. . . Which is Love? To do God's will, or merely suffer it? . . . . . No! I must headlong into seas of toil, Leap far from self, and spend my soul on others. For contemplation falls upon the spirit, Like the chill silence of an autumn sun: While action, like the roaring south-west wind, Sweeps laden with elixirs, with rich draughts Quickening the wombed earth. _Saint's Tragedy_. JUNE 21. St. John the Baptist. How shall we picture John the Baptist to ourselves? Great painters have exercised their fancy upon his face, his figure, his actions. The best which I can recollect is Guido's--of the magnificent lad sitting on the rock, half clad in his camel's-hair robe, his stalwart hand lifted up to denounce he hardly knows what, save that things are going all wrong, utterly wrong to him--his beautiful mouth open to preach he hardly knows what, save that he has a message from God, of which he is half conscious as yet--that he is a forerunner, a prophet, a foreteller of something and some one who is to come, and which is very near at hand. The wild rocks are round him, the clear sky over him, and nothing more, . . . and he, the noble and the priest, has thrown off--not in discontent and desperation (for he was neither democrat nor vulgar demagogue), but in hope and awe--all his family privileges, all that seems to make life worth having; and there aloft and in the mountains, alone with God and Nature, feeding on locusts and wild honey and clothed in skins, he, like Elijah of old, preaches to a generation sunk in covetousness, party spirit, and superstition--preaches what?--The most common--Morality. Ah, wise politician! ah, clear and rational spirit, who knows and tells others to do the duty which lies nearest to them! . . . who in the hour of his country's deepest degradation had divine courage to say, our deliverance lies, not in rebellion but in _doing right_. _St. John the Baptist_, _All Saints' Day Sermons_. JUNE 29. St. Peter, Apostle and Martyr. God is revealed in the Crucified; The Crucified must be revealed in me:-- I must put on His righteousness; show forth His sorrow's glory; hunger, weep with Him; Taste His keen stripes, and let this aching flesh Sink through His fiery baptism into death. _Saint's Tragedy_. St. Peter, as he is drawn in the Gospels and the Acts, is a grand and colossal human figure, every line and feature of which is full of meaning and full of beauty to us. _Sermons_, _Discipline_. July.