“Judge nothing before the time.” This is a hard saying. Who can hear it? There never was a time in which the critical spirit was more thoroughly in the ascendant. Every man now is an independent critic. To accept fully, or as it is now called, to follow blindly; to admire heartily, or as it is now called, fanatically—these are considered signs of weakness or credulity. To believe intensely; to act unhesitatingly; to admire passionately; all this, as the latest slang phrases it, is “bad form”; a proof that a man is not likely to win in the race of this world the prize whereof is, the greatest possible enjoyment with the least possible work.
The Critical Spirit. 1871.
Toil and Rest. September 8.
Remember always, toil is the condition of our being. Our sentence is to labour from the cradle to the grave. But there are Sabbaths allowed for the mind as well as the body, when the intellect is stilled, and the emotions alone perform their gentle and involuntary functions.
Letters and Memories. 1842.
Storm and Calm. September 9.
Then Amyas told the last scene; how, when they were off the Azores, the storms came on heavier than ever, with terrible seas breaking short and pyramid-wise, till, on the 9th of September, the tiny Squirrel nearly foundered, and yet recovered, and the General (Sir Humphrey Gilbert), sitting abaft with a book in his hand, cried out to us in the Hind, “We are as near heaven by sea as by land,” reiterating the same speech well be-seeming a soldier resolute in Jesus Christ, as I can testify he was.
Westward Ho! chap. xiii.
On the Heights. September 10.
It is good for a man to have holy and quiet thoughts, and at moments to see into the very deepest meaning of God’s word and God’s earth, and to have, as it were, heaven opened before his eyes; and it is good for a man sometimes actually to feel his heart overpowered with the glorious majesty of God—to feel it gushing out with love to his blessed Saviour; but it is not good for him to stop there any more than for the Apostles in the Mount of Transfiguration.