Precept & Practice – JANUARY 4 – An Blameless Life
Man’s heart is like a millstone, for ever swiftly at work, grinding its grist of thought and feeling and purpose. And, like a millstone, the heart will grind itself if it has nothing else to grind. So many men and women long for a life lifted above the need of work, a paradise of idleness! But there is nothing that keeps us so hale and sound, and in such full possession of our strength and the joy of living, as a steady round of duty, and solid work that we must dispose of, and for which we feel fit. God pity the vacant lives !
The most pitiable life is the aimless life. Heaven help the man of woman, the boy or girl, who is not interested in anything outside of his or her own immediate comfort and that related thereto; who eats bread to make strength for no special cause; who pursues science, reads poetry, studies books, for no earthly or heavenly purpose other than mere enjoyment or acquisition; who goes on accumulating wealth, piling up money, with no definite or absorbing purpose to apply it to anything in particular.
Jenkin Lloyd Jones.
Not unless we fill our existence with an aim do we make it life.
Reichel.
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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 