"In our spiritual life we have highs and lows; there are times indeed of kindled purpose and high affections to us all; when the spirit is willing and our faculties strong; when the mighty stream of Resolution sweeps rapidly away, and plays with difficulties as with the momentary bubbles that eddy on its wave; when a purer atmosphere seems to clear and swell the soul, and every speck of evil passion melts and disappears; and then indeed to the meek and holy there is no cross to bear; they do not pace up the hill of death, but are rather borne down the mount of triumph over scattered flowers to the City of their God.

But, duty is constant; affection is transient; obligation often rises, while the spirit sinks; and after the divine freshness of the morning air, a sluggish mist damps down, and turns life, which had looked brilliant as Eden, into a flat and weary marsh. And then it comes to pass, that we know the path that we should go, but love it no more.

Ease bids us stay at home; inclination shows us a pleasanter way; or if we set out on the thorny track, we begin to pity our own bleeding feet, and reward with admiration our half-spent strength. When the soul has lost its earliest tension, evil, with close collapse, presses in upon it again; worthless temptations resume a dreadful force; the dainty senses are not so easy to despise; peevish works and sullen thoughts torment us as our familiar friends; the moments lent for holy service we desire to steal for selfish whims; and to the dulled and slothful eye our nearest work seems unnaturally hard." Martineau.

The turf is marble underfoot, 
The fountain drips with icy spears;
And round about the cedar's root
The hungry blackbird pecs and pears. 
Yet down below the frozen rind
The silent waters creep and meet; 
The roots press downwards unconfined, 
Where deeper burns the vital heat.
Arthur Benson. 

 "These things I have spoken to you, so that in me
you may have peace."
I was reminded of that verse when I read this poem because
I see the frozen season as our trials and tribulations, but
underneath, our faith presses down deeper where the vital
heat of His Spirit abides.

  "It is a mistake to think that one makes a friend because of his or her qualities; it has nothing to do with qualities at all. It is the person that we want, not what he does or says, or does not do or say, but what he is! That is eternally enough. Who shall explain the extraordinary instinct that tells us, perhaps after a single meeting, that this or that particular person in some mysterious way matters to us?" Arthur Benson.

  Needless to say I've been reading about friendship lately, and I just love this quote. I work a Christian Hotline and I talk to many people, hundreds: but there are some that stand out and instantly I am taken by them, it is something mysterious, and grand. There is an immediate connection, we talk on the same frequency, well, this quote explains it better than I can. 

The following piece about simple conversation has become far more complicated than when this was written a hundred years ago. I relate to many of his sentiments here.

  "What I desire and admire in life is a friendly contact with my fellows, interesting work, leisure for following the pursuits I enjoy, such as art and literature. I wish with all my heart that all people cared equally for the things which I love. I should like to be able to talk frankly and unaffectedly about books, and interesting people, and the beauties of nature, and abstract topics of a mild kind, with any one I happened to meet. But, as a rule, to speak frankly, I find that people of what I must call the lower classes are not interested in these things; and people in what I will call the upper class are faintly interested, in a horrible and condescending way, -- which is worse than no interest at all." Arthur Benson.

  "Lively conversation upon the instructing and elevating topics is but little practiced, but whenever it is found it gives a charm to the society of females which nothing else can. It triumphs over deformity and old age, and makes ugliness itself agreeable. Curran, speaking of Madame de Stael, who was by no means handsome, but a splendid conversationalist, said that she had the power of talking herself into a beauty. Ladies should think of this. Beauty lies in other things than fine features or cosmetics. Women, however lovely they may be in person, rarely excite true admiration, if they are ignorant of the art of conversing well."

 "Conversation is a very serious matter. There are men with whom an hour's talk would weaken one more than a day's fasting."

The true seminary

  The following piece explains why God wants us to be personally involved with the downtrodden. He explains how it brings alive our noble appreciations as well as our moral disgusts.

Working with the downtrodden is the schoolhouse of Christianity, where we broaden our understanding of God, of justice and of mercy, and how it deeply changes us and helps us understand the plans and purposes of God.

  "In every heart God has implanted moral admirations and disgusts, they may lie dormant perhaps, until some occasion comes, but they are ready to waken into power, and do homage to the noble and spurn the base.

These natural sentiments you will exercise when you associate personally with the poor and the downcast, and in exercising these sentiments, you may confirm, by offering to them examples for judgment, or examples of patient suffering that touch the springs of pity, or of selfishness and cruelty that gnaws the heart with honest indignation, or of heroic faithfulness that flings across the soul a breeze of resolution, of saintly love that diffuses the very atmosphere of heaven.

  By bringing this various world of the poor and downtrodden into your world, you deliver yourself from the imprisonment of merely personal interests and you enlarge your ethical field of view, you begin to fully understand justice and introduce your sentiments of right and wrong to a whole new scope of meaning.

  The effect of this wider experience is incalculably great. It opens 'fresh continents' of character to mental survey, and throwing the human tones upon the ear in language unheard before, it startles the observer with the sigh of pity and the vow of justice and the prayer of sorrow, in a dialect other than vernacular, it acts upon the judgments of conscience like foreign travel upon those of perception; and imparts a quickness of insight and breadth of view which are unattainable within a narrow circle, and which, by the very presence within the memory of a thousand other scenes of beauty, bathes the home-landscape in the light of new endearment and appreciation.  Abridged James Martineau. 

  "There is something fine in hard physical labor.... One actually stops thinking. I often work long without any thought what ever, so far as I know, save that connected with the monotonous repetition of the labor itself -- down with the spade, out with it, up with it, over with it -- and repeat. 
  And yet sometimes -- mostly in the forenoon when I am not at all tired --- I will suddenly have a sense as of he world opening around me; a sense of happiness, that is near complete content." David Grayson. 

  "Happiness, I have discovered, is nearly always a rebound from hard work. It is one of the follies of men to imagine that they can enjoy mere thought, or emotion, or sentiment. As well try to eat beauty! For happiness must be tricked! She loves to see men at work. She loves sweat, weariness, self-sacrifice." David Greyson. 

  "Nothing is better than conversation as a corrective of self-sufficiency. In educated conversation a person soon finds his own level. He learns more truly than from books, in converse with living people, he learns to estimate his powers modestly and justly. A book is passive; it does not repel pretensions; it does not rebuke vanity. Indeed, reading and study become to many but the nature of conceit. In conversation a person is not long discovering that he alone does not know everything, and that though he were to die, wisdom would not perish with him." Author unknown.