MARCH 1
"They hear no more the cries of their brothers caught in the nets of misery: 'Help us, we are perishing.' The curtains of their comfort are fast drawn; they sit at home wrapt in family ease. Outside, the sleet is falling, the bitter wind is blowing, thousands of the children of sorrow are dying in the fierce weather. God Himself is knocking at the door, calling 'Come forth and seek the lost with Jesus.' We hear nothing, the cotton of comfort stops our ears. For a time, till God Himself breaks in on us with storm, and disperses our comfort to the winds, we can run no Christian race.... Therefore, lay aside, not all comfort—men have a right to that—but that excess of it which softens and enfeebles the soul; which sends to sleep the longing for God's perfection; which makes our life too slothful to follow Christ, the Healer of the world!"
The Gospel of Joy, Stopford Brooke.
"All my soul is full
Of pity for the sickness of this world;
Which I will heal, if healing may be found
By uttermost renouncing and strong strife."
The Light of Asia, E. Arnold.
MARCH 2
"Pity, indignation, love, felt and not made into acts of pity or of self-sacrifice, lose their very heart in our dainty dreaming, and are turned into their opposites. Our animation and activity of love, unexercised, becomes like the unused muscle, attenuated; and we are content to think with pleasure of the times when we were animated and active—a vile condition. But the worst wretchedness of these losses does not consist in the damage we do ourselves, but in the loss of power to benefit mankind, in the loss of power to do God's work for the salvation and the greater happiness of man. We are guilty to man, and guilty before God, when we lose our powers in inglorious ease. We owe ourselves to men and women; no amount of work frees us from the duty of keeping ourselves in the best possible trim, body and soul, mind and spirit, that we may nobly work the loving work of Him that sent us."
The Gospel of Joy, Stopford Brooke.
"Opportunities are swarming around us all the time, thicker than gnats at sundown. We walk through a cloud of them."
Van Dyke.