Being and Doing – 16 July – Responsibility

IT WAS Wednesday evening, and Merle walked down through the fields to preach, burning with one thought – the worth of a man. What Tom’s one year of Christian life had done!   And all around were lives as precious – not all as gifted, but everyone as capable of being filled with the Spirit of God – sinking to the low level of a careless, tippling life-drifting up to the great cities, where we call them redundant masses, and wonder how to endure the pressure of so great a multitude – and each unit might be a temple of the Holy Ghost.  For Tom himself might have sunk, with all the rest, into the slough, had no hand arrested him.   And Christians can live to dress and dine, and think it much to spend an hour a week in surface labour, while this tremendous ruin of the most precious thing created is going on.

E. B. BAYLY

THERE is work which every one of us ought to be doing at our very doors.   You have a fellowship, every one of you, in this solidarity of evil.   You cannot wipe off from your souls, as with a wet cloth, as though it was no concern of yours, the stains left by the sins of others.  From each one of you radiates invisibly an interminable web-work, of which the implicated consequences, if summed together, are incalculable.   But if it be so in evil, so is it also, thank God, with any good you do;  it may put on white robes, and go forth as an angel to bless the world.   Oh, if we could all, every one of us, be made to feel how awful is our common responsibility for the general evil, how urgent is our individual duty to labour for the common good, we should see in a regenerated world the fulfilment of the olden prophecy.

Archdeacon FARRAR

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These quotes are from ‘Being and Doing’ A selection of helpful thoughts from various authors arranged for daily reading.

Collected by Constance M Whishaw and first published in 1908 for members of the Being and Doing Guild whose object is to do all they can for the relief of suffering and misery.

Most of the writers are 19th Century Christians from Britain and Europe who were committed to living their faith through deeds as well as words – Being AND Doing.

For many years these words have kept me company and encouraged me on the journey of faith.  I hope they will encourage others also.