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

    MS. Sermon.  1857.

A Living God.  January 8

Here and there, among rich and poor, there are those whose heart and flesh, whose conscience and whose intellect, cry out for the Living God, and will know no peace till they have found Him.  For till then they can find no explanation of the three great human questions—Where am I?  Whither am I going?  What must I do?

    Sermons on the Pentateuch.  1862.

The Fairy Gardens.  January 9

Of all the blessings which the study of Nature brings to the patient observer, let none, perhaps, be classed higher than this, that the farther he enters into those fairy gardens of life and birth, which Spenser saw and described in his great poem, the more he learns the awful and yet comfortable truth, that they do not belong to him, but to One greater, wiser, lovelier than he; and as he stands, silent with awe, amid the pomp of Nature’s ever-busy rest, hears as of old, The Word of the “Lord God walking among the trees of the garden in the cool of the day.”

    Glaucus.  1855.

Love.  January 10

Oh!  Love!  Love!  Love! the same in peasant and in peer!  The more honour to you, then, old Love, to be the same thing in this world which is common to peasant and to peer.  They say that you are blind, a dreamer, an exaggerator—a liar, in short!  They just know nothing about you, then.  You will not see people as they seem—as they have become, no doubt; but why?  Because you see them as they ought to be, and are in some deep way eternally, in the sight of Him who conceived and created them!

    Two Years Ago, chap. xiv.  1856.

Life—Love.  January 11

We must live nobly to love nobly.

    MS.

The Seed of Good.  January 12

Never was the young Abbot heard to speak harshly of any human being.  “When thou hast tried in vain for seven years,” he used to say, “to convert a sinner, then only wilt thou have a right to suspect him of being a worse man than thyself.”  That there is a seed of good in all men, a divine word and spirit striving with all men, a gospel and good news which would turn the hearts of all men, if abbots and priests could but preach it aright, was his favourite doctrine, and one which he used to defend, when at rare intervals he allowed himself to discuss any subject, from the writings of his favourite theologian, Clement of Alexandria.

Above all, Abbot Philamon stopped by stern rebuke any attempt to revile either heretics or heathens.  “On the Catholic Church alone,” he used to say, “lies the blame of all heresy and unbelief; for if she were but for one day that which she ought to be, the world would be converted before nightfall.”

    Hypatia, chap. xxx.  1852.

Danger of Thinking vaguely.  January 13

Watch against any fallacies in your ideas which may arise, not from disingenuousness, but from allowing yourself in moments of feeling to think vaguely, and not to attach precise meaning to your words.  Without any cold caution of expression, it is a duty we owe to God’s truth, and to our own happiness and the happiness of those around us, to think and speak as correctly as we can.  Almost all heresy, schism, and misunderstandings, between either churches or individuals who ought to be one, have arisen from this fault of an involved and vague style of thought.

    MS.  1842.

The Possession of Faith.  January 14

I don’t want to possess a faith, I want a faith which will possess me.

    Hypatia, chap. xvii.  1852.

The Eternal Life.  January 15

Eternally, and for ever, in heaven, says St. John, Christ says and is and does what prophets prophesied of Him that He would say and be and do.  “I am the Root and the Offspring of David, the bright Morning Star.  And let him that is athirst, come: and whosoever will, let him take of the Water of Life freely.”  For ever Christ calls to every anxious soul, every afflicted soul, to every man who is ashamed of himself, and angry with himself, and longs to live a gentler, nobler, purer, truer, and more useful life, “Come, and live for ever the eternal life of righteousness, holiness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit, which is the one true and only salvation bought for us by the precious blood of Christ our Lord.”  Amen.

    Water of Life Sermons.  1865

The Golden Cup of Youth.  January 16

Ah, glorious twenty-one, with your inexhaustible powers of doing and enjoying, eating and hungering, sleeping and sitting up, reading and playing!  Happy are those who still possess you, and can take their fill of your golden cup, steadied, but not saddened, by the remembrance that for all things a good and loving God will bring them to judgment!

Happier still those who (like a few) retain in body and soul the health and buoyancy of twenty-one on to the very verge of forty, and, seeming to grow younger-hearted as they grow older-headed, can cast off care and work at a moment’s warning, laugh and frolic now as they did twenty years ago, and say with Wordsworth—

“So was it when I was a boy,
So let it be when I am old,
Or let me die.”

    Two Years Ago, chap. xix.  1856.

Work and Duty.  January 17

If a man is busy, and busy about his duty, what more does he require for time or for eternity?

    Chalk Stream Studies.  1856.

Members of Christ.  January 18

. . . Would you be humble, daughter?
You must look up, not down, and see yourself
A paltry atom, sap-transmitting vein
Of Christ’s vast vine; the pettiest joint and member
Of His great body. . . .

. . . Let thyself die—
And dying, rise again to fuller life.
To be a whole is to be small and weak—
To be a part is to be great and mighty
In the one spirit of the mighty whole—
The spirit of the martyrs and the saints.

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

Beauty a Sacrament.  January 19

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful.  Beauty is God’s handwriting—a way-side sacrament; welcome it in every fair face, every fair sky, every fair flower, and thank Him for it, who is the Fountain of all loveliness, and drink it in simply and earnestly with all your eyes; it is a charmed draught, a cup of blessing.

    True Words to Brave Men.  1844.

The Ideal of Rank.  January 20

With Christianity came in the thought that domination meant responsibility, that responsibility demanded virtue.  The words which denoted Rank came to denote, likewise, high moral excellencies.  The nobilis, or man who was known, and therefore subject to public opinion, was bound to behave nobly.  The gentle-man—gentile-man—who respected his own gens, or family, or pedigree, was bound to be gentle.  The courtier who had picked up at court some touch of Roman civilisation from Roman ecclesiastics was bound to be courteous.  He who held an “honour,” or “edel” of land, was bound to be honourable; and he who held a “weorthig,” or “worthy,” thereof, was bound himself to be worthy.

    Lectures on Ancien Régime.  1866.