Annotation: Discipline

Content

Structure

Context

Applicability

Notes

p62: Charles is going to go fight

Outward forms represent inward life. All of man’s action is a representation of himself. He lives out his inner life.

A body grows around a man as a tree around the life it represents. If he be a fruitful tree, he is known by his fruit — if not fruitful, his barrenness reveals him as much as his fruit would be fruitful.

When thou dost look at a tree, thou canst tell the kind of life that is in it, what its fruit will be, and what its use to man.

When thou dost look at a church, thou canst tell what kind of God is worshipped in it. It is the outer boddy of the inner idea of God

p73: Charles is training

I am told that to many in the South the idea of Liberty itself is strangely associated with that of African Servitude. We are pitted against a demonic spirit which has been known in all ages as Oppression: that spirit which is so brutalizing in its influence that it can change a woman into a fiend, and a child into an impof cruelty. Peace is not the answer now. We must do wrong rather than suffer wrong. There is no folley in expecting Satan to cast out Satan.

p90: Big fight, later Charles’s hand gets stabbed in the area of the nails on the cross

There is a holy mind that is above fear.

p124: Charles is heading south, his mother is dying

There are two understandings to man: the inward and the outward, the outward knoweth not the inward for it is too dense to penetrate within. The inward searcheth eternal things, the outward external things. The word is the Glory of God revealed. The Spirit of man liveth in this glory when it comprehendeth the word. The Glory of God is that living goodness which surrounds him eternally, even as the presence of a good man surrounds him externally.

Thou dost learn to labor in eternal fields.

p166: Charles has been shot in the ear

The world has a false scale in which actions are weighed. A man is frequently considered good simply because he attends some house of worship regularly. Many attend such places for this consideration. I would rather do one good act tan go to church a lifetime without doing it, and would rather take the chance of the one act than all the professions in the world. Goodness is an active principle. It is simply acting up to thy own highest idea of right. Goodness is the fruit of the action.

All we do to others is done in realty unto ourselves. For every violation of his own inward light of truth man must suffer, and he will soon cease to kindle fires which burn only himself.

Each man is his own scale weighed, and the lean of the scale is his own ray of light.

P193: They set up a pontoon bridge in an attempt to rescue slaves

In the present we are most barbarous animals compared with our own high ideal of right and justice, of love and light. How will we look when man in the great future shall gaze back upon us?

Compare the bloody deeds of the present with our profesions of love and mercy. The future loses sight of our professions and judges us as we are.

P203: Going to bury the dead, it talks about how the Lord will end slavery/the war in his own time, which I don’t trust, as it robs us of the actions described above.

255: Charles escapes prison

Heaven is not seen, it is felt and known. It is within thy spiritual understanding. It is not entered by force. Thou cannot batter down the doors of heaven and rush headlong in.