Excerpt from The Uncommon Commonplace

When shall we learn, past ever forgetting it, that the commonplace is uncommon? The common things must always be the chief delight of all such as have lived deeply. The shallows where ships cannot sail and wild waves cannot come ashore may have scant care for commonplaces, and call loudly for the unusual, but the deep places of the soul and deep souls are ever expectant for the invasion of the ordinary. The going far afield for pastures for the brain and heart is witless and is obsolescent. Let us rejoice out loud because of that. It was one of the strenuous achievements of Charles Dickens that he made romance a domestic matter. He did not foreignize the heart. He put it under every lowly roof. He did not take us into kings palaces, where we would be intruders at the best, and endured though never wanted, but he put us in homely houses where we felt the eternal wonder of the hearts which God had made. It is not meant that Dickens discovered this. Of course not. All democracy was discovered to mankind by Christ. The cattle stall settled that, and the carpenter's bench settled that. Life has been content to king it in scant quarters since the epiphany of God.

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