Daily Thoughts | Page 2

has been through
them and is alive for evermore. Christ is the first, and was loving and
just and glorious and almighty before there was any death or hell. And
Christ is the last, and will be loving and just and glorious and almighty
as ever, in that great day when all enemies shall be under His feet, and
death shall be destroyed, and death and hell shall be cast into the lake
of fire.
MS. Sermon. 1857.

A Living God. January 8.
Here and there, among rich and poor, there are those whose heart and
flesh, whose conscience and whose intellect, cry out for the Living God,
and will know no peace till they have found Him. For till then they can
find no explanation of the three great human questions--Where am I?
Whither am I going? What must I do?
Sermons on the Pentateuch. 1862.

The Fairy Gardens. January 9.
Of all the blessings which the study of Nature brings to the patient
observer, let none, perhaps, be classed higher than this, that the farther
he enters into those fairy gardens of life and birth, which Spenser saw
and described in his great poem, the more he learns the awful and yet
comfortable truth, that they do not belong to him, but to One greater,
wiser, lovelier than he; and as he stands, silent with awe, amid the
pomp of Nature's ever-busy rest, hears as of old, The Word of the
"Lord God walking among the trees of the garden in the cool of the
day."
Glaucus. 1855.

Love. January 10.
Oh! Love! Love! Love! the same in peasant and in peer! The more
honour to you, then, old Love, to be the same thing in this world which
is common to peasant and to peer. They say that you are blind, a
dreamer, an exaggerator--a liar, in short! They just know nothing about
you, then. You will not see people as they seem--as they have become,
no doubt; but why? Because you see them as they ought to be, and are
in some deep way eternally, in the sight of Him who conceived and
created them!
Two Years Ago, chap. xiv. 1856.

Life--Love. January 11.
We must live nobly to love nobly.
MS.

The Seed of Good. January 12.
Never was the young Abbot heard to speak harshly of any human being.
"When thou hast tried in vain for seven years," he used to say, "to
convert a sinner, then only wilt thou have a right to suspect him of
being a worse man than thyself." That there is a seed of good in all men,
a divine word and spirit striving with all men, a gospel and good news
which would turn the hearts of all men, if abbots and priests could but
preach it aright, was his favourite doctrine, and one which he used to
defend, when at rare intervals he allowed himself to discuss any subject,
from the writings of his favourite theologian, Clement of Alexandria.
Above all, Abbot Philamon stopped by stern rebuke any attempt to
revile either heretics or heathens. "On the Catholic Church alone," he
used to say, "lies the blame of all heresy and unbelief; for if she were

but for one day that which she ought to be, the world would be
converted before nightfall."
Hypatia, chap. xxx. 1852.

Danger of Thinking vaguely. January 13.
Watch against any fallacies in your ideas which may arise, not from
disingenuousness, but from allowing yourself in moments of feeling to
think vaguely, and not to attach precise meaning to your words.
Without any cold caution of expression, it is a duty we owe to God's
truth, and to our own happiness and the happiness of those around us,
to think and speak as correctly as we can. Almost all heresy, schism,
and misunderstandings, between either churches or individuals who
ought to be one, have arisen from this fault of an involved and vague
style of thought.
MS. 1842.

The Possession of Faith. January 14.
I don't want to possess a faith, I want a faith which will possess me.
Hypatia, chap. xvii. 1852.

The Eternal Life. January 15.
Eternally, and for ever, in heaven, says St. John, Christ says and is and
does what prophets prophesied of Him that He would say and be and
do. "I am the Root and the Offspring of David, the bright Morning Star.
And let him that is athirst, come: and whosoever will, let him take of
the Water of Life freely." For ever Christ calls to every anxious soul,
every afflicted soul, to every man who is ashamed of himself, and
angry with himself, and longs to live a gentler, nobler, purer, truer, and

more useful life, "Come, and live for