"Some people seem to be here in the world just on their guard all the while, always so afraid of doing wrong that they never do anything really right. They do not add to the world's moral force; as the man, who, by constant watchfulness over his own health, just keeps himself from dying, contributes nothing to the world's vitality. All merely negative purity has something of the taint of the impurity that it resists. The effort not to be frivolous is frivolous itself. The effort not to be selfish is very apt to be only another form of selfishness." PHILLIPS BROOKS. "Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues. It is good to abstain and teach others to abstain, from all that is sinful and hurtful. But making a business of it leads to emaciation of character, unless one feeds largely also on the more nutritious diet of active sympathetic benevolence." O. W. HOLMES. "The seductions of life are strong in every age and station; we make idols of our affections, idols of our customary virtues; we are content to avoid the inconvenient wrong, and to forego the inconvenient right with almost equal self-approval, until at last we make a home for our conscience among the negative virtues and the cowardly vices." _The Life of R. L. Stevenson_, GRAHAM BALFOUR. Character MAY 18 "The moments of our most important decisions are often precisely those in which nothing seems to have been decided; and only long afterwards, when we perceive with astonishment that the Rubicon has been crossed, do we realise that in that half-forgotten instant of hesitation as to some apparently unimportant side issue, in that unconscious movement which betrayed a feeling of which we were not aware, our choice was made. The crises of life come, like the Kingdom of Heaven, without observation. Our characters, and not our deliberate actions, decide for us; and even when the moment of crisis is apprehended at the time by the troubling of the water, action is generally a little late. Character, as a rule, steps down first." _Diana Tempest_, MARY CHOLMONDELEY. "Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards--they simply unveil them to the eyes of men. Silently and imperceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we grow and wax strong, or we grow and wax weak, and at last some crisis shows us what we have become." Bishop WESTCOTT. Character--"Our Echoes roll from Soul to Soul" MAY 19 "One of the main seats of our weakness lies in this very notion, that what we do at the moment cannot matter much; for that we shall be able to alter and mend and patch it just as we like by-and-by." HARE.