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21.

SINGLE life," said Bacon, "doth well with churchmen, for charity will hardly water the

ground where it must first fill a pool."

charities are

Certainly there are men whose limited, if not dried up, by their concentrated domestic anxieties and relations. But there are others whose charities are more diffused, as well as healthier and warmer, through the strength of their domestic affections.

Wordsworth speaks strongly of the evils of ordaining men as clergymen in places where they had been born or brought up, or in the midst of their own relatives: Their habits, their manners, their talk, their acquaintanceships, their friendships, and let me say, even their domestic affections, naturally draw them one way, while their professional obligations point out another." If this were true universally, or even generally, it would be a strong argument in favour of the celibacy of the Roman Catholic clergy, which certainly is one element, and not the least, of their power.

22.

L

ANDOR says truly: "Love is a secondary passion in those who love most, a primary in those who love least: he who is inspired by it in the strongest degree is inspired by honour in a greater.'

"Whatever is worthy of being loved for any thing is worthy to be preserved."

Again: "Those are the worst of suicides who voluntarily and prepensely stab or suffocate their own fame, when God hath commanded them to stand on high for an example.”

"Weak motives," he says, "are sufficient for weak minds; whenever we see a mind which we believed a stronger than our own moved habitually by what appears inadequate, we may be certain that there is to bring a metaphor from the forest-more top than root."

Here is another sentence from the same writerrich in wise sayings:

"Plato would make wives common to abolish selfishness; the very mischief which, above all others, it would directly and immediately bring forth. There is no selfishness where there is a wife and family. There the house is lighted up by mutual charities; everything achieved for them is a victory; everything endured a triumph. How many vices are suppressed that there may be no bad example! How many exertions made to recommend and inculcate a good one.

True and I have much more confidence in the charity which begins in the home and diverges into a large humanity, than in the world-wide philanthropy which begins at the outside of our horizon to converge into egotism, of which I could show you many and notable examples.

A

LL my experience of the world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the safe side and the just side of a question is the generous side and the merciful side. This your mere worldly people do not seem to know, and therein make the sorriest and the vulgarest of all mistakes. "Pour être assez bon il faut l'être trop : mercy than we deserve.

we all need more

How often in this world the actions that we con

demn are the result of sentiments that we love and opinions that we admire!

Α

23.

observed in reference to some of her

friends who had gone over to the Roman Catholic Church," that the peace and comfort which they had sought and found in that mode of faith was like the drugged sleep in comparison with the natural sleep necessary, healing perhaps, where there is disease and unrest, not otherwise,"

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24.

POET," says Coleridge," ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing.

Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to your imagination than your memory."

This advice is even more applicable to the painter, but true perhaps in its application to all artists. Raphael and Mozart were, in this sense, great borrowers.

W

25.

HAT is the difference between being good and being bad? the good do not yield to temptation and the bad do."

This is often the distinction between the good and the bad in regard to act and deed; but it does not constitute the difference between being good and being bad.