[July 6.]
It is true that the task which God lays upon us all is the same—the unceasing surrender of their own wishes to the higher aims which he successively sets before them. But with men of passionate temperament and selfish habits, who are therefore at every turn exposed by circumstances to violent temptation, their natural wishes are, for the most part, so obviously sinful that, though the struggle of renouncing them may be hard, the duty of doing so is clear and pressing. And when such turn to God, their falls in attempting the Christian walk are often frequent enough, or at least their battles with temptation severe enough, to teach them the evil and weakness of their own heart. With men, on the other hand, of calm, pure and affectionate disposition, and trained in conscientious habits, so many of their wishes are for things harmless, or even good in themselves, that it is less easy to see why and how they are to be given up. Such men, just, kindly, and finding much of their own happiness in that of others, live, for the most part, in harmonious relations with those around them, and have little to disturb their consciences beyond the fear of falling short in the path of duty on which they have already entered. But they are exposed to many perils, more insidious, because less startling, than those which beset their more fiercely tempted brethren. They are in danger of depending too much on the respect and love which others so readily yield them; of valuing themselves on a purity which, if ever one of struggle, has come to be one of taste; of prizing intellectual clearness above moral insight and vigor; of mistaking the pleasure they feel in the performance of duty, for real submission to the will of God; and above all, of shrinking from new truths which would, for the time, confuse their belief, and break up the calm symmetry of their lives.
For … different natures require and receive a very different discipline from God. Sometimes it is by outward affliction that God speaks to souls, thus sinking into the lethargy of formalism; and the loss of friends, or health, or influence suddenly seems to cut off, as it were, half the means of serving him, and to rouse long-forgotten temptations to rise up against his will. Sometimes, on the other hand, he speaks to them inwardly, by opening their eyes to heights of holiness which they had never before steadily contemplated. They now suddenly perceive that many of the fancied duties which have till now occupied their lives and satisfied their consciences, have long ceased to be duties, and have come to be mere habits or pleasures; and that while they have been thus living in self love, unseen and unrepented of, they might have been coming to the knowledge of the higher obligations to which they have been so blind, but which were all implied in their first belief if they had but continued to read it with a single eye.—From Susanna Winkworth, in “Tauler’s Life and Times.”
[July 13.]
Especially, too, if they be distracted and disheartened (as such are wont to be) by the sin and confusion of the world; by the amount of God’s work which still remains undone, and by their own seeming incapacity to do it, they will take heart from the history of John Tauler and his fellows, who, in a far darker and more confused time than the present, found a work to do and strength to do it; who, the more they retired into the recesses of their own inner life, found there that fully to know themselves was to know all men, and to have a message for all men; and who by their unceasing labors of love proved that the highest spiritual attainments, instead of shutting a man up in lazy and Pharisaic self-contemplation, drive him forth to work as his Master worked before him, among the poor, the suffering, and the fallen.
Let such take heart, and toil on in faith at the duty which lies nearest to them. Five hundred years have passed since Tauler and his fellows did their simple work, and looked for no fruit from it, but the saving of one here and there from the nether pit. That was enough for which to labor; but without knowing it, they did more than that. Their work lives, and will live forever, though in forms from which they would have perhaps shrunk had they foreseen them. Let all such therefore take heart. They may know their own weakness; but they know not the power of God in them. They may think sadly that they are only palliating the outward symptoms of social and moral disease; but God may be striking, by some unconscious chance blow of theirs, at a sort of evil which they never suspected. They may mourn over the failure of some seemingly useful plan of their own; but God may be, by their influence, sowing the seed of some plan of his own, of which they little dream. For every good deed comes from God. His is the idea, his the inspiration, and his its fulfillment in time; and therefore no good deed but lives and grows with the everlasting life of God himself. And as the acorn, because God has given it “a forming form,” and life after its kind, bears within it not only the builder oak, but shade for many a herd; food for countless animals, and last, the gallant ship itself, and the materials of every use to which nature or art can put it and its descendants after it throughout all time; so does every good deed contain within itself endless and unexpected possibilities of other good, which may and will grow and multiply forever, in the genial light of him whose eternal mind conceived it, and whose eternal spirit will forever quicken it, with that life of which he is the giver and the Lord.—From Rev. Charles Kingsley, in “Preface to Tauler’s Sermons.”