Precept & Practice – FEBRUARY 13 – Discipline
When one is wide enough awake to life to inquire the meaning of its pains and wrestling, its difficulties and blank walls, its hungers for daily bread and much more, what answer comes to one? Surely the one solution of it all is ‘Discipline’! It is the one fact which meets us everywhere. Nothing lies at our feet to be kicked easily forward. Nil sine labore they said two thousand years ago, and it is still true. Peace is the reward of strife, and love is only perfected by the passion of overcoming, and knowledge is the prize granted to such alone as subdue ignorance.
J. M. Blake
Let us all be sure that all is well, whatever comes, while we trust and stand fast and strive, and only hopeless – and rightly hopeless – when we want what we are in no wise willing to earn. The glory and the glow of life come by right living.
Collyer
Then, welcome each rebuff
That turns earth’s smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go!
Be our joys three-parts pain!
Strive, and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang;
dare, never grudge the throe!
Robert Browning
oooOOOooo
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 