Character and Conduct Part 27

Bishop WESTCOTT.

"Moral courage is obeying one's conscience, and doing what one believes to be right in face of a hostile majority; and moral cowardice is stifling one's conscience, and doing what is less than right to win other people's favour."

Dr. JOHN WATSON.

Public Opinion

JUNE 16

"Opinion has its value and even its power: to have it against us is painful when we are among friends, and harmful in the case of the outer world. We should neither flatter opinion nor court it; but it is better, if we can help it, not to throw it on to a false scent. The first error is a meanness; the second an imprudence.... Be careful of your reputation, not through vanity, but that you may not harm your life's work, and out of love for truth. There is still something of self-seeking in the refined disinterestedness which will not justify itself, that it may feel itself superior to opinion. It requires ability to make what we seem agree with what we are,--and humility to feel that we are no great things."

_Amiel's Journal._

"Suppose any man shall despise me. Let him look to that himself. But I will look to this, that I be not discovered doing or saying anything deserving of contempt."

MARCUS AURELIUS.

Spiritual Balance and Proportion

JUNE 17

"A well-governed mind learns in time to find pleasure in nothing but the true and the just."

_Amiel's Journal._

"Not only does sympathy lead us to see the opinions of others in a truer light, it enables us to form a sounder judgment on our own; for as long as a man looks only 'on his own things,' he fails to see them in true proportion."

LUCY SOULSBY.

"If we can live in Christ and have His life in us, shall not the spiritual balance and proportion which were His become ours too? If He were really our Master and our Saviour, could it be that we should get so eager and excited over little things? If we were His, could we possibly be wretched over the losing of a little money which we do not need, or be exalted at the sound of a little praise which we know that we only half deserve and that the praisers only half intend? A moment's disappointment, a moment's gratification, and then the ocean would be calm again and quite forgetful of the ripple which disturbed its bosom."

PHILLIPS BROOKS.

Temperance

JUNE 18

"(Of Training...) its aim must be to bring into human character more of that unity, consistency, harmony, proportion, upon which the Greek philosophers were never weary of insisting as the essence of virtue."

_The Making of Character_, Professor MACCUNN.

"_Temperance._--The original term describes that sovereign self-mastery, that perfect self-control, in which the mysterious will of man holds in harmonious subjection all the pa.s.sions and faculties of his nature.

"Self-will is to mind what self-indulgence is to sense, the usurpation by a part of that which belongs to the whole.

"_In Knowledge temperance._--The Apostle counsels temperance, the just and proportionate use of every faculty and gift, and not the abolition or abandonment of any.

"It is easier in many cases to pluck out the right eye or to cut off the right hand than to discipline and employ them."

Bishop WESTCOTT.

Balance

JUNE 19

"Temperance is reason's girdle and pa.s.sion's bridle."

JEREMY TAYLOR.

"Be wary and keep cool. A cool head is as necessary as a warm heart. In any negotiations, steadiness and coolness are invaluable; while they will often carry you in safety through times of danger and difficulty."

Lord AVEBURY.

"Place a guard over your strong points! Thrift may run into n.i.g.g.ardliness, generosity into prodigality or s.h.i.+ftlessness. Gentleness may become pusillanimity, tact become insincerity, power become oppression. Characters need sentries at their points of weakness, true enough, but often the points of greatest strength are, paradoxically, really points of weakness."

Balance

JUNE 20

"Culture implies all which gives a mind possession of its powers."

EMERSON.

"There are very, very few from whom we get that higher, deeper, broader help which it is the prerogative of true excellence in judgment to bestow: help to discern, through the haste and insistence of the present, what is its real meaning and its just demand; help to give due weight to what is reasonable, however unreasonably it may be stated or defended; help to reverence alike the sacredness of a great cause and the sacredness of each individual life, to adjust the claims of general rules and special equity; help to carry with one conscientiously, on the journey towards decision, all the various thoughts that ought to tell upon the issue; help to keep consistency from hardening to obstinacy, and common sense from sinking into time-serving; help to think out one's duty as in a still, pure air, sensitive to all true signs and voices of this world, and yet unshaken by its storms."

_Studies in the Christian Character_, Bishop PAGET.

Sound Judgment

JUNE 21

"We are all inclined to judge of others as we find them. Our estimate of a character always depends much on the manner in which the character affects our own interests and pa.s.sions. We find it difficult to think well of those by whom we are thwarted or depressed, and we are ready to admit every excuse for the vices of those who are useful or agreeable to us."

MACAULAY.

"To judge is to see clearly, to care for what is just, and therefore to be impartial,--more exactly, to be disinterested,--more exactly still, to be impersonal."