Part 73

"To try to fix my thoughts in prayer without distraction.

"To watch over a growing habit of uncharitable judgment."

F. W. Robertson's Life.

Confession of Sin

OCTOBER 15

"An immense quantity of modern confession of sin, even when honest, is merely a sickly egotism which will rather gloat over its own evil than lose the centralisation of its interest in itself."

Ethics of the Dust, JOHN RUSKIN.

"The fit of low spirits which comes to us when we find ourselves overtaken in a fault, though we flatter ourselves to reckon it a certain sign of penitence, and a set-off to the sin itself which God will surely take into account, is often nothing more than vexation and annoyance with ourselves, that, after all our good resolutions and attempts at reformation, we have broken down again."

The Ideal Life, HENRY DRUMMOND.

"And be you sure that sorrow without resolute effort at amendment is one of the most contemptible of all human frailties; deserving to be despised by men, and certain to be rejected by God."

Bishop TEMPLE.

Morbid Introspectiveness

OCTOBER 16

"Plainly there is one danger in all self-discipline which has to be most carefully watched and guarded against, that, namely, of valuing the means at the expense of the end, and so falling into either self-righteousness or formalism, and very probably into uncharitableness also. If we esteem our obedience to rule, and self-imposed restraints, for their own sake, we effectually destroy their power to train and elevate. I suppose this is the real mistake of a false asceticism, which sees the merit rather in the amount of discipline undergone than in the character and self-conquest to be gained by it."

Bishop WALSHAM HOW.

"... It is a clear view of higher motives, which at once reveals and defeats our meaner impulses; which assists the discipline of proper self-searching, by making it healthy and hopeful; and resists any habit of morbid introspectiveness with its fatal tendency to paralyse activity of character."

Canon KNOX LITTLE.

Introspection

OCTOBER 17

"Beware of despairing about yourself."

ST. AUGUSTINE.

"Any man who is good for anything, if he is always thinking about himself, will come to think himself good for nothing very soon. It is only a fop or a fool who can bear to look at himself all day long, without disgust. And so the first thing for a man to do, who wants to use his best powers at their best, is to get rid of self-consciousness, to stop thinking about himself and how he is working, altogether."

PHILLIPS BROOKS.

"On somehow. To go back Were to lose all."

TENNYSON.

Our True Selves and Our Traditional Selves

OCTOBER 18

"I have sometimes thought that this facility of men in believing that they are still what they once meant to be--this undisturbed appropriation of a traditional character which is often but a melancholy relic of early resolutions, like the worn and soiled testimonial to soberness and honesty carried in the pocket of a tippler whom the need of a dram has driven into peculation--may sometimes diminish the turpitude of what seems a flat, barefaced falsehood. It is notorious that a man may go on uttering false assertions about his own acts till he at last believes in them: is it not possible that sometimes in the very first utterance there may be a shade of creed-reciting belief, a reproduction of a traditional self which is clung to against all evidence? There is no knowing all the disguises of the lying serpent.