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Show CLEANINGS FROM RUSKIN. You can no more filter your mind into purity than you can compress it into calmness; you must keep it pure if you would have it pure; and throw no stones into it if you would have it quiet The poor wo must have with us always al-ways and sorrow is inseparable from any hour of life; but we may make their poverty such as shall inherit the earth; and the sorrow such as shall bo hallowed by the hand of the Comforter, Com-forter, with everlasting comfort You know how often it is difficult to be wisely charitable; to do good without with-out multifying the sources of evil. You know that to give alms is nothing unless you give thought also; and that therefore it is written, not "blessed is he that feedeth the poor," but "blessed is be that considereth the poor." And you know that a little thought and a little kindness aro often worth more than a great deal of money. The essonce of lying is in deception, not in words; a lie may be told by silence, si-lence, by equivocation, by an accent on a sylable, by a glance of the eye; and all these kinds of lies are worse and baser than a lie plainly worded; so that no form of blinded conscience is so far sunk as that which comforts itsolf because the deception was by gesture or silence, instead of utterance; utter-ance; for, according to Tennyson's deep and trenchant line, "A lie which is half the truth is ever the worst of lies." People sometimes speak, in mis working age, as if houses and lands, and food and raiment were alone useful, and as if sight, thought and admiration were all profitless, so that men insolontly call themselves Untllitarlans, who would turn themselves them-selves and their' race into vegetables; men who think (as far as such can be said to think) that the moat is more than life, and the raiment than the body; hewers of wood and drawers of water, who think that it is to give them wood to hew, and water to draw, that the fine forests cover the mountains moun-tains like the shadow of God, and the great rivers move like His eternity. We seem to think sometimes that a reverent and tender duty is due to one whose affection we still doubt; and whose character we as yet do but partially and distantly descern, and that this reverence and duty are to be withdrawn when the affections has become wholly and limitlessly our own, and the character has beentso sifted and tried that we fear not to intrust it with the happiness of our lives. Do you not feel how Ignoble and unreasonable this is. Do you not feel that marriage, when it is ture marriage at all, is only tho soal which marks the vowed transition of temporary tem-porary into untiring service, and of fitful inb eternal love? |
