls on his neck and kisses him, com- [59] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING mands that he be robed again in the best robe, and decked again with the jewel of his son- ship, and that there shall be feasting and great joy. So our divine Teacher would show us in a parable the faith he holds always in his heart, — that it is not in the abasement of serfs the God and Father of us all would have us come to him, because we are still his sons, and servility cannot be the soul's true attitude when we would order our cause before him. THE ABUNDANT LIFE We may be able to say no word to which the world will listen; may have no faculty, possess no knowledge, be as poor as the widow with her two mites which made one farthing, and believe that we do not believe anything. But because we love with the love which is life, we shall have the eloquence which surpasses speech, and the intuition that dives below the faculty of the seers, the knowledge before which the lamp of knowl- edge pales, as a taper before the sun ; the gold which is good and the devotion that is better than burning — the devotion of loving. Heaven will then be in the soul : we shall not seek it, we shall carry it. [60] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING MINISTERING ANGELS I think we do not realize as we ought what ministries cluster round our life to aid us in being what we may be — angels — angels every one thick about us every day, bearing us in their hands and lifting us up when we are fallen. Their faces gladden us when we do well and grow very sad at us when we sin. Ay, and in some way those that we speak of and think of as in heaven love us still with all the old love of earth and all the new love of heaven together. So because they love us still we are still one — our love in theirs and they in ours. We touch hands in spirit and the light that is not the light of the sun cov- ers and enfolds us all. RESOLUTION We are not things, but men who can say, I will and I will not. We hold the winnings of the million years in heart and brain, in hand and foot, and can waste the treasure or win more as we take heed to our ways, or are heedless and so fall back towards the rude and base beginnings. [61] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING A LIGHT ON THE WAY While we may not know what trials wait on any of us, we can believe that as the days in which Job wrestled with his dark maladies are the only days that make him worth re- membrance, and but for which his name had never been written in the book of life, so the days through which we struggle, finding no way, but never losing the light, will be the most significant we are called to live. In- deed, men in all ages have wrestled with this problem of the difference between the con- ception and the condition. Literature is full of these appeals, from the doom that is on us to the love that is over us — from the God we fear to the God we worship. The very Christ cries once, My God, why hast thou forsaken me? Yet never did our noblest and best, our apostles, martyrs, and confessors, flinch finally from their trust that God is light; that life is divine; that there is a way though we may not see it; and have gone singing of their deep confidence by fire and cross into the shadow of death. It is true — nay, truest of all — that men who suffered countless ills "in battle for the true and just" [62] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING have had the strongest conviction like old Latimer, that a way would open in those mo- ments when it seemed most impossible. Their light on the thing brought a commanding assurance that there must somewhere, some- time, be a light on the way. SYMPATHY WITH OUR KIND I know of no way so sure to the loftiest and holiest life of heaven as that which lies directly through a deep, quick sympathy with the life on earth. When we lose that we lose what the sap is to the tree; the mediator be- tween our being and the life about us and above us; the secret of all our growth and fruitfulness as of all our glory and joy. "SURSUM CORDA" The worth of what we have done is but the foretelling of what we shall do, as we hear and answer the challenge from on high, "Son of Man, stand on thy feet and I will speak to thee." Say still, if we must, that many of these woes are strokes of God, strokes of his rod ; but I love rather to believe the rod is there, but it is rather as the rod in [63] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING the hand of the mentor at the blackboard when these things befall us, pointing out the way we shall solve the problems, so that when we have well learned our lesson, as my faith stands, we shall hear no more about the dark and terrible strokes of God, but only of his hand laid on us in perpetual benediction. THE WAY TO WIN I must look out for myself as if I was the one momentous factor in the sum, and yet forever fall back on the eternal strength, as if that alone was mine, as indeed it is. And because this truth lies in the heart of any faith or any religion worth the name, a faith and a life which will hold as true the terms touched by the old prophet, "What is re- quired of thee, O man, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" while, the more sincere and true we are in this walk with God and his Christ, the less likely we shall be to put on airs and pos- ture before the world as saints. FAITHFULNESS FIRST God gives no man a supreme place who will not do a supreme work. [64] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING HEAVEN'S ESTIMATE Men differ in their ways and nature as widely as the chestnut and cherry, or the walnut and the peach, and yet they may all be good men. Here, again, we set up our idea of what is good fruit in the face of heaven, and then find it hard to make out that there is much good in the world. We want men and women to be good according to the way we define goodness, and cannot believe in them if they cannot conform to our standard. A man may be as good at the heart of him as a man can be, but if he be sharp, or hard on the surface, we cannot quite be- lieve in such goodness as that ; we never think that such a man is a chestnut, or a walnut in the harvest of the year as good in his own way as any. Others, again, are all sweetness until you get at their heart and then you find a tang of bitterness and hardness you never expected. You wonder whether they can be really good men. You might as well wonder whether there can be a good plum, or peach, or cherry. Some, again, are wrapped up in husks that are dry, withered and dead; but down within the husk is the grain, and that [65] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING is good, and you know it; but you sorrow that the husk should be there, and never think it has to be there for a nature like that, or there would be no grain, and that by and by all this will be stripped away and done with. THE DISCERNING WILL TO CHOOSE There can be no hope well worth the name which fails to start in us all the springs of a good striving, first, last and always, which will make a close and true connection with the fruition for which we so often have to watch and wait ; and we are only wise when we catch the moments on the wing and turn them to the true and good account in the conduct of life. HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS The helpful life is the holy life. Holiness is help ; sin is hinderance. At whatever point we touch life to help it, in whatever way we help the world and do not hinder it, whether by our prayers, and songs, and sermons and industry in the church, or by the creation of a locomotive, or the construction of a rail- road, or the painting of a picture, or the [66] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING writing of a book, or the digging of a drain, or the forging of a horse-shoe, or the fight- ing of a battle — whatsoever thing we do, if we really help and do not hinder, then that is a holy life. And in whatever way we hin- der the world and stand in the way of its life, its healthy, hearty growth, by doing what will hurt or hinder men in the largest sense, then that, being the reverse of helpful, is a sinful life. The first principles of sin and holiness reach back into all creeds and churches so far as they stand true to life, and no more; and the touchstone of holiness is the organic law by which the best interests of the whole man can be secured in his rela- tion to the whole world, and all the men that are in it. THE SLOW, SURE JUDGMENT OF GOD In all the world and all time you shall find this to be true, and we can almost say this only : that in our human life, as in other treas- ures, we love best to find the gold in the dross and shard; and so on this ground also we may gladly believe that the dogma of our total human depravity is a grosser affront to [67] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING Heaven than it can be to you and me. I would not tamper with the evil things, the sins and shames, God knows, or call black white in their interest. We must hate sin in all its incarnations, and be sure that only fools make a mock at sin. But here is the truth we should always remember: that in God's great garden, which lies outside all the fences we have to make and maintain, that the fair- est and best may bloom and ripen, and there is not one worthless weed — not one. L RESTING IN GOD Joyfulness has its own place; gladness is the wine of life; but the life-blood comes of the struggle, and the Saviour is the Man of Sorrows. Yet we can never be sure of this as we should be, until the great thing Paul had, to make the best of his thorn, is ours also, and that is the uplifting and out-going of the heart to God. The out-going of the heart in faith, and prayer, and patience; and the confidence, that while I rest in the sense of my Father's wisdom and love, and do the best I can, things will be just about what they should be, and would be, if I were the sole r 68] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING being besides the Father in the universe, and he had no thought but to make everything come into harmony with my desire. It is always the old history over again we have to realize, before we can be entirely at rest. The cup is held to our lips, and we shrink back and cry, "Let this pass from me." But then the soul says, "The cup that my Father has given me, shall I not drink it?" and we say "Thy will be done," and then there is quiet. The sun shines in the soul then, though it is black night outside; and though we have to bear after that the kiss of the traitor, and the curse of the fiend, and the crown of thorns, all in the flesh together, and the cross and shame, we can bear all, and be all, while we rest in God, and look up to our great Forerunner, whose life from the time he came forth to help us bear our burdens was one long pain, the thorn always hurting, that so we might learn how the way to the loftiest life in heaven may lie through the roughest ways of earth. GOD'S HARVEST In all sorts of husks and shells, hard, [69] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING sharp, withered, and dead, God sees a good- ness we are always missing, and counts and treasures it in the granary of heaven. We think of him too much as one walking through the world, looking only for the best, and rejecting, with aversion, what is not the best. I tell you when he goes forth with his reapers to gather his harvest, he looks as lovingly now as once he looked through the eyes of Christ, his son, for all the good there is everywhere. There may be only a single grain in October where he put a grain in March : he bids his angels gather that as carefully as if it were a hundredfold. STORMING HEAVEN The best things in the divine life, as in the natural, will not come to us merely for the asking. True prayer is the whole strength of the whole man going out after his needs, and the real secret of getting what you want in heaven, as on earth, lies in the fact that you give your whole heart for it, or you cannot adequately value it when you get it. So, "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened [70] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING unto you" ; means, Put out all your energies, as if you had to waken heaven out of a mid- night slumber, or an indifference like that of the unjust judge. This I conceive to have been the meaning of Christ in the parable; and it touches something in our life we sel- dom adequately consider, namely, what I would call the indifference of God to any- thing less than the best there is in man — the determination of Heaven, if I may say so, not to hear what we are not determined Heaven shall hear. So calling out the faculty that lies hidden in our nature, to answer to another deep word of this great Teacher, "The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force"; and any adequate answer to our cry of "Let thy king- dom come," must greatly lie in our power to bring in the kingdom. THE TOUCHSTONE In our common life we may do as well as those about us, or seem to be doing better, even, if we are reckless about the reserves, while others are carefully storing them away. But the truth is, such times are no test of the [71] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING man and manhood any more than the piping times of peace, when they flame out in scarlet and gold in London, are a test of the queen's guards, or than our own were tested when they marched southward through our streets with their music and banners. It is Waterloo and the Crimea, Chancellorsville and Ball's Bluff, and such grim backgrounds as these, against which they must stand before the matchless manhood can come into high relief and reveal the truth of the reserves. And so we can all go easily enough through our own easy-going times, make good headway, as we imagine, and hold our own with the best, while such times hold no virtue in them to bring out the reserve power. GO FORWARD The holy life is the life whole to this present world; keeping its laws, chording with its harmonies, true to it every time and to the life that is in it; discerning always be- tween the world and its wickedness, and holding on to the one with all my might, that I might be able to master the other — as a good swimmer holds on to the water, and so destroys its power to hurt him. [72] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING LOVE— THE TEACHER If in the soul there is no glow and expan- sion, no such feeling in the heart as that which you may understand easily any time you will watch a mother in the midst of her little brood of children — then there must be such a glow and expansion, or all there is be- side is sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. "He that loveth not, knoweth not God." The very love of God is only one of the loves of our loving. It is not the object but the life of which I am to make sure; and then, as Richter says, "the heart in the heaven like the wandering sun sees nothing from a dew- drop to an ocean, but a mirror it warms and fills." "So loving was St. Francis," says Ruskin, "that he claimed brotherhood with the wolf." "So loving was St. Francis," says another, "that he remembered those God had seemingly forgotten." It is this love — and this alone — that beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things and never faileth. FANCY AND FATALISM It is true that there are both a fancy and a [73] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING fatalism that are perfectly sound and good. The fancy that clothes the future to an earn- est lad with a sure hope, that keeps the world fresh and fair, as in natures like that of Leigh Hunt, when to most men it has become arid as desert dust — the bloom and poetry, thank God, by which men are converted and be- come as little children. And there is a fatal- ism that touches the very centre of the circle of faith, which Paul always had in his soul when sounding out some mighty affirmation of the sovereignty of God he would go right on, with a more perfect and trusting devotion to work in the line of it. Fancy and fatal- ism are the strong hand-maidens of faith; happy is the man whose faith they serve. LETTING THINGS MAKE THE BEST OF US Some men save money and treasures at the price of their honor, perhaps. I cannot do that, but I can lose with them what is of far more worth than they are. I can lose my fluent and hopeful nature and petrify. I must encounter these troubles, and it may be they will shake the very centres of my life; but I need not stay within the shadows of my [74] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING misfortune. I can begin again and say I will not allow defeat and frustration to be the masters of my life. Yes, and though I have to dwell in smallness all my days, as many a better man or woman has done before me, if this purpose is in me then, to push on, the sun will not shine and the rain fall on a pillar of salt, but on a cheerful, striving man or woman who can take what God gives us and be thankful, or be quiet in any case, and know what the Master means when he says, "A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth." HOPING AND WAITING It is good that a man should both hope and wait, should nourish this spirit and tem- per through which the soul in us feels her wings, the hope which puts us in a working mood and holds the terms of her own fulfil- ment : — " Waits through the darkness for the coming dawn Frustrated day by day, but still to victory borne," — the winged spirit which stands ready to sing to us if we will only turn the face toward [75] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING the promise which lies forever in the new mornings of God, — the divine alchemy, as the good seer says, which can help us turn the bare and common stones of our life into rich and rare jewels. THE PERFECT FAITH Let us have the fervid feeling, by all means, when it comes from above; but we must never forget that religion is, of all things we can think of, a long, slow growth. It is the arming of the young knight for the battle, not the crowning of the victor, when we first feel its power. Saints are not made in a day; it takes a life-time; and, when some of us have quietly done our best, we shall still have to cry from the far line where earth and heaven meet, "Not that I have already attained, or am already perfect," and leave it all in the assurance that, as in the lower ranges of life, character and con- duct get themselves stored away and ripen at last into something very noble and good, so it must be in this best thing a man can be and do. We carry with us, and leave behind us, what can never fall out of any world; [76] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING but, waiting through the long seasons of God, it is sure to come to perfection in his good time. REST YE AWHILE The best there is in the Bible, and the great thinkers, the poets and seers outside the Bible, will never open out into its truest worth to busy, cumbered souls. We find these waters of life at their clearest in quiet days. Shakespeare, Milton, and every other sun or star of truth, must have a still soul to shine in, or one can only have such broken lights from them as I saw in the stormy sea. TO-DAY'S RESOLVE Any kind of an honest job is better than no job at all. A WINTER'S THOUGHT It is something to see, for one hour, a snow-driven city — to admire how all the vile- ness is hidden for a few minutes out of sight, though there were no use except that in it. But in the country the snow casting its white robe of protection over the land, gathering it [77] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings — that is a sight which leads us again toward the heaven out of which the wonder comes. And I would touch these snowflakes less for what they prove than for what they are — the testimony of a snow-drift to the Sermon on the Mount — the extension of Christ's great argument out of summer into winter. If God so shape the snow-star can he fail finally to shape the soul? And if he giveth snow like wool, to hap the shivering seed, if he so clothe the land as well as the lily, will he leave me naked? BOUNDLESSNESS OF GOD'S PURPOSES We must take our life as it lies with God, in the clasp for us all of his eternal love; and say, I will have what there is, Abba Father, and if the bitter follows the sweet, and the long droughts the sweet spring rains, while pain usurps the throne of pleasantness, mind the good bishop's saying that "wormwood eaten with bread is not bitter;" for so shall it be then with the bread of life which cometh down from heaven. We must open our hearts — the doors and the windows — to the [78] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING new mornings which will never cease to come until there is no more night ; see to the things which remain from all the yesterdays and be sure they are not all dead. They are never all dead, and so it is good for a man that he shall both hope and wait. "PRAY DEVOUTLY, HAMMER STOUTLY" Prayer in its purest reality, is first the cry of the soul to God for his gift, and then it is the effort of the soul to make as sure of what it longs for, as if it were to come by its own winning. It is something in which the words we say are often of the smallest possible con- sequence, and only our unconquerable per- sistence under God is omnipotent. PREPAREDNESS The man who has just conduct and char- acter enough to run along in easy times, but lays up no reserves on which he can draw when the cry strikes the midnight of disaster, can have no great peace or joy; but he has both who stores up the reserves on which he can draw when the challenge comes to hold up the light strong and clear. [79] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING SUCCESS OR FAILURE The two great sources of failure, when the fault lies at all in ourselves, are to be found first, in not keeping our heart and life awake to the call of God, and — second — in not knowing how to take hold when we are called. Every man and woman who has achieved a real success in any way whatever, from the forging of a horse-shoe to the sav- ing of a soul, succeeded through being ready when the call came. You believe that a lucky hit, as we call it, made them what they are. I tell you, Nay; whatever has come out of the head, and heart, and hand of any man or woman, first went into it in some quick, gen- uine human fashion. They builded better than they knew, but they knew they builded. John Bunyan was the pilgrim who made the Progress; George Fox quaked and trembled, it was Wesley's methods that made the Methodist; and before the slaves could be free Garrison must be bound with them. No man or woman ever won the penny by acci- dent. If you will be sure that the longing you feel for something better is not to end in disgrace when your call comes, you must now [80] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING be gathering the ideas and aptitudes that will insure the place; keep your whole life open and ready ; then when the Master comes, and says, "That is the place you are to fill, and the work you are to do," you shall find that to you, as fully as to those that were called before you, comes the full reward. OUR PART We must mind the saying of the grand old martyr I love so to cite — God is our helper, but he loves to be helped. And so as we say in our folk-speech, we must be on hand and get a good ready; must beware how we say, It is no use trying, when the droughts of life are at their worst. We must trust in the great Helper to cube all our striving, and lis- ten to the Psalmist's cheerful song, "Wait on the Lord, be of good courage, and he shall give thee thy heart's desire." THE MINISTRY OF THE THORN Is not this also the law of life, that the fineness and strength essential to our best being and to make us do our best work, come by the hammer and the fire ? — by the thorn in [81] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING the flesh, the trouble and pain in our life which may act in us as the fire acts in the iron, welding the fibre afresh, and creating the whole anew (as the Apostle would say) unto good works? We go along in our easy way, with nothing particular to do or bear beyond ordinary duties and burdens; and then there is nothing particular in our nature. But sud- denly some great trouble comes — some thorn in the flesh — and breaks up the old monot- ony. The good time, in that sense, is over; and then, though we may feel sore and sav- age about it, towards the Providence that is above us, we are drawn towards those nearest to us with a new tenderness and trust. The strands that bind us are better; we are better men and women. I dare trust the worst brute in the city to be good to his wife, if he has helped to nurse the buried babe she is break- ing her heart about. The thorn, for the time he feels it, has made a man of him. THE TRUE STANDPOINT If the truth stands good that some will be forever looking towards the shadows while others will never be content until they find [82] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING where the light dwelleth, let us — please God — be of these last. Those great souls of the old days and the new who help and inspire us to the finest purpose and the most divine have caught the secret of the true standpoint for you and me. Let me stand where they stood, fronting the light. Then it shall smite through sickness for me, and pain, and the dark glass of hard fortune, and make a noble faith my own in life and death. Let me try to do as they did — be cowed by no rebuff, tired out by no waiting, and beaten in no fight. LOOKING TOWARD THE LIGHT I take it to be the very genius of the Gos- pels, that Jesus never stands outside, so far as we are concerned, for an instant. But from the day when he takes the lilies and holds them up to the sun, and watches the birds on the wing between himself and heaven, — from that day to the day when he weeps over the doomed city, but still whis- pers to those about him: "When the worst comes to the worst, then look up," he is al- was looking toward the light. And so his [83] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING word still keeps the world in heart, and helps us as no other word can help us to solve the sorest problems of life. THE WORTH OF "I WILL" .Regeneration is God's method of righting the wrong done to me in my birth, of restor- ing the wayward balance, invading the weakened will and enabling me to say, I will be a whole man. While if it takes more than this to meet the lien the Most High holds on me, as the truth is set forth in the Gospel, — Be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect, — then the saint may have to wait a thousand years for aught I know; but I will be a man in the Commonwealth of the sons of God. IN GOD'S HANDS This whole world is God's world, and all this pottering about the way in which he must stand related to us and we to him, be- cause we believe certain dogmas and observe certain ordinances of this or that church, is time thrown away, except as it can result in making me a better man all round and all [84] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING through; and I desire to speak in no narrow spirit when I say that through these means of grace, as they are called, this does not often happen. It is the contact of the divine soul with our own as the sun smites the lilies, and the rain and dew touch them from cup to root; the love of God shed abroad in the heart, as the Scripture says; and the love of God is the love of goodness. SLOW AND SURE We are all within the circle of a great or- der, in which before God a thousand years is as one day. The slow certainties of heaven through which we watch first the blade, then the ear, and then the full corn in the ear, are gathered and treasured in your life and mine, transmitted to the children we raise in our homes or inform through our spirit; and life and all things move in us also toward the ripening of the harvest of God; and all this haste and fever must be a sign of the frustra- tion of this holy order, through which we ourselves may simply come to a swift decay, while the world about us moves on in its an- cient order. We all hold in our nature con- [85] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING ditions of growth and ripening we disturb at our peril through unnatural ambitions. So much we can do and be, while we hold on quietly and work the will of Him that sent us; but once let us begin to say, "This will not do, I must go ahead at any cost, make money, climb into high places, push my chil- dren to the front, or make myself a great name," and in doing any of these things wrong these quiet forces, which must have their time. Then I break with the divine order, make shipwreck perhaps of faith and a good conscience, grow sick to death at last of the whole thing and wish it were well over. Do you think of a fortune as the most desirable thing to aim at? This is the truth about the way to make money so that it will be in any sense a blessing: it must be made by patient continuance in well doing. There is no short cut to the wealth which stays by you. . . . Or, do you wish to push your chlidren to the front, go slow. It is a noble ambition in its way; but the forcing process is always a mistake. Keep them up to the line of this law of heaven; but do not try to [86] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING force them over it. They hold in their na- ture the conditions of so much in so long; and you cannot, by taking thought, add one cubit to that stature. Do you want to go to the front yourself, — to command the listening senates, or lead the world captive by your thought, to be a great preacher, or the thirteenth man on all the juries, as Wellington said of a great pleader in his day, or able to thrall us by your genius in some other way? Do not fuss and fume about it, or complain of the long delay. If you have it in you to do any of these things, time and the slow, sure order will see to it; if not, and you are in dead ear- nest, still you have it in you, and the seed re- mains and bides its time. The singing of Robert Burns was but the ripeness of all en- deavors of his race to sing, which seemed to end where they began. And this truth touches, last of all, the highest life we can live; for, as you cannot urge on the circles of the seasons, or push your life far ahead of these conditions in these things I have mentioned, so the last fine grace of a soul rounded and ripe in reli- gion must have its long, slow season. [87] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING HOW TO ATTAIN A HAPPY LIFE The faith in the Most High, and the love for him which gives life and a soul to our noblest powers, inspires us to the noblest ser- vice, and is one in the spirit and in truth with the fine word of Plutarch touching a certain manhood in his time, that not the past, but the future charmed them; and they were so eager to advance that they were impatient even of the good in their desire for the bet- ter. SELF DEPENDENCE The books tell me that every well-made man has the iron in his blood to make a ring. Well, I must have enough to ring me round with an iron resolution to be a whole, true man in all nobleness and pureness of life. I must realize that I am not a log, not a worm, but by my birthright a child of God and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven here on earth and in the world to come. THE SECRET The grand old dogmatist, Dr. Johnson, said: "What's the use talking? I feel I am [88] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING free, and that's the end on't." He spake for us all; and his words are in themselves a right noble ally to these — "I will take heed to my ways," — for I am able to do this be- yond all question or I am not a man, but only a thing. IMPATIENCE Travellers in India tell us they have seen a magician make an orange tree spring and bloom, and bear fruit, all in half an hour. That is the way many believe fortune ought to come. They cannot wait for its patient, steady, seasonable growth; that is all too slow, as the time-piece and garden-bed are to the child ; they must put the time-piece for- ward and that will bring thanksgiving, and gather their crop when they sow their seed. Patience comes and whispers, "It will never do ; the perfect work is only that done by my spirit; the magician can never bring his thirty-minute oranges to market, because they can never nourish anybody as those do that come in the old, divine fashion, by the patient sun and seasons." He gives no heed to the wise, sweet counsels; takes [89] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING his own way; and then if he wins, finds that somehow he has lost in the winning ; the possession is not half so good as the expecta- tion; but the rule is, that the man who will not let Patience have her perfect work in building up his position and fortune, ends bare of both, and has nothing but a harvest of barren regrets. THE OVERPLUS OF BLOSSOMS Believe in the trees if you cannot quite be- lieve in yourselves, and note their happy les- son. The blossoms in themselves are good. They mean ten times more than they do ; but what beauty and fragrance still abides in their meaning! How it floats over the homes of men as a delicate aroma nothing can slay except the ugly enormity of our overcrowded tenements ! So we can thank God for the blossoming in our nature of beautiful and good intentions, which will be sure to fail, as we are taught to think of fail- ing, and for the good fruit, which will be sure to ripen from some of them if we do the best we may. [90] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING EVERY MAN HIS PENNY "For the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is a householder, which went out early in the morning, and at the third hour, and at the sixth, and at the ninth, and at the eleventh hour, and hired laborers for a penny a day. So when the even was come, the Lord said, Call the laborers and give them their hire, beginning from the first even unto the last. And they that came first, and they that came last, re- ceived every man his penny." The para- ble is said to be meant for a lesson to the Jews at the moment when God was about to call the Gentiles into his vineyard also, and give them a place they had never filled before in working out his will. It is possible this meaning may lie in the parable in some re- mote way; but I cannot believe that this is all the Saviour meant when he spoke to the Jews. The truth is, that then as now, and for- ever, there are great numbers of men and women waiting in the market-place, in all sorts of ways, watching for the coming of the Master to set them to work; to give [91] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING them their true place in this life; the place they know they can fill — men and women who have never found their calling, and yet have never ceased to watch for it, and wait with weary, hungry, patient eyes, and to say, "What shall I do?" We look at them, very likely as we stand in our place doing our work, and despise them for what we call their shiftlessness ; when if we did but know the whole truth we might wonder over them for their power to do what is harder than any hard work ever could be to such natures, — to wait for work, such as they ought to do, and hear no command to go. These were in the world then as they are now, and this Divine soul, which saw everything that had a sorrow in it, saw them; and the heart that had a sympathy sweet and abundant as a full honeycomb, took them all in, and then cried to the Father to know the truth about this; and the truth came in this parable of those that work, and those that wait ; touching with its consolation the waiters, too; giving them their place in life and their promise ; and bid- ding the worker pause in his hasty judgment of those who wait until he is quite sure that [92] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING the waiter is not the most worthy of the two. THE LIVING WORD When I am in any great strait — when I want to find words other than my own to re- buke some crying sin or to stay some desper- ate sinner, to whisper to the soul at the part- ing of the worlds, or to read, as I sit with them that weep beside their dust, words that I know will go to the right place as surely as corn dropped into good soil on a gleaming May-day, — then I put aside all books but one — the book out of which my mother read to me, and over which she sang to me as far back as I can remember; and when I take this book, it is like those springs that never give out in the dryest weather, and never freeze in the hardest, because they reach so directly into the great, warm fountains hidden under the surface. It never fails. ALWAYS DOING BETTER I see no worth save in striving instantly to be a whole, true man. I must not do evil that good may come. I can not afford to be — shall we say — half man and half monkey, [93] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING lest the lower half get the better of me, which means the worse, when I break rank, as so many have done, and lose not my own winnings alone, but the winnings of all the ages, and, so far as this is in my power, lose my own soul also. IN TUNE WITH THE INFINITE Our time, and all time, abounds in those who have a great faith, but not a great hope ; the solid certainty about the heart, but not the shining assurance about the intellect. God will make all right somehow, they feel; but tell them that he will do far more ex- ceeding abundantly above all that they can ask, or think, and that will strike them as something they never adequately realized, always providing they believe you. Yet it is this alone that lifts us out of the world of inspection into that of expectation; that flashes into the soul the vision of that shy, trembling, blue misty distance on the far horizon of the world of grace and truth ; hint- ing rather than revealing its beauty, but bringing untold treasure of rich experiences as we pull up stream to seek it, — experiences [94] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING we had never suspected staying down among the flats. COMPENSATION Within every healing shadow is God him- self; and so, though it seem to be a shadow of the sorest sorrow and pain, yet it will lift me upward and lead me into the light. In- deed it cannot be a hurting shadow if God is in it. I care not how painful, perplexing, and dark — the very darkness will be light about me. If he is with me I will fear no evil. All the shadows of God are divine I HOLD FAST TO FAITH As the outer life takes its deepest meaning from the soul, the inner life takes its deepest meaning from God; and when that goes all goes. When a man ceases to believe in God he is in instant danger of ceasing to believe in anything worth the name of belief. A POSSESSION WORTH HAVING The apostle in speaking of patience, inti- mates that it is not a belonging, but a being, a spirit separate, in some manner, from the [95] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING human spirit, as the angels are; trying to do something for us, but only able as we will give it free course; so that his charge to his fellow Christians all the world over, to let patience have her perfect work, is not so much that we shall do something, as that we shall let something be done for us. All the help required of us toward patience, is not to hinder her working; then she will do all that is needed, in her own time and in her own way, and we shall be perfect and entire lacking nothing. So that, when a man or woman says, "I will have patience," they speak closer to the truth than when they say, "I will be patient." To say, "I will be pa- tient," has a touch of assumption in it; to say, "I will have patience," denotes humility. The one word means, I will be what I will; the other, I will be what God will help me to be. It is as if one man said, "I will be learned," and another said, "I will have learning." And a very brief reflection will enable us to see that the apostle is borne out in this happy distinction by the nature and grace of things as we see them all about us, and by what we feel within us. Patience is [96] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING not there to begin with. It is no inborn grace like love. It comes to us by and by, and tries to find room in our nature, and to stay and bless us, and so make us altogether its own. MAKING DUTY A DELIGHT Joy lies in chastity, and purity, and charity touched with a tender concern for those we do not like, and in doing for duty what can never be pleasant but must be done. It is in denying myself, when myself would deny my manhood; and in bearing my cross, though I have no hope of a crown. NEVER WEARY OF WELL-DOING I notice that Bunyan, after taking his pil- grims over the hill of difficulty, says, "Then I saw in my dream that they came to a coun- try where the air tended to make one drowsy;" and I wonder whether this is not what he means, — that the time may come when we begin to let painstaking slip out of our striving, and to draw on the days when we did strive nobly for the shortage. The time when we do not care to nourish a great [97] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING hope any more, but are content to exchange the soaring heart for the plodding, and where once we stood bravely and strong for noble reforms in our life and our faith, we begin to drowse and to think the old reforms that kindled in us the white fire, as citizens of the commonwealth, went far enough; while for the higher and diviner truth which touches most truly the soul's life, we grow content not to go quite so far as some we can name. It is then that your noble artist hardens down into a mere imitator, and creates no more; your noble writer gives us the skim milk where once he gave us the cream of his genius; and your minister, whose word was once tipped with fire from heaven, preaches the cold ashes of his dead sermons. But in the life of the commonwealth and in the church of the living God the brave and true men Heaven delights to honor, and the women to match them, hold on well to the noble passion, and never see the day when they are not ready to maintain the truth for which they have stood in passing over the hill of difficulty by faith and hope in God. [98] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING A HABIT WORTH FORMING I like that word of a sound divine who says that next to the grace of God, paying our debts right along is the best means of grace in the world to deliver us from a thousand snares. THE TRUE CHOICE Two men shall start out in life together, and in the heart of each there shall be a pur- pose touching what they will be and do in the life which lies before them; but one shall say I am bound to succeed, and the other shall say I am bound to deserve success. What I do in the world shall not be a mere business or profession, but a possession that will hold me always to the heart of sincerity and truth to God and man. My work shall be one with my faith, and shall blend with my life as the leaven blends with the meal to make all sweet and wholesome. At the bar or in the pulpit, painting pictures or building bridges, forging iron and steel or making shoes and garments, busy in Wall street or the workshop, it is all the same; I will take heed to my ways. Truth in the inward man [ 99 1 THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING shall be my lode-star, for Milton says, "God can never be served with a lie." So I must be a co-worker with Him. I cannot make my craft or profession one thing and my re- ligion another; they must blend together and be one. I do but indicate by a stroke what purpose may lie in each man's heart. The purposes and plans are diverse as our natures are; but some purpose every man will be sure to have who has the ambition to be worth his bread and salt, who will be a unit and no mere vul- gar fraction in the sum of our human life, and says, "Succeed, or fail, I am bound to de- serve success, and will leave the rest with the Most High God." KEEP YOUR GRIT Let me be sure that all is well, whatever comes, while we trust and stand fast and strive, and only hopeless — and rightly hope- less — when we want what we are in no wise willing to earn. The glory and the glow of life come by right living. [100] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING "LIKE A LITTLE CHILD" When Jesus would touch the one single in- stance of the spirit which cannot be content to peer in and ponder, but must always have a background of heaven and the sun, he takes a little child and sets him in the midst, and says, The kingdom of heaven, the kingdom, is like that little child. See how the small creature is always looking eagerly toward where the light dwelleth, and so is able to find something of this kingdom in the poor and forlorn life which has fallen to his lot; never trying to spell out the secret from the wrong side; always finding the place where the light will strike through all he can be aware of in the design ; familiar with heaven in his simple heart, glad for it all as a lark in full song, catching the glory and hiding it away for the days when the mists will fall as he stands outside and the glory is only a memory. The little child he will have us see solves the problem of the standpoint for us all. "His angels do always behold the face of my Father;" while Schiller teaches the same truth when he says: "My whole life has only been the interpretation of the visions [101] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING and oracles of my childhood;" and Words- worth, when he sings: " Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness. But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home." FACE THE STJN Whatever you do never let a painful in- spection rob you of a great expectation. If, as you live, you try to live faithfully, then, as the Lord liveth, try to live hopefully, or you will miss the better half of your living. THE PARABLE OF THE GRAIN Nature has her blessed parable ready for our reading of the holy worth of waiting. So is it true that all things come to those who can wait; then here, of all the times that can come to us, it is true, here may be the finest wealth won by waiting. "I will have none of this," the arrested blade may say. "Let me die and have done with it. I am buried under the drift. What is there for me but the end of all hope and joy?" "But no," the brave germ answers in the heart of all — [102] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING not alone in the highest life and divinest, but on all the lines — "I am not here to die but to wait, and then to live to some finer pur- pose." This is where the painter finds his finest pictures, the inventor his insight, the preacher his choicest word, the true king his power to rule with Alfred in the name of the Lord, the President his strength to lead the people; these all answer to the parable of the brave, enduring grain. "No, no," the brave heart and hopeful answers, "I must bear all this and wait. There is something for me beyond these clouds and mists that lie so heavy, these storms and drifts which strike like the stroke of doom, yes, and the retreating sun, — some- thing beyond and above them all. Ay, and something in them of God's treasure, and so I will wait." And then the time of fruition comes, and we find — as the good old man did — the worth of the tiny word if he tarry. For the kingdom of heaven is as when a man cast- eth seed into the ground, and it springeth and groweth, he knoweth not how, first the blade, then the ear, and after that the full corn in the ear. [103] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING OPULENCE THROUGH GROWTH Put heart and life into an honest and high endeavor, trust in God as Moses did, let the way be ever so dark, and it shall come to pass that your life at last shall surpass even your longing; not, it may be, in the line of that longing, that shall be as it pleases God, but the glory is as sure as the grace ; and the most ancient heavens are not more sure than that. THE MEANING AND VALUE OF LIFE No man lives to himself. What we are all doing as we stand to our lot steady to our manliness, or womanliness, in our black days is to tell, in its measure, on the life and faith of every good man coming after us, though our name may be forgotten. There is a story in the annals of science touching this principle, that we cannot struggle faithfully with these things and leave them as we found them. THE TRIUMPH OF HOPE The apostle makes our life a battle, and every man a soldier, and it is not enough that [104] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING the heart be protected by the shield of faith, the head must be guarded also by the helmet of hope; the one is as indispensable as the other. And a brief glance at the life about us will soon convince you that the man is right. Whether we dip into our own ex- perience, or watch that of other men, we shall still conclude with wise old Samuel Johnson, that our powers owe very much of their en- ergy to our hope; and whatever enlarges hope exalts courage; and where there is no hope there is no endeavor. HOW TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM When we say we have no hope, radiant and strong, in some great stress of life, and grieve over this, — thinking we could bear our burden so much better and more bravely if we could clasp the bright angel to our heart and hold her there, — may not this word of the brave apostle — "Tribulation worketh pa- tience, and patience experience, and experi- ence hope" — help us to find the one true answer to this painful problem in the truth he tells ? That we can have no such hope as we may long and pray for yet awhile, be- [105] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING cause it is not time for the radiant angel to come to us on her holy errand. The foremother, Tribulation, must come first, while this we may say we have had, God knows, in full measure and running over. "Very true," he answers, "but the own child of Tribulation is Patience, and so I would ask is her sweet face familiar to you, and has she changed yours into the same image and likeness, or is impatience and revolt lord and master of the days ?" And, again, if we answer, "Yes I have learned to dwell with Patience : there was no help for that; for what is the use bruising your head against the walls of fate and doom?" he notes the tone of my telling which holds the soul of impatience after all, and asks me whether Experience has had her time and turn to teach me something she alone can impart, "or do you leave me still in doubt," he asks, "whether indeed you have learned to dwell with the good angel by moaning for Hope before the true time has come for her advent, or do you want that to come first which must come last in the divine order?" She waits to plume her wings and [106] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING pour out her songs on you in the full time, but she must not disturb the law and order of God's kingdom in your life and in his world. Tribulation first, then Patience, then Hope clasping hands with Faith and Love, and then " God's greatness flows around our incompleteness, Round our restlessness his rest. ' ' GOD KNOWETH BEST The young man leaves his home in the spring-tide of his life, and feels sure that, if he does his best, he will win a good place and do whatever he hungers and thirsts to do, to find at the end of twenty or thirty years that he is not at all the man he should have been if the fruitage had been equal to the blossom ; and then he is in danger of growing bitter and doubtful, not about himself alone, but about the good providence of God, which, as he thinks, should have helped him to make his aspiration come true, or else have left him more moderately endowed with as- pirations. Now I would like to get hold of that man and ask him to note what Nature has been [107] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING doing in the woods and orchards this year, and then tell him it was a splendid thing to have the aspiration, and that was good fruit also, of its kind; for if he has been true at all to the inner impulse which crowned his youth with this fair crown, he has done far better than the man who did not aspire and did not care. There is always some good fruit, soon or late, from the blossoming in every one of us, — just as much as we could carry, perhaps, if we could only fathom the whole secret. And so we should no more doubt God's providence because so much of the promise has fallen dead about us, than we doubt Nature's providence as she snows down her overplus of blossom about the roots of the trees. NOTHING EVER LOST In the old monastic gardens which have lain to the wilderness these three hundred years, when they dig down deep and turn up the soil, flowers spring and bloom again which have been buried ever since the harry- ing of the monks; and so shall your sowing be. You will think no man cares, — well, [108] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING then, God cares. And you may think this may end it all. You were never more mis- taken. The great full tides will bear up your bark, never fear; or the tempter may tell you how you will have twice as good a time if you will only give up half your manhood. The tempter lies. "It's dogged as does it," the poor day-laborer says to the parson in the story, when he finds him quite broken down; and, it may be, this will be all you can do. Well, then, I will pray: "O God, make me as noble in my doing as some dogs I know of are in theirs ; and I will win the day by sheer doggedness, but I will win the day." "DEEDS NOT CREEDS" We hear the cry going forth far and wide that not creed, but character, is the standard by which man must be weighed and meas- ured in the good time coming; and then, if we must have our diverse modes of faith and worship, the question for all the churches to answer will be, "What sort of men do you raise in there, and women — noble or mean, sweet or bitter, full of charity or stricken with bigotry, Christ-like, and God-like, and loving [109] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING the light, or of those who hug the darkness and have no part or lot in the city which lieth four-square ? GOD'S WAY— OR OURS David despairs when he stands, as he does so often, with his back to the sun. Nature is haggard then to him and life a huge tur- moil of selfishness and sin. But he finds his way into some holy place for the soul, and then the harmony masters the harsh discords; and he sings of fire and hail, snow and vapor, summer softness and winter storm all blend- ing together in the great design, and of man so mean and yet made higher than the angels, crowned with glory and honor. It is Paul's trouble, also, as he looks in toward the shadows. There is no help then for the sin-smitten race, so chapter after chap- ter bleeds with disheartenment, woe and pain and utter condemnation. But then he turns to where the light of God's eternal love shines through the blurred and ugly outlines, so dark and forbidding in the fog and mist; and lo ! the whole design stands forth to his heart in a golden glory as he sings, "I am [110] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, shall be able to separate us from the love of God." "THE DEAR LIGHTS OF HOME" If preachers ever exhaust the Bible, so that they must find a new store of texts to preach from, I think this is sure to be one of them : "There is no place like home." In the heart of a grain of wheat the miller tells me there is one spot of a golden cast, which is the reason for a certain delicate golden hue, if you grind the wheat for bread, and if you sow it there lies the germ of all the harvests. What that germ is to the grain, the home is to the man. Strip away the enfolding nur- ture and bare him to the heart of his being, and there you find the golden spot which colors all, and is the living germ for har- vests that are yet to be. THANKSGIVING AND THANKSLIVING The fable says the wild things of the world called a conference once, in which the ques- [lii] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING tion was mooted, Which is the worst trou- ble we have to face and fight? It is hunger, one said; and one, it is fear; and another, it is anger. Then a wise old hermit who lived among them, and knew their speech, said, it is your temper and disposition which breeds and nourishes the whole brood of your com- plaints. I would nourish the spirit and tem- per, then, which brings forth thanksgiving, and girdle the whole year — the spring, and summer, the autumn, and the winter — and beware of the spirit and temper which would turn all the days into tenter-hooks on which to hang my complaints. I would hold this for a primal and essential truth: that this poor old mother earth — as we may be ready to call her when the black spot is in our eyes — was never so full of a fair promise as she is today, that our home is no poor house fall- ing to decay, but a palace rather in the build- ing, not a desert, but a garden of the Lord in the making — and so would mind the word of the good old bishop: "Serve God and be cheerful." [112] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING THE HEART OF THE SHADOW When I am in trouble, and darkness comes down on me like a pall, the first question ought to be: "How much of this unbelief about providence and life, like Cowper's sense of the unpardonable sin, comes from the most material disorganization? Is the darkness I feel in the soul, or is it on the win- dows through which the soul must see?" Then clear on this matter, the man tried so will endeavor to stand in the shadow of the Almighty, if he must stand in a shadow, and hold on to the confidence that somewhere within all this trial is the eternal, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. THE LESSON OF SORROW It is the saddest sight in the world for me — this hardening of human and gracious souls that I have seen in those who could not push on to Zoar, which is smallness, and find the mighty secret of the Calvaries as they tower above the Canas in our human life. It is the last truth I can touch in this darker reach of our life and lot; while the truth of the parable, touching the other side, waits [A3] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING always our accepting — that sweet and noble hopes and expectations can spring from our graves. The ancients say that, when the first mother wept for her first great, devouring sorrow, some tears became pearls of great price, while where some fell the Narcissus sprang, and some were seeds of the star-eyed daisy. That is another parable we may nurse in our hearts when this peril touches us of the pillar of salt; for blessed is the man and blessed the woman who can find these pearls and these blossoms of the soul's life born of their tears. LOVE By faith I stand; by hope I soar; by love I am. Faith assures me, hope inspires me, love is me at my best. "Love," says an old French lexicon, "is the sameness of souls." "Love," says Luther, "is that by which I de- sire to be in perpetual union with that I love." "Love," says Dr. South, "is the spirit and spring of the universe." "Love," says Em- erson" is our highest word and synonym of God." "And love," says Solomon, "is [114] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING strong as death." But the instant we read that, we say Solomon does not reach the mark in his definition, any more than he did in his life; for in the history of humanity, millions of proof have been given that love is stronger than death, and is, as Erasmus says, "as immortal, when it is rooted in vir- tue, as virtue herself." THE TRUE PRAYER Instead of a prayer being something we can say easily at any time and be done with, can read out of a book, or have said for us by a minister, — in the most sacred and essential sense, a true prayer must be the deepest and most painful thing a man can possibly do; may be so costly that he will give up, without a murmur, his very life before he will give up that which his prayer has wrested, as it were, out of the heart of the heavens ; and it may be so protracted that twenty years shall not suffice to say it. CONSCIENTIOUSNESS A good day's work at what you can best do is the hard pan to which all must come. [115] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING "MORE THAN MANY SPARROWS" Margaret Fuller preserved a letter, writ- ten, as I judge, by a woman who says: "I went this morning to hear Dr. Channing, and came away sadly tired listening to one of his great sermons. He set us up so high, and expected so much from us in consequence of his doctrine, that when I got home I was fain to take my New Testament and read where Jesus says, 'Ye are more than many spar- rows;' and the blessed old Word rested me and did me a sight of good, because it was not so exalting and flattering." I think I can understand that feeling. The soul cannot live forever in the white light of her own dignity and glory, any more than the sweet wood-violets can live forever in the sun. And so, while it is all true about the dignity of our human nature, and true also, that no man can ever tell the whole worth of what is waiting in the waiting heavens as the fruit of God's sending and of our own human striving, still that tender glance the woman got through the heart of Christ is very restful and gracious, when we try to measure the distance between the aspir- [116] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING ation and the attainment. 'Ye are more than sparrows.' And so you must not be over- troubled, if, while you are quite aware of the wider vision and stronger pinions, you can neither soar so high, nor fly so far as your eager hearts would have you. Ye are the branches, and I am the Vine. Bear what fruit you can, then, this year, without dam- aging the stock for the next. THE BOND OF NEIGHBORHOOD The question of a wholesome personal goodness that finds finds expression in kindly offices and loyalties is open to all. The neighborhood is the court in which that claim of our life is tried. ONE'S REAL NAME My real name is that they write in the books which are kept where nothing enters that maketh a lie. It is the name I earn, be it a brand of shame, or a title to which that of princes or nobles is a mockery; and I wait for this real, this new name, until I have made my stroke or indeed until I have lived my life, as Shakespeare did, and Cromwell, [117] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING and Milton, and then it is that baptism for the dead against which there is no appeal, and for which there is no legislation. We say of a man sometimes, he has made a name. It is the truth about every man ; and it would be as easy to change the name of a nation, or shall I not say of God, as this I win when I have fairly lived my life. And it depends in no wise on the whim or fancy of those about us. It is the signature and seal of those above us, and touches a law like that through which iron can never be branded as silk, or round shot for wheat. A NOBLE ANGER It is at our peril we let our anger degrade itself down to a bad temper. We must have the strength to hold it high for a beacon and not turn it into a torch which hisses and smokes in the mire of mean and poor emo- tions; or waste this fine might of our proper manhood, as the vessels in our river blow off their steam, vexing everybody near them with their clamor and then just swinging to the dock. The power to be angry abides in you and me for a far nobler end than that. We [US] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING also must "ride on the whirlwind and direct the storm," when such occasions rise in our life. I know of nothing greater in its own true place than a right anger, as I know of few things more paltry and poor in a man than to be forever getting angry. And this lesson so many of us have to learn, we must teach to our children that there is no harm in a high temper if they will keep it for noble uses, for it will be a very grand factor then in the sum of their life. It is a great mistake to leave our children ignor- ant touching the greatness and worth of this gift, and to be forever harping, as some do, on its meanness ; or to try to break their tem- per, we say, instead of keeping it whole and sound for the sterner demands of their life. You will see an indignation now and then in a well-nurtured boy, equal in its way to any- thing you shall find in Knox, or Luther — beautiful, and generous, and replete with self- abnegation ; and when we see that we should be glad for it to tears. For to strike fire and blaze out over cowardice, falsehood, or cruel- ty, is still more beautiful in them than it can be in us, because it is fresher from the deeps [119] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING of a divine revolt, more like the anger of the angels we see in the old pictures, but do not see in the new, now that even genius seems to have lost track of this most noble passion. THE SECRET OF SUCCESS Does not a genius for anything depend greatly on our absorbing love for it and the intense application through which every other power is set to its finest edge, and directed to the one purpose the man has in his heart and brain? I imagine that what we call genius is very often something like our power of lift- ing, — a common endowment at the start, but capable of such a growth by diligent striving in a healthy man that it shall become a won- der. So genius of any sort lies less in the original endowment and more in the power to work steadily in the spirit of what we have to do and what we want to do, than we are ready to admit, who go to work with half a heart. Native endowment is like iron in the ore; genius is the iron forged to fine shapes and polished and tempered for all noble uses. Genius latent, or asleep, is like the gold dust and scales of gold they wash in the [120] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING mountains; but it passes through this spirit, is fused and refined, and then is wrought into forms which add an almost priceless value to the mere weight of worth, such as you find in a vase by Cellini. Genius is the gift of God, and then it is our intense and absorbing pur- pose to make the very best of the gift, the perpetual fidelity to Paul's great word, "This one thing I do," and to the greater word of Jesus, "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." TRYING AND FAILING I like the suggestion that the way the eagle got his wings and went soaring up toward the sun, grew out of the impulse to soar. That the wings did not precede the desire to fly, but the desire to fly preceded the wings. Something within the creature whispered: "Get up there into the blue heavens, don't be content to crawl down in the marsh. Out with you!" And so somehow — through what would seem to us to be an eternity of trying, so long it was between the first of the kind that felt the impulse, and the one that really did the thing — done it was at last, in [121] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING despite of the very law of gravitation, as well as by it; and there he was, as I have seen him, soaring over the blue summits, scream- ing out his delight and spreading his pinions twelve feet, they said, from tip to tip. I like the suggestion because it is so true to the life we also have to live — trying and failing; setting out for Canaan and stopping at Haran; intending great things and doing little things, many of us, after all. I tell you again, the good intention goes to pave the way to heaven, if it be an honest and true in- tention. There is a pinfeather of the eagle's wing started somewhere in our starting — a soaring which goes beyond our stopping. We may only get to the edge of the slough, but those who come after us will soar far up to- ward the sun. NO CAUSE FOR DISCOURAGEMENT No one need die having missed the good, new name. Have you been false? You can be true. Or heedless, hearing only and not doing? You can give diligence to make your calling and election sure. Have you gone back on the good name they gave you in [122] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING baptism? You can find courage in God, as old Cranmer did when he held the hand that had signed away his manhood in the fire, and said, "Burn thou first." The first faint sketch we make may be sad as the "Misere" they used to carve sometimes for an epitaph — just that, and no more. Yet that word may be so re-written that men shall be proud and tender over it to tears. Or, you may be trying to win the new name, and it may seem to be of no use. The loose-livers and the loose-thinkers may appear to be having the good times, and as good a name withal, as a man need care for. Nour- ish no such distrust in the eternal Providence. Men have what they live for, and the pure in heart see God. Let us be true to ourselves, and to him, and his Christ, and then the new name shall be written on thy door-post and lintel, ay, and on thy forehead. THE DAILY DRILL The one thing for a man to do first of all, is to be true to the duty of the day. [123] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING THE WAY TO SING "High Heart" is emblazoned on the ban- ner over the tomb of the great prince in Can- terbury, and that is the heart we can summon to our singing when we make our whole life a song. Then those who listen shall say, Songs like these never bloom forth on the sand- dunes of doubt and dubitation. They are songs of deliverance from the bondage to fear; songs of the new morning of God the Most High. THE KEY-NOTE OF LIFE True love grows out of reverence and de- ference, loyalty and courtesy, dark days and bright days, sorrows and joys. It is the fine essence of all we are together, and all we do. NOW IS THE ACCEPTED TIME If I want to do a great and good thing in this world of any sort, while the best of my life lies still before me, the sooner I set about it the better. For while there is always a separate and special worth in a good old age, this power is very seldom in it I would try to verify; and it is not your old Philip, but your [124] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING young Alexander who conquers the world. I can remember no grand invention, no peerless reform in life or religion, no noble enterprise, no superb stroke of any sort that was not started from a spark in our youth or early manhood. Once well past that line you can dream of Canaan, but the chances are you will stop at Haran, so this putting off any great and good adven- ture from your earlier to your later age is like waiting for low water before you launch your ship. If we want to make our dream of a nobler and wider life come true we must push on while the fresh strong powers are in us which are more than half the battle. The whole wealth of real enterprise belongs to our youth and earlier manhood. It is then that we get our chance of rising from a collective mediocrity into some sort of distinct nobility. Yes, and we may have a splendid vision, as when Terah saw Hermon and Sharon and the sea in his mind's eye, as he sat in his chair; and a noble and good intention as when he started for the mountains and halted on the plain ; but just this is what will befall us also, if we are not true to the holy law of our life. [125] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING A CO-WORKER WITH GOD It is never true that we are not helpers; where the fervent heart is there is the servant of God, and unto him comes ever with the work the reward. He is still and strong in God, because he is a co-worker with God and his life holds for itself a secret which is not known to another — he has come in his very work to the rest that remaineth. THE ESSENCE OF WELL-DOING To be in the spirit in the simplest sense, week-day, or Sunday, is no mystery we cannot fathom. It is as real and true a thing as to be alive, and is indeed neither more nor less than becoming intensely alive to the meaning and purpose of the day. We all remember times when we have gone to our work all out of tune and unable to fix the mind on what we had to do, half dead as it were to the de- mand; to find, as the time went on, that things were slipping through our hands to no sort of purpose; and when night came we had to say sadly with the emperor "I have lost a day." We have lost the day because we have not caught its spirit. But on another [126] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING day we have found we were so clear of head and sure of hand that we have done the work of two men and come out all aglow with the spirit which has borne us as on the wings of eagles. Leave this absorbing and inspiring spirit out of the account, then, and you are powerless to do anything supremely well. You drift with the tide, you fall behind in the race. You are like the clock which always loses time, and would have to give up if you had no hope that the old fervor would come back again and make the spirit equal to the day. Nor can we help seeing that the best work we ever do has this quality in it above all others. It is done in the spirit, or fails of its finest secret. From nursing a little child to fighting a battle, from forging a bolt to paint- ing a picture, from working in a saw-mill to singing in "The Messiah" we must have this essence and spirit of all well-doing, or else we never do well. A GOLDEN RULE Sleep eight hours of the twenty-four, eat three meals a day and walk on the sunny side of the way. [127] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING THE RIGHT AND THE WRONG WAY There is a law of life Heaven will not tamper with for all our prayers, a steady se- quence of cause and consequence we have to abide by whether we like it or not; a right way and true touching these foundations of our life out of which Bibles may grow in the long succession of the ages, and a line of men and women whose life will enrich the world. This, and a wrong way that will lead on to a hapless life full of wild deeds that end in a clouded heaven, and this life will go on also until the evil has wrought itself out by the mercy of God. We may say what we will, therefore, about standing ready to suffer for our own misdeeds, and to pay as we go; the woe of it is that no man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself, and the shadow of such truth is just as sure as the light. GETTING READY We may be all the time getting ready to write this new name of ours, or to empower the eternal watchers to write it in some su- preme moment and then there is the seal of our greatness, or the brand of our meanness [128] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING so long as our name endures. Jesus said, "Be ye ready for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh." And some will tell you he means you shall be ready to die; but I think he means rather that you shall be ready to live, to compact your life, if it must be so, into one grand stroke and so win at once and forever the good new name. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the grand ordeal comes in a great steamer on fire far out at sea, or with her side torn open by some foul blow; and then "dastard," "coward," "brute," are branded forever on the men on one side, and "hero," "saint," "son of God," are written on the foreheads of those on the other. Their names go out into all the earth as synonyms of baseness — or nobility — the cowards saving a life which was proven by their deed to be not worth saving, deaf to the cries of women and little children ; the heroes, steadfast as Milton's angels, tossing all their own chances aside, fronting death with steady eyes, dying, and leaving us to cry, "He saved others, himself he would not save." Ah! I am glad to be a man when I read such a record. It is these heroes and not the [129] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING cowards, these noble and not the base, that hurl the grand defiance in the teeth of death, and say, "You can do nothing to me." These make me proud of my human kind. These are my proof of the immortal soul and the blessed heaven. Set your machines going to grind out poorer proof, metaphysic, theo- logic; I do not care for them one pin's head in comparison with the proof such men can give me. So the new name may be written once and forever by one grand stroke. Yet we may spend a whole life-time getting ready to make that stroke; and no man knoweth the day, or the hour, when the cry will come, and the demand be made to reveal in that stroke the hidden soul of me. THE OPEN MIND Everything of the new time which holds a hope in it for the help of the world and its uplifting must find a welcome from you and me. Every new discovery in science and the arts of life, with whatsoever can give us some new insight of the laws of nature are, there- fore, the laws of the Most High, and touch our life with gleams of a new nobility. [130] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING THE LESSON OF THE BACKGROUND I have wondered whether the dimness and dismay which trouble us all now and then may not come from our failure to find this true background of the clear heavens and the sun, through standing outside and looking in toward the shadows, instead of standing inside and looking out toward the light; and whether we shall not find this truth — as the large result of all our seeking, — that those who have found the finest fitness in this life, and the fairest hope touching the life to come, have always been the men and women who could still insist on finding this fair back- ground for the problems we have to solve, and then on waiting and watching, at any cost, until at last the sun came out to make the whole purpose radiant to them. A RESTFUL THOUGHT Heaven has no anachronisms, nature has none. THE SPIRIT OF THE DAY I will give place to no man in my faith that every day is the Lord's day; that work [131] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING well done is also worship; that the ring of the hammer is as sacred as the striking of the harp; the hum of honest industry as the psalms of the sanctuary; and the long strain of the week-day burden, as the sabbath rest and prayer. Every word of this is true; but then for that reason I must be in the spirit on the Lord's Day as I am also in the week-day, and if I deem work as sacred as worship the canon holds good again I must deem worship as sacred as work. Life to the most of us on our week-days is a hard battle with heavy labor and too scant rest. We look for our Sunday as in stony Arabia the traveller looks forward to palm trees and a well. We are hungry in the heart and athirst and tired, and it may be disheartened. I am in the spirit on the Lord's Day, and in the spirit of the Lord's Day it is a battle flag and a trumpet, bread that never moulders, wells that never run dry, a great sweet shadow in a weary land. I go to my church and bear up my minister then on the wings of an eager longing to welcome his thought, instead of beating his wings down with the rain of my indifference. I pour out [132] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING the oil of my welcome over the dry sticks of what he may truly call his "effort," and it is as when the fire came down and licked up at once offiering and altar, and wrested Israel in a day from Baal back to God. I turn to my books when I come home; they reveal deeper meanings in the quiet restful hours, and a sweeter grace. I seek the woods and meadows; they are haunted for me by the spirit of my day. The great tonemaster has attuned all things afresh. A voice has said again: "Behold, I make all things new." THE MESSAGE OF THE SNOW We speak of the snow as of an image of death. It may be that ; but it hides the ever- lasting life always under its robe, — the life to be revealed in due time when all cold shad- ows shall melt away before the ascending sun, and we shall be not unclothed, but clothed upon, and mortality shall be swallowed up of life. THE PROBLEM OF LIFE The solution of the problem turns on one thing only. As I stand here looking wist- [133] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING fully onward, longing for the light, crying for the glory, am I able to step out in time with what is demanded of me as a man? When I have answered that question, I have answered all. God will see to the rest. There can be no fear but my life will pass into the ever-nearing glory, and, in the ful- ness of time, I am sure to receive the full revelation. WHAT IS WORTH WHILE A mere feeling may fail you, but a help- ful spirit never can, because that is a holy spirit. The ready hand and the fervent heart, if the one work and the other beat for good, are sure to be right. AT THE END OF THE DAY When our life begins, our name is almost everything; but when our life is ended, it has been heavily freighted with good or evil, and is what the things are to which it gives per- sonal identity. INSEPARABLENESS OF WORK AND RELIGION The sacredness which invests any worthy work in the end is not one thing, and your [134] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING religion the other, but as the good Methodist woman said she never missed the corners in sweeping a room when she said the Scripture, "Create in me a clean heart, O God," so you shall find that your work and your religion always meet and tie. "I keep up my heart," Kepler said one grim day, "with the thought that I serve not the emperor, but the whole human race." And I suspect there is some such fine wholeness in whatever we do in this spirit, right down to sweeping a room or the streets.- Wholeness and oneness, each and all, the red-cloaked clown and the emperor; Beethoven, in the little church at Godesberg, touching the new organ to such a holy (whole) purpose of a week-day morning, that the peasant women could not scrub the floor for delight and wonder, and then the better scrubbing from the line where they paused to listen to the matchless music. A DIVINE PERSISTENCE If God visits the sins, he also visits the holiness, of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. Let no man, therefore, striving hard to succeed but [135] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING held back by hindrance conclude that a poor mite of this world's wealth is all that he is to get out of the endeavor. It is as certain as anything can be, that one or more of the children about his knees, who already know something of his heartsickness, are feeling afresh the power to knock which may be fail- ing in himself, and what he cannot give them in a banker's balance, will still come to them in a wealth that is infinitely better, — the wealth of a clear head, and a strong heart, and a divine persistence in seeking what it is his hunger and thirst to find. THE DAY OF REST The more I study the question of seven- sameness, the more I am drawn to the Sab- bath as a prime necessity of life, apart from its special uses for worship, and ready to ad- mit that, if it did not take so great a place in the master book of the master races on the globe, we should still grope our way some- how to the conclusion of a great physiologist, that "while the night's rest seems to equalize the circulation, still it does not restore the perfect balance to the life." Hence it will [136] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING come to pass, that while the man who neg- lects to take a seventh day, at least, for rest may be borne along by the vigor of his mind to continual exertion, yet in the long run he will break down sooner and more suddenly than the man who is determined to put aside at least one seventh of his working life for rest and recreation. But not for this alone will the Christian minister stand by the Sab- bath, but because he knows that the needs of the soul are as imperative as those of the body, the hunger of the inner life as sore as that of the outer, and that no man can live by bread alone. STRENGTH THROUGH WEAKNESS The law of life is to feel the thorn; the balance scale of ecstasy is agony. Poor little Boston, in the exquisite story, still wanted to be buried in a grave six feet long. I never blamed Byron for feeling as he did about his foot; he could no more help that, with his nature, than he could help his lameness. The blame lay in his never summoning that strength to the maimed part, by which he could have outsoared the eagle, and outrun [137] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING the deer, — the strength that is made perfect in our weakness. THE DESIRED HAVEN Men can go right onward over this great sea of life. The chart and compass are with them ; and the power is with them to observe the meridian sun and the eternal stars. Storms will drive them, currents will drift them, dangers will beset them ; they will long for more solid certainties; but by noon and by night they will drive right on, correcting deflections, resisting adverse influences, and then, at the last, when they are near home, they will know it. The darkness may be all about them, but the soul shines in its confi- dence; and the true mariner will say to his soul, "I will wait for the mist to rise with the new morning; I know home is just over there." Then in the morning he is satisfied; he wakes to see the golden light on temple and home. So God brings him to the de- sired haven. THE POWER OF FAITH This is the sense I would put on that strange saying of Jesus, — "If ye have faith [138] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING to say to that mountain, 'Be thou removed and cast into the sea,' it shall be done," — that what he wants to impress on us is, not so much the mountain riven out of its deep fastnesses on the earth, as the faith abiding in its deeper fastnesses in the heart. "If ye have faith it shall be done," I conceive to be the true reading, as the true teaching is, What cannot be done, cannot be of faith. There can be no real faith in the soul toward the impossible; but make sure that faith is there, and then you can form n oconception of the surprises of power hidden in the heart of it. DOING AND KNOWING All the harvests are ours for the striving; and do not you forget that, especially, who are in the springtime of what you may be, and do. We may have a poor lot to work on; it need not stay poor, if we add to our faith virtue. THE MEASURE OF GOODNESS There is a certain homely goodness of the common life that we all understand and [139] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING honor. I mean the goodness that lies in al- ways telling the truth; in always dealing fairly and honestly; in being ready to do a good turn, or two, or ten, or twenty, for the same man, looking for nothing again; in being trusty as a neighbor and friend which- ever way you are tried; in giving and forgiv- ing; doing a fair day's work for a fair day's wages; in being so pure in word and deed that if a petty slander is set afloat, men shall never believe it possible you can have started it; or if a sin is found out, and not the sin- ner, men shall never whisper, "You may have done it." This is the common natural meas- ure of goodness for the common daily life of man. These things are the square founda- tions upon which you must build the tower on which to plant your loftiest standard of goodness. THE TRUE TEST I count that the most hideous of all bigot- ries that would question the Christianity of any man who shall do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with his God. The soul has an absolute right to say where she will seek [140] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING her home in beliefs and churches. There is no general human way to test a belief, as it enters into the life of a man, except by some such method as you test a fruit or a flower. Is the belief high, pure, and good, can only be answered by finding whether the life is high, pure, and good. What is sour, or bit- ter, may be good for God, and in some way for men too ; but we decide by instinct for the goodness of what is pure, sweet, and grateful over that which is not so. FITNESS When I make my sense of the fullness, and variety, and ripening of men the standard with which to measure the divine sense of it, it is as if I made my sense of what is gathered here in October tell the whole story of the year all over the world. Good fruit to God surpasses all conception that I can form either of its measure, or of its variety, But this must not for one instant leave me careless about growing to be my best, or of helping others to grow. It must only be an inspiration and incitement to me, as I feel there is so much more to encourage me than [141] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING there would be if I believed that the most of what can be grown is only good to burn. It is good to garner under all its varieties. I shall not despair of anything. If only a little seed of good ripens, that little seed will never be lost. One of the worst women we ever had, says the matron of one of the great English prisons, was caught one day weeping over a daisy. Well, I think God's angels saw that woman weeping and went and told it in heaven, and then there was joy there, for they knew that somehow, somewhere, some- time, that "wee, crimson- tipped flower" would bring her, and be brought by her, through the golden gates. PREDESTINATION OF GOD'S LOVE When I see a young man slow and back- ward and in a poor place, whose soul I know would expand in the sunshine of prosperity and fill a better place; or a woman waiting with her unfulfilled life in her heart, willing to give it in any high pure fashion to the Lord, if he will but come and take it; or a preacher with a mighty power to preach somewhere in his nature if he could only [142] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING find the clew to it; or a man who has waited through his life-time for the Lord to show him the true church, the place where he can find that the religious heart of him is at rest; — if in these things, or in any of them, I feel I have found my place and am doing my work, I must feel very tenderly and judge very generously all the waiters in all these ways; must call up this picture of the faces so wistful in the old market-place watch- ing for the coming of the Lord. "Who has made me to differ, who has called me at the first hour, why do I succeed where others fail?" It is the gift of God; it is not of works, lest any man should boast. It is the difference between the seed the husbandman, for his own good reason, will leave dark and still in the granary, and the seed he sows which can spring at once to the sun and the sweet airs of summer. It is the difference in our home, in our conduct toward our children, when we know it is best to let one go forward in the school, and keep another back; yet both decisions come out of our heart's best love and are made through what we know, but the children do not know, [143] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING of their present and future. So this work- ing and waiting lie in the will of God, and God is my Father, and this is the predestina- tion of my Father's love. A DISTORTED VIEW There is a theory of human nature that busies itself forever in trying to prove that our human nature in itself is abominably and naturally despicable. Toward their fellow- men the holders of this idea are as particular about their character and standing as the rest of us. They shall rise from their prayers, in which they have called themselves twenty hard names and if you repeat over but one of them, instantly they are offended. Toward us they are as particular upon points of honor as a Spaniard. Toward God they turn with not one shred of self-respect — "they like to be despised." They insist upon it that God never cast a golden coin into this world at all — that our common human na- ture is nothing but base metal, with awful chances that it will ever be aught else — that if saved, then saved by transmutation — if lost, then lost because, though the Almighty [H4] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING considered men worth making, he did not consider them worth transmuting. Yet the fact remains that God does, in all times and places, send golden men into this world. Gold is the mine it may be; or gold, and sand, and mica-gold that needs to be pounded, and melted, and purified by fire; but still at the heart of all, real gold, — gold by creation, and not by transmutation, — needing only what it finds in God, and in life to bring it out into full perfection. "THE PATIENT ANGEL" One of the old pagan kings would not let the sage go, who came and told him that when passion was like to be his master, would do well, before he gave way, to recite to himself all the letters of the alphabet. The counsel seemed so admirable, that the king cried, "I cannot do without you." It was only a dim pagan shadow of the sheen of the patient angel as the apostle sees her. There she sits, the bright good servant of the Most High, ready to help all who cry to him. The good servant that, through untold ages, wrought at this world to make it ready for [145] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING our advent; laying together an atom at a time, this wonderful and beautiful dwelling- place, with all these stores of blessing in mine and meadow, mountain and vale; then when her great charge came, she was waiting for him, to nurse and tend him, own sister of faith, and hope, and love, and twin-sister of mercy; tireless, true, and self-forgetful, anxious only for her charge and never to leave us, if we will let her have her perfect work until, through all hinderance, she leads us through the golden gate over which is written, "here is the patience of the saints; here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus;" then she will have her perfect work and we shall be per- fect and entire, lacking nothing. STEADFASTNESS I tell you it is no matter what you may come to be, as the result of your true and honest life. Men may revile you, and cast you out; but through it all if you are true to God you shall feel that there is a life of the soul that pales all other in its exceeding glory. John may be in the prison with his poor gar- [146] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING ments of camel's hair, and with the headsman waiting for him outside ; but he is blessed be- yond all telling compared with Herod in the palace with slaves to watch his merest nod. For the one has even now breaking upon his soul the glory from that city where the Lord God is the light; the thick walls of cloud are already lifting before the morning sun; he knows the home lies just over there. But the other has only a leap in the dark, after a life in the dark, with dark faces in the dark all about him. Endure hardships, then, like good soldiers. Ye shall reap your reward. MAKING THE BEST OF WHAT WE HAVE The divine ordination that will give to one one talent, to another two, and to an- other ten it is not ours to control; but the Holy Spirit that will make the future man or woman faithful over that which they have, will be sure to come in answer to the prayer which is first a longing, and then a wise and loving endeavor that it shall be so. Great influences, which we cannot understand, stretching over the whole span of human life will make one man as great as a Mariposa [147] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING pine, and another as small as a dwarf pear; yet in its degree this shall be as good as that, while the sun will shine, and the rain fall, and the blessing of Heaven rest on both. THE FOUR EVANGELISTS This is the truth we touch first of all in these diverse gospels as it seems to me. Each sincere and true man stands within his own book and must not be taken, or mistaken, for another; while each man will tell me out of his reverent and loving heart the things he most surely believed to be gospel true, sub- ject to his own genius and his limitations. Every man must have his own way in tell- ing the great divine story, his own instinct, intuition, or inspiration — call this what you will — touching the words which were said, and the things which were done through those great and most pregnant years. MATTHEW— THE FRIEND OF THE POOR Shall we glance at them, then, in the order we find in the book ? Here is the man Mat- thew; shall we ask how he came to write the Gospel which bears his name and the impress [148] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING of his inspiration? He will answer: "I could not do otherwise. It was laid upon me for love's sake and I could not refuse. I was an old man when I felt the time had come to write down what had lain so many years in my heart and memory, and so it must be now or never." Again when we know who the man was and what he was doing when Jesus said to him, "Follow me," I think we possess the master key to his Gospel. He was a publi- can, a low-down man and an outcast who must herd with his kind for self-respecting folk, though ever so poor, would not be seen in his company or harbor him in their homes; for he belonged to one of the three classes with whom your promise need no.t be kept, — murderers, thieves, and publicans, — and no money known to be given by a publican could be received in the temple treasury — a thing which seems almost past belief with the mod- ern usage in some of our churches. He would be the servant of a syndicate in great Rome, that farmed the taxes as they did in France so long after, and ground the poor into the dust. He was the man, therefore, [149] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING who knew how hard and bitter was the poor man's lot, borne down with anxiety and cark- ing care, and he must tell the story of the dear Master's love for them, and what he said which would help these poor to bear their sad and bitter fortune. So you do not wonder that he alone should gather into one grand wholeness, at the very outset of his tender purpose, the Sermon on the Mount, jewelled with the beatitudes — the poor man's sermon and good for all time. And he alone remembers that story of the treasure hid in a field, to bid such men look up as they toil and slave at their day's darg ; and that of the wheat and the tares, with its sug- gestion of patience while we wait for the time when the wheat will ripen and the tares be burned; and that of the laborers waiting to be hired, where the poor man stands in the market-place through the weary hours look- ing wistfully in the faces of those that come and go, but with no answer, and then when hope is dying he is bidden forth to the vine- yard and wins his penny. These are among the things our good Mat- thew will — and must — remember, as he [150] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING bends over his tasks that you do not find in the other Gospels. And with these the rebukes poured from the Christ's indignant heart- fire, hot as lava, over those who were counted among the "unco guid and most rigidly righteous," but wore the mask of piety to rob the poor of their pittance, who shrank from natural duties under a pre- tence of holy vows, were saints in church, and cheated in the market, gave short measure, and made up the shortage by long prayers. He knew his poor like a book. He had summered and wintered with them aforetime, no doubt, as peasant or fisher- man. He knew what was in them and how hard life was on them, and it may be — in the times of the tax-gathering — had been compelled by the syndicate to make it harder ; for Cicero reports such devil's work. But here he was, as I think of him, an old man now with a heart full of pity like that of the dear friend; and so in writing his Gospel he must write to this noble and beautiful pur- pose, while here lay the line of his work and limitation when the publican slip grafted on the stock of Christ had come to its flowering [151] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING and its fruitage. So they tell us the book was written in the vulgar tongue, and, it may be long after he had done his good day's work, was turned into the strong and musical Greek; but scholars say that the fruit still holds some tang of the old rude speech, some intimation of the strength and verve of the peasant and fisher-folk, like that which would remain, I suppose, if you should translate old Bunyan into the French or the Italian. THE PICTURES OF MARK When you turn to the man who stands sponsor for the Second Gospel, Mark — whose name means the brilliant — you find quite another personality. Here is a man whose work has been well compared to a picture by one of the great old masters in the Netherlands, — so sharp in its outline it is ; so full, without crowding; and so lucid and clear — a picture in which a single line will bring forth some new light or shadow; and the briefest, by far, of the four, so graphie in these touches that you are reminded of Ten- nyson, or Carlyle now and then. So Mark alone tells you of the green grass on which [152] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING the crowd sat down who have come after the loaves and the fishes. And when they went after the colt on which the Master would ride to his doom, they found the beast tied to a door at a place where two ways meet. The young ruler again does not stroll round, as we should say, to ask his great question — he comes running, and kneels down. And in the great storm he says: "Jesus lay asleep in the stern on a pillow." And, when they brought young children to him, he took them in his arms, and put his hand upon them and blessed them. Mark paints a picture where the others tell a story. He will tell you how Jesus stayed at a certain place, coming there at sunset and leaving at gray dawn. So you see him for a moment in the golden light of even-tide, weary, and then in the morning haze going forth on his holy errand rested and refreshed. He does not seem to care much for the par- ables, only preserving four in the thirty all told ; but he sends down one — the others miss that — of the seed growing secretly, full of a divine truth touching our life; while he alone has saved for us that magnificent [153] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING aphorism — "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath." This is Mark the brilliant; and the traditions of the early time make him the penman of Peter in this Gospel, but the man's own genius and in- spiration pervade the book. I said it has been compared to some picture by the great masters, but there are also things that are like a fine cut gem, flashing strong and clear in the sun. THE GOSPEL OF HUMAN SYMPATHY When you ask why Luke the luminous should feel bound to write the Third Gospel, I think we find the answer in the book again. He could not be content as we have heard with what had been done already, because it is clear, as you read, so much had been left undone of the most vital moment that he must bend that grand head, you see in the early frescoes, over the treasure-trove he had collected from those who from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word, and so write his Gospel for the dear friend's sake and for the world. Nor is it hard to find the heart of the man and to see and say, [154] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING This is the Gospel of human sympathy and, therefore, divine; sympathy for the infidels as we should call them, if we were given to calling names — the infidels and outcasts, the hapless and hopeless, the heretics, the come- outers, and the lost in our great human fam- ily. He must tell the story of the tender concern for these and most generous, which beat in the heart of the Son of Man. This must be a gospel of the Father's love for his children, for the man or woman you cannot have on any terms within the pale; and, as I think also, of a communism like that we dream of in the good time coming when the rich shall no longer rot in their wealth, or the poor be left to perish in their poverty. And so he alone will tell us that parable of the publican and of the Pharisee who looked down on the outcast in scorn and con- tempt saying, "God I thank thee I am not as this publican," while the poor creature he scorned could only moan out his scant prayer, "God help me," yet was nearer to the heart of the divine pity in that prayer than the saint by his own reckoning was in his pride. Then I hear him say, as he bends over the treasure- [155] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING trove : I must not miss the story of that prodigal, the swineherd and worse, who wasted his substance with the harlots and then crept home a mere bundle of rags, with only the poor semblance of a man within them ; how he would fain be a serf in the home where once he was a son and begged that poor boon, but the father would not hear him, for mighty love's sake ran out to meet him and fell on his neck and kissed him, no matter about the grime, enrobed him in the best, put the ring of dignity and sonship again on his finger to make all sacred and sure, made a feast for him and set the whole commune aglow sharing his joy. And the story of the Samaritan, the heretic of the last and worst brand, whose soul is like a star and dwells apart because he forgot all about heretic and orthodox when he saw the man of the adverse creed left for dead, where the priest and Levite had also seen him and gone swiftly on their way through the Via Mala. I think our good Matthew could not have told the story; but I can dream I see tears in my Luke's luminous eyes as he tells the story for all time of that man. [156] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING Brother Matthew gives us the parable of the lost sheep, and says the good shepherd goeth after his sheep, if haply he may find it. But no, no! my Luke says the words were, he goeth after his sheep until he finds it. There was no "haply" which would infer such a mishap. The shepherd is master of the situation, not the sheep. And Luke alone tells the story of the woman who was a sin- ner, in a pathetic perfection. Here then, to my own insight, is the master chord in the Gospel we are glancing at. It is the Gospel for our whole human family. He will join hands and leave no one of us out. He will hear of no upper ten, and the balance in the thousand left out in the cold. He alone has caught into his Gospel the parable of the great supper, where the Lord of the feast bids his servants scour the highways and hedges for the poor, the maimed, the halt, and the blind, and compel them to come in that his house may be filled. He will not — be- cause he cannot — split the holy light of the pity and love of the Father into prisms, as it was revealed by the dear Son; he will do what he may to make it luminous and fair as [157] THOUGHTS FOR DAILY LIVING the clear shining of the sun at noon. They say Paul's great heart must be reckoned with in this Third Gospel; but Luke is no mere amanuensis as he bends that noble head over his welcome task. He is God's free man and gospeller. ACCORDING TO ST. JOHN The Fourth Gospel stands in some sense alone. You find no parables here, and I have to wonder whether you can find the over- mastering sympathy with our common human life we have touched in our liberal Luke. It is the Gospel which lingers most lovingly over the tender concern of the Christ for those who were nearest to him and dearest, as this man thinks — the words he said to them especially, and for them to the Father, and the things he would do for them, as when he washed their feet. It is the Gospel, also, in which the broad humanity you find in that of Luke gives place to what we gladly call the divinity of Jesus. [158]