Kindle Notes & Highlights
There are men and women who can be happy in such circumstances by securing the corner of a couch near a good fire. With the help of a good novel, they are able to forget the world around them. The noise of the waves on the sands, the storm resounding through the chimney, or the rain on the windows serves to deepen the calm of their spirits.
The question is not whether a man works because he has to, but whether the work he does is good, honest work for which the world is better off. In this matter there are many first that shall be last. The work of a baker for instance, must stand higher in the judgment of the universe than that of a brewer, no matter how good his ale might be. Because the one trade brings in more money than the other, many in the world count it more honourable. But there is another judgment at hand.
And now, the moment she began to flutter her weak wings, she found the whole human family hanging upon her, and that she could not rise except in raising them along with her. For the necessities of our deepest nature are such as not to allow a mere private and individual satisfaction.
Being is the mother to all little Doings as well as the grown-up Deeds and the mighty heroic Sacrifice.
It is the law that the man who does wrong shall suffer. It is the only hope for him and the neighbour he wrongs. When he forsakes his evil, one by one the dogs of his suffering will drop away from his track. He will find at last that they have but hounded him into the land of his nativity, into the home of his Father in heaven.
that it is a killing thing to talk about what you mean to do. It is to let the wind in upon a delicate plant, requiring a long childhood under glass, open to sun and air, closed to wind and frost.
Only man can help man. Money without man can do little or nothing. As our Lord redeemed the world by being a man, the true Son of the true Father, so the only way for a man to help men is to be a true man to his neighbour.
Light and shade, sunshine and shadow pursue each other over the moral as well as the material world. Every soul has a landscape that changes with the wind that sweeps its sky, with the clouds that return after its rain.
In the midst of a refined family he behaved as the blind and stupid generally behave to those who see what they cannot see. Mockery is the share they choose in the motions of life eternal.
He delights in his children. As soon as they can be indulged without ruin, he will heap upon them their desires. They are his too.”
Her new life was, no doubt, from its lack of ties to a home and the restraining influences of older people, dangerous—no kite can soar without the pull of the string. But danger leads less often to ruin than some people think. He who can walk without falling will learn to walk the better that his road is not always smooth.
Then would such a quiescence pervade Hester’s spirit, such a sweet spiritual sleep creep over her, that nothing seemed required of her but to live—mere existence was conscious wellbeing. On and off, however, she would he haunted with a vague sense of guilt at enjoying the leisure, but then faith would rouse itself and say: “But God will take care of you in this thing, too. You do not have to watch lest he should forget, only be ready when he gives the lightest call. You have to keep listening.”
How many things there are in the world in which the wisest of us can hardly perceive the hand of God! Who not knowing could ready the lily in its bulb, the great oak in the pebble-like acorn? God’s beginnings do not look like his endings, but they are. The oak is the acorn, though we cannot see it.
Few seem to understand that the true end is not to keep their children from doing what is wrong, though that is on the way to it, but to render them incapable of doing wrong. While one is capable of doing wrong, he is no nearer right than if that wrong were done—not so near as if the wrong were done and repented of. Some minds are never roused to the true nature of their selfishness until having done some patent wrong, the eyes of the collective human conscience are fixed upon them. Doubtless in the disapproving crowd are many just as capable of the wrong as they, but the deeper nature in
...more
No ill in our neighbours, if we be right in ourselves, will ever seem hopeless to us.
