MS.
Siccum Lumen. August 6.
How shall I get true knowledge? Knowledge which will be really useful, really worth knowing. Knowledge which I shall know accurately and practically too, so that I can use it in daily life, for myself and others? Knowledge too, which shall be clear knowledge, not warped or coloured by my own fancies, passions, prejudices, but pure and calm and sound; Siccum Lumen, “Dry Light,” as the greatest of philosophers called it of old.
To all such who long for light, that by the light they may live, God answers through His only begotten Son: “Ask and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find.”
Westminster Sermons. 1873.
This World. August 7.
What should the external world be to those who truly love, but the garden in which they are placed, not so much for sustenance or enjoyment of themselves and each other, as to dress it and to keep it—it to be their subject-matter, not they its tools! In this spirit let us pray “Thy kingdom come.”
MS. 1842.
The Life of the Spirit. August 8.
The old fairy superstition, the old legends and ballads, the old chronicles of feudal war and chivalry, the earlier moralities and mysteries—these fed Shakespeare’s youth. Why should they not feed our children’s? That inborn delight of the young in all that is marvellous and fantastic—has that a merely evil root? No, surely! it is a most pure part of their spiritual nature; a part of “the heaven which lies about us in our infancy;” angel-wings with which the free child leaps the prison-walls of sense and custom, and the drudgery of earthly life. It is a God-appointed means for keeping alive what noble Wordsworth calls those