This text is part of:
“
[140]
the coating of worldliness which seems to varnish the life out of a man; dead eyes, dead smile, and (worst of all) dead breath.”
“September 23. To church in Newport.
A suggestive sermon from Mr. Alger on ‘Watching,’ i.e., upon all the agencies that watch us, children, foes, friends, critics, authorities, spirits, God himself.”
“As we drove into town [Newport] I had one of those momentary glimpses which in things spiritual are so infinitely precious.
The idea became clear and present to my mind that God, an actual presence, takes note of our actions and intentions.
I thought how helpful it would be to us to pass our lives in a sense of this divine supervision.
After this inward experience I was almost startled by the theme of Alger's sermon.
I spoke to him of the coincidence, and he said it must have been a thought wave.
The thought is one to which I have need to cling.
I have at this moment mental troubles, obsessions of imagination, from which I pray to be delivered.
While this idea of the divine presence was clear to me, I felt myself lifted above these things.
May this lifting continue.”
“November 4. In my prayer this morning I thanked God that I have come to grieve more over my moral disappointments than over my intellectual ones.
With my natural talents I had nothing to do: with my use or abuse of them, everything.”
“I have thought, too, lately, of a reason why we should not neglect our duty to others for our real or supposed duty to ourselves.
It is this: ourselves we ”
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York. 1916.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.