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

Westward Ho! chap. xii.Open Thou mine Eyes.  June 1I have wandered in the mountains mist-bewildered,And now a breeze comes, and the veil is lifted;And priceless flowers, o’er which I trod unheeding,Gleam ready for my grasp. Saint’s Tragedy, Act i. Scene ii.1847.The Spirit of Romance.  June 2

Some say that the spirit of romance is dead.  The spirit of romance will never die as long as there is a man left to see that the world might and can be better, happier, wiser, fairer in all things than it is now.  The spirit of romance will never die as long as a man has faith in God to believe that the world will actually be better and fairer than it is now, as long as men have faith, however weak, to believe in the romance of all romances, in the wonder of all wonders, in that of which all poets’ dreams have been but childish hints and dim forefeelings—even

“That one divine far-off eventTowards which the whole creation moves,

that wonder which our Lord Himself has bade us pray for as for our daily bread, and say, “Father, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is done in heaven.”

Water of Life Sermons.  1865.The Everlasting Music.  June 3

All melody and all harmony upon earth, whether in the song of birds, the whisper of the wind, the concourse of voices, or the sounds of those cunning instruments which man has learnt to create, because he is made in the image of Christ, the Word of God, who creates all things; all music upon earth, I say, is beautiful in as far as it is a pattern and type of the everlasting music which is in heaven, which was before all worlds and shall be after them.

Good News of God Sermons.  1859.Gifts are Duties.  June 4

Exceeding gifts from God are not blessings, they are duties, and very solemn and heavy duties.  They do not always increase a man’s happiness; they always increase his responsibility, the awful account which he must render at last of the talents committed to his charge.  They increase, too, his danger.

Water of Life Sermons.Summer Days.  June 5Now let the young be glad,Fair girl and gallant lad,And sun themselves to-dayBy lawn and garden gay;’Tis play befits the noonOf rosy-girdled June;. . . . .The world before them, and aboveThe light of Universal Love. Installation Ode, Cambridge.  1862.“Sufficient for the Day.”  June 6

Let us not meddle with the future, and matters which are too high for us, but refrain our souls, and keep them low like little children, content with the day’s food, and the day’s schooling, and the day’s play-hours, sure that the Divine Master knows that all is right, and how to train us, and whither to lead us; though we know not and need not know, save this, that the path by which He is leading each of us, if we will but obey and follow step by step, leads up to everlasting life.

All Saints’ Day Sermons.  1871.Secret of Thrift.  June 7

The secret of thrift is knowledge.  The more you know the more you can save yourself and that which belongs to you, and can do more work with less effort.  Knowledge of domestic economy saves income; knowledge of sanitary laws saves health and life: knowledge of the laws of the intellect saves wear and tear of brain, and knowledge of the laws of the spirit—what does it not save?

Lecture on Thrift.  1869.Out-door Worship.  June 8

In the forest, every branch and leaf, with the thousand living things which cluster on them, all worship, worship, worship with us!  Let us go up in the evenings and pray there, with nothing but God’s cloud temple between us and His heaven!  And His choir of small birds and night crickets and booming beetles, and all happy things who praise Him all night long!  And in the still summer noon, too, with the lazy-paced clouds above, and the distant sheep-bell, and the bee humming in the beds of thyme, and one bird making the hollies ring a moment, and then all still—hushed—awe-bound, as the great thunder-clouds slide up from the far south!  Then, then, to praise God!  Ay, even when the heaven is black with wind, the thunder crackling over our heads, then to join in the pæan of the storm-spirits to Him whose pageant of power passes over the earth and harms us not in its mercy!

Letters and Memories.  1844.God’s Countenance.  June 9

Study nature as the countenance of God!  Try to extract every line of beauty, every association, every moral reflection, every inexpressible feeling from it.

Letters and Memories.  1842.Certain and Uncertain.  June 10

“Life is uncertain,” folks say.  Life is certain, say I, because God is educating us thereby.  But this process of education is so far above our sight that it looks often uncertain and utterly lawless; wherefore fools conceive (as does M. Comte) that there is no Living God, because they cannot condense His formulas into their small smelling-bottles.

O glorious thought! that we are under a Father’s education, and that He has promised to develop us, and to make us go on from strength to strength.

Letters and Memories.  1868.Sensuality.  June 11

What is sensuality?  Not the enjoyment of holy glorious matter, but blindness to its meaning.

MS.  1842.The Journey’s End.  June 12

Let us live hard, work hard, go a good pace, get to our journey’s end as soon as possible—then let the post-horse get his shoulder out of the collar. . . . I have lived long enough to feel, like the old post-horse, very thankful as the end draws near. . . .  Long life is the last thing that I desire.  It may be that, as one grows older, one acquires more and more the painful consciousness of the difference between what ought to be done and what can be done, and sits down more quietly when one gets the wrong side of fifty, to let others start up to do for us things we cannot do for ourselves.  But it is the highest pleasure that a man can have who has (to his own exceeding comfort) turned down the hill at last, to believe that younger spirits will rise up after him, and catch the lamp of Truth, as in the old lamp-bearing race of Greece, out of his hand before it expires, and carry it on to the goal with swifter and more even feet.

Speech at Lotus Club, New York.  1874.Punishment Inevitable.  June 13

It is a fact that God does punish here, in this life.  He does not, as false preachers say, give over this life to impunity and this world to the devil, and only resume the reigns of moral government and the right of retribution when men die and go into the next world.  Here in this life He punishes sin.  Slowly but surely God punishes.  If any of you doubt my words you have only to commit sin and then see whether your sin will find you out.

Sermons on David.  1866.The Problem Solved.  June l4

After all, the problem of life is not a difficult one, for it solves itself so very soon at best—by death.  Do what is right the best way you can, and wait to the end to know.

MS. Letter.

But remember that though death may alter our place, it cannot alter our character—though it may alter our circumstances, it cannot alter ourselves.

Discipline and other Sermons.The Father’s Education.  June 15

Sin, αμαρτια, is the missing of a mark, the falling short of an ideal; . . . and that each miss brings a penalty, or rather is itself the penalty, is to me the best of news and gives me hope for myself and every human being past, present, and future, for it makes me look on them all as children under a paternal education, who are being taught to become aware of, and use their own powers in God’s house, the universe, and for God’s work in it; and, in proportion as they do that, they attain salvation, σωτηρια, literally health and wholeness of spirit, “soul,” which is, like health of body, its own reward.

Letters and Memories.  1852.Parent and Child.  June 16

Superstition is the child of fear, and fear is the child of ignorance.

Lectures on Science and Superstition.1866.A Charm of Birds.  June 17

Listen to the charm of birds in any sequestered woodland on a bright forenoon in early summer.  As you try to disentangle the medley of sounds, the first, perhaps, which will strike your ear will be the loud, harsh, monotonous, flippant song of the chaffinch, and the metallic clinking of two or three sorts of titmice.  But above the tree-tops, rising, hovering, sinking, the woodlark is fluting tender and low.  Above the pastures outside the skylark sings—as he alone can sing; and close by from the hollies rings out the blackbird’s tenor—rollicking, audacious, humorous, all but articulate.  From the tree above him rises the treble of the thrush, pure as the song of angels; more pure, perhaps, in tone, though neither so varied nor so rich as the song of the nightingale.  And there, in the next holly, is the nightingale himself; now croaking like a frog, now talking aside to his wife, and now bursting out into that song, or cycle of songs, in which if any man find sorrow, he himself surely finds none. . . . In Nature there is nothing melancholy.

Prose Idylls.  1866.Notes of Character.  June 18

Without softness, without repose, and therefore without dignity.

MS.Our Blessed Dead.  June 19

Why should not those who are gone be actually nearer us, not farther from us, in the heavenly world, praying for us, and it may be influencing and guiding us in a hundred ways of which we, in our prison-house of mortality, cannot dream?  Yes!  Do not be afraid to believe that he whom you have lost is near you, and you near him, and both of you near God, who died on the cross for you.

Letters and Memories.  1871.Silent Influence.  June 20

Violence is not strength, noisiness is not earnestness.  Noise is a sign of want of faith, and violence is a sign of weakness.

By quiet, modest, silent, private influence we shall win.  “Neither strive nor cry nor let your voice be heard in the streets,” was good advice of old, and is still.  I have seen many a movement succeed by it.  I have seen many a movement tried by the other method of striving and crying and making a noise in the streets, but I have never seen one succeed thereby, and never shall.

Letters and Memories.  1870.Chivalry.  June 21

Some say that the age of chivalry is past.  The age of chivalry is never past as long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth, and a man or woman left to say, “I will redress that wrong, or spend my life in the attempt.”  The age of chivalry is never past as long as men have faith enough in God to say, “God will help me to redress that wrong; or if not me, surely He will help those that come after me.  For His eternal will is to overcome evil with good.”

Water of Life Sermons.  1865.Nature and Art.  June 22

When once you have learnt the beauty of little mossy banks, and tiny leaves, and flecks of cloud, with what a fulness the glories of Claude, or Ruysdael, or Berghem, will unfold themselves to you!  You must know Nature or you cannot know Art.  And when you do know Nature you will only prize Art for being like Nature.

MS. Letter.  1842.Simple and Sincere.  June 23

There are those, and, thanks to Almighty God, they are to be numbered by tens of thousands, who will not perplex themselves with questionings; simple, genial hearts, who try to do what good they can in the world, and meddle not with matters too high for them; people whose religion is not abstruse but deep, not noisy but intense, not aggressive but laboriously useful; people who have the same habit of mind as the early Christians seem to have worn, ere yet Catholic truth had been defined in formulæ, when the Apostles’ Creed was symbol enough for the Church, and men were orthodox in heart rather than exact in head.

For such it is enough if a fellow-creature loves Him whom they love, and serves Him whom they serve.  Personal affection and loyalty to the same unseen Being is to them a communion of saints both real and actual, in the genial warmth of which all minor differences of opinion vanish. . . .

Preface to Tauler’s Sermons.  1854.God’s Words.  June 24

Do I mean, then, that this or any text has nothing to do with us?  God forbid!  I believe that every word of our Lord’s has to do with us, and with every human being, for their meaning is infinite, eternal, and inexhaustible.

MS. Letter.Taught by Failure.  June 25

So I am content to have failed.  I have learned in the experiment priceless truths concerning myself, my fellow-men, and the city of God, which is eternal in the heavens, for ever coming down among men, and actualising itself more and more in every succeeding age.  I only know that I know nothing, but with a hope that Christ, who is the Son of Man, will tell me piecemeal, if I be patient and watchful, what I am and what man is.

Letters and Memories.  1857.Presentiments.  June 26

“I cannot deny,” said Claude, “that such things as presentiments may be possible.  However miraculous they may seem, are they so very much more so than the daily fact of memory?  I can as little guess why we remember the past, as why we may not at times be able to foresee the future.” . . .

Two Years Ago, chap. xxviii.

A thing need not be unreasonable—that is, contrary to reason—because it is above and beyond reason, or, at least, our human reason, which at best (as St. Paul says) sees as in a glass darkly.

MS. Letter.  1856.Common Duties.  June 27

But after all, what is speculation to practice?  What does God require of us, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with Him?  The longer I live this seems to me more important, and all other questions less so—if we can but live the simple right life—

Do the work that’s nearest,Though it’s dull at whiles;Helping, when we meet them,Lame dogs over stiles. Letters and Memories.  1857.Lost and Found.  June 28“My welfare?  It is gone!”“So much the better.  I never found mine till I lost it.” Hypatia, chap. xxvii.  1852.How to bear Sorrow.  June 29

I believe that the wisest plan is sometimes not to try to bear sorrow—as long as one is not crippled for one’s everyday duties—but to give way to it utterly and freely.  Perhaps sorrow is sent that we may give way to it, and in drinking the cup to the dregs, find some medicine in it itself, which we should not find if we began doctoring ourselves, or letting others doctor us.  If we say simply, “I am wretched—I ought to be wretched;” then we shall perhaps hear a voice, “Who made thee wretched but God?  Then what can He mean but thy good?”  And if the heart answers impatiently, “My good?  I don’t want it, I want my love;” perhaps the voice may answer, “Then thou shalt have both in time.”

Letters and Memories.  1871.A certain Hope.  June 30

Let us look forward with quiet certainty of hope, day and night; believing, though we can see but little day, that all this tangled web will resolve itself into golden threads of twined, harmonious life, guiding both us, and those we love, together, through this life to that resurrection of the flesh, when we shall at last know the reality and the fulness of life and love.  Even so come, Lord Jesus!

Letters and Memories.  1844.SAINTS’ DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALSWhit Sunday

Think of the Holy Spirit as a Person having a will of His own, who breatheth whither He listeth, and cannot be confined to any feelings or rules of yours or of any man’s, but may meet you in the Sacraments or out of the Sacraments, even as He will, and has methods of comforting and educating you of which you will never dream; One whose will is the same as the will of the Father and of the Son, even a good will.

Discipline Sermons.Trinity Sunday

Some things I see clearly and hold with desperate clutch.  A Father in heaven for all, a Son of God incarnate for all, and a Spirit of the Father and the Son—who works to will and to do of His own good pleasure in every human being in whom there is one spark of active good, the least desire to do right or to be of use—the Fountain of all good on earth.

Letters and Memories.JUNE 11St. Barnabas, Apostle and Martyr. . . Which is Love?To do God’s will, or merely suffer it?. . . . .No!  I must headlong into seas of toil,Leap far from self, and spend my soul on others.For contemplation falls upon the spirit,Like the chill silence of an autumn sun:While action, like the roaring south-west wind,Sweeps laden with elixirs, with rich draughtsQuickening the wombed earth.Saint’s Tragedy.JUNE 21St. John the Baptist

How shall we picture John the Baptist to ourselves?  Great painters have exercised their fancy upon his face, his figure, his actions.  The best which I can recollect is Guido’s—of the magnificent lad sitting on the rock, half clad in his camel’s-hair robe, his stalwart hand lifted up to denounce he hardly knows what, save that things are going all wrong, utterly wrong to him—his beautiful mouth open to preach he hardly knows what, save that he has a message from God, of which he is half conscious as yet—that he is a forerunner, a prophet, a foreteller of something and some one who is to come, and which is very near at hand.  The wild rocks are round him, the clear sky over him, and nothing more, . . . and he, the noble and the priest, has thrown off—not in discontent and desperation (for he was neither democrat nor vulgar demagogue), but in hope and awe—all his family privileges, all that seems to make life worth having; and there aloft and in the mountains, alone with God and Nature, feeding on locusts and wild honey and clothed in skins, he, like Elijah of old, preaches to a generation sunk in covetousness, party spirit, and superstition—preaches what?—The most common—Morality.  Ah, wise politician! ah, clear and rational spirit, who knows and tells others to do the duty which lies nearest to them! . . . who in the hour of his country’s deepest degradation had divine courage to say, our deliverance lies, not in rebellion but in doing right.

St. John the Baptist,All Saints’ Day Sermons.JUNE 29St. Peter, Apostle and MartyrGod is revealed in the Crucified;The Crucified must be revealed in me:—I must put on His righteousness; show forthHis sorrow’s glory; hunger, weep with Him;Taste His keen stripes, and let this aching fleshSink through His fiery baptism into death.Saint’s Tragedy.

St. Peter, as he is drawn in the Gospels and the Acts, is a grand and colossal human figure, every line and feature of which is full of meaning and full of beauty to us.

Sermons, Discipline.

July

It was a day of God.  The earth lay like one great emerald, ringed and roofed with sapphire: blue sea, blue mountain, blue sky overhead.  There she lay, not sleeping, but basking in her quiet Sabbath joy, as though her two great sisters of the sea and air had washed her weary limbs with holy tears, and purged away the stains of last week’s sin and toil, and cooled her hot worn forehead with their pure incense-breath, and folded her within their azure robes, and brooded over her with smiles of pitying love, till she smiled back in answer, and took heart and hope for next week’s weary work.

Heart and hope for next week’s work.—That was the sermon which it preached to Tom Thurnall, as he stood there alone, a stranger and a wanderer like Ulysses of old: but, like him, self-helpful, cheerful, fate defiant.  He was more of a heathen than Ulysses—for he knew not what Ulysses knew, that a heavenly guide was with him in his wanderings; still less that what he called the malicious sport of fortune was, in truth, the earnest education of a Father. . . .  “Brave old world she is after all,” he said; “and right well made; and looks right well to-day in her go-to-meeting clothes, and plenty of room and chance for a brave man to earn his bread, if he will but go right on about his business, as the birds and the flowers do, instead of peaking and pining over what people think of him.”

Two Years Ago, chap. xiv.Nature and Grace.  July 1

God is the God of Nature as well as the God of Grace.  For ever He looks down on all things which He has made; and behold they are very good.  And therefore we dare to offer to Him in our churches the most perfect works of naturalistic art, and shape them into copies of whatever beauty He has shown us in man or woman, in cave or mountain-peak, in tree or flower, even in bird or butterfly.  But Himself?  Who can see Him except the humble and the contrite heart, to whom He reveals Himself as a Spirit to be worshipped in spirit and in truth, and not in bread nor wood, nor stone nor gold, nor quintessential diamond?

Lecture on Grots and Groves.  1871.Love and Book-Learning.  July 2

I see more and more that the knowledge of one human being, such as love alone can give, and the apprehension of our own private duties and relations, is worth more than all the book-learning in the world.

MS.The Ancient Creeds.  July 3

Blessed and delightful it is when we find that even in these new ages the Creeds, which so many fancy to be at their last gasp, are still the finest and highest succour, not merely of the peasant and the outcast, but of the subtle artist and the daring speculator.  Blessed it is to find the most cunning poet of our day able to combine the rhythm and melody of modern times with the old truths which gave heart to the martyrs at the stake, to see in the science and the history of the nineteenth century new and living fulfilments of the words which we learnt at our mother’s knee!

Miscellanies.  1850.A Master-Truth.  July 4

Every creature of God is good, if it be sanctified with prayer and thanksgiving!  This to me is the master-truth of Christianity, the forgetfulness of which is at the root of almost all error.  It seems to me that it was to redeem man and the earth that Christ was made man and used the earth!—that Christianity has never yet been pure, because it never yet, since St. Paul’s time, has stood on this as the fundamental truth, and that it has been pure or impure, just in proportion as it has practically and really acknowledged this truth.

Letters and Memories.  1842.English Women.  July 5

Let those who will sneer at the women of England.  We who have to do the work and fight the battle of life know the inspiration which we derive from their virtue, their counsel, their tenderness—and, but too often, from their compassion and their forgiveness.  There is, I doubt not, still left in England many a man with chivalry and patriotism enough to challenge the world to show so perfect a specimen of humanity as a cultivated British woman.

Lecture on Thrift.  1869.Life retouched again.  July 6

Even in the saddest woman’s soul there linger snatches of old music, odours of flowers long dead and turned to dust,—pleasant ghosts, which still keep her mind attuned to that which may be in others, though in her never more; till she can hear her own wedding-hymn re-echoed in the tones of every girl who loves, and see her own wedding-torch re-lighted in the eyes of every bride.

Westward Ho! chap. xxix.Mystery of Life.  July 7

“All things begin in some wonder, and in some wonder end,” said St. Augustine, wisest in his day of mortal men.  It is a strange thing, and a mystery, how we ever got into this world; a stranger thing still to me how we shall ever get out of this world again.  Yet they are common things enough—birth and death.

Good News of God Sermons.Beauty of Life.  July 8

The Greeks were, as far as we know, the most beautiful race which the world ever saw.  Every educated man knows that they were the cleverest of all nations, and, next to his Bible, thanks God for Greek literature.  Now the Greeks had made physical, as well as intellectual education a science as well as a study.  Their women practised graceful, and in some cases even athletic exercises.  They developed, by a free and healthy life, those figures which remain everlasting and unapproachable models of human beauty.

Lecture on Thrift.  1869.

Study the human figure, both as intrinsically beautiful and as expressing mind.  It only expresses the broad natural childish emotions, which are just what we want to return to from our over subtlety.  Study “natural language”—I mean the language of attitude.  It is an inexhaustible source of knowledge and delight, and enables one human being to understand another so perfectly.  Therefore learn to draw and paint figures.

Letters and Memories.  1842.True Civilisation.  July 9

Civilisation with me shall mean—not more wealth, more finery, more self-indulgence, even more æsthetic and artistic luxury—but more virtue, more knowledge, more self-control, even though I earn scanty bread by heavy toil.