I have no patience for the cowardly little humbug who is all suavity in society but who makes home a hell, who vents upon the helpless heads of his wife and children an ill nature he would inflict on his fellow men but dares not.

 I can forgive much in that fellow mortal who would rather make men swear than women weep; who would rather have the hate of the whole world than the contempt of his wife; who would rather call anger to the eyes of a king than fear to the face of a child. 

W.C. Brann.  

Brushing hair

I finished Fenelon’s book on rearing daughters and I thoroughly enjoyed most of it. Such keen insights, such deep moral truths and such practical applications.

 I found in my library a book I picked up at a garage sale titled “Celebrating Girls,” and decided to read it. The Author, Virginia Beane Rutter is a psychotherapist although I doubt she is a Christian. There are some practical things that I thought were really good. I’ll include one here.

 “Every morning when I was a girl, from kindergarten through fourth grade, my mother braided my long, thick brown hair. She made one braid on either side of my face and then pinned them across the top of my head, where they made a crown. I loved this daily ritual; the feel of her hands combing the tangled hair, the soft tugs that made the braids smooth, the snug fit of the braids as they were pinned with small bobby pins, just so. The result – a shiny crown with all the pins hidden from sight; is memorialized in my happy smiling fourth-grade photograph. My mother’s loving and careful hands performed a wonderful ritual of adornment, of preparation for the day. It is an intimacy that I have always treasured.

  Teaching your daughter to groom and care for her hair is a way to express love and respect for her femininity. Symbolically, it is also a way to honor her mind, her thoughts, her fantasies……… As you help her wash, comb, or braid her hair, express your respect for the power of her mind. Talk to her. By listening attentively to what she has to say from the beginning, you will teach her to trust her feminine intelligence, which includes both her body and intuition.” 

Passionate tones

Sometimes when reading the ancient Christian authors I run across a line of thought that is so different than ours today; the following piece is a good example.

Music and Painting require the same precautions; all these arts are of the same taste and tendency: as to music, we know that the ancients thought nothing was more pernicious to a well regulated republic, than to admit an effeminate melody: it enervates men, unbending and sensualizing their minds: languishing and passionate tones please only, by subjecting the soul to the seducement of the senses, till it becomes intoxicated by them. It was on this account, that the magistrates of Sparta broke all the instruments, the harmony of which was too delicate; and this was one of the most important parts of their policy. On the same account Plato strictly forbids all the luxurious tones of Asiatic music; and Christians, who ought never to pursue pleasure only for the sake of pleasure, are under much stronger obligations to guard themselves against these dangerous entertainments.

  This thought, which is completely foreign to me, may have been the chief reason that hymns were composed without the beat and melody of our modern music which is specifically written to excite the passions. Music which I was raised on and saturated the background of my life. The intoxication of music is what I seek when listening to music. Odd, that this was looked down upon; certainly manhood, protection and ability to war was a prevalent thought in rearing boys. I found this interesting and thought provoking.

How times change. 

A Farewell

Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever;

  Do noble things, not dream, them all day long;

And so make life, death, and that vast forever

One grand, sweet song.

Charles Kingsley, picture by Brian Jagd Mauritzen

 

"Wear your velvet within

 Show yourselves amiable to those above all who live with you."

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

"Attention is narrow-mouthed.

Pour into it what you have to say carefully,

and so to speak, drop by drop." 

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

Joseph Joubert 

Down along the dwindled creek

We go loitering. We speak

Only with old questionings

Of the dear remembered things

Of the days of long ago, 

When the stream seemed thus and so

In our boyish eyes:--- The bank

Greener then, through rank on rank

Of the mottled sycamores,

Touching tops across the shores:

Here, the hazel thicket stood ---

There, the almost pathless wood

Where the shellbark hickory tree

Rained its wealth on you and me. 

Autumn! as you loved us then,

Take us to your heart again!

James Whitcomb Riley, from Time of Clearer Twitterings

Rebuking a child

  "Never rebuke a child in the first moments of passion, whether on your side or hers. If on yours, she will perceive that you conduct yourself according to caprice and resentment, and not according to reason and affection: you will, in consequence, irretrievably lose your authority. If you correct in the first gust of her passion, her mind is not sufficiently collected to confess her fault, to conquer her feelings  and to acknowledger the importance of your advice......... 

Fenelon's book on rearing daughters, painting by Max Ernst.

"By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we quote." 
                                                               R.W. Emerson.

Thoughts of the Queen

  "I pluck up the goodlisome herbs of sentences by pruning, eat them by reading, digest them by musing, and lay them up at length in the high seat of memory by gathering them together; that so,
having tasted their sweetness, I may the less perceive the bitterness of life."      Queen Elizabeth.

  In our times, like the times of Queen Elizabeth, is it not important to search out the goodlisome herbs and fill our minds with them to offset the continual flood of distressing news? The Queen thought so.

Spiritual depression

  I wish that the Christian life were spent on the mountain tops, but such is not the case. Rather, most of life is spent in routine and we struggle as not to let the worries and responsibilities of this life rob us of our joy and hope. The following piece describes the battle and the victory in a most beautiful way.

  The real marrow of life is in its higher experiences. The exultant moods are always the most joyous. We manage to endure a great deal that is disagreeable and depressing, if now and then comes seasons of spiritual uplifting, moments of soul-glow and sunrise, when we are translated from the low flats of a dull, earthly monotony, to higher levels and better fellowships.

  Then, too, after a season of spiritual depression; where you had gone mournfully with a sense of barrenness and burden, the painful spell was finally broken….. You remember how the spring odors of the tender-leaved woods seized your finer sense as you came forth from the place of prayer, and wafted your thoughts to the trees of Paradise; and how, on the billowy splendors of indescribable sunsets, you were borne to the gates of light, which seem uplifted, as if to welcome the King of Glory; and how, on the mountain-top, as a day flung its roses over the sky, and kissed the wide waters to crimson, you were borne afar; and how, awed and ravished beneath the midnight stars, you seemed to wander through the eternal deeps amid the blossoming constellations, until you almost heard the sphery harmony, and touched the uncreated throne! More than once, in the solitude and by the sea, amid the noon’s delicious peacefulness, and when the fresh winds blew health and music out of the west, over leagues of prairie starred with unnumbered flowers, your heart overran with sacred emotion, and expanded to embrace the beautiful repose! Wings were yours.

Antoninus Pius

 
  Emperor Antoninus Pius was a pagan Emperor but ruled with justice and mercy. Marcus Aurelius admired him greatly and wrote the following advice to those he ruled ---

  "Do everything as a disciple of Antoninus, say's Marcus Aurelius. "Remember his constancy in every act, which was conformable to reason, and his evenness in all things, and his piety, and the serenity of his countenance, and his sweetness, and his disregard of empty fame, and his efforts to understand things; and how he would never let anything pass without having first most carefully examined it, and clearly understood it; and how he bore with those who blamed him unjustly without blaming them in return; how he did nothing in a hurry; and how he listened not to calumnies, and how exact an examiner of manners and actions he was; not given to reproach people, nor timid, nor suspicious, nor a sophist; with how little he was satisfied, such as lodging, bed, dress, food, servants; how laborious and patient; how sparing he was in his diet; his firmness and uniformity in his friendships; how he tolerated freedom of speech in those who opposed his opinions;  the pleasure that he has when any man showed him anything better; and how pious he was without superstition. Imitate all this, that thou mayest have as good a conscience, when thy last hour comes, as he had."

  I should hope to have someone think so highly of me. He didn't believe in Christ, the church in its infancy at this time and in the middle of great controversy; but he wouldn't allow persecution of this new sect that was getting so much criticism. Would that we had leadership like this today.

  A young Polish girl in a New York school, was asked along with her class to write an essay on the difference between an educated and an intelligent man, she summed up the matter by saying: "
An educated man gets his thinks from someone else, but an intelligent man works his own thinks." 
Twelve Tests of Character, Fosdick

Warm me

  I read something from John Henry Newman today that my heart resonated with. He gives a brief explanation why he believes in God in the midst of a world so full of lamentation.

  “Were it not for this voice, speaking so clearly in my conscience and my heart, I should be an atheist, or a pantheist, or a polytheist when I looked into the world.

I am speaking for my self only; and I am far from denying the real force of the arguments in proof of a God, drawn from the general facts of human society, but these do not warm me or enlighten me; they do not take away the winter of my desolation, or make the buds unfold and the leaves grow within me, and my moral being rejoice. The sight of the world is nothing else than the prophet’s scroll, full of “lamentations, and mourning, and woe.”