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Daily Thoughts, a non-fiction book by Charles Kingsley |
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_ SAINTS' DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS. NOVEMBER 1. All Saints' Day. Commemoration of the Blessed Dead. "If any man serve Me, him will My Father honour," said the Blessed One. And if God honours His servants, shall not we honour them likewise? We may not, as our forefathers did blindly, though lovingly, worship them as mediators and lesser gods, and pray to them instead of to their Father in heaven to whose throne of grace we may all come boldly through Christ Jesus, or believe that their relics will work miracles in our behalf, thus honouring the creature instead of the Creator. This we may not do, but we may honour the Creator in His creature, and honour God in those who have lived godly and God-like lives; and when they have passed away from among us--souls endued by God with manifold virtues and precious gifts of grace--we may give thanks and say, These, O God, are the fruits of Thy Spirit. Thou honourest them in heaven with Thy approving smile. We will honour them on earth, not merely with our lips, but in our lives. What they were we too might be, if we were as true as they to the inspiration of Thy Spirit. Help us to honour their memories, as Thou and they would have us do, by following their example; by setting them before us, and not only them, but every holy and noble personage of whom we have ever heard, as dim likenesses of Christ--even as Christ is the likeness of Thee. Amen. _MS. Sermon_.
Form your own notions about angels and saints in heaven--as you will, . . . but bear this in mind: that if the saints in heaven live the everlasting life, they must be living a life of usefulness, of love, and of good works. The everlasting life cannot be a selfish, idle life, spent only in individual happiness. _Good News of God Sermons_.
December. It chanced upon the merry, merry Christmas eve, Then arose a joyous clamour from the wild-fowl on the mere, _A Christmas Carol_.
The Final Victory. December 1. I believe that the ancient creed, the eternal gospel, will stand and conquer, and prove its might in this age, as it has in every other for eighteen hundred years, by claiming and subduing and organising those young anarchic forces which now, unconscious of their parentage, rebel against Him to whom they owe their being. _Yeast_, Preface. 1851.
They drift away--Ah, God! they drift for ever. _A Fragment_. 1867.
Our Father. December 3. Take your sorrows not to man, but to your Father in heaven. If that name, Father, mean anything, it must mean that He will not turn away from His wandering child in a way in which you would be ashamed to turn away from yours. If there be pity, lasting affection, patience in _man_, they must have come from Him. They, above all things, must be His likeness. Believe that God possesses them a million times more fully than any human being. _Letters and Memories_.
Our wanton accidents take root, and grow _Saint's Tragedy_, Act ii. Scene v.
Duty. December 5. When a man has once said _honestly_ to himself, "It is my duty;" when that glorious heavenly thought has risen upon his soul, like the sun upon the earth, warming his heart and enlightening it, and making it bring forth all good and noble fruits, then that man will feel a strength come to him and a courage come from God which will conquer all his fears, his selfish love of ease and pleasure, and enable him to bear pain and poverty and death itself, provided he can do what is right, and be found by God working His will where He has put him. _Sermons_.
Humanity and the Bible. December 6. He who has an intense perception of humanity must know that Christianity is divine, because it is the only religion which has a perfect perception of human relations, wants, and feelings. None but He who made the heart could have written the Bible. _MS. Note-book_. 1843.
Music. December 7. There is music in heaven, because in music there is no self-will. Music goes on certain laws and rules. Man did not make those laws of music, he has only found them out, and if he be self-willed and break them, there is an end of his music instantly; all he brings out is discord and ugly sounds. Music is fit for heaven. Music is a pattern and type of heaven, and of the everlasting life of God which perfect spirits live in heaven; a life of melody and order in themselves; a life of harmony with each other and with God. _Good News of God Sermons_. 1859.
Ay--stay awhile in peace. The storms are still. _Saint's Tragedy_, Act iii. Scene iii.
"One thing at least I have learnt," he said, "in all my experiments on poor humanity--never to see a man do a wrong thing without feeling I could do the same in his place. I used to pride myself on that once, fool that I was, and call it comprehensiveness. I used to make it an excuse for sitting by and seeing the devil have it all his own way, and call that toleration. I will see now whether I cannot turn the said knowledge to a better account, as common sense, patience, and charity, and yet do work of which neither I nor my country need be ashamed." _Two Years Ago_, chap. xxiii. 1856.
In many things success at first is dangerous, and _defeat_ an excellent medicine for testing people's honesty--for setting them honestly to work to see what they want, and what are the best modes of attaining it. Our sound thrashing, as a nation, in the first French war was the making of our armies; and it is good for an idea, as well as for a man, to bear the yoke in his youth. _Lectures on Ancien Regime_. 1867.
Beware of depending on your own _emotions_, which are often but the fallings and risings of the frail flesh, and mistaking them for spiritual feelings and affections! * * * * * Think less of what you _feel_--even of trying _to be_ anything. Look out of yourself at God. Pray and praise, and God will give you His Spirit often when you feel most dull. _MS. Letter_. 1842.
. . . What a thought it is that there is a God! a Father, a King! a Husband not of individuals, that is a Popish fancy, which the Puritans have adopted--but of the Church--of collective humanity. Let us be content to be members; let us be, if we may, the feet, lowest, hardest worked, trodden on, bleeding, brought into harshest contact with the evil world! Still we are members of Christ's Church! . . . _Letters and Memories_. 1843.
Have charity, have patience, have mercy. Never bring a human being, however silly, ignorant, or weak, above all, any little child, to shame and confusion of face. Never by petulance, by suspicion, by ridicule, even by selfish and silly haste, never, above all, by indulging in the devilish pleasure of a sneer, crush what is finest, and rouse up what is coarsest in the heart of any fellow-creature. _Westminster Sermons_. 1872.
God grant us to be among "those who really hunger and thirst after righteousness," and who therefore long to know what righteousness is, that they may copy it--those who long to be freed not merely from the punishment of sin after they die, but from sin itself while they live on earth, and who therefore wish to know what sin is that they may avoid it. _Preface to Tauler's Sermons_. 1854.
This is the especial curse of our day, that religion does not mean, as it used, the service of God--the being like God and showing forth God's glory. No, religion means nowadays the art of getting to heaven when we die, and saving our own miserable souls, and getting God's wages without doing God's work--as if that was godliness, as if that was anything but selfishness, as if selfishness was any the better for being everlasting selfishness! _Village Sermons_. 1849.
Christ may come to us when we are fierce and prejudiced, with that still small voice--so sweet and yet so keen, "Understand those who misunderstand thee. Be fair to those who are unfair to thee. Be just and merciful to those whom thou wouldst like to hate. Forgive and thou shalt be forgiven." He comes to us surely, when we are selfish and luxurious, in every sufferer who needs our help, and says, "If you do good to one of these, my brethren, you do it unto Me." _Last Sermon_. _MS._ 1874.
When will men open their eyes to the plain axiom that nothing is impossible with God, save that He should transgress His own nature by being unjust and unloving? _Preface to Tauler_. 1854.
Educators of Men. December 18. There are those who consider--and I agree with them--that the education of boys under the age of twelve years ought to be entrusted, as much as possible, to women. Let me ask--of what period of youth and manhood does it not hold true? I pity the ignorance and conceit of the man who fancies that he has nothing left to learn from cultivated women. I should have thought that the very mission of woman was to be, in the highest sense, the educator of man, from infancy to old age; that that was the work towards which all the God-given capacities of women pointed. _Lecture on Thrift_. 1869.
Let us remember that if the body does feel a burden now (as it must at moments), what a happiness it is to have a body at all: how lonely, cold, barren, would it be to be a "disembodied spirit." As St. Paul says, "Not that we desire to be unclothed, but to be clothed upon"--to have a spiritual, deathless, griefless life instilled into the body. _MS. Letter_. 1842.
When all the world is old, lad, _The Water Babies_. 1862.
The hearts and minds of the sick, the poor, the sorrowing, the truly human, all demand a living God who has revealed Himself in living acts; a God who has taught mankind by facts, not left them to discover Him by theories and sentiments; a Judge, a Father, a Saviour, an Inspirer; in a word, their hearts demand the historic truth of the Bible--of the Old Testament no less than the New. _Sermons on Pentateuch_. 1863.
"Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but heaven" (Hebrews xii. 26- 29). This is one of the royal texts of Scripture. It declares one of those great laws of the kingdom of God which may fulfil itself once and again at many eras and by many methods; which fulfilled itself most gloriously in the first century after Christ; again in the fifth century; again at the time of the Crusades; and again at the great Reformation in the sixteenth century,--and is fulfilling itself again at this very day. _Westminster Sermons_. 1872.
Never hurt any one's self-respect. Never trample on any soul, though it may be lying in the veriest mire; for that last spark of self-respect is as its only hope, its only chance; the last seed of a new and better life; the voice of God which still whispers to it, "You are not what you ought to be, and you are not what you can be. You are still God's child, still an immortal soul. You may rise yet, and fight a good fight yet, and conquer yet, and be a man yet, after the likeness of God who made you, and Christ who died for you." Oh! why crush that voice in any heart? If you do the poor creature is lost, and lies where he or she falls, and never tries to rise again. _Good News of God Sermons_. 1859.
We will have no sad forebodings on the eve of the blessed Christmas-tide. He lives, He loves, He reigns; and all is well; for we are His and He is ours. _Two Years Ago_, Introduction. 1856.
After the crowning miracle of this most blessed night all miracles are possible. The miracle of Christmas night was possible because God's love was absolute, infinite, unconquerable, able to condescend to anything that good might be done. . . . This Christmas night is the one of all the year which sets a physicist on facing the fact of miracle, and which delivers him from the bonds of sense and custom by reminding him of God made Man. _Letters and Memories_. 1858.
All things are blessed now, but sin; for all things, excepting sin, are redeemed by the life and death of the Son of God. Blessed are wisdom and courage, joy and health and beauty, love and marriage, childhood and manhood, corn and wine, fruit and flowers, for Christ redeemed them by His life. . . . Blessed is death, and blest the unknown realms where souls await the Resurrection Day, for Christ redeemed them by His death. Blessed are all days, dark as well as bright, for all are His, and He is ours; and all are ours, and we are His for ever. _National Sermons_. 1848.
To abolish the superstition, the misrule, the vice, the misery of this world. That is what Christ will do in the day when He has put all enemies under His feet. That is what Christ has been doing, step by step, ever since that day when first He came to do His Father's will on earth in great humility. Therefore, that is what we must do, each in our place and station, if we be indeed His subjects, fellow-workers with Him in the improvement of the human race, fellow-soldiers with Him in the battle against evil. _All Saints' Day Sermons_. 1867.
There is a healthy ferment of mind in which one struggles through chaos and darkness, by means of a few clues and threads of light--and--of one great bright pathway, which I find more and more to be _the_ only escape from infinite confusion and aberration, _the_ only explanation of a thousand human mysteries--I mean the Incarnation of our Lord--the fact that there really is--a God-Man! _MS. Letter_. 1844.
Blessed, thrice blessed, is it to find that hero-worship is not yet passed away! that the heart of man still beats young and fresh; that the old tales of David and Jonathan, Damon and Pythias, Socrates and Alcibiades, Shakespeare and his nameless friend, of love "passing the love of woman," ennobled by its own humility, deeper than death and mightier than the grave, can still blossom out, if it be but in one heart here and there, to show man still how, sooner or later, "he that loveth knoweth God, for God is love." _Miscellanies_. 1850.
The heart will cry out at times, Oh! blissful future! Oh, dreary present! But let us not repine. What is dreary need not be barren. Nothing need be barren to those who view all things in their real light, as links in the great chain of progression both for themselves and for the Universe. To us all Time should seem so full of life: every moment the grave and the father of unnumbered events and designs in heaven and earth, and the mind of our God Himself--all things moving smoothly and surely in spite of apparent checks and disappointments towards the appointed end. _Letters and Memories_. 1844.
Surely as the years pass on they ought to have made us better, more useful, more worthy. We may have been disappointed in our lofty ideas of what ought to be done, but we may have gained more clear and practical notions of what can be done. We may have lost in enthusiasm, and yet gained in earnestness. We may have lost in sensibility, yet gained in charity, activity, and power. We may be able to do far less, and yet what we do may be far better done. And our very griefs and disappointments--have they been useless to us? Surely not. We shall have gained instead of lost by them if the Spirit of God has been working in us. Our sorrows will have wrought in us patience, our patience experience, and that experience hope--hope that He who has led us thus far will lead us farther still, that He who has taught us in former days precious lessons--not only by sore temptations but most sacred joys--will teach us in the days to come fresh lessons by temptations, which we shall be more able to endure; and by joys which, though unlike those of old times, are no less sacred, but sent as lessons to our souls by Him from whom all good gifts come. _Water of Life Sermons_. Out of God's boundless bosom, the fount of life, we came; through selfish, stormy youth, and contrite tears--just not too late; through manhood, not altogether useless; through slow and chill old age, we return whence we came, to the bosom of God once more--to go forth again, it may be, with fresh knowledge and fresh powers, to nobler work. Amen. _The Air Mothers_. 1869. SAINTS' DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS.
The spirits of just men made perfect, freed from the fetters of the gross animal body, and now somewhere in that boundless universe in which this earth is but a tiny speck, doing God's will as they longed to do it on earth, with clearer light, fuller faith, deeper love, mightier powers of usefulness! Ah, that we were like unto them! _All Saints' Day and other Sermons_.
Thank God, that One was born, at this same time, _Saint's Tragedy_, Act iv. Scene iv.
These are the holy ones--the heroes of mankind, the elect, the aristocracy of grace. They are those who carry the palm branch of triumph, who have come out of great tribulation, who have dared and fought and suffered for God and truth and right; who have resisted unto blood, striving against sin. What should easy-going folk like you and me do but place ourselves with all humility, if but for an hour, where we can look afar off upon our betters, and see what they are like and what they do. _All Saints' Day and other Sermons_.
And what do they do, these blessed beings? They longed for, toiled for, it may be died for, the true, the beautiful, and the good; they entered while on earth into the mystery and glory of self-sacrifice, and now they find their bliss in gazing on the one perfect and eternal sacrifice, and rejoicing in the thought that it is the cause and ground of the whole universe, even the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. _All Saints' Day and other Sermons_.
Christ comes to us in many ways. But most surely does Christ come to us, and often most happily, and most clearly does He speak to us--in the face of a little child, fresh out of heaven. Ah, let us take heed that we despise not one of these little ones, lest we despise our Lord Himself. For as often as we enter into communion with little children, so often does Christ come to us. So often, as in Judaea of old, does He take a little child and set him in the midst of us, that from its simplicity, docility, and trust--the restless, the mutinous, and the ambitious may learn the things which belong to their peace--so often does He say to us, "Except ye be changed and become as this little child, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me. For I am meek and lowly of heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls." [THE END] _ |
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