The Northern News. — 1896-12-05 (Carlisle, Cumbria, England)

THOUGHTS FROM GREAT MINDS.  Honest error is to be pitied, not ridiculea. It is the duty of a gnat mind to despise injuries.— Seneca.  Speaking without thinking is like shooting without taking aim.  Man may bend to virtue, but virtue cannot bend to a man.—Japanese Proverb. Activity is liable to commit some injuries; but indolence is sure to do no good.—Ziramerman. If evil be said of thee, and it be true, correct thyself; it it be a lie, trouble not about it—Epictetus.  The tallest trees are most in the power of the winds, and ambitious men of the blasts of fortune.— Penn.  Believe me, when 1 tell you, that thrift of time will repay you in after life with a usury of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams, and the waste of it will make you dwindle alike in intellectual and moral stature beyond your darkest reckonings.— Gladstone.  How absolute and omrupotent is the silence of the night ; and yet the stillness seems almost audible! From all the measurele:: ohs of air around us comes a half-sound, a half-w hi,per, as if we could hear the crumbling away and falling of earth and all created things, and the miracle of nature, decay and reproduction, ever beginning, never ending, the gradual lapse and running of the sand in the great hourglass of Time.—Longfellow.  The voice is a human sound which nothing inanimate can perfectly imitate. It has an authority and an insinuating property which writing lacks. It is not merely so much air, but air modulated by us, impregnated with our warmih, and, as it were, enveloped by the vapour of our atmosphere, some emanation of which accor pinies it, giving a certain configuration and certain virtues calculated to act upon the mind. Speech is but the incorporation of thought. The noblest lives are not always those that are called into public view. In private life, there is the daily bearing of a burden lh it cannot be shared, the gnawing of an anxiety that i. 4 not to be communicated, and in which. perbou,,, the hardest element to be borne is its essential solilaiines.q. The meekness. the patience, the kindness, the constant sacrifice of self, the gentle expressions of a lovely and loving spirit, all these go to make lip what we call the daily routine of an unnoticed life. Many a mother has a higher claim to veneration than the world's heroes.  Nothing but love will fill up the void ;Which the taking awto- of love has caused. God must grow into the empty place. Meanwhi:e, what a drag it is upon you. It is like a cross which is too long, so long you cannot balance it on your shouldor, so it drags and jolts over every stone, and ko goes on wounding and weakening you more and more, just when people look for time's healing and strengthening You. There is no cure but divine love—not simply divine worship— but divine love. God must become more and more dear, more and more desirable.—Faber. When do you suppose the ducation of a child begins? At six months o:d it can answer smile wit&a smile, and impatience with impatience. It can observe, enjoy, and suffer acutely, and, in a measure, intelligently. Do you suppose it makes no d:fference to it that the order of the house is perfect and quiet, the faces of its father and mother full of peace, their soft voices familiar to its ear, and even those of strangers, loving? or that it is tossed from arm to arm, among hard, or reckless, or vain-minded persons, in the gloom of a vicious household, or the confusion of a gay one? The moral di:position is, I doubt not, greatly determined in those first speechless years. I believe especially that quiet, and the withdrawal of objects likely to distnact, by amusing the child so as to let it fix its attention undisturbed on every visible least thing in its domain is essential to the formation of some of the best powers of thought.—Ruskin. Wh),- art thou east down? The All-Living, AilLoving One loves thee, and is actually in contact with thy spirit. Post thou doubt this contact? Only think truly of thyself, and thy doubts will all vanish. Oxen and sheep are content in the pasture, and have no concern _about. to-morrow; fish appear to find  satisfaction in their single element ; the birds seem not incned to commit suicide, although they have neith?r storehouse nor barn. Bub thou who hast the freedom of field, and wood, and mountain, of sea and air, and to whom night opens the splendours of the illimitable universe—thou with all thy stores and luxuries and indulg?nces, in rich variety for all seasons, hest the feeling that all is not enough. Thy thoughts and desires overleap all bounds. Whence is this, but that the Infinite Spirit is in contact with the?, and plays upon all the chords of thy being— thy mind, thy senses, and thy passions. Thy scope is clearly then in the Infinite, the Eternal.—Pulsford.  Alas! we know that ideals can never be complAely bodied in practice. Ideals must ever lie a great way off, and we will thankfully content ourselves with any not intolerable approximation thereto! Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously "measure by a scale of perfection the m?agre product of reality" in this poor world of ours. We will esteem hm no wise man; we will esteem him a sickly, discontent2d, foolish man. And yet, on the other hand, it is never to be forgotten that ideals do exist; that if they be not approximated to at all the whole matter goes to wreck--infallibly. No bricklayer builds a wall perpendicular—mathematically this is not possible; a certain degree of perpendicularity suffices him, and he like a good bricklayer must have done with the job, leaves it so. And yet, if he sway too much from the perpendicular; above all, if he throw p'_unimet and 1?vel quite away from him and pile brick on brick heedless, just as it comes to hand, such bricklayer, I t!, ink, is in a bad wayA He has forgotten himself but the law of giavitltion does not forget to act on him; he and his wall rush town into a confus3d welter of ruins.—Carlyle.