Precept & Practice – JANUARY 1 – Between the New Year and the Old
The year which came to us twelve months ago, all fresh and young, is old and weary. A new year will come to crowd him from his place. On such a day it is not mere habit – it is a natural and healthy instinct – which makes us stand between the new year and the old, between the living and the dead, and listen to them as they speak to one another.
The old year says to the new year, ‘Take this man and show him greater things than I have been able to show him. You must be for him a fuller, richer day of the Lord than I could be.’ The new year says to the old, ‘I will take him, and do for him the best that I can do. But all that I can do for him will be possible only in virtue of the preparation which you have made, only because of what you have done for him already.’
Bishop Phillips Brooks
We live by days. They are the leaves folded back each night in the great volume that we write. They are our autobiography. Each day takes us not newly, but as a tale continued. It finds us what yesterday left us; and as we go on, every day is telling to every other day truths about us, showing the kind of being that is to be handed on to it, making of us something better or something worse, as we decide.
F. J. W. Ware.
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From the Introduction to Precept and Practice
The kindly welcome given to my other little books, ‘Being and Doing’ and ‘Character and Conduct,’ must be my excuse for adding another collection of extracts to the number now in circulation.
The quotations are gathered from the books of many earnest thinkers, and deal with Life in all its length and breadth, with ourselves, our characters, our plain unvarnished faults and weaknesses, our often untoward circumstances, and with all that drags us down;- with our purposes, our religion, our love and friendships, and with all that uplifts us;- with our relation to others, our influence and responsibilities, and finally with those stages of our journey which bring us to the Road’s Last Turn and to the Silent Land.
CONSTANCE M. WHISHAW
Suffolk Vicar 