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 eter