Hungering for Spiritual

Food.

"Give me the interior beauties of the soul." SOCRATES.

It cannot be too often repeated, where it continues still unknown or forgotten, that man has a soul as certainly as he has a body; nay, much more certainly; that properly it is the course of his unseen, spiritual life which informs and rules his external visible life, rather than receives rule from it; in which spiritual life, indeed, and not in any outward action or condition arising from it, the true secret of his history lies, and is to be sought after and indefinitely approached.

THOMAS CARLYLE.

POOR soul, the centre of my sinful earth,

Fooled by those rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward wall so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms inheritors of this excess,

Eat up thy charge? is this thy body's end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,1

1 But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway. .-1 Cor.

ix. 27.

HUNGERING FOR SPIRITUAL FOOD.

155

And let that pine to aggravate thy store;

1

Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;

Within be fed, without be rich no more:

So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there's no more dying then.2

Sonnet, cxlvi.

1 Buy the truth, and sell it not; also wisdom, and instruction, and understanding. - Prov. xxiii. 23.

2 The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. -1 Cor. xv. 26.

Repentance.

Think thou on this, my son: To err, indeed,

Is common unto all, but having erred,
He is no longer reckless or unblest,
Who, having fallen into evil, seeks

For healing, nor continues still unmoved.

SOPHOCLES, Antigone, 1. 1023.

The faithful knight now grew in little space,
By hearing her and by her sister's lore,
To such perfection of all hevenly grace,
That wretched world he gan for to abhore,
And mortal life gan loath as thing forlore,
Greeved with remembrance of his wicked wayes,
And pricked with anguish of his sinnes so sore,
That he desired to end his wretched dayes;

So much the dart of sinfull guilt the soule dismayes.

EDMUND SPENSER, The Faerie Queen, Book i., canto 10, stanza 22.

MOTHER, for love of grace,

Lay not that flattering unction to your soul. . .

Confess yourself to heaven;

Repent what's past; avoid what is to come;

And do not spread the compost on the weeds,

To make them ranker.

Hamlet, Act iii. Sc. 4, 1. 145.

REPENTANCE.

Juliet. I do confess it, and repent it, father.
Duke. 'Tis meet so, daughter: but lest you

do repent,

As that the sin hath brought you to this shame,
Which sorrow is always towards ourselves, not heaven,
Showing we would not spare heaven as we love it,
But as we stand in fear,

Ful. I do repent me, as it is an evil,

And take the shame with joy.

Duke.

There rest.1

157

Measure for Measure, Act ii. Sc. 3, 1. 29.

Oftentimes excusing of a fault

Doth make the fault the worse by the excuse,
As patches set upon a little breach

Discredit more in hiding of the fault

Than did the fault before it was so patch'd.

King John, Act iv. Sc. 2, 1. 30.

Very frankly he confess'd his treasons,
Implored your highness' pardon and set forth
A deep repentance: nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it; he died
As one that had been studied in his death

To throw away the dearest thing he owed,1
As 'twere a careless trifle.

Macbeth, Act i. Sc. 4, 1. 5.

1 For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death. - 2 Cor. vii. 10.

2 Owned.

Conversion.

Never yet did there exist a full faith in the Divine Word by whom light as well as immortality was brought into the world, which did not expand the intellect while it purified the heart; which did not multiply the aims and objects of the understanding, while it fixed and simplified those of the desires and passions. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

THE NEW LIFE OF HENRY THE FIFTH.

Archbishop of Canterbury. The king is full of grace and fair regard.

Bishop of Ely. And a true lover of the holy church.

Cant. The courses of his youth promised it not.

The breath no sooner left his father's body,

But that his wildness, mortified in him,

Seem'd to die too; yea, at that very moment
Consideration, like an angel, came

And whipped the offending Adam out of him,
Leaving his body as a paradise,

To envelope and contain celestial spirits.
Never was such a sudden scholar made;
Never came reformation in a flood,

With such a heady current, scouring faults;