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

May

Is it merely a fancy that we are losing that love for Spring which among our old forefathers rose almost to worship?  That the perpetual miracle of the budding leaves and the returning song-birds awakes no longer in us the astonishment which it awoke yearly among the dwellers in the old world, when the sun was a god who was sick to death each winter, and returned in spring to life, and health, and glory; when Freya, the goddess of youth and love, went forth over the earth while the flowers broke forth under her tread over the brown moors, and the birds welcomed her with song?  To those simpler children of a simpler age winter and spring were the two great facts of existence; the symbols, the one of death, the other of life; and the battle between the two—the battle of the sun with darkness, of winter with spring, of death with life, of bereavement with love—lay at the root of all their myths and all their creeds.  Surely a change has come over our fancies!  The seasons are little to us now!

The earth is holy!  Can there be a more glorious truth to carry out—one which will lead us more into all love and beauty and purity in heaven and earth?  One which must have God’s light of love shining on it at every step.  God gives us souls and bodies exquisitely attuned for this very purpose—the æsthetic faculty, our sensibilities to the beautiful.  All events of life, all the workings of our hearts, should point to this one idea.  As I walk the fields, the trees and flowers and birds, and the motes of rack floating in the sky, seem to cry to me: “Thou knowest us!  Thou knowest we have a meaning, and sing a heaven’s harmony by night and day!  Do us justice!  Spell our enigma, and go forth and tell thy fellows that we are their brethren, that their spirit is our spirit, their Saviour our Saviour, their God our God!”

Is there a living God in the universe, or is there not?  That is the greatest of all questions.  Has our Lord Jesus Christ answered it, or has He not?

Look at those thousand birds, and without our Father not one of them shall fall to the ground; and art thou not of more value than many sparrows—thou for whom God sent His Son to die? . . .  Ah! my friend, we must look out and around to see what God is like.  It is when we persist in turning our eyes inward, and prying curiously over our own imperfections, that we learn to make a god after our own image, and fancy that our own hardness and darkness are the patterns of His light and love.

If we do not understand our fellow-creatures we shall never love them.  And it is equally true, that if we do not love them we shall never understand them.  Want of charity, want of sympathy, want of good feeling and fellow-feeling—what does it, what can it breed but endless mistakes and ignorances, both of men’s characters and men’s circumstances?

If all that a man wants is “a religion,” he ought to be able to make a very pretty one for himself, and a fresh one as often as he is tired of the old.  But the heart and soul of man wants more than that; as it is written, “My soul is athirst for God, even for the living God.”  I want a living God, who cares for men, forgives men, saves men from their sins: and Him I have found in the Bible, and nowhere else, save in the facts of life which the Bible alone interprets.

Do the duty which lies nearest to you; your duty to the man who lives next door, and to the man who lives in the next street.  Do your duty to your parish, that you may do your duty by your country and to all mankind, and prove yourselves thereby civilised men.

Why speak of the God of Nature and the God of grace as two antithetical terms?  The Bible never in a single instance makes the distinction, and surely if God be the eternal and unchangeable One, and if all the universe bears the impress of His signet, we have no right, in the present infantile state of science, to put arbitrary limits of our own to the revelation which He may have thought good to make of Himself in Nature.  Nay, rather, let us believe that if our eyes were opened we should fulfil the requirement of genius and see the universal in the particular by seeing God’s whole likeness, His whole glory, reflected as in a mirror in the meanest flower, and that nothing but the dulness of our simple souls prevents them from seeing day and night in all things the Lord Jesus Christ fulfilling His own saying, “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.”

Goodness rather than talent had given her a wisdom, and goodness rather than courage a power of using that wisdom, which to those simple folk seemed almost an inspiration.

Two great rules for the attainment of heavenly wisdom are simple enough—“Never forget what and where you are,” and “Grieve not the Holy Spirit.”

Music—there is something very wonderful in music.  Words are wonderful enough, but music is more wonderful.  It speaks not to our thoughts as words do, it speaks straight to our hearts and spirits, to the very core and root of our souls.  Music soothes us, stirs us up; it puts noble feelings into us; it melts us to tears, we know not how; it is a language by itself, just as perfect, in its way, as speech, as words; just as divine, just as blessed.  Music has been called the speech of angels; I will go farther, and call it the speech of God Himself.

The old Greeks, the wisest of all the heathen, made a point of teaching their children music, because, they said, it taught them not to be self-willed and fanciful, but to see the beauty of order, the usefulness of rule, the divineness of law.

The only comfort I can see in the tragedies of war is that they bring us all face to face with the realities of human life, as it has been in all ages, giving us sterner and yet more loving, more human, and more divine thoughts about ourselves, and our business here, and the fate of those who are gone, and awakening us out of the luxurious, frivolous, and unreal dream (full nevertheless of hard judgments) in which we have been living so long, to trust in a living Father who is really and practically governing this world and all worlds, and who willeth that none should perish.

One has only to go into the streets of any great city in England to see how we, with all our boast of civilisation, are yet but one step removed from barbarism.  Is that a hard word?  Only there are the barbarians round us at every street corner—grown barbarians, it may be, now all but past saving, but bringing into the world young barbarians whom we may yet save, for God wishes us to save them. . . .  Do not deceive yourselves about the little dirty, offensive children in the street.  If they be offensive to you, they are not to Him who made them.  “Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones: for I say unto you, their angels do always behold the face of your Father which is in heaven.”

Heaven and hell—the spiritual world—are they merely invisible places in space which may become visible hereafter? or are they not rather the moral world of right and wrong?  Love and righteousness—is not that the heaven itself wherein God dwells?  Hatred and sin—is not that hell itself, wherein dwells all that is opposed to God?

Our hearts are dull, and hard, and light, God forgive us! and we forget continually what an earnest, awful world we live in—a whole eternity waiting for us to be born, and a whole eternity waiting to see what we shall do now we are born.  Yes, our hearts are dull, and hard, and light.  And therefore Christ sends suffering on us, to teach us what we always gladly forget in comfort and prosperity—what an awful capacity of suffering we have; and more, what an awful capacity of suffering our fellow-creatures have likewise. . . .

We sit at ease too often in a fool’s paradise, till God awakens us and tortures us into pity for the torture of others.  And so, if we will not acknowledge our brotherhood by any other teaching, He knits us together by the brotherhood of suffering.

Every gift of God is good, and given for our happiness, and we sin if we abuse it.  To use your fancy to your own misery is to abuse it and to sin.  The realm of the possible was given to man to hope and not to fear in.

A living God, a true God, a real God, a God worthy of the name, a God who is working for ever, everywhere, and in all; who hates nothing that He has made, forgets nothing, neglects nothing; a God who satisfies not only the head but the heart, not only the logical intellect but the highest reason—that pure reason which is one with the conscience and moral sense!  For Him we cry out, Him we seek, and if we cannot find Him we know no rest.

Whenever we are tempted to say more than is needful, let us remember St. John’s words (in the only sermon we have on record of his), “Little children, love one another,” and ask God for His Holy Spirit, the spirit of love, which, instead of weakening a man’s words, makes them all the stronger in the cause of truth, because they are spoken in love.

How difficult it is to distinguish between the loving tact, which avoids giving offence to a weaker brother, and the fear of man, which bringeth a snare!

Do not rashly count on some sudden radical change happening to you as soon as you die to make you fit for heaven.  There is not one word in the Bible which gives us reason to suppose that we shall not be in the next world the same persons that we have made ourselves in this world. . . .  What we sow here we shall reap there.  And it is good for us to know and face this.  Anything is good for us, however unpleasant it may be, which drives us from the only real misery, which is sin and selfishness, to the only true happiness, which is the everlasting life of Christ, a pure, loving, just, generous, useful life of goodness.

Science is great; but she is not the greatest.  She is an instrument and not a power—beneficent or deadly, according as she is wielded by the hand of virtue or vice.  But her lawful mistress, the only one which can use her aright, the only one under whom she can truly grow and prosper and prove her divine descent, is Virtue, the likeness of Almighty God.

“I saw at last!  I found out that I had been trying for years which was stronger, God or I; I found out I had been trying whether I could not do well enough without Him; and there I found that I could not—could not!  I felt like a child who had marched off from home, fancying it can find its way, and is lost at once.  I did not know that I had a Father in heaven who had been looking after me, when I fancied I was looking after myself.  I don’t half believe it now.” . . .  And so the old heart passed away from Thomas Thurnall, and instead of it grew up the heart of a little child.

Strange it is how mortal man, “who cometh up and is cut down like the flower,” can harden himself into a stoical security, and count on the morrow which may never come.  Yet so it is, and perhaps if it were not so no work would get done on earth—at least by the many who know not that God is guiding them, while they fancy they are guiding themselves.

There is a Providence which rules this earth, whose name is neither Political Economy nor Expediency, but the Living God, who makes every right action reward, and every wrong action punish, itself.

“He has yet to learn what losing his life to save it means, Amyas.  Bad men have taught him (and I fear these Anabaptists and Puritans at home teach little else) that it is the one great business of every man to save his own soul after he dies; every one for himself; and that that, and not divine self-sacrifice, is the one thing needful, and the better part which Mary chose.”

“I think,” said Amyas, “men are enough inclined to be selfish without being taught that.”

What if I had discovered that one law of the spiritual world, in which all others were contained, was Righteousness? and that disharmony with that law, which we call unspirituality, was not being vulgar, or clumsy, or ill-taught, or unimaginative, or dull; but simply being unrighteous? that righteousness, and it alone, was the beautiful, righteousness the sublime, the heavenly, the God-like—ay, God Himself?

Believe me that he who has been led by love to a human being to understand the mystery of that divine love which fills all heaven and earth, and concentrates itself into an articulate manifestation in the person of Christ, will soon begin to find that he cannot enter into the perfect bliss of that truth without going further, and seeing that the human heart requires some standing-ground for its affection, even for the love of wife and child, deeper and surer than that love, namely, in utter loyalty, resignation, adoring affection to Him in whom all loveliness is concentrated.  It is a great mystery.  It is a hard lesson.

A high artistic finish is important for more reasons than for the mere pleasure it gives.  There is something sacramental in perfect metre and rhythm.  They are outward and visible signs (most seriously we speak as we say it) of an inward and spiritual grace, namely, of the self-possessed and victorious temper of one who has so far subdued nature as to be able to hear that universal sphere-music of hers, speaking of which Mr. Carlyle says, that “all deepest thoughts instinctively vent themselves in song.”

There can be no objection to praying for certain special things.  God forbid!  I cannot help doing it, any more than a child in the dark can help calling for its mother.  Only it seems to me that when we pray, “Grant this day that we run into no kind of danger,” we ought to lay our stress on the “run” rather than on the “danger,” to ask God not to take away the danger by altering the course of nature, but to give us light and guidance whereby to avoid it.

When a stream is swelled by a flood, a shower of rain clears it.  So in trouble, when the heart is turbid from the world’s admixtures, and the stirring up of the foul particles which will lie at the bottom, nothing but the pure dew of heaven can restore its purity, when God’s spirit comes down upon it like a gentle rain!

Look at the rows of vines, or what will be vines when the summer comes, but are now black, knotted and gnarled clubs, without a sign of life in the seemingly dead stick.  One who sees that sight may find a new beauty and meaning in the mystic words, “I am the Vine, ye are the branches.”  It is not merely the connection between branch and stem common to all trees; not merely the exhilarating and seemingly inspiring properties of the grape, which made the very heathen look upon it as the sacred and miraculous fruit, the special gift of God; not merely the pruning out of the unfruitful branches, to be burned as firewood—not merely these, but the seeming death of the Vine, shorn of all its beauty, its fruitfulness, of every branch and twig which it had borne the year before, and left unsightly and seemingly ruined, to its winter sleep; and then bursting forth again by an irresistible inward life into fresh branches, spreading and trailing far and wide, and tossing their golden tendrils to the sky.  This thought surely—the emblem of the living Church, springing from the corpse of the dead Christ, who yet should rise to be alive for evermore—enters into, it may be forms an integral part of, the meaning of that prophecy of all prophecies.

Christ’s cross says still, and will say to all Eternity, “Wouldst thou be good?  Wouldst thou be like God?  Then work and dare, and if need be, suffer for thy fellow-men.”  On the Cross Christ consecrated, and as it were offered to the Father in His own body, all loving actions, unselfish actions, merciful actions, heroic actions, which man has done or ever will do.  From Him, from His spirit, their strength came; and therefore He is not ashamed to call them brethren.  He is the King of the noble army of martyrs; of all who suffer for love and truth and justice’ sake; and to all such He says, thou hast put on My likeness; thou hast suffered for My sake, and I too have suffered for thy sake, and enabled thee to suffer likewise, and in Me thou too art a Son of God, in whom the Father is well pleased.

“Lo, I am with you always,” said the Blessed One before He ascended to the Father.  And this is the Lord who we fancy is gone away far above the stars till the end of time!  Oh, my friends, rather bow your heads before Him at this moment!  For here He is among us now, listening to every thought of our poor simple hearts.  He is where God is, in whom we live, and move, and have our being, and that is everywhere.  Do you wish Him to be any nearer?

June

Three o’clock, upon a still, pure, Midsummer morning. . . .  The white glare of dawn, which last night hung high in the north-west, has travelled now to the north-east, and above the wooded wall of the hills the sky is flushing with rose and amber.  A long line of gulls goes wailing inland; the rooks come cawing and sporting round the corner at Landcross, while high above them four or five herons flap solemnly along to find their breakfast on the shallows.  The pheasants and partridges are clucking merrily in the long wet grass; every copse and hedgerow rings with the voice of birds; but the lark, who has been singing since midnight in the “blank height of the dark,” suddenly hushes his carol and drops headlong among the corn, as a broad-winged buzzard swings from some wooded peak into the abyss of the valley, and hangs high-poised above the heavenward songster.  The air is full of perfume; sweet clover, new-mown hay, the fragrant breath of kine, the dainty scent of sea-weed, and fresh wet sand.  Glorious day, glorious place, “bridal of earth and sky,” decked well with bridal garments, bridal perfumes, bridal songs.