Precept and Practice – JULY 7 – Unconscious Influence

The effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive;  for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistorical facts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.

(George Eliot – Middlemarch)

I am sure that the world is a better place for you and me to live in to-day, not merely for the hundred great pattern lives which have passed into the heavens, and which we call still by their names, but far more for the countless, nameless multitude of men and women who have wrought into the very substance of the earth, where at last they lay their bodies in unnoticed graves, the great, first, simplest words of God – that man was sacred, that duty was possible, that self-sacrifice was sweet, and that love for one’s brother was the crown of life.   And you ought not to be satisfied until you find yourself able to feel that the hope of doing something by your living to make the world in a real, although an un-appreciable, degree more full of these words for the men who are to follow us, is the noblest and most inspiring promise which can be set before your soul.

(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