The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe Chautauquan, Vol. 05, February 1885This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The Chautauquan, Vol. 05, February 1885Author: Chautauqua Literary and Scientific CircleChautauqua InstitutionEditor: Theodore L. FloodRelease date: July 5, 2017 [eBook #55053]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Emmy, Juliet Sutherland and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHAUTAUQUAN, VOL. 05, FEBRUARY 1885 ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The Chautauquan, Vol. 05, February 1885Author: Chautauqua Literary and Scientific CircleChautauqua InstitutionEditor: Theodore L. FloodRelease date: July 5, 2017 [eBook #55053]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Emmy, Juliet Sutherland and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Title: The Chautauquan, Vol. 05, February 1885
Author: Chautauqua Literary and Scientific CircleChautauqua InstitutionEditor: Theodore L. Flood
Author: Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
Chautauqua Institution
Editor: Theodore L. Flood
Release date: July 5, 2017 [eBook #55053]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Emmy, Juliet Sutherland and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHAUTAUQUAN, VOL. 05, FEBRUARY 1885 ***
Transcriber’s Note:This cover has been created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
Transcriber’s Note:This cover has been created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
The Chautauquan.
A MONTHLY MAGAZINE DEVOTED TO THE PROMOTION OF TRUE CULTURE. ORGAN OF THE CHAUTAUQUA LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC CIRCLE.
Vol. V.FEBRUARY, 1885.No. 5.
President, Lewis Miller, Akron, Ohio.Chancellor, J. H. Vincent, D.D., New Haven, Conn.Counselors, The Rev. Lyman Abbott, D.D.; the Rev. J. M. Gibson, D.D.; Bishop H. W. Warren, D.D.; Prof. W. C. Wilkinson, D.D.; Edward Everett Hale.Office Secretary, Miss Kate F. Kimball, Plainfield, N. J.General Secretary, Albert M. Martin, Pittsburgh, Pa.
Transcriber’s Note:This table of contents of this periodical was created for the HTML version to aid the reader.
BY RICHARD GRANT WHITE.
It has occurred to me that some readers ofThe Chautauquanmay have been disappointed in these articles because in their judgment they have been thus far not sufficiently “practical.” Many people, far too many, desire chiefly to find some short, straight road to knowledge. They like to have some man who is called an “authority” upon a certain subject cut his knowledge up into small parcels or “chunks” of convenient size, and arrange them with labels, alphabetically, in an article or a book, so that they maybe referred to at need, and followed like a recipe for making a pudding, and with as little thought. But there are no such recipes for acquiring real knowledge. In this way an acquaintance with facts may be made which, used blindly, may prove of some immediate service, and may not. Nothing, however, learned in this perfunctory way is worthy of the name of knowledge. For it is a barren process; it really teaches nothing; it profits nothing; it does nothing for the education of the person by whom it is adopted. Real knowledge comes only by a thoughtful learning of the relations of facts. True as to all subjects, this is eminently true as to language; because, language is eminently a subject of relations. There is hardly a word that we use which has not relations to other words, and other forms of speech; relations historical, spiritual, almost moral; to set forth which in detail would furnish occasion for a little essay. The mere learning to speak and to write a language is only a matter of memory and practice; nothing more. It is child’s work, and it is continually done, and is best done, by children. A man may speak and write English, French, German or Latin with unexceptionable correctness and fluency, and yet know no more about that language than a well instructed parrot would which had been taught to use all the words which he uses. His study would not be a study of language; and in that which he had painfully learned he might be easily and unconsciously surpassed by a child who had never studied at all. Now what I hope to do here is to help my readers to some knowledge of the English language, in so far as my own imperfect acquaintance with my mother tongue and its literature will enable me to do so.
We have seen what English is, of what stuff it is made, how it came by its present compositeness of substance; how it became strong, and full, and flexible, and fervent; let us now look a little into its structure,i. e., the way in which it is put together, in doing which we shall see by comparison how it differs from other languages. This matter of structure, the formation of the sentence, is the distinctive trait of a language. Mere words are not the essential difference between languages. Many words are common (with slight phonetic variation) to all the languages of the Aryan or Indo-European stock, as we have already seen. Multitudes of words have been adopted into all the modern tongues from other languages ancient and modern, dead and living, as most of the readers ofThe Chautauquanknow. The bulk of English dictionaries like Webster’s and Worcester’s is composed of words which are of Latin, Greek, French or Italian origin, and which indeed are essentially the same words in all these languages; their unlikeness being merely a phonetic variation, mostly caused by difference in pronunciation, or change in termination. For example,floweris in Latinflos(genitivefloris), in Italianfiore, in Frenchfleur, in Spanishflor; each language having somewhat changed the sound of the word, according to rules or habits which are loosely called laws; but the word is in all essentially the same. A sentence—many sentences—might be written in English, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish and German, in which all the words of subject-matter (all but verbs likehaveandbe, and prepositions and conjunctions) should be essentially the same, and so like that an intelligent person with some faculty for language, and who understood any one of these languages, could apprehend the meaning of any one of the supposed sentences with little difficulty. And yet the sentences would be respectively English, Latin, French, and so forth. Why and how? It is to the reason of this, that is the why and the how of it, that we shall now give a little time and attention.
The most important and significant distinction between languages is in their grammar; that is, in the structure of the sentence. In the languages mentioned above the greatest unlikeness in this respect is manifested in English, Latin and German, or to name them in their order of grammatical importance,Latin, German and English. The term “grammar” has two senses; one large and vague, and called by some “philosophical” or “scientific” (phrases commonly used with a deplorable union of pretension and looseness), which includes all that relates to the history, the substance and the structure of a language; the other much narrower and simpler; the sense implied when the phrases “good grammar” and “bad grammar” are used. To this sense I shall here confine myself, and shall here repeat a definition of grammar which I have given before.[A]
Grammar concerns the forms of words and their dependent relations in the sentence.
To illustrate this: It is “bad grammar,” ludicrously, monstrously bad grammar, to say in Latin,Nos habeo bonus mater, and yet these Latin words, literally and simply translated in their order, mean, We have a good mother, which in English is perfectly “good grammar.” In the Latin (to call it Latin) every word is wrong; in English every word is right. The reason of this is that in Latin words change their forms according to their relations, not according to their essential meaning.Habeomeans have; but it can not be used to express a plural having; that requires forwe(nos) the formhabemus.Bonusmeans good; but it can not be used to express the goodness of a feminine object, for which the formbonais required. Yet further: Evenbonacan not be used to qualify a noun which is the object of a verb, or, as we say, in the objective (or accusative) case, for which the formbonamis required.Matermeans mother, but as the object of the verbhave,matermust change its form tomatrem. By these required changes of form the Latin sentence becomes,Nos habemus bonam matrem, which is “good grammar,” although poor Latin, but which, after all the changes, means simply, We have a good mother; nothing more nor less. Yet further: The sentence, as written above, although grammatical, is poor Latin because it is at variance with the habit, or as it is sometimes called the spirit, or even the genius, of the Latin language. In Latin the wordhabemus(although likehabeoit means simply, have) is so positively and distinctively limited in use to the first person plural that the pronounnos—we—is quite superfluous, and is never used unless with an emphatic purpose;habemus, without thenos, means, we have. Moreover it was the Latin habit of speech to place the object generally before the verb; and good Latin for, We have a good mother would be,bonam matrem habemus—i. e., A good mother we have, or rather (literally) Good mother we have for the Latin strangely has no articles, or none which correspond to ouran(or a) andthe, and which may be translated by them.
This illustration, brief and simple although it be, is sufficient, I think, to make the great and essential distinction between English and Latin, and measurably between English and all other modern civilized tongues, clear to the readers of these articles. The essential difference is not one of words but of the construction of the sentence. In Latin and other languages that construction depends not upon the thought and the meaning of the words, but upon the forms of the words—their inflections. Now the distinctive trait of English is that it is a language without inflections—not absolutely so, but so to all intents and purposes; and, being without inflections, it is therefore without grammar, which, as we have seen, concerns the forms of words and their dependent relations in the sentence.Nos habeo bonus materis bad grammar because the forms of the words are incorrect according to the usage of the Latin language.Bonusmeans good; but for the expression of the quality good in its barest, simplest ideabonustakes on five forms in Latin;bonusfor masculine goodness in the singular,bonafor feminine singular,bonumfor neuter singular;bonimasculine plural;bonæfeminine plural,bonaneuter plural. To be brief; for use in various relations, this wordbonustakes on no less than thirteen forms, of which more need not here be given.Mater—mother—takes on eight of these forms or inflections, which are called cases. But in Englishgoodhas but one form. Singular, plural, masculine, feminine, neuter, nominative, possessive, dative, objective, vocative—in whichever of these senses the word which it qualifies is used it has but one form—good. Thus it is with all English adjectives, and with articles (anandthe) which are a kind of adjective. In all other languages adjectives and articles have various forms adapted to the various numbers, genders, and cases of nouns. In English nouns have two cases (strictly but one, the nominative not being a true case), the second of which is the possessive:e. g., mother’s; and they have a singular and a plural form,e. g.,mother,mothers.
In other languages the verb is inflected into a multitude of forms, expressive of voice (active and passive), person, number and time of action. In English the variations of form in the verb are very few. There is no passive voice. The English has but one passive verb; the obsoletehight, which means, is called. As to time, there are only the forms of present and perfect, e. g.,loveandloved; as to person and number, inflections only in the present tense, e. g.,love,lovest,loves; and of these one,lovest, is obsolete, or very obsolescent. To these inflected forms there is to be added only the present or indefinite participleloving. Beyond this there are in English, by way of inflection, only the cases of the pronouns, e. g.,he,his,him,who,whose,whom,etc.And it is here to be remarked that almost all the questions of “good grammar” and “bad grammar” that arise in English relate to the use of pronouns. (For surely we may leave out of consideration here the difficulties of those who sayI seeorI seen him, forI saw him, orI have wentforI have gone, and the like.) Here, therefore, we have set forth, although very succinctly, the distinctive grammatical position of the English language.
That position is briefly this: In English words have (with the few exceptions mentioned above) but one form; and as grammar is concerned only with the formal relations of words in the sentence, English has no grammar. Among languages it is the grammarless tongue.
Let us further illustrate this point by a brief consideration of a subject which is very perplexing to the learners of a foreign language, and which is not less so to the historical students of language in general; a subject which, I believe, has never been explained by the latter with any semblance of satisfaction—gender. All other languages are infested with gender; in English there is no such distinction in words as that of gender. English, it should be needless to say, has words to express difference of sex; that no language can fail to do, for failing in that, it would not communicate the facts and thoughts of every-day life. But grammatical gender has no relation to sex, no relation to the essential characteristics of things. Gender, grammatical gender, is an attribute ofwords. He creatures are male, she creatures female, and the words which are their names are generally (but not universally) masculine and feminine in all languages. Things neither male nor female are neuter, which means merely, neither. But this is not gender. Gender, as I have said before, is an attribute of words; of words only. For example, the Latin wordpenna—a pen, or quill, is feminine; in French the wordtable—table, is also feminine. It is needless to say that there is no question as to the sex of a pen, or of a table; nor is there any quality in either of those objects which has a sexual trait or characteristic. In each case it is the word which is of the feminine gender; and in all, or almost all, languages but English all or almost all words are afflicted with this mysterious pest of gender. How annoying and perplexing it is, and how it complicates the use of language, and makes the acquisition of foreign languages difficult, no student needs be told. For it creates an ever present and far-reaching perplexity. It dominates the construction ofthe sentence and binds it up in bonds of iron. For every adjective, and in French and other languages having articles, every article which is applied to a noun must be of the gender of that noun. You can not say in Latinbonus penna, a good pen, without “bad grammar,” you must saybona penna. You can not say in Frenchun mauvais table, a bad table, but must sayune mauvaise table; norle table, butla table—although both mean the table, nothing more nor less. The absurdity of this is made very apparent when a feminine word is applied to a male object. Thusmajesté—majesty, is feminine; but when a king is called your majesty, the wordssa majesté(her majesty) are used because theword majestyis feminine; and instead of saying he (il) did thus or so, we must say she (elle) did it, although the she was a man; the reason being that the wordmajestéis feminine.[1]All this has been swept clean away in English, in which language there is no distinction of gender but only that of sex: male creatures, or those so personified, are masculine, female, feminine; those which have no sex are neuter; and there an end. English is eminently a language of common sense; and one marked evidence of this trait is its freeing itself entirely from the nuisance of grammatical gender along with other grammatical trammels.[2]
It hasfreeditself from those trammels; for at one time it was hampered by them sorely. Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, was an inflected speech, and was tied up in the bonds of gender and other grievous grammatical tetherings. This was long ago; but it was after Britain had become England, or Engle-land, the land of the English people and of English speech. When our English forefathers were little better than semi-savages, bloody, barbarous, heathen, worshiping Thor and Woden, and in a state of benighted ignorance of which it would be difficult for those of my readers who have not tried to pierce the darkness of that historical past to form even an approximate notion—at this time, and in this social and intellectual condition of the speakers of the English language, it was copiously provided with grammar. Even Greek had not much the better of it in this respect. It had not only forms for person and number, but gender forms, and cases galore.[3]Take, for example, a word which was English a thousand years ago, just as it is to-day,man. This simple word has undergone no change in all the thousand years, unless by losing a little breadth of sound; it having probably been pronouncedmahn, of which sound the rusticmonof provincial England is a relic and representative. Butmancould not be used pure and simple, under all circumstances and in all cases, in the English of that day any more than, as we have seen,materandbonuscould be so used in Latin. There was the nominative singular—man, simply; the genitivemannes—of a man; the dativemen, to or for a man; accusativemannan—a man objectively; nominative pluralmen; genitivemanna—of men, or men’s; and a dativemannum—to or for men.
Of all these various forms or cases ofman, the language has freed itself, excepting the genitive singular,mannes, and the nominative plural,men. These have been retained, not by accident, or neglect, but at the dictate of common sense, because convenience and intelligibility required their use. It was found necessary to distinguish the plural from the singular; and the genitive or possessive idea from the simple and absolute; butmanas a dative or accusative singular, andmenas the same in the plural, were found quite as useful and convenient as the old inflected forms; and therefore (or therefore finally and in a great measure) the latter were discarded. The genitive or possessive has been retained; but it has slightly changed its form; by contraction only, however;manneshas becomeman’s. The old sign of the possessive wases; and it is this, and not the pronounhis(as once was supposed) that is represented in our possessive case, in which the apostrophe merely marks the elision of the olde. There is really no good reason for the use of the apostrophe, none which would not apply equally to many other cases in which no elision is marked. In the Elizabethan era it was not used, and with no consequent confusion. Mans folly, the boys hat, Johns coat, are as clear in meaning as they would be with the apostrophe; and the possible confusion of the possessive with the plural, as in that fancy of the girls, and that fancy of the girl’s is so remote and so very unlikely as to be worthy of little consideration.
As to English in its earliest form (Anglo-Saxon) suffice it here to say in this regard that it was so largely an inflected language, that is, it varied the forms of its words so numerously to express time of action, mode of action, person, number, case, and gender, that it is in this respect almost as unlike modern English as Greek is, and is little less difficult of acquirement to the English speaking student of to-day than Latin. Its very articles had gender forms as well as case forms; and, moreover, like the Mæso-Gothic and like the Greek it had preserved the old dual number (for the expression of a plural of two) although only in the personal pronoun. A comparative examination of the pronoun of the first person and of the present tense of the verbto havein their ancient and modern forms will show the mode and the reason of the changes by which English has assumed its present character.
OLD ENGLISH PRONOUN OF THE FIRST PERSON.
The dual form has been swept away entirely as needless, and worse, cumbrous and perplexing; but it will be seen that we have retained every one of the other forms.Ichas become I;mineis still the possessive of I;meis still not only the objective form of the first person, but the dative, “make me a hat,” or “buy me a horse,” being merely “make a hat to or for me,” or “buy to or for me a horse.”Weanduswill be recognized at sight, andurehas only changed its pronunciation fromoortoour. These forms have been retained in our modern English partly because a pronoun is the most ancient of indestructible parts of speech,[B]but chiefly because of their usefulness, their convenience. A brief consideration of them by the intelligent reader will make this so plain that more need not be said on the subject.
Now let us see the unlike fate of the verbto have. This will be more readily apparent if we look at it in Latin, in French, and in English (it is actually the same word in all these languages, with slight phonetic variation); and we shall thus also have another demonstration of the manner in which English differs from other languages.
It will be seen at once that the Latin and the French have each a special plural form, and also three forms for the three persons of that number. English has swept away this plural form entirely, and uses for the plural in all its persons the simplehaveof the first person singular. The form of the second person singular has also virtually disappeared; the simplehaveappearing in its substitute,you have. Whether the form of the third person singular will ever follow the other is doubtful; but it is certain that our language has lost nothing in clearness, and has gained much in simplicity by the doing away with all the formal superfluity by which the old numbers and persons were distinguished.
This simplification of the forms of words is not absolutely confined to the English language. It appears to be a tendency of language; a modern tendency, using modern in its widest sense. For this movement toward simplification appears in the Latin, in the Romance tongues formed from it, and in the Gothic languages. In none, however, does this simplification, this destruction of superfluous forms, approach, even remotely, that which has taken place in English. So different, indeed, are the results, that the process seems, if not of another kind, at least as having another motive. For example, all the other languages retain the absurdity of gender. In this respect German is no better than French. And let me here remark that the common notion that English and German are most alike of all modern languages, and most nearly akin, is altogether wrong. On the contrary, English and German are very unlike; the most unlike of all the Gothic (or Teutonic) languages. English and French have much greater likeness, both in substance and in structure. There are more words now common to the English language and to the French than to English and German; and the syntax of the French language is very much more like that of the English, than German syntax is. A French sentence literally translated in the French order of the words is, in most cases, so like an English sentence that it requires little change to be correct English, while a similar translation of a German sentence produces an effect both harsh and ludicrous.
The simple form of the English language is the result of two causes. Of these the first in order of time was the conflict and subsequent mingling of the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and the Norman-French. When two languages are thus brought together and are both spoken by two peoples, all that is superfluous in the words of each soon begins to disappear. Each people grasps only the essential in the foreign words which it is obliged to use; each soon adopts the curtailed form of its speech used by the neighbors of another race and speech with whom it is obliged to live in daily communication; and ere long a composite speech of simpler forms takes the place of two tongues—each of which was more complex in structure, but less rich and varied in substance. By this process, out of Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French, came modern English. But not only thus. Other languages have mingled, but never before with such a result. Never was there in any other amalgamation, such an esurience of superfluous form; a devouring which has to all intents and purposes made English a language of one-formed words, and therefore a language practically without formal grammar. In this characteristic is its strength; from this comes its flexibility, its adaptation to all the needs of man, the highest and the lowest. Hence it is eminently the language of common sense as well as of the highest flights of poetry. The English mind saw that it was not necessary to have two words to express possession in the singular and in the plural; thatgoodas clearly expressed the goodness of a woman as of a man, and that of a dozen men as well as that of one; that pens and tables needed no distinction of gender in their names; in fact that nothing was gained, and that much was lost by these grammatical excrescences; and therefore they were done away with very thoroughly, almost entirely. The process was pretty well completed some three hundred years or more ago; since when no noteworthy changes in this respect have taken place. But it is still going on, although so slowly as to be perceptible only on close examination. All the little specks of grammar that English has are mostly to be found in the pronouns, as I have before remarked. In the use of one of these a change is very gradually taking place.Whomhas begun to disappear, began, indeed, a long time ago; but of late is fading somewhat more perceptibly. For example: all speakers of good English say, The man whom I saw, not The man who I saw;whombeing the objective form ofwho.
But now-a-days not one person in a hundred of the best bred and best educated speakers of English asks, Whom did you see? but,Whodid you see? Indeed, the latter form of the question may be regarded almost as accepted English. Yet in the latter phrase, as in the former, the pronoun is the object of the verbsee, and should strictly have the objective form. But, Whom did you see? would now sound very formal and precise, almost priggish, likegotteninstead ofgot. When, however, the pronoun is brought in direct contact with the verb, as in the phrase, The man whom I saw, we shrink from insult to the little semblance of grammar that our language possesses, and give the word its objective form. The time will probably come, although it may be remote, whenwhomwill have altogether disappeared. As togotten, its use is now so confined to the over-precise in this country as to make it almost an Americanism. Its disappearance from our language in England is also one of the evidences of the process of simplification which is still slowly going on. Another, which has taken place within the memory of the elder living generation, is the disappearance of the subjunctive mood, which is now obsolete, or so very obsolescent as to be met with very rarely. But thirty-five or forty years since correct writers used this mood, and wrote, for example,if he goinstead ofif he goes. Of the effect of this grammarless condition of the English language we may see something in a subsequent article.
FOOTNOTES[A]“Every Day English,” chapter xvii.[B]Certain uneasy manipulators of speech have lately set themselves at making an impersonal English pronoun. Vanity of vanities! Make a pronoun? As well undertake to build a pyramid. Better. There is not a pronoun in use that was not hoary with age before the first stone of Keops was laid.
[A]“Every Day English,” chapter xvii.
[A]“Every Day English,” chapter xvii.
[B]Certain uneasy manipulators of speech have lately set themselves at making an impersonal English pronoun. Vanity of vanities! Make a pronoun? As well undertake to build a pyramid. Better. There is not a pronoun in use that was not hoary with age before the first stone of Keops was laid.
[B]Certain uneasy manipulators of speech have lately set themselves at making an impersonal English pronoun. Vanity of vanities! Make a pronoun? As well undertake to build a pyramid. Better. There is not a pronoun in use that was not hoary with age before the first stone of Keops was laid.
SELECTED BY CHANCELLOR J. H. VINCENT, D. D.
I find David making a syllogism, in mood and figure, two propositions he perfected.
(Ps. lxvi) 18. If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.19. But verily God hath heard me, he hath attended to the voice of my prayer.
(Ps. lxvi) 18. If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.
19. But verily God hath heard me, he hath attended to the voice of my prayer.
Now I expected that David should have concluded thus:
Therefore I regard not wickedness in my heart.
Therefore I regard not wickedness in my heart.
But far otherwise he concludes:
20. Blessed be God, who hath not turned away my prayer, nor his mercy from me.
20. Blessed be God, who hath not turned away my prayer, nor his mercy from me.
Thus David hath deceived, but not wronged me. I looked that he should have clapped the crown on his own, and he puts it on God’s head. I will learn this excellent logic, for I like David’s better than Aristotle’s syllogisms, that, whatsoever the premises be, I make God’s glory the conclusion.
Young King Jehoash had only a lease of piety, and not for his own, but his uncle’s life (2 Kings xii:2): He did that which was right in the sight of the Lord all his days, wherein Jehoiada the priest instructed him.
Jehu was good in the midst of his life, and a zealous reformer to the utter abolishing of Baal out of Israel, but in his old age (2 Kings x:31) he returned to the politic sins of Jeroboam, worshiping the calves in Dan and Bethel.
Manasseh was bad in the beginning and middle of his life, filling Jerusalem with idolatry; only toward the end thereof, when carried into a strange land, he came home to himself and destroyed the profane altars he had erected.
These three put together make one perfect servant of God.Take the morning and rise with Jehoash, the noon and shine with Jehu, the night and set with Manasseh. Begin with youth-Jehoash, continue with man-Jehu, conclude with old-man-Manasseh, and all put together will spell one good Christian, yea, one good, perfect performer.
Constantly pray to God, that in his due time he would speak peace to thee.… Prayers negligently performed draw a curse, but not prayers weakly performed. The former is when one can do better, and will not; the latter is when one would do better, but, alas! he can not.…
Be diligent in reading the word of God, wherein all comfort is contained.… Thou hast a great journey to go, a wounded conscience has far to travel to find comfort (and though weary shall be welcome at his journey’s end), and therefore must feed on God’s word, even against his own dull disposition, and shall afterward reap benefit thereby.…
Be industrious in thy calling; I press this the more because some erroneously conceive that a wounded conscience cancels all indentures of service, and gives them (during their affliction) a dispensation to be idle.
Let none in like manner pretend that (during the agony of a wounded conscience) they are to have no other employment than to sit moping, to brood over their melancholy, or else only to attend their devotion; whereas a good way to divert or assuage their pain within is to take pains without in their vocation. I am confident, that happy minute which shall put a period to thy misery shall not find thee idle, but employed, as some ever secret good is accruing to such who are diligent in their calling.—Fuller.[1]
The Deity is intended to be the everlasting field of the human intellect, as well as the everlasting object of the human heart, the everlasting portion of all holy and happy minds, who are destined to spend a blissful but ever active eternity in the contemplation of his glory.… He will forever remain “the unknown God.” We shall ever be conscious that we know little compared with what remains to be known of him; that our most rapturous and lofty songs fall infinitely short of his excellence. If we stretch our powers to the uttermost, we shall never exhaust his praise, never render him adequate honor, never discharge the full amount of claim which he possesses upon our veneration, obedience, and gratitude. When we have loved him with the greatest favor, our love will still be cold compared with his title to our devoted attachment. This will render him the continual source of fresh delight to all eternity. His perfection will be an abyss never to be fathomed; there will be depths in his excellence which we shall never be able to penetrate. We shall delight in losing ourselves in his infinity. An unbounded prospect will be extended before us; looking forward through the vista of interminable ages we shall find a blissful occupation for our faculties, which can never end; while those faculties will retain their vigor unimpaired, flourish in the bloom of perpetual youth, … and the full consciousness remain that the Being whom we contemplate can never be found out to perfection … that he may always add to the impression of what we know, by throwing a veil of indefinite obscurity over his character. The shades in which he will forever conceal himself will have the same tendency to excite our adoring wonder as the effulgence of his glory; the depths in which he will retire from our view, the recesses of his wisdom and power as the open paths of his manifestation. Were we capable of comprehending the Deity, devotion would not be the sublimest employment to which we can attain. In the contemplation of such a Being we are in no danger of going beyond our subject; we are conversing with an infinite object, … in the depths of whose essence and purposes we are forever lost. This will probably give all the emotions of freshness and astonishment to the raptures of beatific vision, and add a delightful zest to the devotions of eternity. This will enable the Divine Being to pour in continually fresh accessions of light; to unfold new views of his character, disclose new parts of his perfection, open new mansions of himself, in which the mind will have ample room to expatiate. Thus shall we learn, to eternity, that, so far from exhausting his infinite fullness, there still remain infinite recesses in his nature unexplored—scenes in his counsels never brought before the view of his creatures; that we know but “parts of his ways;” and that instead of exhausting our theme, we are not even approaching nearer to the comprehension of the Eternal All. It is the mysteriousness of God, the inscrutability of his essence, the shade in which he is invested, that will excite those peculiar emotions which nothing but transcendent perfection and unspeakable grandeur can inspire.—Robert Hall.[2]
We need not go far to seek the materials for an acceptable offering; they lie all around us in the work of our callings, in the little calls which divine Providence daily makes to us, in the little crosses which God requires us to take up, nay, in our very recreations. The great point is to have the mind set upon seeing and seeking in all things the service of Christ and the glory of God, and, lo! every trifling incident which that mind touches, every piece of work which it handles, every dispensation to which it submits becomes a sacrifice.