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Updated: July 8, 2025
Catholic art bears witness to this: "Where a man seeks himself there he falls from love," says a Kempis, and this is proved not only in the love of God, but in what makes the glory of Christian art, the love of beauty and truth in the service of faith. "Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage."
He took delight in the most spiritual mystical writings he could find, a Kempis, Madame Guyon, Fenelon, and the like, and endeavoured to fulfil the Gospel measure of holiness.
Atkin and Mary. 'Always, my dear friend, very truly yours, 'December 16, 1867. 'My dear Miss Mackenzie, Your brother's pedometer reached me safely three days ago. I feel most truly unworthy to receive such gifts. I have now his sextant, his pedometer, and, most precious of all, his "Thomas a Kempis"; they ought to help me to think more of him, and his holy example.
I have so many such experiences that I feel like a baby just learning to walk, who is so afraid of falling that it has half a mind to sit down once for all. Then there is another thing. Seeing mother so fond of Thomas A Kempis, I have been reading it, now and then, and am not fond of it at all. From beginning to end it exhorts to self-denial in every form and shape.
"You think she did right?" asked Robina. "I cannot say," I answered; "there are no rules for Life, only for the individual." "I have read it somewhere," said Robina "where was it? 'Love suffers all things, and rejoices." "Maybe in old Thomas Kempis. I am not sure," I said.
"As often as I have been among men," says Seneca, "I have returned less a man." And Thomas a Kempis declared that "the greatest saints avoided the company of men as much as they could, and chose to live to God in secret." The Christian philosophy was no improvement upon the pagan in this respect, and was exactly at variance with the teaching and practice of Jesus of Nazareth.
Take the great doctrinal and experimental Puritans, such as John Owen, Thomas Goodwin, Richard Baxter, John Howe, and Jonathan Edwards, and add on to them the greatest and best mystics, such as Jacob Behmen, Thomas A Kempis, Francis Fenelon, Jeremy Taylor, Samuel Rutherford, Robert Leighton, and William Law, and you will have the profoundest, the most complete, the most perfect, and, I will add, the most fascinating and enthralling of spiritual teaching in all the world.
There is Don Quixote and Hudibras, Gulliver and Hume, Paley and Butler, Hervey and Watts, Lavater and Trenck, Seneca and Gregory, Nepos and even Aspasia Vindicated to say nothing of Abelard and He1oise and Thomas a Kempis. All the Voltaires have been sold, however, and the Tom Paines went off at a rattling gait.
The admirable advice of Thomas a Kempis to keep away from people whom we desire to please, and the quiet perfection of his warning to the censorious, "In judging others, a man toileth in vain; for the most part he is mistaken, and he easily sinneth; but in judging and scrutinizing himself, he always laboureth with profit," can make their just appeal only to the humorous sense.
This man is no eavesdropper; your evil secrets have only a sobering and a saddening and a silencing effect upon him. Your house might be full of skeletons for anything he would ever discover or remember. The beam in his own eye is so big that he cannot see past it to speak about your small mote. 'The inward Christian, says A Kempis, 'preferreth the care of himself before all other cares.
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