Precept & Practice – APRIL 3 – Cordiality

No relations are fulfilled without cordiality;  we give nothing if we do not give love:  this is implied in our Lord’s commandments – ‘that ye love one another as I love you,’ and ‘I say unto you love your enemies.’  If we do not, most of us go far in fact towards this transcending unity, it may possibly be because, intrenched in the circle of our own self-regard, we are only too well content not to go out into the vital experiences of another – far less of those who need us through the world;  we shrink from the self-expenditure of sympathy, and prefer the sundered to the corporate life, hiding ourselves for ourselves within ourselves.

But we can hardly blind ourselves to the fact, that the Christian spirit as such, is always making towards such a transcending of the barriers of sundered personalities such a living of each not only for but in others; and that those who have possessed it most eminently are those whose spirit has had the most eminent power of reproducing itself in the spirit of others.   Never perhaps is the good man so completely, so royally himself as when the inherent force of what he is, is becoming the vital principle of what others are also with him.

Need I plead that sympathy is a Christian ideal in a sense far higher than that which we are mostly content to allow the world. 

Canon R. C. Moberley (Atonement and Personality)

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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