The grain of dust is a thought of God; God's power made it; God's wisdom gave it whatsoever properties or qualities it may possess. God's providence has put it in the place where it is now, and has ordained that it should be in that place at that moment, by a train of causes and effects which reaches back to the very creation of the universe. The grain of dust can no more go from God's presence or flee from God's Spirit than you or I can. _Town Geology_. 1871. Be Calm. March 5. Strive daily and hourly to be calm; to stop yourself forcibly and recall your mind to a sense of what you are, where you are going, and whither you ought to be tending. This is most painful discipline, but most wholesome. _MS. Letter_. 1842. Self-sacrifice and Personality. March 6. What a strange mystery is that of mutual self-sacrifice! to exist for one moment for another! the perfection of human bliss! And does not love teach us two things? First, that self-sacrifice, the living for others, is the law of our perfect being, and next, that by and in self-sacrifice alone can we attain to the perfect apprehension of ourselves, our own personality, our own duty, our own bliss. So that the mystics are utterly wrong when they fancy that self-sacrifice can be attained by self- annihilation. Self-sacrifice, instead of destroying the sense of personality, perfects it. _MS. Letter_. 1843. Follow your Star. March 7. I believe with Dante, "_se tu segui la tua Stella_," that He who ordained my star will not lead me _into_ temptation but _through_ it. Without Him all places and methods of life are equally dangerous, with Him all equally safe. _Letters and Memories_. 1848. Reverence for Books. March 8. This is the age of _books_. And we should reverence books. Consider! except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book--a message to us from the dead, from human souls whom we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away, and yet in those little sheets of paper speak to us, amuse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers! We ought to reverence books, to look at them as awful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion or politics, trade or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the Maker of all things, the Teacher of all truth, which He has put into the heart of some men to speak. And at the last day, be sure of it, we shall have to render an account--a strict account--of the books which we have read, and of the way in which we have obeyed what we read, just as if we had had so many prophets or angels sent to us. _Village Sermons_. 1849. The Unknown Future. March 9. As for the things which God has prepared for those who love Him, the Bible tells me that no man can conceive them, and therefore I believe that I cannot conceive them. God has conceived them; God has prepared them; God is our Father. That is enough.