Part 36

Amiel's Journal.

Habit

MAY 21

"The Hell to be endured hereafter which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters the wrong way. Could the young realise how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar."

Psychology, Professor WILLIAM JAMES.

"Routine is a terrible master, but she is a servant whom we can hardly do without. Routine as a law is deadly. Routine as a resource in the temporary exhaustion of impulse and suggestion is often our salvation."

PHILLIPS BROOKS.

"It is just as easy to form a good habit as it is a bad one. And it is just as hard to break a good habit as a bad one. So get the good ones and keep them."

MCKINLEY.

Sin has its Pedigree

MAY 22

"One false note will spoil the finest piece of music, and one little sin, as we deem it, may ruin the most promising character, involving it in a network of unforeseen consequences out of which there may be no escape."

Life Here and Hereafter, Canon MACCOLL.

"There is a physical demonstration of sin as well as a religious; and no sin can come in among the delicate faculties of the mind, or among the coarser fibres of the body, without leaving a stain, either as a positive injury to the life, or, what is equally fatal, as a predisposition to commit the same sin again. This predisposition is always one of the most real and appalling accompaniments of the stain of sin. There is scarcely such a thing as an isolated sin in a man's life. Most sins can be accounted for by what has gone before. Every sin, so to speak, has its own pedigree, and is the result of the accumulated force, which means the accumulated stain of many a preparatory sin."

The Ideal Life, HENRY DRUMMOND.

Temptation

MAY 23

"Two things a genuine Christian never does. He never makes light of any known sin, and he never admits it to be invincible."

Canon LIDDON.

"We always meet the temptation which is to expose us when we least expect it."

The Ideal Life, HENRY DRUMMOND.

"It is of the essence of temptation that it should come on us unawares."

Pastor Pastorum, HENRY LATHAM.

"If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations."

EMERSON.

Sin

MAY 24

"We judge of sins, as we judge of most things, by their outward form. We arrange the vices of our neighbours according to a scale which society has tacitly adopted, placing the more gross and public at the foot, the slightly less gross higher up, and then by some strange process the scale becomes obliterated. Finally it vanishes into space, leaving lengths of itself unexplored, its sins unnamed, unheeded, and unshunned. But we have no balance to weigh sins. Coarser and finer are but words of our own. The chances are, if anything, that the finer are the lower. The very fact that the world sees the coarser sins so well is against the belief that they are the worst. The subtle and unseen sin, that sin in the part of the nature most near to the spiritual, ought to be more degrading than any other. Yet for many of the finer forms of sin society has yet no brand."