A Christian's Habits: Chapter Ten
The Habit of High-Mindedness
“There is a law of moral gravity as well as a law of physical gravity. Unless the mind is borne up, given good nourishment from without, it will drop into empty imaginings, or evil will slip in to fill the place which belongs to good.” -Robert Speer.
Randy’s Introduction
We’re inconsistent. We have our definite opinions, we hold tightly to our definite opinions, and we’re even willing to divide our country over our definite opinions. Our definite opinions are consistent, but they consistently reflect inconsistent ideas.
For example, Westerners have worked for generations toward equal rights for women. Progress has been made for this clearly defined demographic. Yet because of the inconsistency of our ideas, our intellectuals are no longer willing to publicly define or defend the 50% of the population we have brought into greater inclusion. And that same intelligentsia is very ready to take a public stand to protect the rights of non-Western cultures who embody views of women that are antithetical to our concepts of equality.
Instead of working together to iron out the inconsistencies of our views, we respond to the conundrum by hardening and politicizing our positions. We distance ourselves from flesh and blood friends and family who don’t see things our way, choosing instead to stream online commentators we don’t personally know simply because they do see things our way. We are consistent in our inconsistency. As a result our problems grow.
If our opinions are going to help rather than destroy, we need to be consistent in building the next two habits of Robert Speer’s book. As Speer says, “What kind of mind we have will determine what kind of deeds we do…” The life that we are experiencing now is the result of what we have been thinking. And what we have been thinking is largely the result of the content we have been taking in. If we are serious about makinggoodhappen, then, we need to create a new regimen for the care and feeding of our minds. That is what this chapter is all about.
So, without further ado, chapter ten of Robert Speer’s A Christian’s Habits, The Habit of High-Mindedness.
I. The Altitude of Your Mind
To what kind of thinking do you aspire?
Each mind has an altitude of its own. Some move on low levels. The thoughts which come to them are low thoughts, sometimes evil, sometimes vain, sometimes merely trifling. Such minds seek what they like. Serious conversation and books are unattractive to them. They go where they can find what is not to their dislike, where stories are told and language spoken which involves no tax upon thought and which feed the tastes of a low-leveled life. As between the library and the grill room, the solid book and the empty story, the talk of men about real questions and life and the chaff and gossip of the scandal-spreader and fool-jester, they choose the lower down. There are many other levels below and above this. The highest is the level of the men who try to bring all their thoughts and tastes into conformity with the best, who by always choosing the upper and better have sought to acquire the habit of a high mind, to which evil thoughts do not naturally come and by which they are rejected when the do come. Such men hope some day to come to the height of character set forth in Daniel’s “Epistle to the Countess Cumberland”1:
He that of such a height has built his mind,
And reared the dwelling of his thought so strong,
As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame
Of his resolved powers; nor all the wind
Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong
His settled peace, or to disturb the same:
What a fair seat hath he, from whence he may
The boundless wastes and wealds of man survey!
And with how free an eye doth he look down
Upon these lower regions of turmoil!
Where all the streams of passion mainly beat
On flesh and blood; where honor, power, renown,
Are only gay afflictions, golden toil;
Where greatness stands upon as feeble feet,
As frailty doth; and only great doth seem
To little minds, who do it so esteem.
How may we hope to attain to such high-mindedness that our thoughts will be always elevated and worthy, firm and consecutive, that our minds may be busy in good things ready always for hard tasks?
II. Increase Our Altitude through Books
Name three “great books” you will master this year.
Substantial reading will help us toward high-mindedness. It will give us a body of good thoughts. The mind will inevitably be employed upon something. If it is not employed upon what is good and high, it will resort to what is evil and low. The radical weakness of human nature appears in the tendency of our minds and hearts to drop. There is a law of moral gravity as well as a law of physical gravity. Unless the mind is borne up, given good nourishment from without, it will drop into empty imaginings, or evil will slip in to fill the place which belongs to good. Occasionally “a full man,” such as Lord Bacon had in mind,2 may be made by meditation, but as a rule he is made only, as Bacon said, by reading. To be high-minded we shall have to read substantial books. It is all right to read books of different kinds. The mind needs them. Dr. Thomas Arnold was very positive about this.
“Keep your view of men and things attentive,” he urged, “and depend upon it that a mixed knowledge is not a superficial one. As far as it goes the views that it gives are true, but he who reads deeply in one class of writers only, gets views which are almost sure to be perverted, and which are not only narrow but false. Adjust your proposed amount of reading to your time and inclination - this is perfectly free to every man; but whether that amount be large or small, let it be varied in its kind and widely varied. If I have a confident opinion on any one point connected with this improvement of the human mind it is on this.”
When people read at all nowadays, however, this is not usually the warning they need. Their difficulty is their diffuse reading. What we need is more concentration on a few great books which we shall master and store in the mind. This will elevate its level.
“The mind has elastic capacities, but its working sections are limited and they can be preempted or reclaimed by what is great and good.”
III. Increase Our Altitude through Conversation
How can you upgrade your conversations today?
A wise use of conversation uplifts the mind. Perhaps sometimes we feel that we have nothing to give. Often the atmosphere of a conversation seems to congeal our minds. We feel a self-consciousness and unnaturalness which strikes us dumb. At such times we can at least draw out others. To appreciate their point of view, to draw out what cargo their minds carry, will quicken and exalt our own minds. Even where other people have no reasoned opinion to share with us they have had their histories, their experiences of life. They came from a definite environment. All that we can draw out of them will enrich them in the giving and will help to ennoble the tone of our own minds if we view it with sympathy. Each day has its opportunities for the enrichment of memory. “I know over a hundred poems and Psalms now,” said an old man of humble circumstances but of a high mind. “I memorize them on the cars and whenever I can, and they make me very rich.” A low mind cannot long remain low when filled with the great words which cannot be kept down, which soar aloft toward God. Each of these words displaces some other. The mind has elastic capacities, but its working sections are limited and they can be preempted or reclaimed by what is great and good.
IV. The Many Uses of High-Mindedness
Would you be better off without streaming news and social media? Why or why not?
The high-minded man will use rightly and yet with strong control the floods of newspaper and magazine literature of the day. Chinese Gordon at one time stopped his newspapers altogether, and many people would be better off without them. They fill the mind with low and trivial interests and they degrade its tone. The highest type of mind cannot be produced from a diet of periodical literature. It can use the papers that pass in the night, but its light will be thrown on them, not drawn from them.
Loving true judgments and sound knowledge for their own sake and not for the sake of the commercial uses to which they can be put, exalts the mind. The mind that dwells with the truth and that ever travels with it will always have truth to give, but the gift will be the richer because free and not calculated, because it flows from a fountain stored up for its own sake. The love of truth gives the mind its fullest elevation and freedom.
“The imagination is a great wanderer. It loves to stray everywhere…It goes down into low places and drags the mind with it. The high mind must lay a law upon the imagination and keep it on the heights. ”
The mind is helped to a higher level by an attitude of appreciation and good will. If we are ever looking for what we dislike and disapprove we shall soon feel the down-pull of such an attitude upon the tone of mind. That which we despise the mind should reject, but its lookout should always be for the things to which it can assent. In every conversation it will give most and gain most by picking out what it can approve. If we watch ourselves we shall soon discover how practical and searching this principle is. The mind soon takes a hint, and when it learns that it is to see what is fair and to be blind to all else, it will respond to the appeal of higher things which this law addresses to it and will uplift itself.
We must check also in the interest of the high-mindedness all useless and evil vagaries of the imagination. The imagination is a great wanderer. It loves to stray everywhere. There is no nook or cranny of the universe where it does not go, and many of its journeys are wasteful or worse. It goes down into low places and drags the mind with it. The high mind must lay a law upon the imagination and keep it on the heights.
V. Increase OurAltitude with Principles
List three key principles you live by. How did you learn them?
The highest things in the world are principles. Whoever associates with principles is in the loftiest company. The mind which wants to be higher should be directed toward principles. Each new principle which it finds and fixes is a new anchorage to the highest. When we have defined to ourselves duty and truth and purity and unselfishness, we have bound our minds to the noblest we can know. They will be high minds as long as they do not forget.
And no principles will more elevate the mind than the principle of prayer and the principle of Christ. Prayer checks all downward movement of the mind and spreads out over its every part the upward pulling of the Spirit of God. And Christ is the great principle of exaltation. He is more than that; he is the Person who lifts. “I, if I be lifted up from the earth,” he said, “will draw all men unto myself.” And to be a Christian is to have the lower levels shut to us while the mind seeks the things that are above, where Christ is. He has now been lifted up and the mind of the Christian must be with him, on the high levels of God.
During the late 1590s to first years of the 1600s, Daniel took on the role of tutor to the young Anne Clifford, daughter of the Countess of Cumberland, the woman to whom he had dedicated A Letter to Octavia. Anne Clifford maintained a sense of gratitude and affection toward Daniel through the rest of her life. She included his portrait and volumes of his works in the family triptych she commissioned that has come to be known as The Great Picture.
Francis Bacon, “Of Studies” (1597)
This was wonderful Randy and I fully enjoyed listening to it! I will be saving this one to draw inspoand encouragement again. 🙂