CMP Review 2025-11-02

In a dramatic passage in Book II of Ourselves, Charlotte Mason writes:

Therefore, Christ ate with publicans and sinners, and pronounced woes against the respectable classes; because the sinners might still have a Will which might rise, however weakly, at the impact of a great thought, at the call to a life outside of themselves. The men at whom no one could point a finger were tied and bound in self, and were incapable of the great act of will implied in, “Choose ye this day whom ye will serve.”

There are but two services open to men—that which has self as the end and centre, and that which has God (and, by consequence, man) for its object.

In her poem on the Second Coming of Christ, Mason portrays our Lord as the judge of these two kinds of men:

A gulf is fixed ’twixt those and these,—
The men who seek their life,—their ease,
Their comfort, wealth, high place,—“for all
Things which concern the Spirit’s call,
All these shall lose the life they seek;
But there be men of spirit meek
Who give their lives, an offering free.

Find how ideas in Mason’s Ourselves are illuminated by awesome words in the Gospel of Christ. Read or hear the poem here.

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