Precept & Practice – MAY 2 – Our Dues

There are a great many people in the world whose first and last thought in life is of what is due to them.   Do you meet them in the ordinary intercourse of daily life?   Nothing is more obvious than that they are on the watch to see that they get their dues.

…..There are mothers and fathers in families who are so absorbed in the thought of what is due them from their husbands or wives or children, that life becomes a sharp, acrid, microscopic hunt for slights that were never dreamed of, and for discourtesies which no one intended.

……There are great griefs in life which we can accept with meekness and bend to with absolute submission;  but there are little wrongs, minor slights, small neglects and injustices behind which often there lingers no deliberate intention nor even any malicious impulse, and these seem to have a power to infuriate us, until, if we do not literally ‘take’ those who have wronged us ‘by the throat,’ it is not because we have not a very decided impulse to do so

…..Speaking and acting thus, these are they who are more than all others responsible for the strifes and resentments, the lingering and long-cherished grudges that deform and disfigure human experience!

…..O!  could we gather together the claims against our fellow men and women which we have accounted just claims, and concerning which our hearts have burned with resentment and our cheeks flushed with anger the petty miserable quarrels and heart-burnings about questions of precedence, about some unintentional slight, about the ten thousand minor collisions which jar and irk us in life – what a contemptible catalogue it would be.  And we who have done so, as often as not profess and call ourselves the disciples of a crucified Christ.   Shame on us that we have so poorly learned the lesson of His gospel or the meaning of His cross!

Bishop Potter (Sermons of the City)

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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