Character and Conduct – 29 May – Sin
REMOVE from us the protection, the encompassing safeguards and shelters we enjoy; withdraw the influences for good that are daily and weekly dropped on us like gentle dew from heaven, and have dropped ever since we had any being; deprive us of the comforts and interests, the innocent substitutes for forbidden pleasures; expose us to the loneliness, the vacancy, the dreary monotony, the hopeless struggle, the despair in which the majority of the men and women who fall find themselves immersed; and bring before us, thus exposed and bereft, what temptation you will – uncleanness, intemperance, theft, lying, blasphemy – and not one in ten of ordinary Christian people, I believe, would stand before it.
R. W. BARBOUR
LOOKING within myself, I note how thin
A plank of station, chance, or prosperous fate,
Doth fence me from the clutching waves of sin;-
In my own heart I find the worst man’s mate,
And see not dimly the smooth-hinged gate
That opes to those abysses
Where ye grope darkly, – ye who never knew
On your young hearts love’s consecrating dew
Or felt a mother’s kisses,
Or home’s restraining tendrils round you curled;
Ah, side by side with heart’s-ease in this world,
The fatal night-shade grows and bitter rue!
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
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These quotes are from ‘Character and Conduct’ A selection of helpful thoughts from various authors arranged for daily reading.
Collected by Constance M Whishaw and first published in 1905 as a follow up to her volume of Daily Readings for members of the Being and Doing Guild who asked for an additional volume
In her preface Whishaw writes:
‘This collection of noble thoughts expressed by men and women of past and present ages who have endeavoured to leave the world a little better than they found it.’
It is my hope in publishing the her readers may be inspired to imitate the example of the authors.
Suffolk Vicar 