Daily Thoughts: selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife

    Water of Life Sermons.  1867.

Speaking the Truth in Love.  May 19

Whenever we are tempted to say more than is needful, let us remember St. John’s words (in the only sermon we have on record of his), “Little children, love one another,” and ask God for His Holy Spirit, the spirit of love, which, instead of weakening a man’s words, makes them all the stronger in the cause of truth, because they are spoken in love.

How difficult it is to distinguish between the loving tact, which avoids giving offence to a weaker brother, and the fear of man, which bringeth a snare!

    MS. Letter.  1842.

Peasant Souls.  May 20

. . . Dull boors
See deeper than we think, and hide within
Those leathern hulls unfathomable truths,
Which we amid thought’s glittering mazes lose.
They grind among the iron facts of life,
And have no time for self-deception.

    Saint’s Tragedy, Act iii. Scene ii.
    1847.

Death and Everlasting Life.  May 21

Do not rashly count on some sudden radical change happening to you as soon as you die to make you fit for heaven.  There is not one word in the Bible which gives us reason to suppose that we shall not be in the next world the same persons that we have made ourselves in this world. . . .  What we sow here we shall reap there.  And it is good for us to know and face this.  Anything is good for us, however unpleasant it may be, which drives us from the only real misery, which is sin and selfishness, to the only true happiness, which is the everlasting life of Christ, a pure, loving, just, generous, useful life of goodness.

    Good News of God Sermons.

Science and Virtue.  May 22

Science is great; but she is not the greatest.  She is an instrument and not a power—beneficent or deadly, according as she is wielded by the hand of virtue or vice.  But her lawful mistress, the only one which can use her aright, the only one under whom she can truly grow and prosper and prove her divine descent, is Virtue, the likeness of Almighty God.

    Roman and Teuton.  1860.

A Child’s Heart.  May 23

“I saw at last!  I found out that I had been trying for years which was stronger, God or I; I found out I had been trying whether I could not do well enough without Him; and there I found that I could not—could not!  I felt like a child who had marched off from home, fancying it can find its way, and is lost at once.  I did not know that I had a Father in heaven who had been looking after me, when I fancied I was looking after myself.  I don’t half believe it now.” . . .  And so the old heart passed away from Thomas Thurnall, and instead of it grew up the heart of a little child.

    Two Years Ago, chap. xxviii.  1857.

Self-Security.  May 24

Strange it is how mortal man, “who cometh up and is cut down like the flower,” can harden himself into a stoical security, and count on the morrow which may never come.  Yet so it is, and perhaps if it were not so no work would get done on earth—at least by the many who know not that God is guiding them, while they fancy they are guiding themselves.

    Two Years Ago, chap. i.

There is a Providence which rules this earth, whose name is neither Political Economy nor Expediency, but the Living God, who makes every right action reward, and every wrong action punish, itself.

    History Lecture, Cambridge.  1866.

Loss and Gain.  May 25

“He has yet to learn what losing his life to save it means, Amyas.  Bad men have taught him (and I fear these Anabaptists and Puritans at home teach little else) that it is the one great business of every man to save his own soul after he dies; every one for himself; and that that, and not divine self-sacrifice, is the one thing needful, and the better part which Mary chose.”

“I think,” said Amyas, “men are enough inclined to be selfish without being taught that.”

    Westward Ho! chap. vii.  1854.

The Law of Righteousness.  May 26

What if I had discovered that one law of the spiritual world, in which all others were contained, was Righteousness? and that disharmony with that law, which we call unspirituality, was not being vulgar, or clumsy, or ill-taught, or unimaginative, or dull; but simply being unrighteous? that righteousness, and it alone, was the beautiful, righteousness the sublime, the heavenly, the God-like—ay, God Himself?

    Hypatia, chap. xxvii.  1852.

Human and Divine Love.  May 27

Believe me that he who has been led by love to a human being to understand the mystery of that divine love which fills all heaven and earth, and concentrates itself into an articulate manifestation in the person of Christ, will soon begin to find that he cannot enter into the perfect bliss of that truth without going further, and seeing that the human heart requires some standing-ground for its affection, even for the love of wife and child, deeper and surer than that love, namely, in utter loyalty, resignation, adoring affection to Him in whom all loveliness is concentrated.  It is a great mystery.  It is a hard lesson.

    Letters and Memories.  1847.

A High Finish.  May 28

A high artistic finish is important for more reasons than for the mere pleasure it gives.  There is something sacramental in perfect metre and rhythm.  They are outward and visible signs (most seriously we speak as we say it) of an inward and spiritual grace, namely, of the self-possessed and victorious temper of one who has so far subdued nature as to be able to hear that universal sphere-music of hers, speaking of which Mr. Carlyle says, that “all deepest thoughts instinctively vent themselves in song.”

    Miscellanies.  1849.

Our Prayers.  May 29

There can be no objection to praying for certain special things.  God forbid!  I cannot help doing it, any more than a child in the dark can help calling for its mother.  Only it seems to me that when we pray, “Grant this day that we run into no kind of danger,” we ought to lay our stress on the “run” rather than on the “danger,” to ask God not to take away the danger by altering the course of nature, but to give us light and guidance whereby to avoid it.

    Letters and Memories.  1860.

Clearing Showers.  May 30

When a stream is swelled by a flood, a shower of rain clears it.  So in trouble, when the heart is turbid from the world’s admixtures, and the stirring up of the foul particles which will lie at the bottom, nothing but the pure dew of heaven can restore its purity, when God’s spirit comes down upon it like a gentle rain!

    MS.  1843.

Vineyards in Spring.  May 31

Look at the rows of vines, or what will be vines when the summer comes, but are now black, knotted and gnarled clubs, without a sign of life in the seemingly dead stick.  One who sees that sight may find a new beauty and meaning in the mystic words, “I am the Vine, ye are the branches.”  It is not merely the connection between branch and stem common to all trees; not merely the exhilarating and seemingly inspiring properties of the grape, which made the very heathen look upon it as the sacred and miraculous fruit, the special gift of God; not merely the pruning out of the unfruitful branches, to be burned as firewood—not merely these, but the seeming death of the Vine, shorn of all its beauty, its fruitfulness, of every branch and twig which it had borne the year before, and left unsightly and seemingly ruined, to its winter sleep; and then bursting forth again by an irresistible inward life into fresh branches, spreading and trailing far and wide, and tossing their golden tendrils to the sky.  This thought surely—the emblem of the living Church, springing from the corpse of the dead Christ, who yet should rise to be alive for evermore—enters into, it may be forms an integral part of, the meaning of that prophecy of all prophecies.

    Prose Idylls.  1864.

SAINTS’ DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS

MAY 1

St. Philip and St. James, Apostles and Martyrs