August

The Cloud of Witness Thursday

I especially like today's.

[355]

Thursday

Sympathy.

Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.--Rom. xii. 15.

Man is dear to Man! the poorest Poor
Long for some moments in a weary life,
When they can know and feel that they have been
Themselves, the fathers and the dealers-out
Of some small blessings;--have been kind to such
As needed kindness.
Wordsworth.

I would have you be . . . like a fire well-kindled, which catches at everything you throw in, and turns it into flame and brightness.
M. Aurelius.

Some souls there are
Who, when they smite it, bring
Forth from the hardest rock its hidden spring.
Lytton.

Be calm in arguing; for fierceness makes
Error a fault, and truth discourtesy.
Why should I feel another man's mistakes
More than his fickleness or poverty!
In love I should: but anger is not love,
Nor wisdome neither;--therefore gently move!

Be useful where thou livest, that they may
Both want and wish thy pleasing presence still:--
Kindness, good parts, great places, are the way
To compass this. Find out men's Wants and Will,
And meet them there!--All the worldly joys go less
To the one joy of doing kindnesses.
Herbert.

Find they reward in the thing
Which thou hast been blest to do,
Let the joy of others cause joy to spring
Up in thy bosom too!--
And if the love of a grateful heart
As a rich reward be given,
Lift thou the love of a grateful heart
To the God of Love in Heaven!
MacDonald.

The Cloud of Witness Wednesday

A little late - I just plain forgot!

[354]

Wednesday Tenth after Trinity

Sympathy

By love serve one another.--Gal. v. 13.
None of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.--Rom. xiv. 7.

Wouldst thou the Life of Souls discern?
Nor human wisdom nor divine
Helps thee by aught beside to learn:--
Love is Life's only sign.
The spring of the regenerate heart--
The pulse, the glow of every part,
Is the true love of Christ our Lord,
As man embrac'd, as God ador'd.
Keble.

She never found fault with you, never implied
Your Wrong by her Right; and yet men at her side
Grew nobler, girls purer.
None knelt at her feet, confessed lovers in thrall,--
They knelt more to God than they used--that was all!
E.B. Browning.

"For this true nobleness I seek in Vain
In woman, and in man I find it not;
I almost weary of my earthly lot,
My life-springs are dried up with burning pain."
Thou find'st it not? I pray thee look again;--
Look inward through the depths of thine own soul!
How is it with thee? Art thou sound and whole?
Doth narrow search show thee no earthly stain?
*Be noble!* And the Nobleness that lies
In other men, sleeping, but never dead,--
Will rise in majesty to meet thine own!
Then wilt though see it gleam in many eye,
Then will pure light around thy path be shed,
And thou wilt never-more be sad and lone!
Lowell.

Let us no more contend, nor blame
Each other, blam'd enough elsewhere!--but strive
In offices of love how we may lighten
Each other's burden in our share of woe!
Milton.

The Cloud of Witness Tuesday

Good news (for me, anyway!) CM's Volume 3 is done, paraphrased in modern English!


[353]

Tuesday.

Sympathy.

Weep not for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.--Luke xxiii. 27, 28.

A while ago I passed
Where every step seemed thornier and harder than the last;
Where bitterest disappointment and inly aching sorrow
Carved day by day a weary Cross, renewed with every morrow--
The heaviest end of that strange Cross I knew was laid on Thee;
So I could still press on, secure of Thy deep Sympathy.
F. R. Havergal.

There are hearts
So perilously fashion'd, that for them
God's touch alone hath gentleness enough
To waken,--and not break,--their thrilling strings!
F. Hemans.

One spring wind unbinds the mountain snow
And comforts violets in their hermitage.
Browning.

How feeble hath been all my Soul's essay
To aid one single man on all God's earth.
Buchanan.

And if a more auspicious fate
On thy advancing steps await,
Still let it ever be thy pride
To linger by the labourer's side;
With words of Sympathy or song
To cheer the dreary march along
Of the great Army of the Poor,
O'er desert sand, o'er dangerous moor!
Nor to thyself the task shall be
Without reward!
Lomgfellow.

The truest joys which we have experienced, have come when we had grace to enter most entirely into a sorrow not our own.
Westcott.

Cloud of Witness

Rather than start at the beginning of the book, I'll just pick up where I think we are chronologically - Monday in the tenth week after Trinity, to the best of my non-Anglican knowledge. I notice the names Keble and Westcott, who CM quoted in her books, and she also used the last quote from Marcus Aerelius. Maybe she wasn't as widely read as it appears from her books - maybe she just got all her quotes from her daily devotional! LOL!

--------------------

[352] Tenth after Trinity

Monday

Sympathy

We have not a High priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our informaries.--Heb. iv. 15 (R.V.)

There is no sorrow, Lord, too light
To bring in prayer to Thee;--
There is no anxious care too slight
To wake Thy Sympathy!
Thou Who hast trod the thorny road
Wilt share each small distress;
The love which bore the greater load
Will not refuse the less.
There is no secret sigh we breathe
But meets Thine ear divine,
And every Cross grows light beneath
The shadow, Lord! of Thine.
Jane Crewdon.

Though sepulchred in absence, Sympathy
Leads a suspended life and cannot die.
Lytton.

He is tenderest, not who has sinned, as is sometimes vainly thought,--but who has known best the power of sin, by overcoming it.
Westcott.

If one heart in perfect Sympathy
Beat with another, answering love for love,--
Weak mortals, all entranc'd, on earth would lie,
Nor listen for those purer strains above . . .
Thou know'st our bitterness!--our joys are Thine!
No stranger Thou to all our wanderings wild!
Nor could we bear to think how every line
Of us,--Thy darken'd likeness and defil'd,--
Stands in full sunshine of Thy piercing eye,
But that Thou call'st us Brethren! Sweet repose
Is in that word;--the Lord who dwells on high
Knows all, yet loves us better than He knows.
Keble.

Men are born to be serviceable to one another; therefore either reform the World, or bear with it!
Marcus Aurelius.

The Cloud of Witness

In proofreading In Memoriam, I learned that, whenever Charlotte Mason's students would graduate and leave her teacher's college at Scale How in Ambleside, England, she would gift them with a book called "Gell's Cloud of Witness." I did a search online, but there's no etext online. I found a used copy at amazon.com, and it arrived today from England.

The book is small and red. It looks like a dailly devotional of Thoughts with an Anglican focus (it's set up to follow the Christian Calendar of Trinity weeks, Advent, etc, which I'm not familiar with.) I'm going to see how it goes if I type a page a day as a kind of devotional. Either I'll get tired of the project (I'm not going to pressure myself to complete it), or else, in a couple of years, I'll have finished the book and send it to Project Gutenberg for their online collection. ;)

Here are the opening pages:

The Cloud of Witness
One Hundred and Thirty-eighth Thousand

(handwritten inscription:)
"To know
That which before us lies in daily life
Is the prime wisdom."
Milton.


That was the True Light.

He that followeth Me shall not walk in darkness.

The Cloud of Witness
A Daily Sequence
of
Great Thoughts from Many Minds
following the Christian Seasons

by the Hon. Mrs. Lyttelton Gell.

"Certain even of your own poets have said, For we are also His offspring."
"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights."

London
Henry Frowde
Oxford University Press Warehouse
Amen Corner, E.C.
New York; 91 & 93 Fifth Avenue

Oxford
Horace Hart, Printer to the University

Prepatory Note
by His Grace
The Archbishop of Canterbury.

____

These sequences of Thoughts, resting each on some one clear 'idea' presented to us in our Sundays, seem to me full of interest and help. Brief words chosen for a dayoften help the day through more strongly and brightly. That is our experience of the greatest Lections of all. The 'ideas' noted in the following pages are full of suggestion, and I know no like book with so wide a range of illustrations.

It is good to hear in pithy phrases what the observing, musing, poet-people, that is the 'maker-people' as the Greeks have it, are saying at this moment:--None the less good, because some of them are yet unable to 'beat their music out'--the music of a full faith. In such voices is heard what St. Paul calls 'the yearning of the Creation,' and that yearning is Creation's witness to the Son of God.

Edw. Cantuar.

Addington, Nov. 29, 1891.

Hear ye not the voices ringing down the ages--
Echoing still the message, though their task be done--
Voices, born of heroes, monarchs, poets, sages,
Yearning still to share the wisdom they had won?

Listen!--Thronging round you, deafening with their clamour,
Fashion-tyrants mock at your vaunt of self-control.
Wake!--Delusive visions fraught with poison glamour
Daze your eyes to blindness, while they paralyse your soul.

Yet the Cloud of Witness solemnly advances,
Widening as each clarion-voice is hushed in Death below;
Yet the Heavenly Vision gleams on raptured glances,
Prompt through changing vesture their changeless Lord to know!

Etext Online: In Memoriam

I'm excited about this! This is a book written to give tribute to the memory of Charlotte Mason just after she died in 1923. It only took a week to get online, thanks to all the typing volunteers!

This calls for a party!!



Read In Memoriam here.

(Smilies from here and here)

Car Trouble

A car accident, actually. Mr. Bob was hit on his way to work as someone was pulling out from a side street. He's fine, but his 20 year old car that he had a new engine put into a couple of years ago needs work. The problem is, the car is so old that parts (like a new door and axle) might not be available, so the car may be a total loss and too old to get enough insurance money to replace it.

So we may be down to the one van with the bad transmission, but with him having to drive it to two jobs, and music lessons four times a week, it may or may not hold up. We live right in between two small cities, so, no matter which way we go, every place we go is a half hour away or more.

This Afternoon

We started weeding a patch of what the boys call "Monkey Grass." It's grown to a bigger and bigger patch over the years, so I want to get rid of it and reclaim our yard. Kahoa got stung by a bumblebee; I think there's a nest of them in all that grass. We found some holes, and there were LOTS of bumblebees hanging around!

During all of this, Miss Moana tried to be social with the kitty. She walked up to him saying, "What a lovely thing." I have no idea where she picked up that expression. Then she got upset because she kept asking him for a hug and he wouldn't give her one. (?) She came to me complaining, "Kitty won't give me a hug!"

Mr. B and Tim are working on a desk. We have two PC's, one is mostly mine and one is the family PC (but Tim is the only one who really uses it!) Then my brother gave Tim an old Mac to practice graphics on. So we have three computers and one corner to squeeze them into. Mr. B and Tim designed a computer desk that three computers will fit on, and two people can sit at. And it fits in the corner in such a way that that the patio door will still open. They've been working on it for awhile (six months?) but it's finally close to completion!

A Bit of Flummery for Serendipity

(The Queen at the Beehive posted a challenge--that is, she hurled the gauntlet at the feet of all bloggers in their aquaintance--and challenged them to post within 24 hours. It's actually been closer to 57. But here I am, anyway, and perhaps this at least merits not getting squid jello.)

A while ago I discovered two things about two names. Both things surprised me because they were so obvious--like Columbus's method of standing an egg on its end, I suppose: they were obvious afterwards.

First was Floyd. The name is simply an Anglicised form of Lloyd (that Welsh double-l sounds like "thl" or "fl": our pronunciation "loyd" is another Anglicisation). This knowledge came to me in a moment of serendipity--the sort that sneaks up on you in the shower and makes you want to hit your head and exclaim, "Well, duh!"--that sort. It was ridiculous how long I had known about that double-l in Welsh without connecting Floyd and Lloyd. ("Fluellen," from "Llewellyn," is another instance of fl-for-ll. So is "flummery.")

Then came Durward (as in Quentin Durward; I haven't read it but the name is hard to forget). The meaning came upon me quite suddenly, like staring at collection of lines and blotches and realising that they form a face. It's "dur-ward," that is, "door-guard." (Like Edward and wardrobe and lots more.)

It makes me wonder: how many other things am I missing that sit right under my nose?