In proofreading In Memoriam, I learned that, whenever Charlotte Mason's students would graduate and leave her teacher's college at Scale How in Ambleside, England, she would gift them with a book called Gell's Cloud of Witness. I did a search online, but there's no etext online. I found a used copy at amazon.com, and it arrived today from England.

The book is small and red. It looks like a dailly devotional of Thoughts with an Anglican focus (it's set up to follow the Christian Calendar of Trinity weeks, Advent, etc, which I'm not familiar with.) I'm going to see how it goes if I type a page a day as a kind of devotional. Either I'll get tired of the project (I'm not going to pressure myself to complete it), or else, in a couple of years, I'll have finished the book and send it to Project Gutenberg for their online collection. ;)

Here are the opening pages:




"Certain even of your own poets have said, For we are also His offspring."
"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights."


These sequences of Thoughts, resting each on some one clear 'idea' presented to us in our Sundays, seem to me full of interest and help. Brief words chosen for a dayoften help the day through more strongly and brightly. That is our experience of the greatest Lections of all. The 'ideas' noted in the following pages are full of suggestion, and I know no like book with so wide a range of illustrations.

It is good to hear in pithy phrases what the observing, musing, poet-people, that is the 'maker-people' as the Greeks have it, are saying at this moment:--None the less good, because some of them are yet unable to 'beat their music out'--the music of a full faith. In such voices is heard what St. Paul calls 'the yearning of the Creation,' and that yearning is Creation's witness to the Son of God.
Addington, Nov. 29, 1891.

Hear ye not the voices ringing down the ages--
Echoing still the message, though their task be done--
Voices, born of heroes, monarchs, poets, sages,
Yearning still to share the wisdom they had won?

Listen!--Thronging round you, deafening with their clamour,
Fashion-tyrants mock at your vaunt of self-control.
Wake!--Delusive visions fraught with poison glamour
Daze your eyes to blindness, while they paralyse your soul.

Yet the Cloud of Witness solemnly advances,
Widening as each clarion-voice is hushed in Death below;
Yet the Heavenly Vision gleams on raptured glances,
Prompt through changing vesture their changeless Lord to know!

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