itself day by day in letters to Mr. Keble, a record of occasional thoughts, and the private journals which he kept for his own conscience to whet itself upon. Sacred as these pages are, they have been printed before in the opening volume of his Remains; and they prove how very far he was from being a mere intellectual theoriser, oblivious of daily duty and common ties. His strife for perfection, a difficult and joyless one at best, began with these. Some excerpts, scattered or consecutive, will serve to show his sincerity and thoroughness: how his thoughts ran; how he fed upon his mother’s memory; with what lowliness he prayed for the divine help, and with what merciless constancy he learned to discipline himself, arraign his own motives, and master the bitter and sovereign science of self-knowledge.
—‘Yesterday I was very indolent, but … my energies were rather restored by reading some of my mother’s journal at Vineyard. I did not recollect that I had been so unfeeling to her during her last year. I thank God some of her writings have been kept: that may be my salvation; but I have spent the evening just as idly as if I had not seen it. I don’t know how it is, but it seems to me that the consciousness of having capacities for happiness, with no objects to gratify them, seems to grow upon me, and puts me in a dreary way. Lord, have mercy upon me.’
—‘Spent the morning tolerably well; read my mother’s journal and prayers, two hours: I admire her more and more. I pray God the prayers she made for me may be effectual, and that her labours may not be in vain, but that God in His mercy may have chosen this way of accomplishing them; and that my reading them so long after they were made, and without any intention of hers, may be the means by which the Holy Spirit will awaken my spirit to those good feelings which she asked for in my behalf. I hope, by degrees, I may get to consider her relics in the light of a friend, derive from them advice and consolation, and rest my troubled spirit under their shadow. She seems to have had the same annoyances as myself, without the same advantages, and to have written her thoughts down, instead of conversation. As yet they have only excited my feelings, and not produced any practical result.’
—‘Read my mother’s journal till half-past twelve: here and there I think I remember allusions. Everything I see in it sends me back to her in my childhood: it gets such hold of me that I can hardly think of anything else. It is a bad way to give a general account of oneself at the end of a day: people at that time are not competent judges of their actions; besides, everyone ought to be dissatisfied with himself always: it is better to give a detailed account like my mother’s by means of which I may hereafter have some idea of what was my standard of virtue, rather than my opinion of myself.’
—‘O Lord, consider it not as a mockery in me, that day after day I present myself before Thee, professing penitence for sins which I still continue to commit, and asking Thy grace to assist me in subduing them, while my negligence renders it ineffectual. O Lord, if I must judge of the future from the past, and if the prayers which I am now about to offer up to Thee will prove equally ineffectual with those which have preceded them, then indeed it is a fearful thing to come before Thee with professions whose fruitlessness seems a proof of their insincerity! But Thine eye trieth my inward parts, and knoweth my thoughts, independently of the actions which proceed from them. “O that my ways were made so direct that I might keep Thy statutes! I will walk in Thy commandments when Thou hast set my heart at liberty.”’
—‘Read my mother’s journal. I hope it is beginning to do me some serious good, without exciting such wild feelings as it did at first.’
—‘I must fight against myself with all my might, and watch my mind at every turning. It will be a good thing for me to keep an exact account of my receipts and spendings: it will be a check on silly prodigality. I mean to save what I can by denying myself indulgences, in order to have wherewith I may honour God and relieve the poor.’
(To Keble, but never sent.)
—‘Perhaps you may think it very odd, but this summer[15] has been the first time I have had resolution to ask for the papers which they found of my mother’s after her death. The
most interesting to me are some prayers, and two fragments of [a] journal, one for the year 1809, I think, and the other in 1815. The prayers seem to have been a good deal later.’