Precept and Practice – NOVEMBER 13 – Our Life and more than our Life

When these matters are talked about before persons of different ages and various shades of intelligence, I think one ought to be very careful that his use of language does not injure the sensibilities, perhaps blunt the reverential feelings, of those who are listening to him.   You of the sterner sex say that we women have intuitions, but not logic, as our birthright.   I shall not commit my sex by conceding this to be true as a whole, but I will accept the first half of it, and I will go so far as to say that we do not always care to follow out a train of thought until it ends in a blind cul-de-sac, as some of what are called the logical people are fond of doing.

Now I want to remind you that religion is not a matter of intellectual luxury to those of us who are interested in it, but something very different.   It is our life, and more than our life;  for that is measured by pulse-beats, but our religious consciousness partakes of the Infinite, towards which it is constantly yearning.   It is very possible that a hundred or five hundred years from now the forms of religious belief may be so altered that we should hardly know them.   But the sense of dependence on Divine influence, and the need of communion with the unseen and eternal, will be then just what they are now.   It is not the geologist’s hammer, or the astronomer’s telescope, or the naturalists microscope, that is going to take away the need of the human soul for that Rock to rest upon which is higher than itself, that Star which never sets, that all-pervading Presence which gives life to all the least moving atoms of the immeasurable universe.

(Young Girl in conversation with Oliver Wendell Holmes – The Poet at the Breakfast Table)

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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