Precept and Practice – JUNE 25 – A School of Peace

A garden, says a great minor poet, is ‘the very School of peace.’   A garden is also the scene of unremitting and watchful conflict, where beauty and order and tranquillity represent the victory of purpose over wild nature.   The gardener sets himself to give his flowers a chance, protecting them against the competition of ranker vegetable growths, with their animal allies.   Nature is against gardens, and if the gardener is to win, he must bribe Nature to fight for him in the soil and air, and when this fails, he must keep Nature out.

And all human peace is in some sort won by conflict and maintained by energy:  it is never the triumph of inertia:  it represents the victory of purpose over circumstance.   Nature is against it.   Peace in body and mind and soul is the outcome of active health, fighting to keep out the invading forces which, if they are allowed admittance, reduce us to worry, and morbidness, and discontent.

The peace which passes understanding has to be sought and kept by active and passive energies which can be practically directed by understanding.   There is another type of peace which is just quiescence;

Wordsworth depicts it:

‘Calm is all Nature as a resting wheel.’

But the calmness of a life which has attained to peace is rather like that of a wheel in steady and balanced motion, perfectly doing its work;  it is like that of the garden, where the life which issues in beautiful forms is allowed free play, and maintained in freedom, by ordered and purposeful effort.

The Reverend H. N. Bate (The Healthful Spirit)

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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