Daily Thoughts | Page 8

surely, by
all the time he has spent in getting back into the way.
And if any of you fancy you can sin without being punished, remember
that the prodigal son is punished most severely. He does not get off
freely the moment he chooses to repent, as false preachers will tell you.
Even after he does repent and resolves to go back to his father's house
he has a long journey home in poverty and misery, footsore, hungry,
and all but despairing. But when he does get home; when he shows he
has learnt the bitter lesson; when all he dares to ask is, "Make me as
one of thy hired servants,"--he is received as freely as the rest.
Water of Life Sermons. 1864.

Silent Depths. February 21.
Our mightiest feelings are always those which remain most unspoken.
The most intense lovers and the greatest poets have generally, I think,
written very little personal love-poetry, while they have shown in
fictitious characters a knowledge of the passion too painfully intimate
to be spoken of in the first person.
MS. 1843.

True Justification. February 22.
God grant us to be among those who wish to be really justified by faith,
by being made just persons by faith,--who cannot satisfy either their
conscience or their reason by fancying that God looks on them as right
when they know themselves to be wrong; and who cannot help trusting
that union with Christ must be something real and substantial, and not
merely a metaphor and a flower of rhetoric.
MS. 1854.

A Present Hell. February 23.
"Ay," he muttered, "sing awa', . . . wi' pretty fancies and gran' words,
and gang to hell for it."
"To hell, Mr. Mackaye?"
"Ay, to a verra real hell, Alton Locke, laddie--a warse ane than any
fiend's kitchen or subterranean Smithfield that ye'll hear o' in the
pulpits--the hell on earth o' being a flunkey, and a humbug, and a
useless peacock, wasting God's gifts on your ain lusts and
pleasures--and kenning it--and not being able to get oot o' it for the
chains of vanity and self-indulgence."

Alton Locke, chap. viii. 1849.

Time and Eternity. February 24.
Eternity does not mean merely some future endless duration, but that
ever- present moral world, governed by ever-living and absolutely
necessary laws, in which we and all spirits are now; and in which we
should be equally, whether time and space, extension and duration, and
the whole material universe to which they belong, became nothing this
moment, or lasted endlessly.
Theologica Germanica. 1854.

Christ's Life. February 25.
What was Christ's life? Not one of deep speculations, quiet thoughts,
and bright visions, but a life of fighting against evil; earnest, awful
prayers and struggles within, continued labour of body and mind
without; insult, and danger, and confusion, and violent exertion, and
bitter sorrow. This was Christ's life. This was St. Peter's, and St.
James's, and St. John's life afterwards.
Village Sermons. 1849.

The Higher Education. February 26.
In teaching women we must try to make our deepest lessons bear on the
great purpose of unfolding Woman's own calling in all ages--her
especial calling in this one. We must incite them to realise the
chivalrous belief of our old forefathers among their Saxon forests, that
something Divine dwelt in the counsels of woman: but, on the other
hand, we must continually remind them that they will attain that divine
instinct, not by renouncing their sex, but by fulfilling it; by becoming
true women, and not bad imitations of men; by educating their heads

for the sake of their hearts, not their hearts for the sake of their heads;
by claiming woman's divine vocation as the priestess of purity, of
beauty, and of love.
Introductory Lecture, Queen's College. 1848.

God's Kingdom. February 27.
Philamon had gone forth to see the world, and he had seen it; and he
had learnt that God's kingdom was not a kingdom of fanatics yelling for
a doctrine, but of willing, loving, obedient hearts.
Hypatia, chap. xxiii. 1852.

Sowing and Reaping. February 28.
So it is, that by every crime, folly, even neglect of theirs, men drive a
thorn into their own flesh, which will trouble them for years to come, it
may be to their dying day--
Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He all--
as those who neglect their fellow-creatures will discover, by the most
patent, undeniable proofs, in that last great day, when the rich and poor
shall meet together, and then, at last, discover too that the Lord is the
Maker of them all.
All Saints' Day Sermons. 1871.

The Church Catechism. February 29.
Did it ever strike you that the simple,