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

Sermons.The Crucifix.  August 23

If I had an image in my room it should be one of Christ glorified, sitting at the right hand of God.  The crucifix has been the image, because the idea of torture and misery has been the idea in the melancholy and the ferocious (for the two ultimately go together),. . . and thus ascetics became inquisitors. . . .

MS.  1843.Love to God proved.  August 24

Our love to God does not depend upon the emotions of the moment.  If you fancy you do not love Him enough, above all when Satan tempts you to look inward, go immediately and minister to others; visit the sick, perform some act of self-sacrifice or thanksgiving.  Never mind how dull you may feel while doing it; the fact of your feeling excited proves nothing; the fact of your doing it proves that your will, your spiritual part, is on God’s side, however tired or careless the poor flesh may be.  The “flesh” must be brought into harmony with the spirit, not only by physical but by intellectual mortification.

MS. Letter.  1843.Training of Beauty.  August 25

There is many a road into our hearts besides our ears and brains; many a sight and sound and scent even, of which we have never thought at all, sinks into our memory and helps to shape our characters; and thus children brought up among beautiful sights and sweet sounds will most likely show the fruits of their nursing by thoughtfulness and affection and nobleness of mind, even by the expression of the countenance.

True Words to Brave Men.  1848.Ignorance of the Cynic.  August 26

Be sure that no one knows so little of his fellow-men as the cynical, misanthropic man, who walks in darkness because he hates his brother.  Be sure that the truly wise and understanding man is he who by sympathy puts himself in his neighbours’ place; feels with them and for them; sees with their eyes, hears with their ears; and therefore understands them, makes allowances for them, and is merciful to them, even as his Father in heaven is merciful.

Westminster Sermons.  1872.Penitential Prayer.  August 27

Faith in God it is which has made the fifty-first Psalm the model of all true penitence for evermore.  Penitential prayers in all ages have too often wanted faith in God, and therefore have been too often prayers to avert punishment.  This, this—the model of all true penitent prayers—is that of a man who is to be punished, and is content to take his punishment, knowing that he deserves it, and far more besides.

Sermons on David.  1866.A Real Presence.  August 28

Believe the Holy Communion is the sign of Christ’s perpetual presence; that when you kneel to receive the bread and wine, Christ is as near you—spiritually, indeed, and invisibly, but really and truly as near you as those who are kneeling by your side.

And if it be so with Christ, then is it so with those who are Christ’s, with those whom we love. . . .  Surely, like Christ, they may come and go even now, though unseen.  Like Christ they may breathe upon our restless hearts and say, “Peace be unto you,” and not in vain.  For what they did for us when they were on earth they can more fully do now that they are in heaven.

All Saints’ Day Sermons.  1862.A Living God.  August 29

Man would never have even dreamed of a Living God had not that Living God been a reality, who did not leave the creature to find his Creator, but stooped from heaven, at the very beginning of our race, to find His creature.

Sermons on David.  1866.Thine, not mine.  August 30

Whensoever you do a thing which you know to be right and good, instead of priding yourself upon it as if the good in it came from you, offer it up to your Heavenly Father, from whom all good things come, and say, “Oh, Lord! the good in this is Thine and not mine; the bad in it is mine and not Thine.  I thank Thee for having made me do right, for without Thy help I should have done nothing but wrong.  For mine is the laziness, and the weakness, and the selfishness, and the self-conceit; and Thine is the kingdom, for Thou rulest all things; and the power, for Thou doest all things; and the glory, for Thou doest all things well, for ever and ever.  Amen.”

Sermons.The Unquenchable Fire.  August 31

A fire which cannot be quenched, a worm which cannot die, I see existing, and consider them among the most blessed revelations of the gospel.  I fancy I see them burning and devouring everywhere in the spiritual world, as their analogues do in the physical.  I know that they have done so on me, and that their operation, though exquisitely painful, is most healthful.  I see the world trying to quench and kill them; I know too well that I often do the same ineffectually.  But, in the comfort that the worm cannot die and the fire cannot be quenched, I look calmly forward through endless ages to my own future, and the future of that world whereof it is written, “He shall reign until He hath put all enemies under His feet, and death and hell shall be cast into the lake of fire.”

* * * * *

The Day of the Lord will be revealed in flaming fire, not merely to give new light and a day-spring from on high to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death, but to burn up out of sight, and off the universe, the chaff, hay, and stubble which men have built on the One Living Foundation, Christ, in that unquenchable fire, of which it is written that Death and Hell shall one day be cast into it also, to share the fate of all other unnatural and abominable things, and God’s universe be—what it must be some day—very good.

* * * * *

Because I believe in a God of absolute and unbounded love, therefore I believe in a loving anger of His, which will and must devour and destroy all which is decayed, monstrous, abortive, in His universe, till all enemies shall be put under His feet, to be pardoned surely, if they confess themselves in the wrong and open their eyes to the truth.  And God shall be All in All.  Those last are wide words.

Letters and Sermons.  1856.SAINTS’ DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALSAUGUST 24St. Bartholomew, Apostle and Martyr

Blessed are they who once were persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.  Great indeed is their reward, for it is no less than the very beatific vision to contemplate and adore that supreme moral beauty, of which all earthly beauty, all nature, all art, all poetry, all music, are but phantoms and parables, hints and hopes, dim reflected rays of the clear light of everlasting day.

All Saints’ Day Sermons.

September

That poet knew but little of either streams or hearts who wrote—

“Nor ever had the breeze of passionStirred her heart’s clear depths.”

The lonely fisher, the lover of streams and living fountains, knows that when the stream stops it is turbid.  The deep pools and still flats are always brown—always dark—the mud lies in them, the trout sleep in them.  When they are clearest they are still tinged brown or gray with some foreign matter held in solution—the brown of selfish sensuality or the gray of morbid melancholy.  But when they are free again! when they hurry over rock and weed and sparkling pebble-shallow, then they are clear!  Then all the foreign matter, the defilement which earth pours into them, falls to the ground, and into them the trout work up for life and health and food; and through their swift yet yielding eddies—moulding themselves to every accident, yet separate and undefiled—shine up the delicate beauties of the subaqueous world, the Spirit-glories which we can only see in this life through the medium of another human soul, but which we can never see unless that soul is stirred by circumstance into passion and motion and action strong and swift.  Only the streams which have undergone long and severe struggles from their very fountain-head have clear pools.

MS.  1843.Goodness.  September 1

Always say to yourself this one thing, “Good I will become, whatever it cost me; and in God’s goodness I trust to make me good, for I am sure He wishes to see me good more than I do myself.”  And you will find that, because you have confessed in that best and most honest of ways that God is good, and have so given Him real glory, and real honour, and real praise, He will save you from the sins which torment you, and you shall never come, either in this world or the world to come, to that worst misery, the being ashamed of yourself.

Sermons for the Times.  1855.Be good to do Good.  September 2

What we wish to do for our fellow-creatures we must do first for ourselves.  We can give them nothing save what God has already given us.  We must become good before we can make them good, and wise before we can make them wise.

All Saints’ Day Sermons.  1867.The Undying I.  September 3

The youngest child, by faith in God his Father, may look upon all heaven and earth and say, “Great and wonderful and awful as this earth and those skies may be, I am more precious in the sight of God than sun and moon and stars; for they are things, but I am a person, a spirit, an immortal soul, made in the likeness of God, redeemed into the likeness of God.  This great earth was here thousands and thousands of years before I was born, and it will be here perhaps millions of years after I am dead.  But it cannot harm Me, it cannot kill Me.  When earth, and sun, and stars have passed away I shall live for ever, for I am the immortal child of an immortal Father, the child of the everlasting God.”

Sermons for the Times.  1855.Love and Time.  September 4

Love proves its spiritual origin by rising above time and space and circumstance, wealth and age, and even temporary beauty, at the same time that it alone can perfectly use all those material adjuncts.  Being spiritual, it is Lord of matter, and can give and receive from it glory and beauty when it will, and yet live without it.

MS.  1843.Common Duties.  September 5

The only way to regenerate the world is to do the duty which lies nearest us, and not to hunt after grand, far-fetched ones for ourselves.  If each drop of rain chose where it should fall, God’s showers would not fall as they do now, on the evil and the good alike.  I know from the experience of my own heart how galling this doctrine is—how, like Naaman, one goes away in a rage, because the prophet has not bid us do some great thing, but only to go wash in the nearest brook and be clean.

Letters and Memories.  1854.Despair—Hope.  September 6

Does the age seem to you dark?  Do you feel, as I do at times, the awful sadness of that text, “The time shall come when you shall desire to see one of the days of the Lord, and shall not see it”?  Then remember that

The night is never so longBut at last it ringeth for matin song.

. . . Even now the dawn is gilding the highest souls, and we are in the night only because we crawl below.

Prose Idylls.  1850.The Critical Spirit.  September 7

“Judge nothing before the time.”  This is a hard saying.  Who can hear it?  There never was a time in which the critical spirit was more thoroughly in the ascendant.  Every man now is an independent critic.  To accept fully, or as it is now called, to follow blindly; to admire heartily, or as it is now called, fanatically—these are considered signs of weakness or credulity.  To believe intensely; to act unhesitatingly; to admire passionately; all this, as the latest slang phrases it, is “bad form”; a proof that a man is not likely to win in the race of this world the prize whereof is, the greatest possible enjoyment with the least possible work.

The Critical Spirit.  1871.Toil and Rest.  September 8

Remember always, toil is the condition of our being.  Our sentence is to labour from the cradle to the grave.  But there are Sabbaths allowed for the mind as well as the body, when the intellect is stilled, and the emotions alone perform their gentle and involuntary functions.

Letters and Memories.  1842.Storm and Calm.  September 9

Then Amyas told the last scene; how, when they were off the Azores, the storms came on heavier than ever, with terrible seas breaking short and pyramid-wise, till, on the 9th of September, the tiny Squirrel nearly foundered, and yet recovered, and the General (Sir Humphrey Gilbert), sitting abaft with a book in his hand, cried out to us in the Hind, “We are as near heaven by sea as by land,” reiterating the same speech well be-seeming a soldier resolute in Jesus Christ, as I can testify he was.

Westward Ho! chap. xiii.On the Heights.  September 10

It is good for a man to have holy and quiet thoughts, and at moments to see into the very deepest meaning of God’s word and God’s earth, and to have, as it were, heaven opened before his eyes; and it is good for a man sometimes actually to feel his heart overpowered with the glorious majesty of God—to feel it gushing out with love to his blessed Saviour; but it is not good for him to stop there any more than for the Apostles in the Mount of Transfiguration.

Village Sermons.  1849.In the Valley.  September 11

The disciples had to come down from the Mount and do Christ’s work, and so have we.  Believe me, one word of warning spoken to keep a little child out of sin,—one crust of bread given to a beggar-man because he is your brother, for whom Christ died,—one angry word checked on your lips for the sake of Him who was meek and lowly of heart; any the smallest endeavour to lessen the amount of evil which is in yourselves and those around you,—is worth all the speculations, and raptures, and visions, and frames, and feelings in the world; for these are the good fruits of faith, whereby alone the tree shall be known whether it be good or evil.

Village Sermons.  1849.Self-Conceit.  September 12

Self-conceit is the very daughter of self-will, and of that loud crying out about I, and me, and mine, which is the very bird-call for all devils, and the broad road which leads to death.

Westward Ho! chap. i.Facing Fact.  September 13

It is good for a man to be brought once, at least, in his life, face to face with fact, ultimate fact, however horrible it may be, and to have to confess to himself shuddering, what things are possible on God’s earth, when man has forgotten that his only welfare is in living after the likeness of God.

Miscellanies.  1858.The Heroical Rest.  September 14

Right, lad; the best reward for having wrought well already is to have more to do; and he that has been faithful over a few things must find his account in being made ruler over many things.  That is the true and heroical rest which only is worthy of gentlemen and sons of God.  As for those who either in this world or in the world to come look for idleness, and hope that God will feed them with pleasant things, as it were with a spoon, Amyas, I count them cowards and base, even though they call themselves saints and elect.

Westward Ho! chap. vii.  1855.Body and Soul.  September 15

Remember that St. Paul always couples with the resurrection and ascension of our bodies in the next life the resurrection and ascension of our souls in this life, for without that, the resurrection of our bodies would be but a resurrection to fresh sin, and therefore to fresh misery and ruin.

All Saints’ Day Sermons.  1870.Love in Absence.  September 16Absence quickens love into consciousness.MS.The baby sings not on its mother’s breast;Nor nightingales who nestle side by side;Nor I by thine: but let us only part,Then lips which should but kiss, and so be still,As having uttered all, must speak again. Sonnet.  1851.Special Providence.  September 17

If I did not believe in a special Providence, in a perpetual education of men by evil as well as good, by small things as well as great, I could believe nothing.

Letters and Memories.Love of Work.  September 18

“Can you tell me, my pastor, what part of God’s likeness clings to a man longest and closest and best?  No?  Then I will tell you.  It is the love of employment.  God in heaven must create Himself a universe to work on and love.  And now we sons of Adam, the sons of God, cannot rest without our mundus peculiaris of some sort—our world subjective, as Doctor Musophilus has it.  But we can create too, and make our little sphere look as large as a universe.”

MS. Novel.  1844.Fret not.  September 19

Fret not, neither be anxious.  What God intends to do He will do.  And what we ask believing we shall receive.  Never let us get into the common trick of calling unbelief resignation, of asking and then, because we have not faith to believe, putting in a “Thy will be done” at the end.  Let us make God’s will our will, and so say Thy will be done.

MS.  1843.Peace!  Why these fears?Life is too short for mean anxieties:Soul! thou must work, though blindfold. Saint’s Tragedy, Act ii. Scene x.Battle before Victory.  September 20

Whenever you think of our Lord’s resurrection and ascension, remember always that the background of His triumph is a tomb.  Remember that it is the triumph over suffering; a triumph of One who still bears the prints of the nails in His sacred hands and feet, and the wound of the spear in His side; like many a poor soul who has followed Him, triumphant at last, and yet scarred, and only not maimed in the hard battle of life.

All Saints’ Day Sermons.  1870.Night and Growth.  September 21

As in the world of Nature, so it is in the world of men.  The night is peopled not merely with phantoms and superstitions and spirits of evil, but under its shadow all sciences, methods, social energies, are taking rest, and growing, and feeding, unknown to themselves.

Prose Idylls.  1850.Passion.  September 22

Self-sacrifice!  What is love worth that does not show itself in action? and more, which does not show itself in passion in the true sense of that word: namely, in suffering? in daring, in struggling, in grieving, in agonising, and, if need be, in dying for the object of its love?  Every mother will give but one answer to that question.

Westminster Sermons.  1870.Worth of Beauty.  September 23

It is a righteous instinct which bids us welcome and honour beauty, whether in man or woman, as something of real worth—divine, heavenly, ay, though we know not how, in a most deep sense Eternal; which makes our reason give the lie to all merely logical and sentimental maunderings of moralists about “the fleeting hues of this our painted clay;” and tell men, as the old Hebrew Scriptures told them, that physical beauty is the deepest of all spiritual symbols; and that though beauty without discretion be the jewel of gold in the swine’s snout, yet the jewel of gold it is still, the sacrament of an inward beauty, which ought to be, perhaps hereafter may be, fulfilled in spirit and in truth.

Hypatia, chap. xxvi.  1852.Empty Profession.  September 24

What is the sin which most destroys all men and nations?  High religious profession, with an ungodly, selfish life.  It is the worst and most dangerous of all sins; for it is like a disease which eats out the heart and life without giving pain, so that the sick man never suspects that anything is the matter with him till he finds himself, to his astonishment, at the point of death.

National Sermons.  1851.True Poetry.  September 25

Let us make life one poem—not of dreams or sentiments—but of actions, not done Byronically as proofs of genius, but for our own self-education, alone, in secret, awaiting the crisis which shall call us forth to the battle to do just what other people do, only, perhaps, by an utterly different self-education.  That is the life of great spirits, after, perhaps, many many years of seclusion, of silent training in the lower paths of God’s vineyard, till their hearts have settled into a still, deep, yet swift current, and those who have been faithful over a few things are made rulers over many things.

MS. Letter.  1842.Office of the Clergy.  September 26

There is a Christian as well as political liberty quite consistent with High Church principles, which makes the clergy our teachers—not the keepers of our consciences but of our creeds.

Letters and Memories.  1842.Opinions are not Knowledge.  September 27

. . . As to self-improvement, the true Catholic mode of learning is to “prove all things,” as far as we can, without sin or the danger of it, to “hold fast that which is good.”  Let us never be afraid of trying anything new, learnt from people of different opinions to our own.  And let us never be afraid of changing our opinions.  The unwillingness to go back from once declared opinion is a form of pride which haunts some powerful minds: but it is not found in great childlike geniuses.  Fools may hold fast to their scanty stock through life, and we must be very cautious in drawing them from it—for where can they supply its place?

Letters and Memories.  1843.The Worst Punishment.  September 28

God reserves many a sinner for that most awful of all punishments (here)—impunity.

Sermons.The Divine Order.  September 29

Ah, that God’s will were but done on earth as it is in the material heaven overhead, in perfect order and obedience, as the stars roll in their courses, without rest, yet without haste—as all created things, even the most awful, fire and hail, snow and vapour, wind and storm, fulfil God’s word, who hath made them sure for ever and ever, and given them a law which shall not be broken.  But above them; above the divine and wonderful order of the material universe, and the winds which are God’s angels, and the flames of fire which are His messengers; above all, the prophets and apostles have caught sight of another divine and wonderful order of rational beings, of races loftier and purer than man—angels and archangels, thrones and dominions, principalities and powers, fulfilling God’s will in heaven as it is not, alas! fulfilled on earth.

All Saints’ Day Sermons.  1867.True Resignation.  September 30

. . . Christianity heightens as well as deepens the human as well as the divine affections.  I am happy, for the less hope, the more faith. . . .  God knows what is best for us; we do not.  Continual resignation, at last I begin to find, is the secret of continual strength.  “Daily dying,” as Bœhmen interprets it, is the path of daily living. . . .

Letters and Memories.  1843.SAINTS’ DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALSSEPTEMBER 21St. Matthew, Apostle, Evangelist, and Martyr

There is something higher than happiness.  There is blessedness; the blessedness of being good and doing good, of being right and doing right.  That blessedness we may have at all times; we may be blest even in anxiety and in sadness; we may be blest, even as the martyrs of old were blest, in agony and death.

Water of Life Sermons.SEPTEMBER 29Feast of St. Michael and All Angels

The eternal moral law which held good for the sinless Christ, who, though He were a Son, yet learned obedience by the things which He suffered, must hold good of you and me, and all moral and rational beings—yea, for the very angels in heaven.  They have not sinned.  That we know; and we do not know that they have ever suffered.  But this at least we know, that they have submitted.  They have obeyed, and have given up their own wills to be ministers of God’s will.  In them is neither self-will nor selfishness; and, therefore, by faith, that is, by trust and loyalty, they stand.  And so, by consenting to lose their individual life of selfishness, they have saved their eternal life in God, the life of blessedness and holiness, just as all evil spirits have lost their eternal life by trying to save their selfish life and be something in themselves and of themselves without respect to God.

All Saints’ Day Sermons.

October

A beautiful October morning it was; one of those in which Dame Nature, healthily tired with the revelry of summer, is composing herself, with a quiet satisfied smile, for her winter’s sleep.  Sheets of dappled cloud were sliding slowly from the west; long bars of hazy blue hung over the southern chalk downs, which gleamed pearly gray beneath the low south-eastern sun.  In the vale below, soft white flakes of mist still hung over the water meadows, and barred the dark trunks of the huge elms and poplars, whose fast-yellowing leaves came showering down at every rustle of the western breeze, spotting the grass below.  The river swirled along, glassy no more, but dingy gray with autumn rains and rotting leaves.  All beyond the garden told of autumn, bright and peaceful even in decay; but up the sunny slope of the garden itself, and to the very window-sill, summer still lingered.  The beds of red verbena and geranium were still brilliant, though choked with fallen leaves of acacia and plane; the canary plant, still untouched by frost, twined its delicate green leaves, and more delicate yellow blossoms, through the crimson lace-work of the Virginia creeper; and the great yellow noisette swung its long canes across the window, filling all the air with fruity fragrance.