Precept & Practice – FEBRUARY 14 – Discipline

Knowledge, the gaining of experience, or experiences, is the chief end of man;  it is the education in time for eternity…..   No experience is without value;  sorrow and suffering, the battle of adverse circumstances, afford the richest discipline of all.

E. Wake Cook

Pain and despair and heartache…..   cast you down for awhile, but afterwards they help you to understand.

John Oliver Hobbes

This is our doctrine – the permanent value of trial – that when a man conquers his adversaries and his difficulties, it is not as if he never had encountered them.   Their power, still kept, is in all his future life…..   He is stronger by the accumulated strength of trial.   His sea of glass is mingled with fire…..  You may go through the crowded streets of Heaven, asking each saint how he came there, and you will look in vain everywhere for a man morally and spiritually strong, whose strength did not come to him in struggle.

Bishop Phillips Brooks

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