ndred hideous and un-Christian sins.
The Greatest Thing in the World, p. 34.
December 2d. You will find, as you look back upon your life, that the
moments that stand out, the moments when you have really lived, are the
moments when you have done things in a spirit of love. As memory scans
the past, above and beyond all the transitory pleasures of life there
leap forward those supreme hours when you have been enabled to do
unnoticed kindnesses to those round about you, things too trifling to
speak about, but which you feel have entered into your eternal life. The
Greatest Thing in the World, p. 60.
December 3d. If events change men, much more persons. No man can meet
another on the street without making some mark upon him. We say we
exchange words when we meet; what we exchange is souls. And when
intercourse is very close and very frequent, so complete is this exchange
that recognizable bits of the one soul begin to show in the other's
nature, and the second is conscious of a similar and growing debt to the
first. The Changed Life, p. 30.
December 4th. In the natural world we absorb heat, breathe air, draw on
Environment all but automatically for meat and drink, for the nourishment
of the senses, for mental stimulus, for all that, penetrating us from
without, can prolong, enrich, and elevate life. But in the spiritual
world we have all this to learn. We are new creatures, and even the bare
living has to be acquired. Natural Law, p. 267.
December 5th. The great point in learning to live the spiritual life is
to live naturally. As closely as possible we must follow the broad, clear
lines of the natural life. And there are three things especially which it
is necessary for us to keep continually in view. The first is that the
organism contains within itself only one-half of what is essential to
life; the second is that the other half is contained in the Environment;
the third, that the condition of receptivity is simple union between the
organism and the Environment. Natural Law, p. 268.
December 6th. To say that the organism contains within itself only
one-half of what is essential to life, is to repeat the evangelical
confession, so worn and yet so true to universal experience, of the utter
helplessness of man. Natural Law, p. 268.
December 7th. Who has not come to the conclusion that he is but a part, a
fraction of some larger whole? Who does not miss at every turn of his
life an absent God? That man is but a
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