Daily Thoughts | Page 3

ever the eternal life of
righteousness, holiness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit, which is
the one true and only salvation bought for us by the precious blood of
Christ our Lord." Amen.
Water of Life Sermons. 1865

The Golden Cup of Youth. January 16.
Ah, glorious twenty-one, with your inexhaustible powers of doing and
enjoying, eating and hungering, sleeping and sitting up, reading and
playing! Happy are those who still possess you, and can take their fill
of your golden cup, steadied, but not saddened, by the remembrance
that for all things a good and loving God will bring them to judgment!
Happier still those who (like a few) retain in body and soul the health
and buoyancy of twenty-one on to the very verge of forty, and, seeming
to grow younger-hearted as they grow older-headed, can cast off care
and work at a moment's warning, laugh and frolic now as they did
twenty years ago, and say with Wordsworth--
"So was it when I was a boy, So let it be when I am old, Or let me die."
Two Years Ago, chap. xix. 1856.

Work and Duty. January 17.
If a man is busy, and busy about his duty, what more does he require
for time or for eternity?
Chalk Stream Studies. 1856.

Members of Christ. January 18.

. . . Would you be humble, daughter? You must look up, not down, and
see yourself A paltry atom, sap-transmitting vein Of Christ's vast vine;
the pettiest joint and member Of His great body. . . .
. . . Let thyself die-- And dying, rise again to fuller life. To be a whole
is to be small and weak-- To be a part is to be great and mighty In the
one spirit of the mighty whole-- The spirit of the martyrs and the saints.
Saint's Tragedy, Act ii. Scene vi. 1847.

Beauty a Sacrament. January 19.
Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful. Beauty is God's
handwriting--a way-side sacrament; welcome it in every fair face,
every fair sky, every fair flower, and thank Him for it, who is the
Fountain of all loveliness, and drink it in simply and earnestly with all
your eyes; it is a charmed draught, a cup of blessing.
True Words to Brave Men. 1844.

The Ideal of Rank. January 20.
With Christianity came in the thought that domination meant
responsibility, that responsibility demanded virtue. The words which
denoted Rank came to denote, likewise, high moral excellencies. The
nobilis, or man who was known, and therefore subject to public opinion,
was bound to behave nobly. The gentle-man--gentile-man--who
respected his own gens, or family, or pedigree, was bound to be gentle.
The courtier who had picked up at court some touch of Roman
civilisation from Roman ecclesiastics was bound to be courteous. He
who held an "honour," or "edel" of land, was bound to be honourable;
and he who held a "weorthig," or "worthy," thereof, was bound himself
to be worthy.
Lectures on Ancien Regime. 1866.

An Indulgent God. January 21.
A merely indulgent God would be an unjust God, and a cruel God
likewise. If God be just, as He is, then He has boundless pity for those
who are weak, but boundless wrath for the strong who misuse the weak.
Boundless pity for those who are ignorant, misled, and out of the right
way; but boundless wrath for those who mislead them and put them out
of the right way.
Discipline Sermons. 1867.

The Fifty-First Psalm. January 22.
It is such utterances as these which have given for now many hundred
years their priceless value to the little Book of Psalms ascribed to the
shepherd outlaw of the Judean hills, which have sent the sound of his
name into all lands throughout all the world. Every form of human
sorrow, doubt, struggle, error, sin--the nun agonising in the cloister; the
settler struggling for his life in Transatlantic forests; the pauper
shivering over the embers in his hovel and waiting for kind death; the
man of business striving to keep his honour pure amid the temptations
of commerce; the prodigal son starving in the far country and
recollecting the words which he learnt long ago at his mother's knee;
the peasant boy trudging afield in the chill dawn and remembering that
the Lord is his Shepherd, therefore he will not want--all shapes of
humanity have found, and will find to the end of time, a word said here
to their inmost hearts. . . .
Sermons on David. 1866.

Waiting for Death. January 23.
Death, beautiful, wise, kind Death, when will you come and tell me
what I want to know? I courted you once and many a time, brave old

Death, only to give