of love;
that the true way to gain influence over our fellow-men is to have
charity towards them. That is a hard lesson to learn; and all those who
learn it generally learn it late; almost--God forgive us--too late.

_Westminster Sermons_.

The Ascetic Painters. February 16.

We owe much (notwithstanding their partial and Manichean idea of beauty)
to the early ascetic painters. Their works are a possession for ever. No
future school of religious art will be able to rise to eminence without
learning from them their secret. They taught artists, and priests, and
laymen, too, that beauty is only worthy of admiration when it is the
outward sacrament of the beauty of the soul within; they helped to
deliver men from that idolatry to merely animal strength and loveliness
into which they were in danger of falling in ferocious ages, and among
the relics of Roman luxury.

_Miscellanies_. 1849.

Reveries. February 17.

Beware of giving way to reveries. Have always some employment in your
hands. Look forward to the future with hope. Build castles if you will,
but only bright ones, and _not too many_.

_Letters and Memories_. 1842.

Woman's Mission. February 18.

It is the glory of woman that she was sent into the world to live for
others rather than for herself; and therefore, I should say, let her
smallest rights be respected, her smallest wrongs redressed; but let her
never be persuaded to forget that she is sent into the world to teach
man--what I believe she has been teaching him all along, even in the
savage state, namely, that there is something more necessary than the
claiming of rights, and that is, the performing of duties; to teach him
specially, in these so-called intellectual days, that there is something
more than intellect, and that is--purity and virtue.

_Lecture on Thrift_. 1869.

The Heroic Life. February 19.

Provided we attain at last to the truly heroic and divine life, which is
the life of virtue, it will matter little to us by what wild and weary
ways, or through what painful and humiliating processes, we have arrived
thither. If God has loved us, if God will receive us, then let us submit
loyally and humbly to His law--"whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and
scourgeth every son whom He receiveth."

_All Saints' Day Sermons_.

The Wages of Sin. February 20.

It is sometimes said, "The greater the sinner the greater the saint." I
do not believe