Charles Beard

“ And so it often happens that, under circumstances like these, a character is built up which, if it necessarily shine upon but a few lives, shines for them with a brightness all the purer and more intense. Such virtue is not the beacon flame upon the hill-top, wakening half the land to heroic courage and stern endurance, but the quiet lamp which giveth light to all that are in the house, for sweet patience, and fine courtesy, and the practice of all homely goodness. ”

“ I admit the wearing power of fretting anxiety, of sorrow that saps the springs of life, of labour pushed to contempt of the physical and moral conditions of existence; but honest work for an honest purpose, the full exercise of all the powers from day to day, the steady strain of faculties that were meant for strain and which rust in disuse, never hurt any one yet. But the temptations of exuberant vitality are all, if not to over-strain, yet to a certain hardness, and arrogance, and disregard of eternal law. ”

“ It is indeed difficult to over-estimate the force of a great soul; though it is needful to remark that not all great souls work in the full light of publicity and have their path marked by revolution, and equally needful to remember that not all dislocating and disturbing spirits put forth any true claim to greatness. We are far too apt to confound the occasions with the causes of any great change, and to forget that if fire do indeed come out of a noble heart, it can only kindle other hearts that are already prepared to burn. ”

“ So down the ages we trace the golden thread of the succession of Saints, Christ the first, afterwards they that are his, in turn receiving, in turn giving life, blessed and blessing—till at last the kingdom comes. ”

“ A father's integrity—a mother's sweet goodness—the quiet air of a happy home—a domestic courage and patience, at which you have looked very closely, and whose every line and lineament you know—some ancestral saintliness, which is a household tradition and no more, but which has never withered in the fierce light of public estimate,—these things have inspired and nourished your nobler part. ”

“ The kingdom of God no longer seems a dimly glorious dream, far off in a new strange world, but an ideal that may be realized, here, upon the ruins of innumerable failures, now, in the depths of living human hearts. ”

“ It is the summons to exchange pain for peace, and enforced quietness for the vigour and the joy of service. The God who has straitened them so long is He who now sets their lives in a large place; and from the twilight of faith they pass into the noon of sight. ”

“ I ask them, Is the life which I have tried to describe worth living? or is there any other method by which they think the highest objects of existence can be more completely attained? Is there any finer discipline for their powers than the service of God, any nobler education than the fellowship of Christ? I do not plead with them for allegiance to any particular form of Christianity, though we have a right to rejoice in the strength and sweetness of our own Saints, and I might argue that the faith which issues in such fruit of holy [Pg 24] living cannot be without its just claim to respect. ”

“ Sometimes a command like this finds a ready echo in a timid and sensitive spirit, to which it is a deliverance not to be compelled by conscience to go down into the throng of life; quite as often it lies, at least for awhile, like a galling fetter upon the active mind and the eager will. ”

“ So [Pg 21] ripen, slowly as the seasons pass and the years come and go, that sweetness and roundness of character which we call saintliness; and as we come in from our worldly work and struggle, with its soil still clinging to us, and the joy of achievement always dashed with the recollection of failure, we wonder at a goodness in which we can hardly detect a flaw, and upon which already rests a foregleam of the presence of God.
For one secret source of the influence which such a life may exercise, undoubtedly lies in its contrast to men's common and more active existence. ”

“ God's tender mercies, even of the most intimately spiritual kind, are over all His human children. But it is the line in which we naturally stand; and to stand in it I count the highest privilege of our humanity. I will lay down no conditions of salvation where I believe Christ has laid none down: I will not attempt to compare his disciples with those of other masters: I am content to know that here is a fountain of living waters, which flows for us, and at which those who drink shall never thirst again. ”

“ What sorrows come to all, do not spare them; and it is the quickly throbbing heart that is the tenderest. They cannot take life with dull acquiescence, being neither keenly glad nor greatly sorry: to them, its brightness is like opening Paradise ”

“ Then, so God has willed it, Quietness and Pain are sister angels, that have a singular privilege of access to Him; and the soul to which they minister, through the weary hours of the day and in the long watches of the night, may frequently mount upon their friendly wings into the sanctuary of His Presence, bringing with it, upon its return earthward, one knows not what glow caught from the infinite and eternal Brightness. The difficulties of a busy life are apt to throw mind and heart back upon themselves ”

“ It is as if God himself were somewhat nearer to us: a strong faith seems to draw Him down from heaven, to build His tabernacle among men: or if this cannot be, and we know that He is always round about us, at least the mists scatter, the clouds clear away, and we catch a glimpse of His unceasing activity, of His eternal rest. ”

“ There is a great charm in the difference between the heated air in which we fight our battles even for goodness, and the still atmosphere which environs these quiet lives: we come back to them from the struggle, and find that while they too are full of all fine aspiration for right, and thrill with a divine indignation against wrong, their aspiration is without restlessness, their indignation has no root of bitterness in it; they are not unduly elated by successes which have turned our heads, nor daunted by failures which have utterly cast us down ”

“ Life is a gift of very unequal distribution. I am not speaking merely of length of life, though that is an important element in the case: there may be sad and quiet years which do not count: we have known existences which crept on in one dull round, from petty pleasure to petty pleasure, from monotonous occupation to monotonous occupation, never roused to storm by any noble passion, never thrilled by an electric touch of [Pg 6] sympathy. ”

“ Our life's work, we think, is half undone; our best hopes have not yet reached fruition; our vital capacity is still unexhausted; a thousand interests claim us. If God called us now, we should obey the call with sorrowful reluctance, and innumerable backward glances to the work and love in which our hearts are centred. ”

“ We live in a sceptical age, when knowledge and faith find it hard to come to terms, and there is always an excuse for disbelieving truths which startle the soul into seriousness and make a painful demand upon the will. But whatever else is false, one thing remains true—that the service of God is strength and peace and freedom. Christ still holds the secret of life: "If any man will come after me, let him [Pg 25] deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it." ”

“ Sometimes, I am inclined to think, we insist too much on our own estimate of small and great in the moral world, forgetting that any single fact or individual life is but one link in an endless chain of causes and consequences, of which we ought to know the whole before we can rightly estimate a part. ”

“ Some lives are complete within narrow limits: in the few years which are all they have, they ripen into perfect sweetness, or expend themselves in such a flash of heroism, as would make subsequent days, were they given, mean and poor by contrast. What shall we say of that nameless engine-driver in America, who last week, measuring his own life against six hundred more, rushed through the flames and saved them? ”

“ A superstition, not without its tender and graceful side, has taken her from her cottage home at Nazareth, and crowned her Queen of Heaven; till all the familiar extravagances of mythology have obliterated even from men's imagination the lines of a sweet and strong human character. ”

“ But it is easier to understand when we remember that a just God asks account only of what He has given. Within the narrowest fate is yet room to round off the perfect sphere. Of the lily that blooms to-day and fades to-morrow, He demands only that it shall be sweet and beautiful in its season. ”

“ What if the sense of joyous energy only fortifies the soul against disappointment, and makes light of hindrances, and enables patience to have her perfect work? We envy the strong [Pg 17] because we think they can do more than we, and enjoy more than we—in a word, because they live more than we. Let us envy them, if at all, because they have more than we to give to God and men, and answer with a fuller and more eager impulse to the breath of inspiration, and can throw a less infinitesimal weight into the scale of the Divine purpose. ”

“ For there the charities of life may be all astir, and the quick affections thence make their far journeys of sympathy; thither may come the workers, now for the refreshment of peace, now for the balm of consolation, now, again, for the inspiration of a purer dutifulness ”

“ And I make it far less to the middle-aged, whose habits are fixed, whose principles chosen, and who have taken a course in life which they will not lightly abandon, than to the young, whose nature is yet plastic, and who may make of their existence what they will. ”

“ For the claims upon an energetic nature are so many, so various, often so conflicting; it is so hard to know which of two competing duties ought to take precedence, so impossible to adjust effort at precisely its right intensity, and to hit the mean between base self-saving and foolish self-squandering,—that I think it must be a common wish for keen consciences to have the boundaries of industry a little more plainly marked out by God, and to be relieved from the perpetual perplexity of choice. ”

“ The religious life, to some imaginations, presents itself as inclining largely to the side of the passive and the negative. It is abstinence from evil quite as much as eager realization of good. On this view, an air of cloistered sanctity hangs about it: it is full of prayers and mystic raptures: its eye is fixed within, or, if not within, only upon God. ”

“ If you, my brethren, have any stoutness of heart to resist mean temptation, if you are conscious of any uplifting of desire towards better and more stable things than form the common stuff of life, if any quiet trust in God sustains you amid the world's chance and change, to what do you owe them? ”

“ This inequality of gift may be a religious difficulty, but it fits in with the whole economy of Nature, who is a Mother at once bountiful and prodigal, and while careful of the type, careless of the individual life; bidding one soul but open unconscious eyes upon the world and close them again, while another moves through the slow changes of ninety years. ”

“ Their characteristic excellences answer in many respects to our weaknesses, and we admire and love them all the more: we cannot wait, and their existence is one long patience: the noise and the light of [Pg 23] publicity are our life, and God has hidden them in His pavilion from the strife of tongues: we argue, and wrangle, and fight, while they but love and pray: health and energy are the very conditions of our activity, and their life is rooted in weakness and in pain: we converse continually with men, and it is a familiar thing with them to be alone with God. ”

“ We are falling upon careless times, when the world is too much with us, and the love of ease seduces us, and we flit—thinking, God help us! that it is pleasure—from one facile excitement, from one selfish gratification, to another. ”

“ But God tempers His weapons in His own way, and all to the best effect; and presently the busiest and most versatile intellect finds new depths and fresh possibilities of interest in the things that lie closest at home; the widest and the warmest heart learns that faltering feet and feeble hands cannot restrain love's farthest and highest flight; and as for God, with all that is involved in the soul's upward strain towards communion, and His descent of help, He may easily [Pg 18] be nearer to the silence of an enforced quietness, than to the noise and press of men's common life. ”

“ And as they emerge out of the narrowness of [Pg 18] their personal lot, to go down into the ringing battle of the world, they encounter blows and bruises which more selfish lives are able to avoid; they lay bare their hearts to sorrows not their own, and are stricken with the disappointments of mankind. Was it not a part of the secret of Christ that his affections were so wide, his sympathies so keen, his identification with humanity so complete, that sin not his own cast a shadow upon him almost like remorse, and all his tears were for others' sorrows? ”

“ Is the faith of Christendom sustained from generation to generation by the suc [Pg 10] cession of heroes and saints, to whose achievements all men look up with despairing admiration, and in whose acknowledged and recorded excellence they see the full embodiment of their own desire, or by the thousand nameless fidelities to duty, and obscure victories of self-devotion, and hidden glories of purity, that pass away without celebration? ”

“ Life may be measured by its breadth as well as by its length: by the number of its intellectual points of contact with humanity, by the width of its sympathies, the largeness of its hopes. Still more, there is a quality of intensity in which lives differ: some live more in a week than others in a year: it is not that they are consuming themselves under stress of circumstance or in agony of [Pg 7] passion, but that their fibre is stronger, their central flame brighter, their power of endurance larger. ”

“ But God Himself provides a diversity of work for His own purposes, and at the same time a variety of example for us, when He chooses some lives, and laying upon them, what seems to be a heavy burthen of sickness and infirmity, or filling them with a great modesty and retiringness of spirit, or shutting them up within very narrow and insurmountable barriers of circumstance, says to them, in a voice which it is impossible to misinterpret, "Serve Me in [Pg 17] darkness and in silence; and let it be enough that I accept the faithfulness which is unknown of men." ”

“ The weaker ones are always apt to take life in too low a key. They are easily daunted: they resign themselves, as they say, to the inevitable: they have too keen a sense of evils to be overborne and difficulties to be confronted: they learn to distrust, if not to smile at, the ideal, to call acquiescence common sense, and cowardice prudence. ”

“ We grow up with them, and hardly know them for His activity; they are among the necessary conditions of our existence; and when we seek for tokens of Him, it is rather in the crises and catastrophes of life—in the sharp wound that pricks a sleeping conscience, in the call of duty which turns the whole current of our energy, in the [Pg 12] sorrow which destroys for ever our trust in the world. ”

“ It is not complimentary to human nature to note that perfectly healthy people, whom nothing tries and who are ignorant of pain, are seldom tolerant, tender, sympathetic, with lives that in one important constituent of happiness are far beneath their own. ”