Part 42

JUNE 14

"'Freedom' is not the power to do what we like, but to be what we ought to be."

CHARLES GORE.

"There is no commoner danger than that of accepting the code of the society in which you live as the rule of right."

Bishop TEMPLE.

"Strive all your life to free men from the bondage of custom and self, the two great elements of the world that lieth in wickedness."

CHARLES KINGSLEY.

"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule ... is harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it."

EMERSON.

Public Opinion

JUNE 15

"It is not the many who reform the world; but the few who rise superior to that Public Opinion which crucified our Lord many years ago."

CHARLES KINGSLEY.

"We are tempted to measure ourselves by others, to acquiesce in an average standard and an average attainment. We forget that while we are not required to judge our neighbours, we are required to judge ourselves."

Bishop WESTCOTT.

"Moral courage is obeying one's conscience, and doing what one believes to be right in face of a hostile majority; and moral cowardice is stifling one's conscience, and doing what is less than right to win other people's favour."

Dr. JOHN WATSON.

Public Opinion

JUNE 16

"Opinion has its value and even its power: to have it against us is painful when we are among friends, and harmful in the case of the outer world. We should neither flatter opinion nor court it; but it is better, if we can help it, not to throw it on to a false scent. The first error is a meanness; the second an imprudence.... Be careful of your reputation, not through vanity, but that you may not harm your life's work, and out of love for truth. There is still something of self-seeking in the refined disinterestedness which will not justify itself, that it may feel itself superior to opinion. It requires ability to make what we seem agree with what we are,--and humility to feel that we are no great things."

Amiel's Journal.

"Suppose any man shall despise me. Let him look to that himself. But I will look to this, that I be not discovered doing or saying anything deserving of contempt."

MARCUS AURELIUS.

Spiritual Balance and Proportion

JUNE 17

"A well-governed mind learns in time to find pleasure in nothing but the true and the just."

Amiel's Journal.

"Not only does sympathy lead us to see the opinions of others in a truer light, it enables us to form a sounder judgment on our own; for as long as a man looks only 'on his own things,' he fails to see them in true proportion."