Precept & Practice – APRIL 7 – Wise Generalship

The trivial services of social life are best performed, and the lesser particles of domestic happiness are most skilfully organised, by the deepest and the fairest heart.   It is an error to suppose that homely minds are the best administrators of small duties.   Who does not know how wretched a contradiction such a rule receives in the moral economy of many a home? – how often the daily troubles, the swarm of blessed cares, the innumerable minutiae of arrangement in a family, prove quite too much for the generalship of feeble minds, and even the clever selfishness of strong ones;  how a petty and scrupulous anxiety, in defending with infinite perseverance some small and almost invisible point of frugality and comfort, surrenders the greater unobserved, and while saving money ruins minds;  how, on the other hand, a rough and unmellowed sagacity rules indeed and without defeat, but, while maintaining in action the mechanism of government, creates a constant and intolerable friction, a grating together of reluctant wills, a groaning under the consciousness of force, that make the movements of life fret and chafe incessantly

James Martineau

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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