THINGS THOUGHTFUL.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 11669, 8 April 1916, Page 8

THINGS THOUGHTFUL.

ALWAYS A BEST WAY. There Is always a best way of doing everything if it be but to boil an egg. Manners are the happy way of, doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love—now repeated and hardened in.' to usage. —Emerson., GET TO WORK. " Ah," said a brave painter to me, . . . " if a man has failed you will find he has dreamed instead of working. There is no way to success in our art' but to take off vour coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railway, all day and every day."—Emerson. THE PROMISE OF LIFE. A life of hope deferred too often is A life of wasted opportunities; A life of perished hope too often is A life of all-lost opportunities. Yet hope is but the flower and not the root, And hope is still the flower and not tho fruit. Arise and sow the seed; a day shall come When also tliou elialt keep thy. harvest homo. —C. Rossetti.

A NATION'S STRENGTH

The strength of a nation can never riso higher than the faithfulness to truth and duty of its own active citizenship. A majority of the unfaithful c*n mako the best efforts of the faithful of no avail; but tho influence of clearthinking goodness is proportionately more effective than the power of selfishness, and even a few citizens of high ideals and faithful lives may act as at redeeming leaven in the community. No Christian man can excuse himself in any apparent decadence of the common life unless he is certain that he has lived his own life and used his own influence with the highest aims in view. If we have no power to make tho world over, we have the. help of God's Spirit to conform our own lives to the iinago of Christ.. And it is character that counts.—-Byron H. Stautfer. THE PRESENT. Let not things future trouble thee. For if necessity so require that they come to pass thou shalt (whenever that is) be provided for them with the same reason, by which whatsoever is now present, is made.both tolerable and acceptable with thee.—Marcus Aurelius. . ie ■ 1 ■ /'■ - - THE FIRST STAGE., . The present life is the first stage of the future evei'-enduring life;- Strength, beauty, dignity, ' loveliness;-"-delight, may. be added, but added only to what we are, never to what w© are not,: What we essentially are in this WGrld,-that we' Shall be in the other; what here we absolutely are not, we shall not be there.—C. Rossetti; i THE PURPOSE. Twenty people cari gain money for ono who can use ifc; and the vital question for individuals and for nations' is never u how much do ihey make," but "to what purpose do* they spend."— Ruskin. be cheerful:.-;;-It were worth while to be'cheerful if for no "better reason than that it, aids digestion. They are dead and buried who but yesterday disturbed themselves to so little pui-pose, and much of . their trouble was of thpir *qwn* making. They bequeathed us the lesson of. their virtues, and their vices. They taught us how little it all amounted to, apart from the example of a sane and.noble life. Far away tot the hills of Peace still stretches the ancient pqth of Wisdom—stretches and waits {for us.— Stanton Davis "Kirkham. \ ,