{63}

To D. D. R; written apropos of a discussion on St. Paul's idea of the relation between Sin and the Law.

2 New Square, Cambridge; Monday before Easter, 1892.

I cannot but help feeling that part of your difficulties are self-made. Is there such a difference between Jewish law and law in general? What is law—law in the abstract? What do you mean when you talk about laws of science or morality? Surely there is no such thing as law in the abstract. You really mean God's thought. All law existed long before this world existed, as the thought of God. This thought expresses itself, when the world is actually made, in animals, nature, man. But this thought is somewhat long before it expresses itself, because it is God's thought. With Him 'to think' is 'to do.' Before you and I were born, before men were made, man exists in God as a thought. Each of us is an expression of part of that thought. The whole thought is the image of God, not any one part. Now, when I speak of man as something in contra-distinction to men, I mean the thought of God in contradistinction to its individual realisation. So when I speak of law as distinct from special laws, I mean a thought of God as distinct from its special expressions. Otherwise 'man' and 'law' are abstractions and nonentities.

The nominalist is right in so far as he denies that law as an abstract thing (considered apart from a person—as his thought) is anything: the realist is right in so far as he affirms that law, apart from {64} any particular manifestation, is an eternal reality. The reconciliation of nominalism and realism is found in God. Applying this to the case in hand—you admit that the Ten Commandments are the ground of morality; therefore, I say, they must be an expression of a thought of God, the Author of morality. But you are puzzled to find that the most trivial sanitary arrangements are considered by the Jew as equally a manifestation of God. Need we be? In every little sanitary precaution I recognise, or ought to recognise, an expression of that same mind as I see it in the Ten Commandments. God is Light, therefore the clean, the healthy, the decent is an expression of Him. God is Love, therefore the social, the self-sacrificing, is an expression of Him as well. But sanitary arrangements and the like, though an expression of an unchanging principle, change according to state of civilisation, climate, country. Therefore we take the principle, not the expression, as the ultimate reality in the case of these sanitary laws.

I am afraid I am rather stupid, and cannot make my meaning plain. I want to show you that the Jewish law only differs from English law as being in some ways a more complete expression of God's nature. But in all sanitary law, &c., now we have God's nature expressed. And it would be true to say, 'God spake unto England, saying'—e.g. in a right decision in court; it would be true to say, 'God spake unto the judge, saying.' Therefore, what holds good of Moses' law holds good of all law, because all law is a thought of God. {65} Therefore St. Paul uses indifferently nomos and ho nomos, for what is true of God's thought is true of every expression of it. In fact, he more often perhaps argues about one particular expression of it. Why? Because we can only tell what the thought is by studying the expression.

[Transcriber's note: The Greek words in the above paragraph were transliterated as follows: nomos—nu, omicron, mu, omicron, final sigma; ho—(rough breathing mark), omicron]

Don't be taken in by abstractions. An ideal is nothing—worse than nothing—unless our ideal is God's idea. Then it is the only reality, because God's idea will take effect. His idea is to make man in His image, and be sure it will take effect. Commandments, judgments, statutes, mean much the same in the Old Testament, I conceive, as we mean when we use them. The Ten Commandments are not so called in the Bible, I think. They are called 'words,' I think.

I do not think St. Paul at all restricted nomos to the Ten Commandments. In fact, I don't know that he ever very clearly separated those off from all the rest.

Do not in your essay make the same mistake as many of the Jews in St. Paul's time. Do not try to consider law apart from the Law-giver. They looked upon law as a dead thing by itself, not as an expression of the character of a person.

Thus the Commandment about resting on the Sabbath day was considered by them as an order as though from a tyrant. But God, when He gave it, did not simply say, 'Here it is: do it'—but 'Do it because,' and He gives the reason why. The reason is different in Exodus and Deuteronomy, because the books were, to a certain degree perhaps, written to {66} illustrate different aspects of God's character. Exodus says: 'Work and rest, because God's life is work and rest. Therefore human life made in His image is work and rest.' Deuteronomy says: 'Work and rest. God has emancipated you from slavery. He bids you rest.' In both cases God is the ground of the law. Study law—any law—English law—and in so far as it is law, and not lawlessness under guise of law, you will be studying God Himself; for if St. Paul's principles are true at all, they must be true of all law. But, oh! don't deal with abstractions, which sound well, but mean little. Let us use what we have. It is a grand thing to know that the highest ideal we can conceive must be realised, for the highest ideal must be part of God's idea.

Don't try to look at moral law apart from national life. St. Paul did not. Law is seen in national life. A nation is a better expression of God than an individual, because God is three, not simply one. He is a social Being, a Being of relations. And nations will last for ever. Law will always be seen worked out in national life. God has more worlds than one. Each nation is a thought of God worked out in human clay (cf. Jeremiah xviii. 1-6). Human clay lasts for ever ('I believe in the resurrection of the body'). Law will always be worked out thus. We are part of a thought of God—part of an English nation—little fragments of a huge whole. Our immortality depends on the fact that we are parts of a nation, parts of a Divine idea, which lasts for ever. Law is more completely seen in conscious than unconscious life, because God's life is conscious. Law is more completely seen {67} in family and national than individual life, because in God Himself are seen the archetypes of human relations.

This letter is disjointed, but contains a few thoughts which may prove helpful—thoughts I have been learning from others of late.

We are having lovely weather.

The buds 'feeling' after each other—new life and resurrection life—a type, a pledge of fuller resurrection, of Easter life—nay, the same Life—'I am the Resurrection and the Life'—working in trees and flowers and man. What a glorious thing to live in a world which has been united with its Maker—a world of perfect law and order—a world where every infraction of law must and will be punished—a world where Love is Law and Law is Love—a world where a great thought is being realised, and will be realised in and for us! You use 'Theology' loosely—'Theology' is the thing and 'Religion' is not, I think, nearly such a fine word. Theology is the Learning, Knowing, Studying God. I am sorry I have said nothing about Jewish sacrificial law. I meant to. That expresses a great fact. It dimly hints (as sacrificial law in other nations does) at the fact that the ground of the universe is self-sacrifice—that the ground of all human, whether family or national, life is a filial sacrifice. I think other nations besides Jews regarded all law as coming from God; nay, I think all nations did in part at least.



{68}

To E. N. L., on the occasion of the death of his brother, who was killed by lightning at Cambridge.[1]

June 18, 1892.

. . . I do feel for you, and could do a great deal to help you. I can only tell you what I have felt to be the only thing which makes life endurable at a time of real sorrow—God Himself. He comes unutterably near in trouble. In fact, one scarcely knows He exists until one loves or sorrows. There is no 'getting over' sorrow. I hate the idea. But there is a 'getting into' sorrow, and finding right in the heart of it the dearest of all human beings—the Man of Sorrows, a God. This may sound as commonplace, but it is awfully real to me. I cling to God. I believe He exists. If He does not, I can explain nothing. If He does, all whom we love are safer with Him than with us. If we can only get nearer ourselves to God, we shall get nearer to those whom we love, for they too are in God.

We shall be one, ever more and more really one, the nearer and the liker we get to God. . . . My dear friend, words are poor comfort at a time like this, when we see into eternity. A Person is our only hope, and that Person is God. God often takes those whom He loves best home to Himself as soon as He can. In the process of their development they break through the bonds of space and time. He has taken your brother, but not taken him away from you. We are {69} all in the same home—praying for, knowing, loving each other. . . I believe in the communion of saints—I believe that those who began to know God here, and whom we call dead, are not dead. They are just beginning to live, because they are finding out God: they are just beginning to know us, because they see us as we are—they see us in God. They are with Jesus, and Jesus is a human being. Because they are with a human being, a man, the man, the Son of man, they must, they do, take a deep interest in the affairs of the sons of men, and—may we not believe?—in us, whom they knew below. . . . These are truths which sorrow helps me to make my own. I pray that you may never, never 'get over' the sorrow, but get through it, into it, into the very heart of God.

[1] Writing to another friend at this time he says, 'He was walking with a friend, and in a moment, without any apparent pain, "God's finger touched him and he slept."'



To A. W. G.

Blackheath: June 27, 1892.

I have more and more come to the conclusion for some time past that the only reality underlying and explaining the world must be personal. I know that I am a person, and that it is persons—especially a few particular persons—not things, who have influenced me and had a power in my life. All my ideas of justice and purity and goodness are inseparably bound up with persons. At last I have come to the conclusion that nothing exists except the personal, and that below all is One who is personal. That means to say that the world and things in it are only real in so far as they are thoughts of God. We are real only in so far as we are thoughts of God. A {70} Roman Catholic poet, speaking of the Virgin Mary, says:

If Mary is so beautiful, What must her Maker be?

I look round the world and I see persons who attract me in a wonderful way—persons who are more gracious and simple than I am; and then I cannot help feeling that they all are a kind of faint picture of One who is better than all of them, One in whose image they are made. I like, I cannot help liking, intensely some of them; and from them I am led on to Him who made them and who therefore must—if I only knew Him—be more attractive even than they are. I believe that we are intended to rise from them to Him who made them, that if we stop short with the creature, we lower ourselves—we become idolaters. We worship beauty or intellect or goodness as though they belonged to the creature; we thereby lower ourselves and the persons whom we worship. If, on the contrary, we rise from them to the Personal Being, we see more in them than we ever saw before, and we get nearer to them than we ever got before. For life is a circle whose centre is God. Each of us is unconnected with his neighbour, but connected with the centre from whom he comes. The nearer the centre, the nearer we get to each other. When we get to the centre, we really become united with each other. To die is to get a step nearer the centre. The closer we are connected with the centre, the nearer we are to those whom we call dead. Our communion with them is spiritual, because 'God is spirit' and they are in Him. But the {71} spiritual is not the unsubstantial, the nebulous, the gaseous; it is the personal—to my mind the awful—reality. The more truly we understand persons, the more we shall find they are spirits.

I tell you what has been the greatest possible strength to me of late. God is not merely a Person, He is Three Persons in One. I am always trying to get closer to those whom I love best, to know them more, to serve them better. Yet something is ever keeping us apart. I said 'something,' I mean 'some one,' for only a person can keep a person from another—only a malicious, a devilish person—yet I feel that some day I shall be able to love, and know them better. Then I look out on life and I see how again and again death, and some one worse than death, is separating us, misinterpreting motives, keeping men apart; men are struggling to be one, and cannot be; on earth persons long to be one, persons who love feel they ought to be, they must be one. In heaven Three Persons are really, perfectly, quite One. What we are trying to do has been done there. Men try to be one. God is One. And the comfort comes in when one knows that 'in the image of God made He man.' Our life is a copy; God's life is the original. Because God is One, we, whose life is a picture of His, shall some day be one, as He is. The unity of Deity is a pledge of the unity of humanity.

The more we make our life like the original the more shall we realise what we long to realise—truer, deeper, more eternal unity. But we are not simply trying to be, we are one. All we have to do, I believe, is to act as though we were one. We have {72} proofs of this unity. We find ourselves doing an action which we should never have done unless we had known some one. That one lives over his life, or part of his life, again in us. So too we are living over our lives in other people, perhaps in some who have passed into other worlds of fuller activity than this. In living our lives over in each other, we show that we are more than we thought; and it is grand to think how big our lives may become in this way, for those whom we influence—into whom our life flows in—in turn may influence others. When I get quite quiet, and my mind is sane, and my conscience at rest, when I almost stop thinking, and listen, I am quite sure that a Personal Being comes to me, and, as He comes, brings some of His own life to flow into my life. I am also sure that with Him come those who live in Him, that all whom I have known or know, and longed or long to know better, who were worth knowing, are near me, are, if I let them, living their lives in my life, making me what I should not be without them. (These are facts, of which I think I may say I have more certainty in the best moments of my life than I have now that Switzerland exists. But I may be exaggerating. Perhaps as regards the second fact—of the other persons with Him—I may have spoken too strongly as regards my certainty. It is so hard to say exactly what one means.)

I don't know that these thoughts will be of much use to you. They may sound somewhat too philosophical. But I have more or less purposely put them in a philosophical form, because we are not thus so {73} easily led astray into vague pleasant feelings, which we sometimes get from rhetoric. But I do wish I could put a little more of my feelings into this cold paper, and cruel, unsympathetic ink. For what I have written is not a mere philosophy of life; it is the only thing that makes life tolerable for a moment to me; it is the one thing which I intensely long to realise. To my mind life is love, and love is life. Love is not sentimental affection, simply the readiness to die for a person. But love is the laying down of life for a person, absolutely renouncing your life for another. It means living the best life you can conceive of for the sake of one you love; knowing for certain that your life is flowing into that other person, though you may never see him again in this world. Love is purifying yourself that another may be pure. Love for one person, if it be true love, leads you at once to God, for 'God is Love.' I do not know what that means, but I do know that the little meaning I can see in it explains everything. As we love, God is there; we see God, we are in God. So we are led on from unselfish love on earth to that unselfish family life of Three in One in heaven; we are led on to Him in whose image we are made, and whose image we never so clearly reflect as when we love most. I could go on talking on this subject almost for ever, but I think I had better not tax your patience.



{74}

To W. A. B.

Christ's College, Cambridge: July 5, 1892.

How very jolly for you to get out right away into the country! I hope some day to be able to do the same. But I think, on the whole, I am better suited for retiring from the world than you are! If it were right to wish it, I might almost wish to exchange places with you. But yet I don't. It is very curious—I dare say you have thought of it—how very, very few people, if any, you would deliberately wish to change into, if you could. One admires many people, and would like to have their goodness, their intellect, or their beauty or strength—but how few of them one would really be: to cease at once to be yourself, and suddenly to be some one else—to look at life with their eyes, to have their past, their hopes for the future, their sins, their inmost thoughts, their anxieties. There is only about one man in the world, whom I know, whom I would like to be—and even of that I am not sure. It is the wonderful sense of personality. We abuse 'me'; we often vaguely say we would rather be some one else; yet very few of us wish to lose 'me': and most of us perhaps never will.

Liddon is, I should think, somewhat stiff and uninteresting. Gore's Bampton Lectures on much the same subject are far more interesting to my mind, far more human. Lectures IV, V, VI of Gore would perhaps interest and educate you on the subject.

Are you so sure that your course at Cambridge is 'over'?

I looked behind to find my past, And lo, it had gone before.

{75}

You will find traces of that course, before you have done, in yourself and in others for good or for evil. It is a good thing to think that nothing good is ever 'over'—that whatever we do is done for eternity, is part of ourselves and of others—that we live on in others, live on a nobler life than we lived in ourselves. When we influence another, our life flows into another: we live our life over again in him. The day will come when we shall see more clearly into what we have been doing. As yet we are like children playing with knives: they little know how near they are to killing themselves at times. So we are playing with big issues: we call them small and secular, we treat them as such—yet every speck of dust is big with infinity. Would that we could see the Infinite Being at every turn, then we should begin to live. You will get wrong in all your plans unless you see them in Him, and Him in them, and correct them as you see them thus—correct your thoughts to fit in with His thoughts, not His thoughts to fit in with your thoughts.

But you'll learn it is true. You'll understand later on why I am always talking about a Person; why to know that Personal Being is life. Meanwhile, thank you very, very much for what you have taught me. I feel I am down in the bottom class of that school, but I am glad that I have got into the school at all. Later on I may reach a higher standard, and know the Teacher better. In that school the lesson each of us is set to learn is love, and the name we are all trying to spell out is the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Some of us, perhaps, have learnt to spell one part of the name, {76} some of us another. But none of us have properly learnt to love one single person as we ought; and few of us have learnt to see the Father's love in all, the Son's grace in all, and the Spirit's fellowship in all. But patience must have her perfect work: and if we work hard at our lessons, we shall know more, love more, think in a simple way, and do more. But we must not be learning merely from each other; the pupils must look away to the Master of all in the centre, and as we all learn from Him and love Him, we shall be more modest, there will be no competition—save who can love most and sacrifice most—and do most for Him who has done all for us.

This letter is hurried. Forgive it. Write again. Accept the will for the deed. Think, think, think!



To T. H. M.

Ivy House, Holkham: September 1, 1892.

The sacraments are tremendous realities to me, just because they are a living protest against all Popish, High Church, Low Church schemes of thought—because they are a protest that man does nothing, God does all—that everything is a sacrament of the grace of God. They explain all life to me. They teach me what love means, for when man might least expect it, love comes deluging in, and the outward and visible is overwhelmed with the inward and spiritual. Oh, if bread and wine and water are capable of being transformed into the highest means of grace and hopes of glory; may not living, human, breathing persons—may not those {77} I love—be sacraments as well? When we come near human beings we love, we should come with the same feelings of reverence as when we kneel at that altar, for we are coming to that which is part of God's image—made in His likeness. And as we speak to them, when they answer purely and simply, the Word of God speaks through them. This is not degrading the sacraments—nay, but raising all human life—nay, raising the sacraments as well, for it brings them into relation with real life, and transforms the poor magical abstractions into eternal realities.



To W. A. B., who had told him that he had made up his mind to take up school work till he was old enough to be ordained.

Holkham: September 3, 1892.

A home circle reminds me, I think, more than anything else of that other home, that other family—the home of a Father and of a Son, the family circle of the Three who live in one unity. We should thank God for every family circle on earth into which we are allowed to enter, and in whose life He allows us to share—for any true family on earth—yes, and every little child who is born into this strange world of ours is a sure and certain pledge—a real sacrament—that God loves us still, has not forgotten us, is giving us little glimpses into His own family life, is making existence here a more perfect image of life in heaven. We should come into such a family circle with the same feelings of awe as when we bend on our knees to receive the Holy Communion. For here, too, we enter into Holy Communion—the {78} communion of simple, human, happy family life; here, too, we approach a sacrament, outward and visible signs of happy, quiet, home life—the signs of an inward and spiritual grace—the grace which lies below and interprets all human grace in man and woman—the grace of our dear Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. True, that grace is but little realised in the best of families—little consciously realised in the noblest life. But, oh! surely a human family—brothers and sisters in a home on earth—are a sure and certain pledge that this grace does exist—that God is—for here we have an exquisite though imperfect copy of the family life of God. Thank God when you see a good or a beautiful man or woman, a pure and a simple family—thank God, because it is a revelation, a manifestation, an unveiling, a copy, a likeness of Himself. For though beauty often is proud and trivial, yet it is a manifestation of Him from whom all beauty comes, in whom all beauty dwells, by whom all beauty exists. And so not only thank—pray. Pray to Him that the outward and visible may be ever more and more but an expression of something inward and unseen and spiritual. For beauty, grace, intellect, everything is doomed, unless it is sacramental—unless it draws its life from God below, unless it lives but to testify of Him who is.

It is an awful problem—a beautiful face with no true moral beauty below—splendid physical grace with no deeper grace beneath—a strong, capable intellect which is not the expression of a noble soul. What does it all mean? How in a world, where the outward and visible is but a manifestation of the {79} good God, can such awful anomalies exist? Partly it is due to the law that goodness is rewarded to a thousand generations (Exodus xx. 6. R.V. margin, cf. Deut. vii. 9), while wickedness is visited upon the third and fourth—that is, that one who is beautiful in body or intellect, and who knows God, leaves the blessing of such beauty long after him to descendants who are little conscious of the reason of its origin, and who have little thought of God.

Beautiful eyes, where there is no beauty of soul beneath, are the eyes of others, long since dead, looking at us still—men who served God in their generation. An exquisitely touching voice, where there is no music in the life of the one who possesses it, may be the voice of one who knew God, and left his legacy for a thousand generations. But still the problem remains. In many cases the outward and inward seem divorced. Now let us not try rashly to solve the problem ourselves. We are inclined when we see such beauty to say, 'It is no use talking. I am quite sure, whatever you say, that there must be some fine traits in the character of one whose face is like the face of an angel, whose voice is sweeter than that of the sons of men.' We may be, I believe we are, partly right—at least in many cases, for the spiritual powers of those who are gone may still in part live on in their descendants. But often, if we are candid, we must admit that apparently the outward and visible are separated from the inward and spiritual, that we have outward beauty and grace which is no sign at all of anything deeper—nay, that the very spiritual qualities, of which it is the sign, {80} and which may once have existed in the person, have been used for the vilest ends. This being the case, we are still left with the problem, Is the outward and visible not intended to be a sign of something deeper? Here it is not a sign. Why not? Will it ever be so? To put the case in its short, simple, concrete form, how can a 'flirt' exist when by all the laws of the universe beauty should surely be a sign not of instability, insipidity, unspirituality, worldliness, shallowness, hypocrisy, but of the Supreme?

I cannot answer this question. I doubt whether any man can. But I can show you where its ultimate solution must lie. It lies in the sacraments. Yes, they are the answer to the whole problem. They tell us that the outward and visible—the commonest objects, water, wine, bread—may be the signs of something which is deeper than anything we know. And they tell us more. They are to my mind a sure and certain pledge that some day the outward and visible shall really correspond to the inward and invisible. For, remember, this world lasts for ever. The good lasts, and is purified by fire. The evil alone is consumed. The sacraments are a pledge to me that some day upon this world our longings after a correspondence of the inward with the outward will be fulfilled—how, God only knows—probably not in the way we expect, but in a way far, far better. For His thoughts are not our thoughts, and His ways are not our ways. When therefore you are utterly bewildered and perplexed by finding so much that is attractive which seems utterly divorced from God's life; when you find yourself that the outward and {81} visible in your own life—the words you say, the actions you do, tend to become absolutely different from your real inward life; when you feel that every one is a hypocrite, and you are the worst of all, kneel down at that wonderful service, and take what is the one power of making outward and inward correspond, of making our words a true index of our thoughts, our actions a true presentation of our lives; kneel down and pray that all you love may enter more and more into the meaning of that service, that they too may flee from self to One who is stronger than self—to the power which is capable of transforming our actions—to the power which raised Christ from the dead, and is capable of raising us up also. Then you will gradually be taught that all life is of the nature of a sacrament—that all food is to be taken because thereby we have health and strength to manifest forth the grace of God in a too often graceless world—you will be taught lessons which I cannot even suggest; for God knows so much more than any of us what unsearchable riches He has as an inheritance for us. Let us enter upon that inheritance. God has called us to be saints, called us, chosen us—chosen us before the world was made—He has chosen us that in us, through us, He might manifest Himself. It is not humility that prevents us recognising the fact. It is our selfishness and stupidity. For the very fact that He has called and chosen you and me and all His Church before we were born shows that everything comes from Him. We are utterly worthless and vile, but when united, as we are united to God, we are transformed into His {82} image, we partake of His life. Only let us be what we are—sons of God.

In regard to those words, 'I looked behind to find my past, and lo it had gone before,' I do not know whether you are right or wrong about the Greek idea. The past has gone before us, we are always coming upon it. Some day we shall be confronted with it. Every day that we live we are making something that we shall meet again. The only way to get unity into our lives—to make it possible to look back without sentimental repining or an awful sense of dread—is to get God as the centre, God as the foundation. As we look back then we shall find days 'linked each to each by natural piety'—we shall see that our life forms a connected whole a real progress, something worth calling life.

. . . Do you know that the best way to strengthen your best thoughts is to try and express them? Get them out; you help others, you help yourself. Don't be careful of the grammatical accuracy and the finish of your sentences; I don't think St. Paul was. I was thinking to-day that perhaps a man who never wrote letters never could appreciate St. Paul. He was a great letter-writer. Copy him. Read him. Read him fairly quickly. Get into him. Find out his motive power, his real meaning. Read the Greek, not from a critical point of view only, but read the Greek. Do not trouble too much about the dictionary and accurate translations, but keep reading and perhaps saying aloud the Greek. St. Paul knew so much of God. Read him, and as you read, a greater than St. Paul will come into you, interpret {83} him, explain him. St. Paul himself will be with you, I think, trying to show you what he meant, and what he has found out that he means now.

But do write me a proper letter. We are just beginning life, and we have so much to learn from and to teach each other. Everything is new to us. Everything is strange. Already it seems to me I have been trained in a hard school—harder, I hope, than you will ever need to be trained in—to understand what God and love mean. I seem to have had a rough time of it, perhaps rougher than most; and even now I am trained in a way which is not attractive to me, trained to throw myself not on any merely human love, but on Him who is perfectly human and perfectly divine. May God train you in a less rough school, if possible! But at any rate, may He train you—train you to get out of self, bring you into deeper sympathies, stronger attachments, simpler earnestness! He alone can give unity to all our thoughts and desires. He alone can give stability. And we poor little creatures, who seem to have twice as much affection as we have mind, how we do need that stability! We want not to be blown hither and thither by every manifestation of strength, beauty, brain—we want to be able to enter into the meaning of what we see and cannot help admiring, without becoming the slaves of the visible and the finite. We must build on the one foundation that is laid. We must lay our affections deep down in the man Christ Jesus. As we see Him in men—and, when we cannot see that, see men in Him—we shall be more stable, less childish, less fickle. We never go deep enough. We skim over {84} life. We must get into its heart. We must never begin an affection which can have an end. For all affection must draw us into God, and God has no end. The moment we see any one whose strength, grace, goodness, beauty, or simplicity attracts us, we have deathless duties by that person. For the attraction is the outward sign of a spiritual connection—a sign that we ought to pray for that person, to thank God for the manifestation of His character, which we see in a riddle, through a glass in that life, that human life.

And then we shall be prepared to realise deeper relationships, more wonderful mysteries of love—to see with clearer eyes the heart of the Supreme. We cannot make relationships too spiritual. We cannot be too careful to see them in God and God in them. Think what it is to see a relationship in God, to see it existing there in His life, as His thought, long, long before we were born, long before we had an idea that we were intended to realise it. What a new light on old relationships—brother and brother, brother and sister, father and child, husband and wife, all thoughts of God, all being gradually entered into, appropriated, realised, understood, worked out by us. They seem so common and natural, and yet they are intensely awful and sacred and mysterious. And then think what it is to see God in them—to see One from whom all family life flows, penetrating those whom we have never properly learnt to love and those whom we love as much as we can. God in them—all that is good and attractive—not their own, but God's. The eyes which seem to be {85} contemplating something which we cannot see, the face which lights up at times with another than human light; the eyes, the face, a realisation and expression of that Being who is at once human and divine, God and man. Why, this is bringing heaven down to earth, this is a realisation in part of the holy city coming down from heaven. For as we think of them, above all as we pray for them, we are led beyond them, we forget our own selfish interests in them, we are brought out from the 'garden' life of individual souls into the 'city' corporate life of a great human society, a family, the Church of God. We should live, we should die for Christ and His Body—the Church—the fulness of His life, who is filling all in all. We must cease thinking and praying for ourselves and for others, as though we were alone. We are all part of one great society. Around us—nay, in us—are others, some whom we can see, some who in the course of development have burst the bonds of space and time and matter, all one, one, for ever one. We all have one common Lord, one common hope, one common life, one common enemy, one common Saviour, who is working through us, in us, in those whom we least understand, in those in whom we should least expect it, in those who are almost repulsive to us, in all—working out one big purpose through the ages, the purpose of the Eternal.

Remember me at my ordination as priest, please. Remember me, for I need it so much, you do not know how much. It is such an important time, and I cannot understand or enter into its significance, as I long to do. Discipline, discipline, discipline, {86} self-discipline—obedience to 'orders.' Oh! how I long to have the power to realise these! Pray for me that I may; that you may, pray also. Be very strict with yourself. Compel yourself to obey rules. You are hurting so many besides yourself when you are not strict with yourself. For we are 'one body.' You are injuring those whom you like best, for you have less power over them, when you have less power over yourself—less power to influence, to pray, to thank for them.

Do remember how marvellously sacred a schoolmaster's work is: it is not enough to be able to play games—how I sometimes wish I could!—it is not enough to be able to teach Latin and Greek: a schoolmaster should be so much more. He represents the authority of God. He can be so much, he may be so little to boys. We can never enter into a boy's life, into his deepest thoughts, his 'long, long thoughts,' unless we too become little children, unless we become young and fresh and simple—and all young life comes from Him, who makes all the little children who ever come into this big world. Let us enter into His life. Do not become a schoolmaster simply to fill up time, to have something to do.



To W. A. B.

Christ's College, Cambridge: November 20, 1902.

. . . I am glad that you like your school, that you like your boys. . . . Think of the weak chaps, those who are 'out of the way,' those who are not naturally {87} attractive, those who positively repel you. They often most need your sympathy, your prayers.

And now about your ordination. Do you know I am doubtful whether it would be a good thing for you to be ordained to a school chaplaincy. I am almost more than doubtful. You would, I suppose, have no parish work, nor anything to do with poor folk. Your work would be reading prayers, and preaching about three times a year, I suppose. You would scarcely care to be a curate in a country or poor town parish later on, would you, if you began thus? But, after all, I must not, I dare not, advise you. I can only point you to the Being who alone can advise us. The great thing is to renounce all plans, all thoughts of self, to give up all we are and expect to be, to come into His presence, and then to ask His advice. Or rather we must come to Him like little helpless children and ask Him to help us to renounce planning and arranging with self as goal—to beg Him to give us strength to give up all.

The great thing is to get the life where we shall develop best all our powers—viz. the life in which we shall have most opportunities of sacrifice. Can you get, can you use, opportunities of self-sacrifice in your school life? Can you get fuller and better elsewhere? . . . Of course, if you find that you have more influence over boys than you would be likely to have over other folk, that might alter the case. Have you found that you can influence them more for good than you would be likely to influence others?

Our one work in life must be to advance God's glory, God's kingdom. The time is short. The night {88} soon comes. The great problem is how to do most in that short time; how we ourselves can best lose ourselves in the little time that we have for losing ourselves. 'He that loseth himself, findeth himself.'



To D. D. R.

14 St. Margaret's Road, St. Leonards; January 10, 1893.

I have been thinking to-day of that strange statement 'I no longer call you slaves . . . but I have called you friends.' To understand any one you must be their friend: you are able then to judge their life from the inside, to see why and how they do what they do; all their actions which seemed disconnected and purposeless before are seen to be part of a plan, to have an end, a goal. We cannot understand the riddle of life, the necessity of all the details in the great scheme of redemption, the reason for certain means of grace, the real significance of the hope of glory, while we are slaves. The whole appears so purposeless, such waste of energy, such unintelligible and irrational self-sacrifice. Why must the Christ suffer? Why could not sin be overcome in a less costly way? Why is the victory of the Christ so incomplete? Why do some, who are better than we, take so little interest in the eternal? We cannot answer these and a thousand other questions while we are slaves. All is a hopeless enigma, a play without a plot, a novel with no plan. But become a friend of a man and all is changed. Each act in his life, each thought in his life, each word from his lips—they have not ceased to be a problem, {89} they are ten thousandfold more wonderful than they ever were before: they are still a problem; but there is, there must be, we feel, a purpose running through the whole. We have but one object—to understand him more, to see what divine ideal he is trying to work out in all the details of his common life. Each detail is important; each thought, however wayward, must be recognised and understood. All are seen in the clear, dry light of eternity; each is seen in something like its right proportion. We feel that his life is our life—nay, more interesting than our own miserable life—that if we are ever to know ourselves we must know him first. So, too, become a friend of Him who alone is, and all is changed. Gradually, perhaps painfully, yet surely, as we become like very little children, the meaning of the whole dawns upon us. We see it all: we see that it could not be otherwise: we cannot say why, but we are quite sure that we see it—at least, we see a little way, and where the light ends and it begins to get dark, we feel that it is all right beyond—that He who is with us in the light will be with us in the darkness. We are no longer slaves, doing His will because we must. We are friends, and we cannot help taking deep interest in all that He does. His acts, His thoughts, His words, they are still a problem—we cannot make them all out. But they are the same kind of problem as a friend is—a strange exquisite torture. We do not know what the whole of his life means; he can do things which we cannot, and which we rejoice to know that we can never do. We only see one side of him ever, and the rest is only known to God. {90} And yet we do know part of his life, and we are content to know no more; what we know is good, and what we do not know or understand must also be good. We judge from what we see what that must be which we cannot see. We do not wish it otherwise. We feel that it would be impious to try and understand him fully, for is he not connected with God Himself? So we see one side of the life of the Eternal; but we are friends; we do not wish it otherwise. We cannot understand Him—we never can. And yet 'I have called you friends.' His main purposes we see: the plan by which He realises them we see in part. And as we know Him better, we shall be able to track His footsteps even where we did not expect to find Him. We shall learn that His methods are simpler and better than ours, that His thoughts are surer, deeper, higher than all our schemes and plans. I am constantly finding that ordinances, customs, beliefs, which I used to despise as strange, antiquated, or useless, are yet the very ones which I need, that my fathers knew better than I my needs, that above all God Himself had provided institutions and customs, and had waited until I was old enough to learn their use and to bless Him as I used them. So, as we know a man better, we feel that we must pray for him and his the more. As we become the friends of the Word, we feel we must pray that His will may be done ever more and more—His purposes realised by us and ours. Let us then not begin by criticising the world and God; let us first be the friends of God, and then in the light of undying friendship and prayer begin to criticise. {91} We must be the friend of a man before we understand his life; we must be the friends of Jesus Christ before we understand His life now upon earth.

I used to skate: I don't now. I obey herein one of the great maxims of my life: 'If you want to get a thing well done, don't do it yourself.' I consider that K——, in this as in other similar pursuits, performs the ancient and 'sacred duty of delegation.' I have no doubt that he does it admirably. Why must people try what they can't do well? Why not leave it to those who like it and can do it well? The wretched public-school-boy conception of dull uniformity is an abomination to me! If K—— does the walking, you do the thinking; G—— does the dandy, M—— the grumbling, S—— the jack-in-the-box, G—— the running, M—— the philosopher, and D—— the little vulgar boy—allow me to do what after all is the hardest of all tasks, 'to do nothing gracefully.' (I am afraid that I begin by trying 'to do nothing—gracefully,' but end by 'doing nothing gracefully.' You see the difference!) I believe in division of labour—let each man do what he is made to do best—and those who feel their vocation to be nothing but receiving the results of the labour of others—why, let them try to do it with the best grace they can! Forgive me if such be my case.



To J. L. D.

Christ's College, Cambridge: May 15, 1893.

I think you are right in believing in the intense worth of sympathy. But 'sympathy' is the Greek {92} as 'compassion' is the Latin form of 'suffering together with.' He who has suffered most has perhaps the most power to sympathise; not simply to pity or console, but to go right out of self and to get right into another, to see life with his eyes, to feel as he feels. If, then, you find many of those among whom your lot is cast almost incapable of sympathy, may it not be that they have not yet learned the meaning of suffering? They may not have had so many opportunities of suffering as you, or, if they have had as many, they may not have found any one to interpret to them what it all meant. Thank Him from whom all sympathy comes if you have known anything of the sufferings of life, anything of the worries and disappointments and delays and unsatisfied ambitions which so many have; if you have known these—known their inner meaning, and have been led out and beyond your own into that wider life of suffering, and have learned what it is to fill up in your turn ta husteremata ton thlipseon tou Christou.

[Transcriber's note: The above Greek phrase was transliterated as follows: ta—tau, alpha; husteremata—(rough breathing mark) upsilon, sigma, tau, epsilon, rho, eta, mu, alpha, tau, alpha; ton—tau, omega, nu; thlipseon—theta, lambda, iota, psi, epsilon, omega, nu; tou—tau, omicron, upsilon; Christou—Chi, rho, iota, sigma, tau, omicron, upsilon]

One hates to see others whose centre is self. Their whole life looks so mean and low. Life over, the Ego alone left; and what a poor, wretched, snivelling creature after all—this what we pampered, this what we thrust forward for others to admire and flatter! If we were not in much the same case, we might be able to view it in others with somewhat different eyes. And yet do you know that, as a matter of fact, our Ego is dead—self is not—and the devil's greatest lie is to make us believe in this self? For do not you and I belong to One stronger than {93} self—One whose own self may live in us—does live in us—whether we recognise the fact or not? We died years ago to self when He claimed us for Himself, and we rose again to a selfless life in Him: zo de ouketi ego, ze de en emoi Christos.

[Transcriber's note: The above Greek phrase was transliterated as follows: zo—zeta, omega; de—delta, epsilon; ouketi—omicron, upsilon, kappa, epsilon, tau, iota; ego—epsilon, gamma, omega; ze—zeta, eta; de—delta, epsilon; en—epsilon, nu; emoi—epsilon, mu, omicron, iota; Christos—Chi, rho, iota, sigma, tau, omicron, final sigma]

We act a lie whenever we make our Ego instead of His Ego the centre. If He is our centre and our goal, then be sure our Ego will begin to live, because it is 'grounded' and rooted in His. Any trouble and anxiety that leads you out of self to the Infinite Ego, that makes you feel helpless and lonely and in need of a Human Helper and a Human Comforter, thank God for it. He is teaching you to cast yourself upon One who is perfectly human because perfectly divine. He is teaching you that you are not your own; that long, long ago yourself died: ei oun sunegerthete to Christo, ta ano zeteite.

[Transcriber's note: The above Greek phrase was transliterated as follows: ei—epsilon, iota; oun—omicron, upsilon, nu; sunegerthete—sigma, upsilon, nu, eta, gamma, epsilon, rho, theta, eta, tau, epsilon; to—tau, omega; Christo—chi, rho, iota, sigma, tau, omega; ta—tau, alpha; ano—alpha, nu, omega; zeteite—zeta, eta, tau, epsilon, iota, tau, epsilon]

Thus we are led to understand something of the meaning of our Christian names—to see that they are living pledges to us, whatever we do, wherever we go—that Christ's name is called upon us—that when tiny little children we were brought home to the Great Ego in whom alone our Ego can ever find satisfaction—to feel that we are His and He is ours.



To J. L. D.

Christ's College, Cambridge: October 9, 1893.

The step which you contemplate taking is one with far-reaching issues—reaching away through time and beyond it. I advise you to try and gain a general idea of the meaning of the first half of St. Paul's {94} second letter to the Corinthian Church—to try and enter into its general spirit. Few things will humble you more: you will see something of the unspeakable dignity of the office of him who represents God to his fellow-men, and of the tremendous enthusiasm and love which a man must have if he would be the minister that St. Paul would have him be. I do not know what St. Paul means when he says that we are ambassadors on behalf of Christ: but the more I think of what the words seem to mean, the more I am startled at the awful responsibility that we have laid upon us. To represent Christ, to treat with men, to attempt to arrange—if one may so speak—terms, to use all our powers in performing the work of the embassy—this at least is involved in the words. What strikes me so much in the letter is the manner in which St. Paul literally loves the Church; how he longs to communicate his own enthusiasm to it; how he would die, almost does die, himself to bring life to them. All his hopes are bound up with theirs—his salvation with their salvation. He seems to 'fail from out his blood, and grow incorporate' into them. We are called to the same office as St. Paul, we have the same power working in us as he had working in him: we too shall have success in so far as we love—as we identify ourselves with those whom God has given us to take care of. The more we are disciplined and yet enthusiastic, the more capable shall we be of love—of getting out of self—of working our way into others—of representing the Christ to them—of understanding and making allowances for them—of seeing them in the ideal, the only real, light in {95} which God sees them—seeing them in the Christ, in whom we live—mind that, with all your intellectual training, you don't forget the other. Now is the time to learn, to force yourself to learn, to pray—to pray not for a few minutes at a time, but to pray for an hour at a time—to get alone with yourself—to get alone with your Maker. We shall not have to talk so much to others if we pray more for them. We talk and we do not influence, or we influence only for a time, because our lives are not more prayer-full.



To J. L. D.

Aldeburgh House, Blackheath, S.E.: December 16, 1893.

I cannot help thinking of you both at this time. It means so much to you both—more than either of you dreams that it means. The issues of your Ordination day are very far reaching indeed. They stretch away and beyond this world in which we now are. The rush of school work and of preparation for examination has probably not left you as much time as you could have wished for thinking over what it all means. I hope you will have more time after the service is over. But you may be comforted in the thought that the last few years have been a definite preparation for your life-work. Though you must regret, as you never regretted before, misuse of time and powers in the past, yet you have had an education which has in some degree prepared you for this time, an education for which you may thank our common Master. But this {96} thought by itself would be but a small comfort. For you must feel, if you are the man I take you for, how unworthy you are to be what you are called to be. Now there are two ways of dealing with this feeling. You may say, 'I am not called to be an absolute saint; but I will try to reach a fairly high standard;' or you may say, 'Yes, I am called to be an absolute saint. I will not lower my ideal. I will comfort myself with that single word "called." If He has called me, He will do in me and for me what He wills.' This second way is the true way of dealing with feelings of unworthiness and unfitness. You and I are utterly unfit. But we are both called—called from our mother's womb—called to be saints and to be ministers. He who called us will help us. With man the call seems quixotic, impossible; with Him all things are possible. At times when the call is loudest we can but reply, 'Ah! Lord, I am but a little child.' We are intensely conscious of feebleness and, what is worse, of treachery and meanness within; we half love what we are called upon to denounce; we play with the sin we are to teach men to abhor. Yet the call is sure, is definite, is perpetual, and again and again you will in all probability find what a help it is to look back to that day in which the call took formal shape. You have that as a definite fact to rest upon, to reprove, to encourage, to urge to renewed effort, to force you to be true and energetic.

One thing you must learn to do. Whatever you leave undone you must not leave this undone. Your work will be stunted and half developed unless you {97} attend to it. You must force yourself to be alone and to pray. Do make a point of this. You may be eloquent and attractive in your life, but your real effectiveness depends on your communion with the eternal world. You will easily find excuses. Work is so pressing, and work is necessary. Other engagements take time. You are tired. You want to go to bed. You go to bed late and want to get up late. So simple prayer and devotion are crowded out. And yet, T——, the necessity is paramount, is inexorable. If you and I are ever to be of any good, if we are to be a blessing, not a curse, to those with whom we are connected, we must enter into ourselves, we must be alone with the only source of unselfishness. If we are of use to others, it will chiefly be because we are simple, pure, unselfish. If we are to be simple, pure, unselfish, it will not be by reading books or talking or working primarily, it will be by coming in continual contact with the ground of simplicity, purity, selfishness. Heaven is the possibility of fresh acts of self-sacrifice, of a fuller life of unselfishness. You are a man and a minister in so far as you are unselfish. You cannot learn unselfishness save from the one Source. Definite habits of real devotion—these we must make and keep to and renew and increase. Then we shall gradually find that we are less dependent on self—that even in the busiest scenes we dare not act on our own responsibility—that, be the act ever so small and trifling, when we are in difficulty we shall naturally, inevitably, spontaneously turn to that place whence help alone can come. But it is a wonderful help again and again to feel that we have been {98} alone with Him, that we are not working on our own responsibility, that He is the 'Living Will' that rises and flows 'through our deeds and makes them pure.'



To D. D. R.

8 Alexandra Gardens, Ventnor: Jan. 2, 1894.

While holding as firmly and unreservedly to the belief that a revelation is a possibility that has actually been realised, I am becoming more aware of the partial and limited view which any single individual can have of the significance of such a revelation; and with this conviction comes a desire not to hinder by any words or prejudices of mine the education of one to whom I owe more than I at present know. Yet, as I believe that no individual life is beyond the wise ordering of a Divine economy, I am sure that he must have lessons to learn from me as well as I to learn from him. Hence I dare not refrain from suggesting to him—often in answer to questions that he puts to me—sides of truth which, as I believe, I have been allowed to apprehend. The knowledge of truth (in however small a degree) is a trust that we hold for the sake of others. What I fear for him and for you—for you even more than for him—is not that you will form wrong opinions on religious or ethical subjects, but that you will lack that moral earnestness that forces a man, whether he will or not, to look the facts of life in the face, that deadly earnestness that refuses to allow us to contemplate creeds as works of art, but forces us to ask whether these things be so. Life as a whole must be faced. What has induced men to {99} believe this and that tenet? Why have men craved for a knowledge of an unseen Being? Why have systems of priestcraft arisen? How is it that those who most revolt against such systems are slaves to other systems bearing different names, but in substance the same? Is there a Deliverer? Is there a unity beneath all this confusion? Can man know such a unity if there be one? Can such a unity be revealed? Has it been revealed? Why do men think it has been revealed if it has not? While I am slow to force upon those whom I most respect and love lessons which I believe that I have slowly learnt in a school in which perhaps they have not been, and never will be, educated, yet I am sure that I cannot be wrong in praying for them and in urging them to be increasingly earnest in the search for and the practice of truth. You are a man in so far as you live. You live in so far as you are self-sacrificing. You are self-sacrificing in so far as you unswervingly practise the truth you know and follow after that which you do not yet apprehend. And I am sure, if there be a unity beneath our lives, if there be One who is educating us when we are most wayward, we shall eventually be led by, it may be, very different paths to a single goal. Meanwhile each failure to be earnest, each relapse into sentimentality, unmanliness, morbidness, despair, unreality, laziness, passiveness, may itself be a discipline, making us utterly mistrust ourselves, whether at our worst or at our best, and forcing us to inquire whether there be any help elsewhere, any power that can sweep through our lives and force us to be human.

For this reason I would impress on you the {100} necessity of trying to think out your position, of asking yourself how you may be most human and best serve God (if, indeed, you believe that this is possible) and your generation. There are around you social forces making for good. Ought you to be—nay, can you be—isolated? Does isolation give greater strength? Does it enable you to do more or to be better? These questions are not merely suggested by me. They have already suggested themselves in one form or another to you. I am frightened of their not receiving the attention they merit.



To T. H. M.

8 Alexandra Gardens, Ventnor: January 3, 1894.

The fact that you have not all the sympathy and manly help and advice that you could wish for from those around you will, I trust, force you to depend with simpler confidence upon the unchanging Ground of all human sympathy. You will, I hope, take all these experiences without grumbling as a real and necessary stage in your education; remembering that if you find yourself repining at the distressful circumstances in which you are placed, you may be dishonouring Him who has placed you where you are. I do not, of course, mean that such reflection will make you condone and excuse the lukewarmness of others, but you will grasp the truth that God uses even the sin of this world as an instrument in the education of His people, and that you yourself may have your character formed partly through the faults of others, for whom you are still bound to pray. {101} This great Christmas festival that is past must be a power to us in the year that is coming on. We must enter into and be penetrated by the Life that has been manifested. For it is life that you and I need. Our own puny individualistic life of morbid self-consciousness and sensibility must be transformed by the fuller Life in which all may have a share; and thus we shall come to think less of ourselves, our successes, our failures, what others think about us and what others ought to think about us—we shall forget all this because we shall share in the Universal Life, which penetrates through all and which makes men forget themselves and their ills, and be pure, simple, healthy, unselfish. And this life has been realised and men have seen it, and it is still with us to-day. In so far as we share in it we shall become natural, unaffected, human. Nay, more. Because the life there manifested is divine as well as human, we shall realise also with fuller force what it is to be a child of a Father who is in heaven. It is life, not a system, that we need. It is life which is given us when we are adopted as sons; it is life that we receive when the Source of all life gives us Himself to feed upon; it is life that Christ bestows upon us when we gradually realise our position as members of a society in which no man can live for himself alone. Life is life in so far as it is unselfish. May He who has called us and given to us all our privileges teach us to live out that which we know and believe!



{102}

To F. S. H.

Cambridge: August 4, 1895.

Life will not be the same without having you up here. I am very dependent upon others, and I soon begin to be downcast if I have not some one to help or to be helped by. But happily He who takes away is the same as He who gives, and His great heart of affection understands our manifold and seemingly contradictory needs. Life would be intolerable if we had no one who knew us perfectly, not simply the outside part of our life, but that inside and apparently incommunicable part. Those who are least able to express themselves in words, or who (if they did express themselves) fear that they would be misunderstood, find in Him an unspeakable consolation. But I must not look at things from the individualistic standpoint. No problem can ever be solved until we have in some measure realised that the Life which flows through us is larger than our own individual life. We get morbid, and our reason becomes warped, when we think of our own future alone. Every obstacle in our path, every interruption to the course which we have planned for ourselves, every rough discipline, tells us that our life and future are not our own, that they are intimately connected with a larger life, a greater future. I have been thinking of those words—so like Jesus Christ to have uttered them—me merimnesete. We are always anxious about a set of circumstances which will soon be upon us—engagements which we tremble to meet. Jesus Christ tells us, me merimnesete. I believe that work in the {103} present world would be far more free and effective if we would obey the command. We cannot enter into life as it comes, because we are living in an imaginary future. The man of God lives in the present; he leaves the future to God, me merimnesete. If God has conducted us so far, He will not leave us. It is easy to talk, hard to act. I think we gain the power to act, we gain the calm peace of God, by compelling ourselves to remain at certain times in His presence. Habits of prayer are slowly formed, but when formed are hard to break. Talking may be a great snare when it takes the place of prayer—and how easily it does! It is easier to talk with a man than to pray for him—in many cases.

[Transcriber's note: The Greek phrases in the above paragraph were transliterated as follows: me—mu, eta; merimnesete—mu, epsilon, rho, iota, mu, nu, eta, sigma, eta, tau, epsilon]



To F. S. H.

Clovelly: September 11, 1895.

I am reading 'The Newcomes': have you ever read it? I find it hard to appreciate Thackeray as much as some people do. Occasionally he says some very true things and shows that he is acquainted with human nature in its brighter and darker aspects. But, on the whole, the story of marriage and giving in marriage—selling your daughter for money or a title—the picture of young men who sow their wild oats and then repent and marry innocent ladies and live virtuously and die in the odour of sanctity—on the whole the story does not seem to correspond to the ideals which haunt me, even though I do not act up to them. Surely life is something utterly different from all this. Surely somewhere there is a picture of {104} human life, somewhere in the mind of God Himself, where the young man grows up without any harvest of wild oats, with clear and unselfish ideals, with a longing to make the world purer and diviner than he found it, a picture which is in some measure realised around us to-day. May God deliver us not only from vicious but from selfish thoughts! I believe Thackeray saw something of that picture, but he didn't draw it with the colours I could have wished. There is a solemn text in Ezekiel, which came in the lesson lately, 'The righteousness of the righteous shall not deliver him in the day of his transgression.' Past religious experiences are of little value without present righteousness.



To his cousin G. F.

Clovelly, N. Devon: September 12, 1895.

I am in perhaps the quaintest and one of the loveliest villages in England, just doing nothing, and enjoying the simple life around me. You would like this village, with its one steep, narrow, picturesque street, the great sea far down below, the little stone pier jutting out and helping to form a small harbour. Then on either side of the village are woods reaching down to the cliffs—beautiful woods, where oaks, and in places heather, are glad to grow. St. Paul says in the lesson to-day that the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal. And one feels how true are his words—how the trees, woods, flowers fade and die; how the old sea wears slowly away the cliffs; how men and {105} their dwellings pass away; how all these things which are seen are temporal; and yet the beauty, the love, the joy, the purity, are more permanent than the particular manifestations of them are. The beauty which is manifested in the country around is eternal. The life which is seen in man has a future beyond this world.

As we enter in behind the veil, as we see that life and love which are expressing themselves in objects around us, we are already in the eternal, in that which endures.

It is not, as we are constantly thinking, the things that are present which are temporal, and the things that are future which are eternal. No; the things which are present have an eternal side to them—the unseen side.

The man who is a slave to the seen has least of the eternal about him: the man who despises not the seen, but who through the seen rises to the unseen, is partaking of eternal life. . . .



To F. S. H.

Cambridge: October 23, 1895.

Let me congratulate you on the way you ran against Yale.[1] I was delighted to read of your 'romping' home!! . . . . It seems to me that every unfulfilled longing is no accidental part of life. The longing, in so far as it is genuinely human, is derived from Him in whose image man is made. When it is hard to see why it is not gratified, yet we {106} may confidently believe that this is part of our training. Is it not a noble work to enter into and, in some measure, bear the burdens of other men's lives, even if they have only imperfect sympathy with ours? May we not sometimes even learn more in this way—or at least learn different lessons—than if they were so similar to ourselves that they could at once understand us? I am afraid that you have a hard struggle before you. You must take care not to act upon first impressions, or impulse—not even if those impressions are favourable . . . your best 'pearls' must be used carefully.

[1] In the international athletic sports in U.S.A.



To F. S. H. on his going to a curacy in Liverpool.

Cambridge: October 18, 1896.

In some respects I am glad to hear of your change of plans. I think you will be more in your element working in a poor part of a large town. . . . Our dean has just been preaching on the words 'One soweth, and another reapeth.' It is a help to realise the continuity of work. We enter into the work of many a man who has passed away, and who, while he worked, often despaired and thought that he was achieving nothing. No work is lost. The obscure and petty—these are relative terms. We use them, but we are told on the best authority that there is nothing secret which shall not be made manifest. The consciousness of the continuity and perpetuity of work quiets and calms us; we need not hurry over anything. When we have left off sowing, others will reap. God give us grace to work, for the night {107} cometh when no man can work. I am so sorry that I have not been able to come up and see you. But we are working in the same field, though it is too large across to see one another!



To C. T. W.

St. Moritz: February 1898.

Two new toboggan runs have been opened: one is a Canadian run on soft snow without turns, short and sweet; the other is part of the Crista run, an ice run, which I suppose is quite the finest in the world, with splendid corners. When it is all made it will be about a mile in length. . . . In a noisy salon it is difficult to collect my scattered thoughts. Music and other atrocities are in full swing; and as I seldom use my brain now, the works are rusty. I wish you could see this country in winter. . . . A male rival of The Brook has appeared. He is impressed with the dust and dampness of the atmosphere—takes out trays to toboggan on into Italy—sprinkles water on his bedroom floor, because he considers a damp atmosphere conducive to sleep. So far we have not fallen out altogether with one another; some of us are on speaking terms. We only confidentially discuss whether so-and-so has come here for his mind. We have an archdeacon, a canon, a curate, two captains; one Plymouth-brother-like, who takes most gloomy views about the future of us, or most of us, including the parsons; the other very noisy, who attempted the Canadian toboggan run which is supposed to be safe for ladies and {108} children, and swears that he almost broke his neck. He had an upset and went head foremost into the snow, and, according to his own account, had to be dug out. If he had been a heavier man, I understand that he would have broken his neck. As two accidents have occurred there, it is not absolutely safe. . . . This place is a splendid pick-me-up. I am a reformed character—go to bed between 6 and 10.30 P.M. I was detected last night cheating at cards. But reformation to be effective requires time. Give up, I say, one bad habit at a time, and then tackle the next. I have given up early rising as being the most patent of my evil practices.



To J. K.

Christ's College, Cambridge: August 19, 1898.

. . . . I am sure that we have need to learn not only in the school of health but also in the school of sickness. These breaks in life, and the sense of helplessness and weakness which attend them, are not simply periods to be 'got over'—to be made the best of till we can 'start again'—but they have a meaning which we can find, if we only look with the eye of faith. It is strange how, although God sees the whole way in which we ought to go, He leaves us in comparative darkness. We need, I am sure, revelation. 'Lord, open the young man's eyes, that he may see.' We shall take the wrong turning if we trust to our ordinary eyes; we shall find the path if we have the eye of faith to see what God is revealing. . . . And now at this time I need your prayers. I have—and {109} this, I need hardly say, is private—an invitation from the Bishop of —— to come and lecture to theological students, whom he hopes to gather round him. Of course the scheme is rather in the air so far. He has not yet got the men. But he has an attractive power, and he might on a smaller scale do some such work as Vaughan used to do for men who did not go to definite theological colleges. Will you pray for me that I may go if I ought, and not go if I ought not, please?

Our wills are ours, we know not how, Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.



To J. L. D.

Cliff Dale, Cromer: October 3, 1898.

I do not belong and I never have belonged to any of the societies or guilds which you mention. I am a member of a Church. For that reason I dare not join any party. In fact, I cannot understand what 'parties' have to do with a Church. The Church by its very existence is a witness against parties and divisions. It will take me more than a lifetime to learn what it is to be a member of a Church; and no one can learn the lesson while he persists in clinging to a party. He must be a member not of a part but of a whole. I therefore have no time to waste in joining a party.

I feel strongly that the various societies and guilds, based upon party life, are eating away the very life of the Church. But I am slow in condemning my neighbour for conscientiously joining any such {110} society. He may only be able to see one side of truth, and it is better—far better—that he should see that side than nothing at all.



To the mother of his godchild, Margaret Forbes.

April 12, 1899.

It is such a joy to me to be allowed to be her godparent, and I shall remember her often in my prayers. What a wonderful revelation she must be to you both—making the Heavenly Home a fuller reality than ever before! It is through earthly relationships that we realise the meaning of the unseen world. I like those lines of Faber:

All fathers learn their craft from Thee: All loves are shadows cast By the beautiful eternal hills Of Thine unbeginning past.



To his mother.

Rouxville, Orange Free State; July 8, 1899.

It is a strange and somewhat terrible study in religion—this Boer religion. It seems to have little or no connection with morality. Kruger seems to have amassed great wealth by doubtful means. A man comes to him and offers him, say, 8,000l. on condition that he may have the right to sell mineral waters. Mrs. Kruger comes in and counts the money; and if it is right, the concession is granted. Yet he is religious, very religious. A short time ago they wanted to fire shells into the low-lying clouds during a time {111} of drought. The clouds gather, but they will not break. Firing shells was found to have a good effect in bringing the rain. But Kruger stopped it because it was wrong to 'fire shells at the Almighty.' You would think that a little state like this might be an ideal one with its simple scattered population of farmers. But it is by no means so. Corruption and injustice are only too prevalent. At the start off they were unfortunate in their choice of President. The state was at war with the Basutos at the time when he was elected; and three months after he was made President he had to be deposed, because he was discovered selling arms to the Basutos.

The Dutch don't treat the natives as well as we do. Yet in some respects their laws are wise. A native may not live in the Free State without doing some definite work, unless he pays a tax of 5s. a month: this is, I think, a wise rule.

We had two very nice services last Sunday at the English church; I preach twice to-morrow.



To C. T. W.

Durban; July 1899.

I write to congratulate you most heartily on your First Class. . . . I believe you will find in a year's time that whatever your work may be, contact with others—the necessity of influencing and guiding them—will be a tremendous help to you in your own life. . . .

Good man! I am delighted to think that you may see the Bishop of Durham. Prophets' eyes are {112} needed out here to catch the glory which must be slowly—so slowly—gaining on the shade. There is so much materialism, so little refinement and spirituality.

I had a grand voyage: only three people rescued from drowning before I got on board, and two stowaways after we left Madeira, and two or three days of rough weather. I enjoyed it. . . .

I had afternoon tea, or rather coffee, with Uncle Paul. He is a strong, fine old man. He was sitting puffing away at his large pipe. It was after a long day's work in the secret Volksraad. He was tired. 'It is hard work,' he said, 'for the head.' The State attorney, a young Christ's man, explained to him that 'we were both at the same school in England.' Kruger was eloquent on the subject of the Petition. He told me that some of the 21,000 had died three years before they signed it, and some had signed it owing to a bottle of whisky. 'And I want you to let that be known in England' (I know anything said to you will circulate—by experience). He said, did the subtle old man, that he wanted to do what was right and fair irrespective of nationality.

This Transvaal question is complicated. I thought it easy at first. But now I can see no moral grounds of any sort for a war with the Boers, in spite of their iniquities. There is a great deal to be said on their side, and much iniquity concealed under such specious phrases as 'Imperialism,' 'Supremacy of Great Britain in South Africa.' I cannot see that we have a real cause for war, but it is a big question with many sides. If England goes to war and wins, she {113} will have her work cut out. 'Can she afford,' said the Attorney of the Transvaal to me, 'to have a second Ireland at the distance of some 5,000 or 6,000 miles from home? What if she had war in India?



To W. A. B.

Lucknow Lodge, Berea, Durban: August 22, 1899.

I thank my God in my prayers on your behalf for His goodness in granting you His best gift—a human soul to love and to inspire. Together you will be able to know and love Him better than either of you could alone. You cannot make your love too sacred; as you know God you will learn to know one another.

We are inclined to think that we know all that love means. The truth is, we are only beginners. Thank God that we are in the school, although only in one of the lowest forms. He will teach us, as years go by, to sanctify ourselves for the sake of another. We have not learned to love until we are living the highest possible life, in order that the object of our affection may become a saint. God is giving you a present, the value of which you see in part now, you will realise fully hereafter. You must wrestle with God for her and for yourself. If you are true to the highest, both of you will rise together and see God. If you are not, she may not be able to mount alone.

I am filled with joy and hope as I think of you both. I believe that you will live for God more completely now than ever before, and that you will be a fuller blessing to your people. You have my prayers. {114} I want you to make your ideals higher and higher. Then, when you have gained one height, you will find that what you took for the summit from the plain was not really so: there were further peaks beyond.

It is the beginning of an endless life. If God Himself be the centre of all, the nearer we are to Him, the nearer we are to one another. I am glad that your wife is one who shares in your ideals, who lives for the highest. What a life in store for you here! And there—

Before the judgment seat, Though changed and glorified each face, Not unremembered you will meet For endless ages to embrace.

You will be nearer the centre then, and nearer to one another.

May God Himself bless you, dear old fellow! Forgive this poor attempt at a letter. I share in your joy, although I am not actually with you. I never remember any wedding outside my own family which has given me greater pleasure. It was good of you to ask me to be present—very good.

B——, I am glad. You must thank God and ask Him to tell you what it all means, and for her sake live as good a life as you possibly can.

With best love I am your friend,

FORBES.



To a Friend after hearing of his intended ordination.

Durban: August 1899.

Your ordination will be like my own over again. It is unutterably good of God . . . to put it into {115} your heart to live the life which I had prayed might be yours. Meizoteran touton ouk charin, hina akouo ta ema tekna en te aletheia peripatounta . . .

[Transcriber's note: The Greek phrases in the above paragraph were transliterated as follows: Meizoteran—Mu, epsilon, iota, zeta, omicron, tau, epsilon, rho, alpha, nu; touton—tau, omicron, upsilon, tau, omega, nu; ouk—omicron, upsilon, kappa; charin—chi, alpha, rho, iota, nu; hina—(rough breathing mark) iota, nu, alpha; akouo—alpha, kappa, omicron, upsilon, omega; ta—tau, alpha; ema—epsilon, mu, alpha; tekna—tau, epsilon, kappa, nu, alpha; en—epsilon, nu; te—tau, eta; aletheia—alpha, lambda, eta, theta, epsilon, iota, alpha; peripatounta—pi, epsilon, rho, iota, pi, alpha, tau, omicron, upsilon, nu, tau, alpha]

. . . If your temptations are great it is because your nature is rich and noble; and when it is disciplined you will have tremendous power. I shall not be content until your every thought is led captive to 'the obedience of the Christ.' You are born to be a saint, and you will be wretched until you are one. You are not the kind of man who can do things by halves.

I think I have told you of my father's words spoken during his last illness: 'If I had a thousand lives, I would give them all—all to the ministry.' You will not regret your decision. If angels could envy, how they would envy us our splendid chance—to be able, in a world where everything unseen must be taken on sheer faith, in a world where the contest between the flesh and the spirit is being decided for the universe, not only to win the battle ourselves but also to win it for others! To help a brother up the mountain while you yourself are only just able to keep your foothold, to struggle through the mist together—that surely is better than to stand at the summit and beckon. You will have a hard time of it, I know; and I would like to make it smoother and to 'let you down' easier; but I am sure that God, who loves you even more than I do, and has absolute wisdom, will not tax you beyond your strength. . . . I'll pray for you, like the widow in the parable, and I have immense belief in prayer. . . . You remember what was said of Maurice, 'He {116} always impressed me as a man who was naturally weak in his will; but an iron will seemed to work through him.' That Will can work through you and transform you, but for God's sake don't trust to your own will. . . .

If you are ordained it will be because there is one who in St. Paul's words—ho aphorisas me ek koilias metros mou—was separating you from birth and educating you with a view to the Gospel of Christ. . . .

Tasks in hours of insight willed Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.[1]

[1] Matthew Arnold, Morality.

[Transcriber's note: The Greek phrases in the above paragraph were transliterated as follows: ho—(rough breathing mark) omicron; aphorisas—alpha, phi, omicron, rho, iota, sigma, alpha, final sigma; me—mu, epsilon; ek—epsilon, kappa; koilias—kappa, omicron, iota, lambda, iota, alpha, final sigma; metros—mu, eta, tau, rho, omicron, final sigma; mou—mu, omicron, upsilon]



To his mother.

Estcourt, Natal; August 18, 1899.

General Gordon came to Kokstad on his way to Basutoland. When he arrived he went to the Royal Hotel, ordered a room, threw open the window, and spent two hours in prayer and meditation. The next day was Sunday. He asked Mr. Adkin what was being done for 1,000 Cape Mounted Infantry then stationed there, and when he learnt that nothing was being done for their spiritual food, he burst into tears. On Monday morning the first telegram which he sent off to the Cape Government was a request that a chaplain should be appointed. Mr. Adkin was appointed and remained chaplain until the force was disbanded. General Gordon went on to Basutoland, and had wonderful power over the natives. He told them that no force would be brought against {117} them; he himself was without weapons. He was settling the country, when news came to him that the Cape Government was, contrary to stipulation, sending an armed force against them; so he left the country in twenty-four hours.

Cecil Rhodes was once at Kokstad. When he was near the place, he lay down on the hillside and exclaimed: 'Oh, how I wish they would let me alone—let me stay here!' However, he had to go down to be feted. He was listless, and bored by the banquet, until the present mayor began to attack him violently in his speech, and to complain about the Cape Government, and to express a desire that Natal would take them over. Then Rhodes woke up with a vengeance and gave them a great speech. Ixopo is where Rhodes started out in South Africa. His name still figures on the magistrates' books—fined 10l., for selling a gun to a native.



To his cousin, J. C. H; on the occasion of the death of his brother.

December 7, 1899.

You know, without my saying it, that you have my deep sympathy and prayers at this time. . . . We dare not and cannot sorrow as do others who have no certain hope. Our sorrow is of another kind. For I am quite sure that

In His vast world above, A world of broader love, God hath some grand employment for His son.[1]

{118} How real it all makes that other world, to have our own brothers there! It makes it in a deeper sense our home.

[1] Faber, The Old Labourer.



To the mother of his godchild, Margaret Forbes.

Dore House, St. Leonards: January 10, 1900.

I am so glad to feel that my little godchild will have real training. I don't know how far I received such a training myself at an early age . . . I came towards the end of a large family. The only permanent instruction which I can remember imparted to me by my nursery maid was a caution not to look behind me when I passed people in the street, enforced by the biblical precept, 'Remember Lot's wife.' I know what a fascination I had to look behind, accompanied by a terrible dread of the consequences.

I have always felt that Faber's 'God of my Childhood' describes the normal and true development of a child's life. I am sure that, although the gravity of sin should be early recognised, greater stress should be laid upon the Fatherhood and kindness of God. I was noticing to-day, when reading the second lesson, how Westcott and Hort have placed the clause in the Lord's Prayer which speaks of the Fatherhood of God in a line by itself as a heading to the whole prayer, putting a colon after the clause, and beginning the first petition with a capital letter. The prayer begins with 'Fatherhood' and ends with a reference to 'Sinfulness.' I think this fact is significant. We may not all be intended to come to {119} know religious truth in that order. But I think we are intended, when we do know it, to lay even more stress on the Fatherhood of God than on our own imperfections. It is a wonderful and terrible thing to watch the development of a human spirit. We can understand so little about any life, even when it is near and dear to us. But I am not sure that we cannot learn more about others than we can about ourselves. I never think it is profitable to study oneself too closely! I never could meditate with any profit on my sins. But there, I dare say, I differ from many others.