"Meanwhile there is much that we can do. It need not be said that home is the most effective school of character. On the duties of home I cannot dwell now. But there is a more general influence of common tone and habits of which serious account ought to be taken. We are at all times unconsciously educating others by our own example. Our standard of duty in the discharge of business and in the use of leisure necessarily influences the desires and the actions of those who look to us for guidance. The young are quick-eyed critics, and the sight of quiet devotion to work, of pleasure sought in common things—and all truly precious things are common—will enforce surely and silently some great lessons of school. We do not, as far as I can judge, rate highly enough our responsibility for the customary practices of society. Not infrequently we neutralise our teaching through want of imagination by failing to follow out the consequences of some traditional custom. We seem to be inconsiderate when we are only ignorant."
Bishop Westcott.
DECEMBER 17
"Christ did not denounce wealth any more than He denounced pauperism. He did not abhor money; He used it. He did not abhor the company of rich men; He sought it. He did not invariably scorn or even resent a certain profuseness of expenditure. With a fine discrimination, He, while habitually discouraging it, yet recognised that, here and there, there was place for it. What he denounced was the love of, the lust of riches; the vulgar snobbishness that chose exclusively the fellowship or the ways of rich men; the habit of extravagance; in one word, greed and luxury and self-indulgence. He taught men, first of all and last of all, that they were stewards, that in the final analysis of men and things neither they nor theirs were their own.
We must not only affirm the brotherhood of man: we must live it. For then the State, and in the State, the home, the Church, and the individual shall become the incarnation of a regenerated humanity, and earth, this earth, our earth, here and to-day, the vestibule of heaven!"
The Citizen in Relation to the Industrial Situation,
Bishop Potter.
DECEMBER 18