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

Be earnest, earnest, earnest; mad, if thou wilt:

Do what thou dost as if the stake were heaven, And that thy last deed ere the judgment-day.

When all’s done, nothing’s done.  There’s rest above—

Below let work be death, if work be love!

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

The Eternal Good.  February 12

“God hath showed thee what is good,” . . . what is good in itself, and of itself—the one very eternal and absolute good, which was with God and in God and from God, before all worlds, and will be for ever, without changing, or growing less or greater, eternally the same good—the good which would be just as good and just and right and lovely and glorious if there were no world, no men, no angels, no heaven, no hell, and God were alone in His own abyss.

    Sermons for the Times.  1855.

Awfulness of Words.  February 13

A difference in words is a very awful and important difference; a difference in words is a difference in things.  Words are very awful and wonderful things, for they come from the most awful and wonderful of all beings, Jesus Christ, The Word.  He puts words into men’s minds.  He made all things, and He made words to express those things.  And woe to those who use the wrong words about anything.

    Village Sermons.  1848.

A Wise Woman.  February 14

What wisdom she had she did not pick off the hedge, like blackberries.  God is too kind to give away wisdom after that useless fashion.  So she had to earn her wisdom, and to work hard, and suffer much ere she attained it.  And in attaining she endured strange adventures and great sorrows; and yet they would not have given her the wisdom had she not had something in herself which gave her wit to understand her lessons, and skill and courage to do what they taught her.  There had been many names for that something before she was born, there have been many names for it since, but her father and mother called it the Grace of God.

    Unfinished Novel.  1869.

Charity the one Influence.  February 15

The older we grow, the more we understand our own lives and histories, the more we shall see that the spirit of wisdom is the spirit of love; that the true way to gain influence over our fellow-men is to have charity towards them.  That is a hard lesson to learn; and all those who learn it generally learn it late; almost—God forgive us—too late.

    Westminster Sermons.

The Ascetic Painters.  February 16

We owe much (notwithstanding their partial and Manichean idea of beauty) to the early ascetic painters.  Their works are a possession for ever.  No future school of religious art will be able to rise to eminence without learning from them their secret.  They taught artists, and priests, and laymen, too, that beauty is only worthy of admiration when it is the outward sacrament of the beauty of the soul within; they helped to deliver men from that idolatry to merely animal strength and loveliness into which they were in danger of falling in ferocious ages, and among the relics of Roman luxury.

    Miscellanies.  1849.

Reveries.  February 17

Beware of giving way to reveries.  Have always some employment in your hands.  Look forward to the future with hope.  Build castles if you will, but only bright ones, and not too many.

    Letters and Memories.  1842.

Woman’s Mission.  February 18

It is the glory of woman that she was sent into the world to live for others rather than for herself; and therefore, I should say, let her smallest rights be respected, her smallest wrongs redressed; but let her never be persuaded to forget that she is sent into the world to teach man—what I believe she has been teaching him all along, even in the savage state, namely, that there is something more necessary than the claiming of rights, and that is, the performing of duties; to teach him specially, in these so-called intellectual days, that there is something more than intellect, and that is—purity and virtue.

    Lecture on Thrift.  1869.

The Heroic Life.  February 19

Provided we attain at last to the truly heroic and divine life, which is the life of virtue, it will matter little to us by what wild and weary ways, or through what painful and humiliating processes, we have arrived thither.  If God has loved us, if God will receive us, then let us submit loyally and humbly to His law—“whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth.”

    All Saints’ Day Sermons.

The Wages of Sin.  February 20

It is sometimes said, “The greater the sinner the greater the saint.”  I do not believe it.  I do not see it.  It stands to reason—if a man loses his way and finds it again, he is so much the less forward on his way, 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.