itement, disappointment, and a host of bad passions. It gives a man
the blessed, invigorating feeling that he is at home; that he has roots
deep and wide struck down into all he sees, and that only the Being who
can do nothing cruel or useless can tear them up. It is pleasant to look
down on the same parish day after day, and say I know all that is
beneath, and all beneath know me. It is pleasant to see the same trees
year after year, the same birds coming back in spring to the same shrubs,
the same banks covered by the same flowers.

_Prose Idylls_. 1857.

How to attain. July 21.

If our plans are not for time but for eternity, our knowledge, and
therefore our love to God, to each other, to everything, will progress
for ever. And the attainment of this heavenly wisdom requires neither
ecstacy nor revelation, but prayer and watchfulness, and observation, and
deep and solemn thought.

Two great rules for its attainment are simple enough--Never forget what
and where you are, and grieve not the Holy Spirit, for "If a man will do
God's will he shall know of the doctrine."

_Letters and Memories_. 1842.

The Divine Discontent. July 22.

I should like to make every one I meet discontented with themselves; I
should like to awaken in them, about their physical, their intellectual,
their moral condition, that divine discontent which is the parent first
of upward aspiration and then of self-control, thought, effort to fulfil
that aspiration even in part. For to be discontented with the divine
discontent, and to be ashamed with the noble shame, is the very germ and
first upgrowth of all virtue.

_Lecture on Science of Health_. 1872.

Dra et labora. July 23.

"Working is praying," said one of the holiest of men. And he spoke
truth; if a man will but do his work from a sense of duty, which is for
the sake of God.

_Sermons_.

Distrust and Anarchy. July 24.

Over the greater part of the so-called civilised world is spreading a
deep distrust, a deep irreverence of every man towards his neighbour, and
a practical unbelief in every man whom you do see, atones for itself by a
theoretic belief in an ideal human nature which you do not see. Such a
temper of mind, unless it be checked by that which alone can check it,
namely, the grace of God, must tend towards sheer anarchy. There is a
deeper and uglier anarchy than any mere political anarchy,--which the
abuse of the critical spirit l