"Virgil said of the winning crew in his boat-race, 'They can, because they believe they can.'"
FEBRUARY 19
"No man who, being a Christian, desires the kingdom of God, can justly neglect giving his energy to the bettering of the social, physical, and educational condition of the poor, the diseased, and the criminal classes. But he is not a Christian, or he has not realised the problem fully, if that is all he does. Social improvement is a work portions of which any one can do, in which all ought to share; but if we who follow Christ desire to do the best work in that improvement, and in the best way, we ought to strive—while we join in the universal movement towards a juster society—to give a spiritual life to that movement; to keep it at an ideal level; to free it from mere materialism; to maintain in it the monarchy of self-sacrifice; to fix its eyes on invisible and unworldly truths; to supply it with noble and spiritual faiths; to base all associations of men on the ground of their spiritual union—all being children of God, and brothers of one another, in the love and faith by which Jesus lived; and to maintain the dignity of this spiritual communion of men in faith in their immortal union with God. This is the fight of faith we, as fellow-workers with God, shall have to wage; and this not only binds us up with the poor, but with the rich, not only with the ignorant, but the learned; for on these grounds all men are seen as stripped of everything save of their humanity and their divine kinship.... Improve, then, the material condition and the knowledge of all who are struggling for justice; it is part of your life which if you neglect, you are out of touch with the new life; but kindle in it, uphold and sanctify in it, the life which is divine, the communion with man of God, without union with whose character all effort for social improvement will revert to new miseries and new despair."
The Gospel of Joy, Stopford Brooke.
FEBRUARY 20
"Idleness standing in the midst of unattempted tasks is always proud. Work is always tending to humility. Work touches the keys of endless activity, opens the infinite, and stands awe-struck before the immensity of what there is to do. Work brings a man into the good realm of facts. Work takes the dreamy youth who is growing proud in his closet over one or two sprouting powers which he has discovered in himself, and sets him out among the gigantic needs and the vast processes of the world, and makes him feel his littleness. Work opens the measureless fields of knowledge and skill that reach far out of sight. I am sure we all know the fine, calm, sober humbleness of men who have really tried themselves against the great tasks of life. It was great in Paul, and in Luther, and in Cromwell. It is something that never comes into the character, never shows in the face of a man who has never worked."
Phillips Brooks.
"No man is born into the world, whose work
Is not born with him; there is always work,
And tools to work withal, for those who will;
And blessed are the horny hands of toil!
The busy world shoves angrily aside
The man who stands with arms akimbo set,
Until occasion tells him what to do;
And he who waits to have his task marked out
Shall die and leave his errand unfulfilled."
James Russell Lowell.