Chapter V: Two Appreciations (2)

. . . 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.