Precept & Practice – JANUARY 24 – Habitual Virtue

The state which repays us, is that habitual virtue, which makes it as natural for a man to act right, as to breathe;  which so incorporates goodness with the system that pure thoughts are conceived without study, and just actions performed without effort:  as it is the perfection of health, when every bodily organ acts without exciting attention;  when the heart beats, and the lungs play, and the pulses flow, without reminding us that the mechanism of life is at work:   So it is with the beauty of moral life!  when man is just, and generous, and good, without knowing that he is practising any virtue, or overcoming any difficulty;  and the truly happy man is he who, at the close of a long life, has so changed his original nature, that he feels it an effort to do wrong;  and a mere compliance with habit, to perform every great and sacred duty of life.

Sydney Smith (Sketches of Lectures on Moral Philosophy)

We shall one day forget all about duty, and do everything from the love of the loveliness of it, the satisfaction of the rightness of it.

George MacDonald

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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