Heart's-ease   By: Phillips Brooks (1835-1893)

[Illustration: Inside cover]

[Frontispiece: Roses]

[Illustration: Title page]

Heart's ease

from

Phillips Brooks

COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY

CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY

NEW YORK

[Illustration: Flowers]

Happiness is perfectly hollow unless there is a meaning behind it, unless it tells of intention somewhere, unless it means love. "Eat and drink and be merry" is not the end of it all.

[Illustration: Flowers]

Whoever, by a Christian word he speaks or by a Christian life he lives, brings a new soul to see the perfect life and take the perfect grace, has poured out of his full hands a blessing on his brother that leaves utterly out of sight any gift that riches can bestow on poverty.

We want a faith, a truth, a grace to help us now , ... and we can have it. One who was man, yet mightier than man, has walked the vale before us.

Every attempt to do right has a tendency to reveal to us more spiritual ways of doing right, and our need of spiritual helps in doing it.

The thought of life is like that untouched line we call the "sky," but which, when we try to reach it, proves to be not one single line, but an infinite depth ... stored with what strange uses and benefactions we dare not say.

Some men's faith only makes itself visible; other men's lightens everything within its reach.

[Illustration: Flowers]

There is positive proof in the single sunbeam of the existence of the sun.

Strike God's iron on the anvil, see God's goods across the counter, put God's wealth in circulation, teach God's children in the school, so shall the dust of your labor build itself into a little sanctuary where you and God may dwell together.

Make truth your friend and guide in all your hourly business, truth of plan, and purpose, and labor... Whoever will not bow before this monarch you have crowned, let him be rebel to you.

If you are not spiritually minded, do not wait for mysterious light and vision. Go and give up your dearest sin. Go and do what is right. Go and put yourself thoroughly into the power of the holiness of duty.

All the world is an utterance of the Almighty.

[Illustration: Cherubs, flowers]

It seems so far off, that Cross of Jesus, and it really is so near! For it is lifted up so high that the waves of time roll unheeded and unmeaning at its foot. It is the power of perfection for us to day.

Each high achievement is a sign and token of the whole nature's possibility. What a piece of the man was for that shining moment, it is the duty of the whole man to be always.

May we not daily tread the same paths of holiness and sorrow, joy and love, that Christ has trodden, and see His footsteps on them still?

Even if you have to force yourself to your duty, still, do it . Do your duty, even if duty be wearisome and hard, for then you are in the place where it can become joyous and easy to you.

We must answer for our actions; God will answer for our powers.

[Illustration: Graveyard scene]

Some day certainly the fog shall rise, the clouds shall scatter, and in the perfect enlightenment of the other life the soul shall see its Lord, and be thankful for every darkest step that we took towards Him here.

Devotion is like the candle which Michael Angelo used to carry stuck on his forehead in a paste board cap, and which kept his own shadow from being cast upon his work when he was hewing out his statues.

David's pilgrims, going through the vale of misery, "use it for a well." ... When they grew thirsty they looked not merely farther on into the heart of the future, but deeper down into the bosom of the present.

The sense of evil in life does not deny , but implies the noblest capacities in men.

Man must be a ray of the great sunshine under whose touch some special flower may open, and some special fruit fill itself with healthy and nutritious juice, some little corner of the field grow rich.