United States or Morocco ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The elect ladies about Richardson joined Betsy with Amelia, and sneered at both. At the same time the two books also show that she was not quite clever enough: and that she had not realised, as in fact hardly one of the minor novelists of this time did realise, the necessity of individualising character.
There is no presumption, but the truest wisdom and lowliness in enclosing, if I may so say, a part of this great common for ours, and putting a hedge about it, as it were, and saying, 'That is mine. We shall not have understood the sweetness and the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ until we have pointed and condensed the general declaration, 'He so loved the world, into the individualising and appropriating one, 'He loved me, and gave Himself for me. Oh! if we could only apply that process thoroughly to all the broad glorious words and promises of Scripture, and feel that the whole incidence of them was meant to fall upon us, one by one, and that just as the sun, up in the heavens there, sends all his beams into the tiniest daisy on the grass, as if there was nothing else in the whole world, but only its little petals to be smoothed out and opened, I think our Christianity would be more real, and we should have more blessings in our hands.
Would they not have more power than they have now? They are so coming. Think away all these other people, and this place, ay, and me too, and let the word of Christ, which deals with no crowds but with single souls, come to you in its individualising force: 'Believest thou? You will have to answer that question one day.
The thing that will alter the whole current and set of a man's affections, that will upset his estimate of the relative value of material and spiritual, and that will turn him inside out and upside down, and make a new man of him, is the revelation of the supreme love that in Jesus Christ has come into the world, with an individualising regard to each of us, and has died on the Cross for the salvation of us all.
Sometimes the Old Testament collective point of view is maintained, as in our Lord's saying in the Sermon on the Mount, 'Ye are the light of the world, but more frequently, the characteristic individualising of the figure prevails, and we read of Christians shining 'as lights in the world, and each holding forth, as a lamp does its light, 'the word of life. Nor must we forget the climax of the uses of this emblem, in the vision of the Apocalypse, where John once more saw the Lord, on whose bosom his head had so often peacefully lain, 'walking in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks. There, again, the collective rather than the individual bearing of the figure is prominent, but with significant differences from the older use of it.
If the individualising phase of Christianity which is now dominant shall long retain its ascendancy, and the creed of Dr. Cumming and Mr. Spurgeon become that of the British people, our purest and noblest spirits will act here, with regard to religion, as the purest and noblest in America have acted with regard to politics.
Titian's real excellence consisted in the power of generalising and of individualising at the same time: if it wore merely the former, it would be difficult to account for the error immediately after pointed out by Sir Joshua.
The chief comedian in the company fell ill; and though Mike had had so little experience, his chief had so much confidence in his native gift, that he cast him for the vacant part. Mike more than justified the confidence, and not only pleased him, but succeeded in individualising himself with the audience.
Be that as it may, the thought is clear throughout all the Old Testament that the heart is the man, and the man is the heart. And so, if Jesus bears our names upon His heart, that does not express merely representation nor merely intercession, but it expresses also personal regard, individualising knowledge.
In sciences in general, then, the object should be, so far from keeping individualising peculiarities out of sight, to contrive the greatest possible obstacles to a merely mechanical use of language: we should carefully keep alive a consciousness of its meaning, by referring, by aid of derivation and the analogies between the ideas of the roots and the derivatives, to the origin of words; and as words, however philosophically constructed, are always tending, like coins, to have their inscription worn off, we should be ever stamping them afresh.
Word Of The Day