Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 6, 2025
In every age the prophet has always asked for the unattainable, always pointed to a higher level than human nature could breathe in, always insisted on a measure of self-renunciation which saints in their prayers send forth the soul's lame hands to clutch-in their ecstasy of aspiration hope that they may some day arrive at. But, alas! they reach it never.
This effect has often been called an answer to prayer, and has been attributed by the ignorant to what they call a "special interposition of Providence," instead of to the unerring action of the great and immutable divine law. Self-Renunciation.
They all insist that saving faith is not a mere humanly moral exercise, but that power to believe with the heart descends from God, and that it must be waited for in prayer, and that it becomes in the believer a series of supernatural and spiritual acts, a habit of soul, at once the seed and fruit of the Divine life-stirring, uniting in itself the characters of penitent humility, self-renunciation, simple trust, and absolute obedience grounded in love.
In this behalf, his inventiveness in small things as in great, his omniscience and industry are such, that at the sight of one of Wagner's scores one is almost led to believe that no real work or effort had ever existed before his time. It seems almost as if he too could have said, in regard to the hardships of art, that the real virtue of the dramatist lies in self-renunciation.
Why is it that a Society so criminal in historic annals, should yet remain as a force in our advanced era of civilization? Simply, because it is of One Mind! Bent on evil, or good, self-renunciation or self- aggrandisement, it is still of One Mind! Friends, were you like them, also of One Mind, your injuries, your oppressions, your taxations would not last long!
Of this great company, what can we say save that they won renown through self-renunciation! What they did makes weak and unworthy what we say. Just here let us remember that the statue of Jupiter was a figure so colossal that worshipers, unable to reach the divine forehead, cast their garlands at the hero's feet. For this law of sacrifice is the secret of the Messiah.
Mata, prostrated at first by the loss of her nursling, soon rallied her practical old wits. She went, in secret, to the hospital, demanded audience of the house physician, and gave to him all details of the strange situation which had culminated in Umè's desperate act of self-renunciation, and induced Tatsu's subsequent madness. She did not ask for a glimpse of the sick man.
From what you know of her, you will not be surprised that she threw some exaggeration and wilfulness, some pride and impetuosity, even into her self-renunciation; her own life was still a drama for her, in which she demanded of herself that her part should be played with intensity.
Whatever her thoughts may have been they were unknown to Philip, as they are to these historians; if she was seeming to be what she was not, and carrying a burden heavier than any one else carried, because she had to bear it alone, she was only doing what thousands of women do, with a self-renunciation and heroism, of which men, impatient and complaining, have no conception.
And what if one or more of these be cut off, if such lopping off of some few branches only throws back into others the self-life to develop more vigorously in them? And what is cross-bearing? We speak of our 'crosses' but the word of God never uses that word in the plural, for there is but one cross the cross on which the self-life is crucified, the cross of voluntary self-renunciation.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking