Character and Conduct Part 47

"To try to feel my own insignificance.

"To believe in myself and the powers with which I am entrusted.

"To try to make conversation more useful, and therefore to store my mind with facts, but to guard against a wish to s.h.i.+ne.

"To try to despise the principle of the day 'every man his own trumpeter,' and to feel it a degradation to speak of my own doings, as a poor braggart.

"To speak less of self and to think less.

"To contend one by one against evil thoughts.

"To try to fix my thoughts in prayer without distraction.

"To watch over a growing habit of uncharitable judgment."

_F. W. Robertson's Life._

Confession of Sin

OCTOBER 15

"An immense quant.i.ty of modern confession of sin, even when honest, is merely a sickly egotism which will rather gloat over its own evil than lose the centralisation of its interest in itself."

_Ethics of the Dust_, JOHN RUSKIN.

"The fit of low spirits which comes to us when we find ourselves overtaken in a fault, though we flatter ourselves to reckon it a certain sign of penitence, and a set-off to the sin itself which G.o.d will surely take into account, is often nothing more than vexation and annoyance with ourselves, that, after all our good resolutions and attempts at reformation, we have broken down again."

_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.

"And be you sure that sorrow without resolute effort at amendment is one of the most contemptible of all human frailties; deserving to be despised by men, and certain to be rejected by G.o.d."

Bishop TEMPLE.

Morbid Introspectiveness

OCTOBER 16

"Plainly there is one danger in all self-discipline which has to be most carefully watched and guarded against, that, namely, of valuing the means at the expense of the end, and so falling into either self-righteousness or formalism, and very probably into uncharitableness also. If we esteem our obedience to rule, and self-imposed restraints, for their own sake, we effectually destroy their power to train and elevate. I suppose this is the real mistake of a false asceticism, which sees the merit rather in the amount of discipline undergone than in the character and self-conquest to be gained by it."

Bishop WALSHAM HOW.

"... It is a clear view of higher motives, which at once reveals and defeats our meaner impulses; which a.s.sists the discipline of _proper_ self-searching, by making it healthy and hopeful; and resists any habit of morbid introspectiveness with its fatal tendency to paralyse activity of character."

Canon KNOX LITTLE.

Introspection

OCTOBER 17

"Beware of despairing about yourself."

ST. AUGUSTINE.

"Any man who is good for anything, if he is always thinking about himself, will come to think himself good for nothing very soon. It is only a fop or a fool who can bear to look at himself all day long, without disgust. And so the first thing for a man to do, who wants to use his best powers at their best, is to get rid of self-consciousness, to stop thinking about himself and how he is working, altogether."

PHILLIPS BROOKS.

"On somehow. To go back Were to lose all."

TENNYSON.

Our True Selves and Our Traditional Selves

OCTOBER 18

"I have sometimes thought that this facility of men in believing that they are still what they once meant to be--this undisturbed appropriation of a traditional character which is often but a melancholy relic of early resolutions, like the worn and soiled testimonial to soberness and honesty carried in the pocket of a tippler whom the need of a dram has driven into peculation--may sometimes diminish the turpitude of what seems a flat, barefaced falsehood. It is notorious that a man may go on uttering false a.s.sertions about his own acts till he at last believes in them: is it not possible that sometimes in the very first utterance there may be a shade of creed-reciting belief, a reproduction of a traditional self which is clung to against all evidence? There is no knowing all the disguises of the lying serpent.

"When we come to examine in detail what is the sane mind in the sane body, the final test of completeness seems to be a security of distinction between what we have professed and what we have done; what we have aimed at and what we have achieved; what we have invented and what we have witnessed or had evidenced to us; what we think and feel in the present and what we thought and felt in the past."

GEORGE ELIOT.

Un-self-consciousness

OCTOBER 19

"An unconscious, easy, selfish person shocks less and is more easily loved than one who is laboriously and egotistically unselfish. There is at least no fuss about the first; but the other parades his sacrifices, and so sells his favours too dear. Selfishness is calm, a force of nature: you might say the trees are selfish. But egoism is a piece of vanity; it must always take you into its confidence; it is uneasy, troublesome, searching; it can do good, but not handsomely; it is uglier, because less dignified, than selfishness itself."

"If a man has self-surrender pressed incessantly upon him, this keeps the idea of self ever before his view. Christ does not cry down _self_, but He puts it out of a man's sight by giving him something better to care for, something which shall take full and rightful possession of his soul. The Apostles, without ever having any consciousness of sacrificing self, were brought into a habit of self-sacrifice by merging all thoughts for themselves in devotion to a Master and a cause, and in thinking what they could do to serve it themselves."

_Pastor Pastorum_, HENRY LATHAM.

Un-self-consciousness

OCTOBER 20

"Think as little as possible about any good in yourself; turn your eyes resolutely from any view of your acquirement, your influence, your plan, your success, your following: above all, speak as little as possible about yourself. The inordinateness of our self-love makes speech about ourselves like the putting of the lighted torch to the dried wood which has been laid in order for the burning. Nothing but duty should open our lips upon this dangerous theme, except it be in humble confession of our sinfulness before our G.o.d. Again, be specially upon the watch against those little tricks by which the vain man seeks to bring round the conversation to himself, and gain the praise or notice which the thirsty ears drink in so greedily; and even if praise comes unsought, it is well, whilst men are uttering it, to guard yourself by thinking of some secret cause for humbling yourself inwardly to G.o.d; thinking into what these pleasant accents would be changed if all that is known to G.o.d, and even to yourself, stood suddenly revealed to man."