A mother should be to her child as the sun in the heavens, a changeless and ever radiant star, whither the inconstant little creature, so ready with its tears and its daughter, so light, so passionate, so stormy, may come to calm and to fortify itself with heat and light.  A mother represents goodness, providence, law, nay, divinity itself, under the only form in which childhood can meet with these high things.  If, therefore, she is passionate, she teaches that God is capricious or despotic, or even that there are several gods in conflict.  The child’s religion depends on the way in which its mother and its father have lived, and not on the way in which they have spoken.  The inmost tone of their life is precisely what reaches their child, who finds no more than comedy or empty thunder in their maxims, remonstrances and punishments.  Their actual and central worship—­that is what his instinct infallibly perceives.  A child sees what we are, through all the fictions of what we would be.

It is curious to see, in discussions on speculative matters, how abstract minds, who move from ideas to facts, always do battle for concrete reality; while concrete minds, on the other hand, who move from facts to ideas, are usually the champions of abstract notions.  The more intellectual nature trusts to an ethical theory; the more moral nature has an intellectualist morality.

The centre of life is neither in thought, nor in feeling, nor in will; nor even in consciousness in so far as it thinks, feels, or wills; for a moral truth may have been penetrated and possessed in all these ways, and yet escape us still.  Far below our consciousness is our being, our substance, our nature.  Those truths alone which have entered this profound region, and have become ourselves, and are spontaneous, involuntary, instinctive and unconscious—­only these are really our life and more than our external possessions.  Now, it is certain that we can find our peace only in life, and, indeed, only in eternal life; and eternal life is God.  Only when the creature is one, by a unity of love, with his Creator—­only then is he what he is meant to be.

The Secret of Perpetual Youth

There are two degrees of pride—­one, wherein a man is self-complacent; the other, wherein he is unable to accept himself.  Of these two degrees, the second is probably the more subtle.

The whole secret of remaining young in spite of years is to keep an enthusiasm burning within, by means of poetry, contemplation and charity, or, more briefly, by keeping a harmony in the soul.  When everything is rightly ordered within us, we may rest in equilibrium with the work of God.  A certain grave enthusiasm for the eternal beauty and order; a glowing mind and cloudless goodwill:  these are, perhaps, the foundation of wisdom.  How inexhaustible is the theme of wisdom!  A peaceful aureole surrounds this rich conception.  Wisdom includes all treasures of moral experience,