The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.

We long for more and God's promise is that there is more awaiting us. More to delight us than we will ever exhaust.

Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others.

Our struggle is--isn't it?--to achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To believe that there is a Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and more desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe? The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already

And so take away his work, which was his life [. . .] and all his glory and his great deeds? Make a child and a dotard of him? Keep him to myself at that cost? Make him so mine that he was no longer his?

I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, of this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

And there's one thing about this underground work, we shan't get any rain.