Charles Beard

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ So in the weakness of one many are made strong; and the activities of earth are bathed and freshened in the airs of heaven.
Such lives are rarely counted happy; the world pities, while it admires them ”

“ And looking back where some light seems to rest upon our own or others' history, it is easy to see how what we should call great and signal, stands next in the line of causation to what seems (but only seems) to be trivial, and is certainly obscure. ”

“ 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 ”

“ These were God's quiet ways, and the very record of them has disappeared; they survive only in their result. But there is no son in whom mother's blood does not flow, and though now we know not how or where, the Mary of whom the world is ignorant, lived and spoke and died in the Christ, to whom the world looks up. ”

“ But we cannot watch the slow upheaval of a long line of coast, where the fisherman hardly knows at the end of a lifetime whether the sea has drawn back or his own landmarks have been moved; we are all unable to note how new continents are now being formed in the ocean's stillest [Pg 7] depths, from whose hardened and uplifted strata future ages may dig out the relics of so much that has been dear and precious to us ”

“ Let us take the most remarkable instance of all,—the Christ, whom no scepticism can dethrone from the foremost place in human history,—who, whatever else he was, [Pg 13] must be admitted even by unbelief to have set his mark upon mankind more deeply than any other son of men. ”

“ God seems to [Pg 8] work, by preference, slowly and in silence. To Him a thousand years are but as yesterday when it is past, and the dial on which His operations are recorded takes no note of human thoughts and expectations. ”

“ And so it often happens that the chamber of long and disabling sickness, or the sofa from which the invalid rarely moves, is the fountain of the finest influence, and the centre of the noblest activities. ”

“ There has been a period of geological speculation, at which all the changes which have taken place upon the earth's surface, and have left their unmistakable marks in countless relics of animal and vegetable life, were attributed to the action of sudden and violent forces, of which, to-day, earthquake and tempest and volcano are only the feeble and transitory types. ”

“ I will not compare what may be achieved by these means, with the less conspicuous results of a goodness which propagates itself less by word and act than by the unconscious contagion of example; for it is not given to us to choose the form and method [Pg 16] of our obedience. The call of conscience is to action; God cannot be acceptably served in inglorious ease. The command comes in many forms: "Work while it is day; the night cometh when no man can work," cries one voice ”