Vesper Talks to Girls

by Laura A. Knott

First fixes our attention,

So manners decent and polite,

The same we practiced at first sight,

Will save it from declension.”

Finally, no selfish person is good to live with. Selfishness in one form or another is at the root of most of the evil in the world. It is an insidious foe, and there are none of us whom it does not attack. It is in the home that habits of unselfishness must be developed or they are likely never to be developed at all. In the home there is an opportunity to practice unselfishness every day and every hour. Nowhere else are there so many opportunities to be watchful of the needs of others and to be ready to supply them. Nowhere else are the occasions so manifold in which one may surrender one’s own pleasure for the good of others. Yet, wherever people live together, there is constant opportunity for the practice of this virtue.

These are some of the little foxes that spoil the vines. There have been people who have been exacting, fault-finding, irritable, self-willed, and discourteous, who yet have lived honest lives and have accomplished something of good in the world. Yet the good accomplished would have been far greater and their lives would have been much happier if, to the more fundamental virtues, there had been added the fine flowering of character which comes with the addition of those particular qualities which make one comfortable to live with, a pleasant person to have about.

IV
ENDURING HARDNESS[^[2]]

In the beautiful cathedral in Oxford there is a stained-glass window, each pane of which represents certain well-known characters in the Bible. Upon my first visit to the cathedral one of these windows immediately attracted my attention, and I never visited the place afterward without finding my eyes wandering to that spot. The picture is of the child Timothy, kneeling by the side of his mother, who is teaching him. In its child-purity and wistfulness, the boy Timothy reminds one of the “Infant Samuel” by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Timothy, as you know, was a young friend of St. Paul’s, and the two epistles in the New Testament called by his name were letters which St. Paul wrote to the young man, whom he loved as a son, and whom, indeed, again and again he calls his son.

St. Paul was a man who won to a remarkable degree the admiration and love of those with whom he lived and worked. He seems to have been almost without kindred in the years when we know him, going about from place to place and establishing churches, then leaving them to the care of others. But, though without a home of his own or family ties, he finds himself at home and among dear friends wherever he goes. Few men have ever been so loved. He always made a place for himself in the hearts of the people with whom he worked. This was particularly true of the young men about him, and we have many touching passages showing his affection for them and theirs for him. He says he yearns to see them, he longs for their welfare, he prays for them without ceasing, and he sends these young men out filled with his spirit, to carry on his work. Of these young men, Timothy seems to have been the one he loved best. He sent him to be the head of some of the churches as a sort of bishop, and the two letters which we have from St. Paul to him are letters of advice regarding the management of the churches. They emphasize above all things the importance of personal character. Timothy, as we learn from these letters of St. Paul, had been brought up most religiously by his mother, Lois, and his grandmother, Eunice, who seem to have been two of Paul’s dearest friends and co-workers. “From a child thou hast known the scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation,” said St. Paul to him.