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Title: Letters to His Friends

Author: Forbes Robinson

Release Date: February 11, 2007 [EBook #20560]

Language: English

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[Frontispiece: Forbes Robinson]






LETTERS TO HIS FRIENDS


BY

FORBES ROBINSON


  LATE FELLOW OF CHRIST'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
  AND EXAMINING CHAPLAIN TO THE BISHOP OF SOUTHWELL



  EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTORY NOTICE
  BY HIS BROTHER CHARLES



SECOND EDITION



PRINTED FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION BY

SPOTTISWOODE & CO. LTD., LONDON. 1904




NOTE


This volume has been printed for private circulation at the request of
many of Forbes Robinson's personal friends.  The first edition having
been exhausted, a second has been prepared, in which are included six
additional letters (cf. pp. 151, 154, 164, 166, 167, 182).  Copies of
this volume will be supplied (price 2s. 6d. post free) to all who
desire to obtain them, on application to the Rev. Canon Charles H.
Robinson, Hill Brow, Woking.  The volume of College and Ordination
Addresses which will be published by Longmans in about two months' time
can be ordered through any bookseller.

_October_ 1904.




[Transcriber's note: The book contains a number of short Greek phrases,
all of which have been transliterated according to Project Gutenberg's
"Greek How-To".  A more detailed transliteration note follows each
paragraph or article where the Greek phrase occurs.]

[Transcriber's note: Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers
enclosed in curly braces, e.g. {99}.  They have been located where page
breaks occurred in the original book, in accordance with Project
Gutenberg's FAQ-V-99.  For its Index, a page number has been placed
only at the start of that section.  In the HTML version of this book,
page numbers are placed in the left margin.]




CONTENTS


INTRODUCTORY SKETCH

CHAPTER.                                            PAGE

   I. SCHOOLDAYS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   1
  II. LIFE AS AN UNDERGRADUATE AT CAMBRIDGE  . . . .  10
 III. WORK AT CAMBRIDGE  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  21
  IV. THE LAST FEW MONTHS  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  32
   V. TWO APPRECIATIONS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  36

LETTERS TO HIS FRIENDS   . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  54

APPENDIX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

INDEX  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199




ILLUSTRATIONS

Forbes Robinson . . . . . . . . . . Frontispiece

Forbes Robinson (1880)

Forbes Robinson (1887)




{1}

INTRODUCTORY SKETCH

CHAPTER I

SCHOOLDAYS

Forbes Robinson was born on November 13, 1867, in the vicarage of
Keynsham, a village in Somerset lying between Bristol and Bath.  He was
the eleventh child in a family of thirteen, of whom eight were sons and
five daughters.  His parents were both from the north of Ireland, and
his Christian name had been his mother's surname.  The motto attached
to his father's family crest was 'Non nobis solum sed toti mundo nati.'
Before he was three years old his father moved to Liverpool and became
incumbent of St. Augustine's, Everton.  He died before Forbes was
thirteen, but the memory of his holy life remained as an abiding
influence.  Thus he writes of him in 1903:

'The old memories form a kind of sacred history urging me onwards and
upwards.  I like to feel that I reap the prayers and thanksgivings of
my father, that God blesses the son of such a father.  The same work,
the same God, the same promises, the same hope, the same sure and
certain reward.  I thank God and take courage.'

{2} As a boy he was never robust and might even be regarded as
delicate.  After attending one or two private schools he was entered,
at the age of twelve, at Liverpool College, where five of his brothers
had been.  When his father died in February 1881, the house in
Liverpool was given up and Forbes was sent to Rossall.  He continued at
Rossall till he entered Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1887.

The photograph which is inserted on p. 4 was taken just before he went
to Rossall.  He was then a shy retiring boy, fonder of reading than of
athletic exercise.  One who was in the same house with him at Rossall,
and who is now vicar of a parish in Lancashire, writes:

'His life at Rossall was not an outwardly eventful one.  Not being
athletic, he lived rather apart from and above the rest of us in a
world of books.  The walls of his study used to be almost covered with
extracts, largely, I think, from the poets, copied on to scraps of
paper and pinned up all round, partly to be learnt by heart and partly,
I think, for companionship.  He was much older than the rest of us
whose years were the same as his.  His school life was a time of
retirement and preparation for the wider life among men at Cambridge.
Though my memory of him as a quiet studious member of the house, more
often alone than not, and quite happy to be alone so long as his books
were near him, is very distinct, I can recall almost nothing of the
nature of incident or about which one can write.'

The present headmaster of Marlborough, who was {3} also a contemporary
at Rossall, writes in a letter to the editor of this memoir:

'Your brother was a great recluse at Rossall, and I much doubt whether
you would get any great amount of information about him from
Rossallians.  I knew him because we were both interested in reading,
and I owed a good deal to his influence. . . .  You will find, I
believe, that his Cambridge days show him in a far clearer light than
his school days.  I know that when I saw him at Cambridge I realised
with pleasure that he was a welcomed visitor in the rooms of very
various types of undergraduates, whereas his circle at school had been
very limited, and most boys no doubt regarded him as quite "out of it."
This is of course to some extent the fault of the athletic standards of
our schools, but I also think that he himself developed a great deal
socially at Cambridge.'

A sketch of Forbes, by Dr. James, written for 'The Rossallian,' will be
found at the close of this chapter.  Dr. Tancock, who succeeded Dr.
James as headmaster of Rossall a year before Forbes left, writes:

'When I was appointed to Rossall in 1886, I found him a member of the
upper sixth form. . . .  He always gave me the impression of an
earnest-minded, hard-working boy, with a deep sense of duty.  It was
rather suggested to my mind sometimes, possibly erroneously, that as a
younger boy he had felt himself misunderstood, and a certain reserve
was the consequence, not perhaps unnaturally.  He was already much
interested in theological work. . . .  It {4} has been a great pleasure
to me in later years to hear of his excellent work at Christ's and the
strong influence he exerted over undergraduates.  It was quite the
natural result of the qualities I saw in him at school, provided once
his reserve could be broken.'

[Illustration: Forbes Robinson (1880)]

Though of Irish descent he only once visited Ireland.  This was during
his summer holidays in 1884, when he travelled round a good part of the
north and west coasts.  The only adventure of special interest was his
unintended voyage across the Bay of Donegal, which was nearly attended
with fatal consequences.  He and his brother, the editor of this
memoir, started in a small open sailing boat from the harbour of
Killybegs, intending to return within a few minutes; but no sooner had
they got outside the harbour than they were caught in a squall, which
rapidly developed into a gale, and made it impossible to turn the boat
or head it for the shore, owing to the immediate risk of swamping.  The
only means of securing momentary safety was to head the boat out into
the Atlantic, but as the nearest land in this direction was the coast
of America, the prospect was far from cheerful.  Eventually the boat
was turned a few points further south, in the direction of land which
could not be seen, but which was known to lie about fifteen miles away
on the other side of the Bay of Donegal.  After having been nearly
swamped many times, and running with bare poles, owing to the violence
of the gale, the boat arrived at length at Bundoran.  As this place was
distant some sixty miles from Killybegs, {5} it seemed wearisome to
return by land, and a return by sea was out of the question.
Accordingly, Forbes and the writer, drenched to the skin and without a
vestige of baggage, started forthwith on a walking tour along the west
coast of Ireland, arriving at Connemara in the course of the following
week.  Forbes's dislike of sea voyages in after years may in part be
traced to this experience.  During the greater part of the voyage
across Donegal Bay he was helpless from sea-sickness; his companion was
busily occupied in baling out the water to prevent the boat from
sinking.

The letters which Forbes wrote from school to members of his family are
a curious mixture of humour and religion.  It was his keen sense of
humour which preserved him from becoming morbid.  It was this same
sense of humour which helped to attract to him at the University men on
whom he eventually exercised a strong religious influence, but whom
religious conversation would have inevitably repelled.

In two letters written to one of his sisters from Rossall in 1886, the
following sentences occur.  They show that he found time while at
school for a considerable amount of reading which was not connected
with his school work:

'You ask me to tell you what books I have been reading.  Among others,
Longfellow's "Hiawatha" and "Evangeline," both exquisite; continually
the "In Memoriam," "Idylls of the King"; some of Buchanan, which I
scarcely recommend; M. Arnold, which I do most heartily recommend; and
Walt Whitman, the {6} great poet of democracy; "Confessions of an
English Opium Eater," by De Quincey, good in its way; G. Eliot and Mrs.
Browning, &c., &c.  Perhaps you would like some of those.  I read Chas.
Kingsley's "Andromeda"--it is really a splendid rhythmical piece of
hexameter--and some of his Life.  I rather like pieces of his poetry,
and the one you sent me I liked.

'My only birthday advice is: Read more Longfellow.  If you have any
writers, send me word, though I am sorry to say I can appreciate but
few. . . .'

Another letter, written the same year, is entirely composed of
selections from Tennyson's 'Princess,' which, he says, 'I have just
read through.'  He ends, 'Mind you send me gleanings of Milton if you
have time.'  In another, 'I have been reading a fair amount of Carlyle
at present, as we had an essay on "The influence of individuals on
great movements of religion, politics, and thought," for which I read
especially Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero Worship," and Emerson's
"Representative Men," and for which, I am glad to say, I not only got
full marks, but the highest maximum possible.  Have read Tennyson's
"Queen Mary."  Am reading "Harold."  I liked the first very much, but
the latter a great deal more.  The scene where Harold debates about
telling a lie or the truth is very fine. . . .'  The rest of the letter
is composed of quotations from 'Harold.'  In other letters he says,
'Get Emerson's "Essays" for me.'  'I send you "Aurora Leigh." . . .'

He left Rossall in the summer of 1887, when he {7} was nearly twenty,
and entered Christ's College, Cambridge, in the following October.  His
brother Armitage, now Dean of Westminster, was then fellow and dean of
Christ's College, and Forbes occupied the attic rooms over his.


The following notice by Dr. James, now headmaster of Rugby and formerly
headmaster of Rossall, appeared in 'The Rossallian' and is reprinted
here at his suggestion:

'Forbes Robinson came to Rossall in 1881.  He was a member of a very
able family; an elder brother is Dean of Westminster; another is
Charles H. Robinson, Editorial Secretary of the S.P.G. and translator
of part of the Gospels into Hausa.  He was a delicate boy, and lived
for a year or two in the headmaster's private house, from which he
passed on into Mr. Batson's.  Rather shy and retiring in disposition,
and unable to take much part in games, he was not conspicuous in the
School until he reached the Sixth, and did not make friends as easily
as some boys do.  But the few who knew him well recognised in him a
deeply affectionate if very sensitive nature, and saw how the religious
side of it, afterwards so conspicuous, was even then developing.  His
powers as a classical scholar, though considerable, were not
exceptional; they enabled him to reach the Upper Sixth, but not to win
a scholarship at his entrance to the university, and I well remember
advising him to make theology, to which his inclinations were already
drawing him, his special subject at Cambridge.  To this I knew he would
bring not only interest but power of reasoning and literary culture.
He had won the Divinity Prize of the School in 1885 and again in 1886,
and the English Essay Prize (for an essay on "The relative value of
art, science, and literature in education") in the latter year.

{8}

'He went up to Christ's, Cambridge, in 1887, and at once addressed
himself to his favourite study.  What strides he was making in it were
apparent at once from the extraordinary series of distinctions which he
won--a scholarship at the college, the Carus Greek Testament Prize for
undergraduates, the Jeremie Septuagint Prize, a first class in the
Theological Tripos, the Burney Theological Essay Prize, the Carus Prize
for Bachelors, the Crosse Divinity Scholarship, and the Hulsean Prize
all fell to him between 1888 and 1893, and finally in 1896 he was
elected to a Fellowship at Christ's, where he had already been
Theological Lecturer for a year.

'His essay which gained the Burney Prize in 1891 was on "The Authority
of our Lord in its bearing upon the Interpretation of the Old
Testament."  He printed it in 1893 under the title of "The
Self-limitation of the Word of God as manifested in the Incarnation."
With characteristic modesty he says in his preface: "I can claim but
little of the work as strictly original."  This is far too deprecatory;
the essay is a singularly lucid statement and attempted solution of a
most difficult theological problem, in which all who believe in the
Deity of Christ must be deeply interested, and I can bear personal
testimony to its helpfulness.  It was only the other day that I was
reading it afresh, for I had just recovered it, when I feared that the
copy he gave me was hopelessly lost and irreplaceable, from South
Africa, where a friend to whom I had lent it had taken it among his
books.  Among Forbes Robinson's later activities were a work on the
Coptic Apocryphal Gospels ("the subject," he wrote to me, "was so
technical and uninteresting that I did not send you a copy"), and the
editing of a Sahidic fragment of the Gospels.

'But his value to Cambridge and to his college lay mainly in the
influence for good which he was able to exert over undergraduates.
Again and again I have been told {9} there how great this was; and it
was no little achievement for one whose very modesty and
humble-mindedness must have made it difficult.  But his heart was in
the work, and in the maintaining of Christian influences in university
life.  It is hard to over-estimate the loss which his death at so early
an age implies alike to students of theology and to those among whom he
was more immediately working.  But he has left us the example of a
simple and devoted life and the consecration of great and growing
powers to his Master's service.  "God buries His workmen, but carries
on His work."'




{10}

CHAPTER II

LIFE AS AN UNDERGRADUATE AT CAMBRIDGE

From this point forward the sketch of Forbes's life can be given almost
entirely in the words of those who knew him at Cambridge.

A writer in the Christ's College Magazine for the Lent term 1904 says:
'Many older friends will always think of him in his attic rooms, where
he began to make his mark in our College society upon his first coming
up.  Only two other Freshmen had rooms in College, and Robinson's rooms
became at once a centre for his year, and later a meeting-place where
the gulfs between higher and lower years were bridged over.  A little
older than most men of his year, he was considerably their senior in
character and in intellect.  He showed at once the qualities which he
retained to such a unique degree in later years--an inexhaustible power
of making friends with all sorts and conditions of men, and an
insatiable interest in all sides of College life; the most serious
things were from the first not beyond his comprehension, and the most
trivial did not appear to bore him, even when their freshness had worn
off.  His love of books was catholic; he possessed a great many and
read them {11} to his friends.  At the College Debate, of which he
became secretary and president in his second year, he was a frequent
and fluent speaker, with a remarkable command of language, though
sometimes his eloquence was more than half burlesque.  His powers of
thought and real strength in argument were more often displayed in
private discussions, where irony and humour hardly veiled the depth of
earnestness below.'

[Illustration: Forbes Robinson (1887)]

During his first three years at Cambridge he read for the Theological
Tripos.  In the course of his first year he was elected a scholar of
his College.  At the beginning of his second year he won his first
University distinction, the Carus prize for the Greek Testament.  The
other University prizes which he gained were the Jeremie prize for the
Septuagint in 1889, the Burney prize essay in 1891, the Carus prize for
Bachelors, the Hulsean prize essay, and the Crosse University
Scholarship in 1892.  He took his degree in the first class of the
Theological Tripos in 1890, and obtained a second class in the Moral
Science Tripos of 1891.  The year which he spent in reading moral
science he afterwards looked back upon as one of the most useful in his
life.  After he had been reading for some time in view of this Tripos,
he wrote to a friend: 'I have come to the conclusion that I know
nothing, and am an awful fool into the bargain. . . .  The subject is
so utterly fresh to me, so completely unlike theology of any sort at
Cambridge, that I find it hard to do anything at it.  In fact, I
chucked it up for about ten days in the middle of the term, and
determined to have nothing more to {12} do with it; but after that rest
I thought better and renewed the study.  It is an excellent training
for the mind.  I never distinctly remember thinking at all before this
term.'

Having learnt to _think_ himself, his desire was to help others by
teaching them to think.  One who came under his influence several years
later says of him: 'I owe so much to him in every way.  Above
everything else he taught me to _think_.  I remember so well the first
time I went to him with a difficulty.  I expected him to solve it for
me, instead of which, at the end of half an hour, I still found that I
had to think it out for myself.  It was a revelation to me, and has
helped me in my dealings with men.'  The same friend writes: 'I may
mention a conversation I once had with him.  He had in front of him the
answers to some Theological Tripos papers.  He took up two of them and
compared the answers given to the same question by the two men.  The
answer required was a translation of a passage of Greek with notes.
And, as far as I can remember, his words were these: "Now, W----, this
man has passed over the real difficulty.  As far as I can tell, he has
not even noticed that there is a difficulty.  I have given him two
marks out of a possible ten.  This other man has seen the difficulty
and grappled with it.  His solution is without doubt incorrect, but
that is quite immaterial.  Result, eight marks out of ten."  I cannot
but think that this attitude of mind was largely the secret of his
influence.'  In another case, when urging a man to attempt some
independent investigation of the Synoptic problem, he said; {13} 'Your
conclusions may be wrong, but you can correct them, and it will teach
you to think.'

One who was an undergraduate with Forbes says of him: He 'did not take
a prominent part in religious movements in the College, such as the
College prayer meeting or Bible readings, though he was occasionally
present at them.  In chapel his reverence was quiet, though in no way
obtrusive.  I think that by not identifying himself with any particular
religious party he had greater influence with those men whose minds ran
in very different grooves.  I always felt when in his company that I
was conversing with one vastly superior to myself in intellectual
powers, and yet he never appeared conscious of it himself.  It is
surprising how considerate he was of the feelings of others.  I
remember a large print of Pope Leo XIII. which used to hang in his
rooms as an undergraduate, which delighted his gyp, who was a Romanist,
but scandalised his Protestant friends.  I begged earnestly for a copy
of one of his prize essays, which had been printed though not
published.  He at first consented, but almost immediately asked me to
return it, saying that he did not wish it to go out to the world as
expressing his matured views.  He then asked me to accept instead a
small booklet, which he said I should find useful to have in visiting.
It contained the verses called "The Old, Old Story."  He also gave me a
copy of the "Practice of the Presence of God," by Brother Lawrence.'

Before he decided to read for the Moral Science Tripos he had thought
of going in for the Semitic Languages Tripos.  With this object in view
he {14} commenced the study of Syriac.  Finding that the best Syriac
grammar was written in German and had not been translated, he decided
to learn German also.  He was advised that Switzerland was a suitable
place in which to study German, and accordingly, after taking his
degree, he started in the summer of 1890 for Switzerland.  The two
following letters are inserted in order to illustrate his sense of
humour, as well as to describe the way in which he spent this summer.
He eventually returned from Switzerland, having made more progress in
Syriac than in German, but without having obtained any great knowledge
of either language.  Soon after his return he decided to commence the
study of Moral Science instead of the Semitic languages.


_To H. M. S._

'Habkern: July 1890.

'A few days after I got to Switzerland, by dint of incessant inquiries
and correspondence I found out the name of a pastor who lived in a
sufficiently healthy place and who talked German.  So I girded up my
loins and went to visit him.  "Sprechen Sie Englisch, mein Herr?" I
asked.  "Nein" was the reply.  As I scarcely knew a word of German I
was in a considerable fix.  But I found out that the Pfarrer spoke
"Lateinisch" and could read English a little when it was written.  So I
went up to his study and we got paper and pencil and began.  I tried to
tell him in a mixture of broken English and dog-Latin that I intended
to give him the honour of my company.  He said he would be pleased to
take me "en pension."  He then {15} asked how much I wished to pay.  I
hadn't for the life of me an idea of what I ought to pay.  "Ut tibi
optimum videtur," I said.  But he made me fix my price.  Then, when I
had fixed it, I had to turn it into Swiss money.  The good Pfarrer was
so pleased with the honour of my company that he took me for less than
I asked.  Our greatest difficulty next arose: How was my luggage to be
conveyed the five miles from the nearest town up a steep hill?  Latin,
French, English, German, failed to make me understand the situation.
At last I took in the Pfarrer's meaning.  I was to send it by the
milkman after leaving it at a certain hotel.  "Ja," I cried in an
ecstasy of joy, at last grasping his meaning, "Ja, ich mittam der
Gepäck von der milkman."  I arrived the next day.  I found the Pfarrer
knew Latin, Greek (but he pronounces both quite differently from me),
German, French, Russian, Syriac, Hebrew, and a little English.  His
usual custom is to address me in German.  If I fail to understand, he
tries Latin and intersperses his remarks with Greek and Hebrew.  So my
great difficulty is first of all to find out what language he thinks he
is speaking in.

'Yesterday we were sitting, smoking and drinking, in the village
"Wirthshaus" among the natives of the place, the Pfarrer addressing me
in Latin, the villagers staring at his learning in adoration and
astonishment, and laughing at my attempts at German.  The landlord came
up to me when I arrived and sent in a bottle of wine for me, refusing
to be paid for it, for he said that the natives of Interlaken fleeced
the English; but when Habkern was for once honoured by the {16}
presence of one, the people were not going to treat him in the same way.

'It is curious how the Pfarrer goes and sits and drinks and gossips in
the "Wirthshaus," even on Sunday, I think.  Last Sunday they had a
country dance, and very curious and pretty was the scene--the
old-fashioned wooden room--the odd national dress of the women--the
curiously cut brown clothes of the men--the thick boots--the fiddlers
raised above the rest--the quaint urn with its inscriptions above--the
gaping crowd of villagers.  Then the church is strange--very rude and
simple, all whitewashed.  The women sit on one side, the men on the
other.  They stand to pray and hear the text, and sit to sing and hear
the sermon.  The organ and font are placed at one end.  The elders
stand below the organ, the Pfarrer is lost in the far distance, right
up in a big pulpit.  The "Predigt" or sermon is everything.  They have
one written prayer before and one after the "Predigt."  The people
never say "Amen" or anything--only sing.  They sing so slowly that,
although I had only been with the Pfarrer three days, I could almost
sing and look out the words in the dictionary at the same time!  I talk
German with every one who will talk with me.  So well did I spin yarns
when I had been in the country three or four days, that with a mixture
of Latin and German I managed to make a German use strong language at
some of my tales, which he was pleased to think were not exactly true.
Reflecting on the situation afterwards, I remembered that I had told
him, among other things, that I had walked nearly fifty "stunden" {17}
in a day.  His language was awful.  I found afterwards that "stunde"
was not, as I had supposed, an English "mile," but an English "hour."
But I keep on talking.  I have come to the conclusion that the way to
learn a language is to argue in it.  Accordingly I do so.  I have tried
to convince them that the order of bishops is semi-apostolic, and that
if St. Paul did not actually wear a surplice himself, his successors
shortly afterwards did.

'One other thing, if you ever reply to this letter: would you copy out
a few of the most thickly marked lines in the "Grammarian's Funeral" in
my edition of Browning?  They are always in my mind, but I can't quite
recollect how they go.  There is no poem I like so much as that.  I
would send you some butterflies, but I daren't kill them.  Some of us
may have once been butterflies: as M. Arnold says,

  'What was before us we know not,
  And we know not what shall succeed.'


_To H. M. S._

'Habkern: August 1890.

'There is a French pensionnaire staying here, the same as I am.  He is
very polite, but his tastes are diametrically opposite to mine.  He
likes wine, walking, women, smoking, painting, violin and piano
playing, dogs, and the like.

'He asked me whether I liked the French.  I told him "No," and gave him
a good many reasons.  He abhors the Germans.  I told him I thought the
Germans were a fine race.  I'm occupying my time {18} in sleeping,
arguing, observing the natives, and reading a Tauchnitz edition of
"Martin Chuzzlewit," which is good, though already a young girl of
seventeen has been introduced, very beautiful and all the rest, and I'm
afraid she won't be poisoned, but marry a certain young man already
introduced.  I'd give a good deal to be able to write a novel in which
all the young ladies tumbled out of windows, six stories high, and were
picked up dead.  I think I must try and write one.  Shall I dedicate it
to you?  The heroine will be a plain old lady with white curls, close
on sixty-five, without any money, but with a certain amount of
intellect.  There will be no marriages, but suicides and murders if
necessary.

'I'm inventing a German word of 1,000 letters.  It is to be divided
into some 150 or 200 compartments.  After each compartment there is
five minutes for refreshments.  After about the 500th letter there will
be half an hour allowed for dinner.  After the 600th letter or so there
will be a notice to the effect that no person with a weak heart may
proceed further without consulting a medical man.  After about the
980th there will be a notice forbidding any one to go further until
their family doctor is in attendance.  I have thought of the groundwork
of the word--the finished word I'm going to send to M----, as he has
the strongest constitution of any one I know.  Then I shall get Duke
Bismarck to patent it; after which I shall take out a professorship on
the strength of it at Berne.  It will, of course, be the "Hauptsache"
of my existence.'

{19}

Forbes was far from being an athlete, but in 1891, shortly before his
ordination, he accomplished the feat of walking with two athletic
friends from London to Cambridge in a day, a distance of more than
fifty miles.  The following description is by Mr. A. N. C.
Kittermaster, who was one of his companions.


_Walk from London to Cambridge._

Some of us had read that Charles Kingsley had walked from London to
Cambridge; so we determined to follow in his footsteps.  We were a
party of three--Forbes Robinson, D. D. Robertson, and myself.  We spent
the previous day at the Naval Exhibition, the night at the Liverpool
Street Hotel, and at 4.30 A.M. of Tuesday, August 25, 1891, we started
on our fifty-mile trudge.  We walked steadily, at first over immense
stretches of pavement, till we reached Ware, twenty-one miles out.
There we had breakfast or lunch of huge chops at 10.15.  After that we
took the road again, and did not call a halt of any length till we had
put another twenty miles behind us.  The day was fine but dull, and we
were not troubled by the heat.  At the fortieth milestone it began to
appear doubtful whether we should all reach the journey's end.  I have
an entry in my diary: 'At 40 Robertson bad, I worse, Deanlet (_i.e._
Forbes) quite fit.'  So at Foulmire, nine miles from Cambridge, we
stopped for tea.  By this time I was in a state of temporary collapse,
but I remember the other two during tea carried on an animated
discussion upon the creation as described in Genesis.  We all felt
better after the {20} rest and covered the last stage fairly easily,
arriving at Christ's at 9.30 P.M.  We had a meal in Forbes's rooms,
fought our battles over again, and retired to rest about midnight.

The thing which remains with me best is the amazing ease with which
Forbes accomplished the journey.  It is a matter of common experience
that prolonged physical effort reacts on the mind; conversation becomes
difficult, and cheerfulness forced.  I must say that in my case the
thought which for a considerable period occupied my mind was how I was
to get to the end.  But it was not so with Forbes.  He travelled
lightly, talking happily on all subjects the whole day.  It seemed to
make little difference to him whether he took food or no, and he was as
willing to stop at every place of refreshment we suggested as to march
the whole day without a meal.




{21}

CHAPTER III

WORK AT CAMBRIDGE

In September 1891 Forbes was ordained as curate to his brother
Armitage, who was at that time vicar of All Saints', Cambridge.
Several of the letters which are given later refer to his thoughts and
feelings at the time of his ordination.  His connection with All
Saints' did not last more than a year, as his brother resigned in the
following spring.  Forbes had already been licensed as chaplain to
Emmanuel College.  He received priest's orders in 1892.  In 1895 he was
appointed theological lecturer at Christ's College, and in the
following year, May 30, 1896, was elected a fellow.  During the same
year he was appointed an examining chaplain to the Bishop of Southwell.

One who knew him well, soon after the time of his ordination, writes:
'I cannot remember how we first became acquainted, beyond the fact that
I used to meet him in the rooms of some prominent members of the
College Football XV.  All I know is that several of our year got to
know him quite well, and the friendship grew with time.  The fact that
he had distinguished himself in the Moral Science Tripos at {22} first
rather awed me, a freshman.  But I soon got over that feeling, for he
was the last person in the world to trouble any one with a sense of
intellectual inferiority.

'I am sure the private business hours of the Debating Society were some
of his happiest moments.  His magnificent assumption of wrath on the
most absurd grounds; his vast intensity over trivialities; his love for
the heat and play of debate, would have made a stranger believe he
lived for nothing else.

'Physical strength and virtue seemed to have a strange attraction for
him.  His assortment of athlete friends was peculiarly wide, and his
frank admiration of their qualities gave them a pleasant feeling that
in some way he looked up to them--a feeling which I am sure
strengthened the hold he had over them.

'He was a tireless walker, and could go far on very little.  A party of
us used to take long walks, often on a Sunday, to various places in the
country.  There was generally a volume of Burke or Emerson in his
pocket, whose sonorous periods filled the interval when we lunched
frugally or rested.  I have never known him anything but good-humoured
under any conditions.  His enthusiasm for our most commonplace jests
was unfailing--perhaps one of the surest ways of getting to a man's
heart and staying there--and he had a wide tolerance for the minor
offences of undergraduate thought and deed.  Yet, as for the tone of
conversation when he was near, I need scarcely say that one simply did
not think of anything unpleasant or vulgar, much less say it.

'I used to admire his immense power of putting {23} his thoughts into
words, but he could be silent too.  Sometimes he would come to my rooms
when I was working, throw himself into an arm-chair, and absolutely
refuse to speak.  After a considerable interval perhaps he would
consider I had worked long enough, and cocoa and conversation would
follow.  But it was when I visited him in his own rooms that I remember
things most vividly.

'I can still see that little room under the roof; the picture on the
wall of the dead saint floating on the dark water; the well-filled
bookcase; the table piled with volumes; himself throwing everything
aside to greet one.  It was almost with a feeling of awe that I
sometimes climbed those stairs and entered into his presence.  Perhaps
it would be for a lesson on the New Testament--for when I was reading
for a Theological Tripos he was generous, even prodigal, of help.  The
lesson over--and there are many who know what a goodly thing a lesson
from him on the New Testament was--he would open a volume of
Tennyson--"In Memoriam" most likely--read a few stanzas, and begin to
talk about them.  Gradually, it would seem, the things of the world
would fade from him.  He forgot the hour and my presence as his
thoughts poured out.  I sat and listened, generally silent, sometimes
hazarding a question.  Presently--it was often late--I would rise to
leave.  Rapt from his surroundings, he seemed scarcely conscious of my
departure; and I would go quietly out, almost as though I had been on
holy ground, where not once nor twice the dweller had seen God face to
face.'

His power of helping men by silent sympathy is {24} referred to by one
who writes: 'The many words of kindness, but more particularly the
silent sympathy he conveyed in some mysterious manner, will ever keep
him present with us.'

Another, who had known him in his early days at Christ's, and again in
later years, writes: 'When I was up he was a nervous retiring man, at
his best when one found him alone in his own room.  Even then he would
sometimes talk little.  Since my return from South Africa I have found
him much more at home with men and much more ready to talk, but
retaining his old power of sympathy without words.'  His own faith was
based rather upon intuitive perception of the Divine love than upon
argument.  On one occasion, quite towards the end of his life, he said
to one with whom he was staying, 'Sometimes I sit and think, till I can
find no reason for the existence of God; and then there rises up in me
something which is stronger than the love I have for those who are dear
to me--and they are very dear--the love of God.  It seems to smile at
my doubts.'

Several of his friends have referred to Forbes's influence as a power
which helped to develop their own sympathy towards others.  Thus one
writes:

'I think perhaps it was my intercourse with him that first taught me to
look out for and appreciate the real goodness--or, better,
Christlikeness--of others from whom one differed in important matters
and with whom one seemed perhaps to have little in common.'

In some instances friendship between Forbes and an acquaintance seems
to have arisen where very {25} little direct intercourse had taken
place.  One who was greatly his senior says of him, 'I have never known
any one with whom there was so strong a sense of intimacy founded on so
little positive intercourse.'

In July 1892--_i.e._ about nine months after his ordination as
deacon--he took part in a kind of peregrinating mission tour through
part of South Cornwall.  Dressed simply in cassock and cape, and
carrying a small brown paper parcel containing necessary luggage, he
and his brother (the compiler of this book) walked from village to
village, preaching afternoon and evening in the open air.  At the end
of the evening service an appeal was made to the people.  It was
explained to them that the preachers had come without provision or
money, and hoped to receive hospitality from those to whom they
ministered.  Night after night Forbes and his companion were taken in
and entertained, often by very poor people.  A unique opportunity was
thus afforded of getting to know something of the home life as well as
of the religious beliefs of the poor.  As a rule, those who acted as
hosts were Nonconformists.  Forbes spoke once or twice each day to the
people who gathered, and his addresses, which were generally based on
the words 'Our Father,' were admirably suited to the comprehension and
needs of the simple country people.

For several months during 1895 he took charge of a small country parish
near Cambridge, called Toft.  While staying at Toft he wrote to a
friend, 'I like living among country folk and talking with {26} and
visiting them.  I want to get out of my life into their lives.  This
parish work humiliates if it does not humble one. . . .  The smallest
parish is a tremendous responsibility.'


The following are a few additional notes contributed by others who knew
Forbes at Christ's: 'His broad sympathies, his unfailing efforts to
find out the good in persons and systems--the rays of truth which each
possessed--combined with the rare faculty of going deep down beneath
vexed questions, and thus lifting controversies to a higher and serener
atmosphere: these were qualities in him which were known especially by
those privileged to have more intimate knowledge of him than that
vouchsafed by formal lectures or social gatherings. . . .  He is now
another link with the life beyond these conflicting voices, one "who
loved Heaven's silence more than fame."'

The same writer says of him in another letter: 'His extreme fairness
and toleration, which at first seemed to me to reduce half one's
cherished beliefs to open questions, was of the greatest value in
dispelling ignorance and prejudice, and in promoting true charity and a
more intelligent faith.  He delighted to call attention to the fact
that our Lord found something commendable and exemplary in the serpent.
And so, in dealing with those with whom he most disagreed, he tried to
fix attention on that portion of truth which lay behind their opinions,
or on those real difficulties, to be slighted only by {27} the
superficial, with which they were grappling.  Tertullian, with his love
of scoring off opponents, fared badly at his hands, and he used to
treat Clement of Alexandria more sympathetically than Irenaeus.

'It was striking to find a mind so evenly balanced and philosophical
become fired with enthusiasm as he spoke in simplest language, in
chapel or elsewhere, of great Christian truths or the victories of
faith.  His sermons influenced, I believe, many of the naturally
careless.  Simple, impartial, earnest and sympathetic, he won, I know,
the deepest affection and respect of many.'

Another writes: 'Bright, pure, and strong--this was the impression he
gave me . . . .  Many men will be very sorry that he is not here any
more, but every one who _knew_ him will be very thankful that he was
here, and that they had an opportunity of hearing him "think"
sometimes.  I recall him most in his own rooms, beginning to talk on
some small matter, and gradually lifting us higher and still higher,
until we all silently listened, following as best we, with our muddier
minds, could; and even when he got beyond us there were still
inspiration and strength to be got from his flashing eyes and
on-rushing earnestness; but if some smaller mind broke in, in a moment
he was down at the level of that mind, half bantering and wholly
sympathising.  Nevertheless, some of us have never forgotten the things
he showed us as he led us up, and the possibility of soaring very high
without losing touch with those whose levels are pathetically
human. . . .  I do know that he helped {28} me much, and that many
things he said I shall never forget, and thank God for still.'

A Cambridge and international athlete, an intimate friend of Forbes,
writes: 'Though I have lost your brother Forbes, and life will be for
ever poorer to me, I can't thank God enough that I ever knew him and
loved him, and that he called himself my friend.  He was so dear to
me--my greatest friend in the world.  His goodness and his help to me
in my Cambridge days were wonderful.  He altered my life.  God has
called him home and to the blessed rest of the children of God, and we
are rich still with his memory and the influence of his beautiful,
patient, Christlike life.'

In another letter he writes: 'The death, or, as I like to think of it,
the passing of Forbes into the Great Beyond has been such a grief to
me.  You have no idea what he was to me--a real man "sent from God"
into my life.  I could do nothing when I heard the sad, and to me
utterly unexpected, news, but kneel down by my bedside, and weep till I
could weep no more for my beloved friend.  I feel so rich and proud to
have had him for my friend, and to have had his love; and so do many
Cambridge men.  Oh, but I did so love him! and my prayer now is that
the memory of him with me always may strengthen my weak and feeble
life, and help me to live somewhat more as he lived, very near the
Master.'

He obtained but little help from self-introspection or
self-examination.  Thus he writes in one of the letters given later on:
'I am not sure that we cannot learn more about others than we can about
ourselves.  {29} 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.'

To very intimate friends he would in rare instances admit that the
secret of any influence which he possessed over men was the outcome of
his efforts to pray for them.  One who had known him intimately at
Christ's writes in 1904:

'About eighteen months ago I had the privilege of spending a night with
him, and then for the first time I realised how much of his spiritual
power was the outcome of prayer.  He told me that in his younger days
he had taken every opportunity of personally appealing to men to come
to Christ.  "But," he went on, "as I grow older I become more
diffident, and now often, when I desire to see the Truth come home to
any man, I say to myself, 'If I have him here he will spend half an
hour with me.  Instead, I will spend that half-hour in prayer for
him.'"  Later on, when I had retired for the night, he came to me again
and said, "W----, what I have said to you is in the strictest
confidence: don't mention it to any one."  And this revelation of his
inner life is my last memory of him.'

On another occasion he said to one with whom he was staying, when
speaking of the little that men could do for each other, 'I think that
I should go mad were it not for prayer.'

As an instance of his common sense in a matter in which as a bachelor
he could have had no personal experience, he strongly urged a married
man, before {30} deciding to accept a curacy which had been offered to
him, to let his wife see the vicar's wife or women-folk.  'She will
know intuitively,' he said, 'whether she can get on with them and they
with her, and it will make all the difference to your work and
happiness.'  The man to whom this advice was offered writes: 'The
advice was given seriously, but with that bright twinkle of his; and I
owe much to it, for we have been here since . . . and I don't want to
go.'


The following is an extract from a notice which appeared in the
'Guardian '!

'By his published work he is best known to the outer world as one of
the few English scholars who have given attention to Coptic.  In 1896
he edited "The Coptic Apocryphal Gospels" in the "Cambridge Texts and
Studies."  The important article on the Coptic Version in Hastings's
"Bible Dictionary" came also from his pen, and he was engaged on an
edition of the Sahidic fragments of St. Luke's Gospel.  His deepest
interest, however, lay not in these subsidiary studies, but in the
fundamental problems of theology proper.  His Burney Prize essay,
printed at the University Press in 1893 under the title of "The
Self-limitation of the Word of God as manifested in the Incarnation,"
is no doubt comparatively slight, and in some respects immature; but
its reverent and fearless treatment of the difficulties of his great
theme gave promise of work of permanent value in this field.  His
interest in the great problems never flagged, and his sympathetic touch
with the life and thought of the younger men in his college kept him
constantly {31} engaged on the task of putting into clear and ever
clearer expression such solutions as he was able to attain.  His
sermons in College Chapel were singularly effective, because he never
wasted a word, and because every sentence was felt to be the outcome of
strenuous thought tested by living experience.

'It is not surprising, therefore, that he exercised an unusual
influence upon younger students.  His friends were very closely bound
to him indeed, in bonds which death can consecrate but cannot sever.
They can never cease to thank God for the pure, bright, tender, utterly
sincere, fearless, and faithful spirit He has given them to love.'




{32}

CHAPTER IV

THE LAST FEW MONTHS

From the time that Forbes took his degree at Cambridge his health was
far from strong.  He suffered from time to time from a form of eczema
which caused him a good deal of discomfort and pain.  Many of his
letters contain references to the fact that he had been unwell and had
been unable to do as much work as he had hoped.  In September 1897 he
went with his brother Armitage on a visit to St. Petersburg and Moscow.
He stayed in the house of a Russian priest at St. Petersburg, and was
much interested in the work of Father John of Kronstadt, with whom an
interview was arranged which unfortunately fell through at the last
moment.  Towards the end of 1897 he developed a bad cough and was
threatened with phthisis.  He accordingly spent Christmas and the first
two or three months of 1898 at St. Moritz in Switzerland.  His health
then seemed to be much improved.  For several years he went back to St.
Moritz to spend the greater part of the Christmas vacation.  He took
great delight in tobogganing, and on one occasion was awarded a prize
for a race in which he took part.  In the summer of 1899 he went out to
South Africa {33} during the Long Vacation.  He visited Pretoria and
had an interview with President Kruger and his wife.  One of his
letters records his impressions of the President.  He was for some time
disposed to believe that the war, which broke out soon after his
return, could and should have been avoided, but he subsequently
modified his views on this point.

Towards the end of August 1903 the pain from which he had suffered
intermittently for years became so much worse that he came up to
consult a London doctor, and by his advice remained in town as a
patient at St. Thomas's Home.  When he entered the home he fully
expected to undergo an operation within a fortnight; but the doctor who
had suggested it declared, after further examination, that no operation
was necessary.  Meanwhile Forbes lingered on in the home week after
week.  Eventually a partial operation was performed, and after he had
spent thirteen weeks in the home the surgeon suggested his removal to a
private nursing home, where he could keep him under closer observation.
Here he performed a second operation.  This seemed at first to have
been a success, and after a fortnight in this private home he was well
enough to start for Switzerland again.  He went at first to St. Moritz,
where he had been so often before; but, finding that the pain returned
and that he could not sleep, he went down to Alassio on the Riviera.
Here he was for several weeks till his return to England.  He reached
Westminster on January 13 and went up to Cambridge on the following
day.  For a few days he was well enough to lecture, and it seemed as
though he might be able to {34} resume his old work.  On Sunday
evening, January 17, he was 'at home' in his rooms and received over
sixty undergraduates who came to welcome him back.  Soon the old
trouble returned, and he rapidly grew worse.  His pain became almost
constant, and he was removed with great difficulty to another London
nursing home on January 29.  It was then proposed that the original
operation which had been suggested, but had never been performed,
should take place, and he fully expected that this would result in his
restoration to health and to work.  A few days later he was threatened
with blood-poisoning, and it became obvious that the operation must be
delayed.  On Saturday evening, February 6, he seemed fairly cheerful.
Neither he nor his doctors had any idea that he was in an extremely
critical state.  About midnight, as the pain had become worse, his
doctor was sent for, and he gave him an injection of morphia.  Soon
after this he asked his nurse to turn the light down and said to her,
'If I am asleep in the morning do not wake me.'  She looked in about
3.30 A.M. to see if he was asleep, and, finding him awake, inquired if
he would like a drink of champagne.  He said yes, and asked her first
of all to help him turn over to the other side.  As she was in the act
of assisting him, he passed away, without a movement of any kind.  A
happy smile lingered long on his face after the end had come.

His body was removed the same evening to St. Faith's Chapel, in
Westminster Abbey.  Here on the following Thursday morning, February
11, at 9 A.M., the funeral service was said.  The chapel {35} was
filled with his friends, who had come from Cambridge and elsewhere.
His body was buried the same afternoon at Eastbourne in the same grave
with that of his sister, the Deaconess Cecilia, who had passed away
five months before.

The inscription on the memorial card issued to his friends was:

  CUM CHRISTO VICTURUS
  DE MORTE AD VITAM MIGRAVIT
  DOMINICA IN SEXAGESIMA
  ANNO SALUTIS MCMIV
  AETATIS SUAE XXXVII.


  And, doubtless, unto thee is given
    A life that bears immortal fruit
    In those great offices that suit
  The full-grown energies of heaven.




{36}

CHAPTER V

TWO APPRECIATIONS

The two following sketches of Forbes Robinson's life at Cambridge have
been contributed, the first by the Rev. T. C. Fitzpatrick, Fellow and
Dean of Christ's College, and the second by the Rev. Digby B.
Kittermaster, of Clare College, now Head of the Shrewsbury School
Mission in Liverpool.


Mr. Fitzpatrick writes:

'College life has changed a good deal since the days when a young
graduate, on his election to a fellowship, was advised not to see too
much of the undergraduate members of the College, that the division
between the senior and junior members of the College might be
preserved.  A custom of that kind, once established, is not easy to
break, for traditions of all sorts, good and bad, live long in College.

'Fortunately, the relations between the undergraduates and the fellows
of the College are gradually becoming more natural, to the benefit of
the whole body.  Forbes Robinson will be long remembered for the
influence that he exerted in this {37} direction, and what he has
effected it will be comparatively easy for others to carry on.

'It is my desire to give some slight impression of his life in College,
and I do not wish to say much about his teaching work.  I must mention,
however, what frequently struck me, the great joy he had in teaching;
his success was not surprising.  When he found (in January last) that
he could not take up all his lecture work he would not allow another to
give in his place the course of lectures on Church History.  "I want,"
he said to me, "to give them myself in my own way," and he hoped to
have given them this Easter term.  I was not surprised to hear from a
pupil of the interest that he and others found in a similar course of
lectures which he had given the previous year.  "He put things so," the
pupil told me, "that you could not forget what he had said."

'My last recollection of him as a teacher bears witness to his interest
and purpose.  Word was brought me before morning chapel that he had
been obliged to call in the doctor in the middle of the night.  I went
to his rooms after chapel and found that he was asleep, I put up a
notice that he would be unable to lecture.  He awoke soon after I had
left his rooms; he had another notice put up that he would lecture in
his rooms.  When I came back to College later in the morning I looked
in and found him lying on his sofa with the room full of men, sitting
where they could.  The class will not forget that lecture, nor shall I
forget the sight.

'When two men have lived a number of years within the same College, it
is difficult for them to {38} realise the change in their relationship
that has come with time.  There is a comradeship that comes through the
influence of circumstances rather than from that personal attraction
which two men feel for one another, and which arose they don't remember
when or how.  It was this comradeship of work and the sharing of
responsibilities that led me to know Forbes Robinson.  We had lived
some years in College before I knew much of him; I was some years his
senior, and our lines of work were very different.  As far as I know,
he never talked to older men in that frank way which was his custom
with those of his own age, and still more with men younger than
himself.  Some weeks ago I was staying at the hotel on the Riviera
where he had been at Christmas time.  The English lady, whose husband
keeps the house, told me that with them Forbes Robinson hardly talked
at all, but that he took their boy out for long walks and talked to
him; and the boy's face lit up as I spoke to him of Forbes.

'There is still the recollection in College, handed on from year to
year, of the walk which he took at the end of a Long Vacation from
London to Cambridge with two other men, and how he talked all the way.
It was these conversations, often prolonged for two or three hours,
that impressed those to whom he opened out his thoughts, and who in
turn let him see something of their inner life.

'Forbes always had one or two special friends among the younger men,
whom he seemed to me to look upon as heroes; he always yearned for
sympathy, and he was prepared to give to others all that {39} he had
got.  This closer relationship with a few men did not in the least
narrow his interest in the life of the College.  He gained, I cannot
believe that it can have been without an effort long and hard, the
power of taking an interest in all sorts of things that form no small
part of the life of the average man.  There was nothing strained or
exaggerated in his relations with other men; he was at all times just
himself.

'When he was elected a Fellow, being also Theological Lecturer, he was
anxious to do something to interest and help those who were not
theological students, and he had, first on Sunday mornings after
Chapel, and afterwards in the latter part of the afternoons, Greek
Testament readings for non-theological men, and some terms he took up
some of the problems that present themselves as difficulties to the
thoughtful man.  These papers were prepared with great care, and, as I
know, at no small cost of time and energy.

'On Sunday evenings he was "at home" from 9 to 11 to any members of the
College who cared to come.  On those occasions it was a curious sight
that met the eyes of any late comer as he opened the door and saw men
in groups sitting on the floor, as chairs were insufficient; as a rule
there was no general subject of conversation--numbers made that
impossible.  Most Sunday evenings there was music, but not always, and
it was difficult at the end of the evening to say what could have
brought so many men together.  It was a common ground of meeting for
different kinds of men.  Forbes Robinson was often at his best on these
occasions; he would join {40} first one group and then another, and
take part in the subject which was being discussed.  Generally one or
two would remain when the others left, and deeper problems would then
be talked over.  Only on one Sunday of last term was Forbes Robinson
well enough to be "at home."  The room was more crowded than I had ever
seen it.  It was a sort of welcome back after his absence the previous
term.  It was evident that it gave him pleasure, and evident, too, that
he was all the time in pain.  Yet with a brightness, which must have
cost him much, he talked with one and another of simple daily interests
in the way that showed his sympathy with life, and gained for him the
power of saying on other occasions deeper things.

'Nothing could have been simpler than the character of these
gatherings.  Simplicity was the secret of his power.

'I find it impossible to write of my own conversations with him; they
dealt chiefly with the difficulties of Cambridge, of College life, and
of the lives of those in our College for whom we felt we had a
responsibility.  Talking of the difficulties of belief, I was struck by
his quiet answer: "I do not believe some things which I did when I was
younger; but those which I believe, I believe more firmly."  Forbes
Robinson had a great belief in the power of intercession.  Quite
recently a man in his year told me that when Forbes Robinson was an
undergraduate he had known him spend two hours during the afternoon in
intercession for his friends.  One is not surprised that prayer was a
subject on which he {41} thought much.  He was to have written an
important article on it.

'As we talked together of different men, I remember being struck with
the desire he expressed that men should be good and strong, and not of
any one type.  He had a great confidence in the essential goodness that
there is in men, and he always formed a high estimate of another.

'His letters will indicate how deeply he entered into the lives of
others, and how wide were his sympathies.  A member of another College
told me that the news of the death of Forbes Robinson reached him just
after the close of their evening chapel, and he had not long returned
to his rooms when an Indian gentleman called, an undergraduate of this
College, who almost in tears told him of all that Forbes had done for
him, and how he had learnt in Hall at Christ's from the strange silence
that something must have happened, and was told of the loss that came
so unexpectedly upon us on Sunday, February 7.

'I close this short account of my friend with extracts from three
letters casually taken from those which have reached me.  A young
clergyman writes: "I feel I owe a very great debt to him, both as a
lecturer and as a friend.  His clearness of mind and power of thought
were such as I have never seen in any other man.  But far more precious
than these intellectual gifts was the inspiration of his personal
character.  His ideals were so high, and he lived so close to them.
Few lives have better expressed the truth of the words of which he was
so fond: 'He that {42} loseth his life shall find it.'"  A schoolmaster
writes: "The last talk I had with him was a month before my ordination,
and I remember the emphasis that he laid on the praying side of a
clergyman's life."  A doctor writes: "Looking back upon my time at
Christ's, I think that of all the influences which helped me, the most
potent was my friendship with Forbes Robinson. . . .  I came to know
him somewhat intimately by spending an Easter vacation with him, and
several of our conversations then have left a lasting impression on my
mind. . . .  I suppose, as one gets older and sees so much more of
death, that a deepening faith takes away that sense of personal loss
and leaves behind a feeling of gladness that yet another friend has
passed to the Communion of Saints."

'Of his life we may use the motto of his College:

'AD HONOREM CHRISTI JESU ET FIDEI EJUS INCREMENTUM.'


Mr. Kittermaster writes:

'Forbes Robinson did not regard any one of us as a "mere
undergraduate," one of a mass; that was the first thing which those of
us who knew him as undergraduates learnt.  He was genuinely interested
from the first in his undergraduate acquaintances; interested in them
as men, not as promising pupils, not as likely scholars, not as
athletes, not as material for "improving" influence, but as
men--individuals, each possessing a separate and distinct human {43}
personality, and therefore of the truest and deepest interest to him.

'Our public schools taught us (and for most of us Cambridge continued
the teaching) that to be of any real importance and consequence among
his fellows a man must be "good at games," or perhaps--but this more
rarely--"good at work."  Such is the simple creed of the undergraduate.
If he satisfies neither of the above requirements, then he recognises,
with greater or less sadness, that he is an ordinary man, the "average
undergraduate."  He is one of the crowd if he has no athletic powers to
commend him to the notice of his fellows _in statu pupillari_; he is
one of the crowd if he has no slightest hope of making for himself any
name in the intellectual world, to commend him to the leaders of
thought at Cambridge.  And this knowledge is to many a Cambridge boy,
playing at being a man, a matter of real, if unconfessed, grief.

'But "there is no such thing as the average man, or at least as the
average undergraduate."  This was the belief which Forbes Robinson held
with increasing conviction as his life went on.  And it was this belief
which accounted to some extent for the very large part which his
friendship undoubtedly played in the life of many a Cambridge
undergraduate.

'For a man condemned by his fellows and himself to the position of the
"ordinary man" found himself in the presence of Forbes (as all of us
universally called him) to be no such thing.  Gradually and with
genuine surprise he learned from him--not by any definite {44} word of
teaching--that though it might cost him efforts painful and many to get
the better of his "special," and though athletic fame knew him not at
all, yet the possibilities of his own peculiar personal life were
wonderful and great.  For here was one who compelled men by his genuine
unaffected interest in their lives and work to be themselves genuinely
interested in them too.  A man could not know Forbes for long and not
be quickly conscious of a new sense of the value of himself, which made
him believe that his own personality and life were things of great
importance.  For "He is interested in me" is what almost every man felt
from the start of his acquaintance with Forbes.  "He is interested in
me" we felt when he passed us in the street with his quaint humorous
smile of recognition; we felt the same when we entered his room, to be
received often without a word but with the same half smile: we felt the
same again if we knew that he was watching the progress of a football
match or boat race in which we were taking part.  And "he is interested
in me"--most wonderful of all--we felt as we listened to him in the
lecture room, and were compelled to attention; for his interest in the
men in front of him, coupled with his interest in his subject, forced
us all--pass men and honours men alike--to listen to the history of
Church and Doctrine and Creeds.  It was this unfeigned interest in men,
simply as men, that in the first instance gave him the influence which
he certainly exercised over all sorts of men, including the kind of men
whom the majority of their fellows disregarded, {45} or perhaps
despised; "the babes and sucklings of the undergraduate world," to
quote another.  Such men, in whom most of us could find little to
attract us, were to him vastly interesting--interesting for their
simple human personality.

'Some men perhaps never discovered from what source his interest in
them sprang.  They knew that their views of the possibilities of their
own life were enlarged, that they believed in themselves more for
having been with him; but it was not all at once that they discovered
the reason of his interest and belief in them.  It was due to the
Christ.  With each new friendship and acquaintance which Forbes
made--and this is especially true of young men--he saw deeper into the
meaning of the Incarnation of Christ.  This was the secret of his
extraordinary interest and amazing belief in nearly every one of us.
He saw in us all, however ordinary, however commonplace--yes, however
unlovely were our lives--something somewhere of Jesus Christ.

'Then some of us were privileged to discover that what he felt for us
was something far deeper and holier than is expressed by the word
"interest."  It was love.  In every fullest sense he understood the
grand full meaning of the word.  His love for his friends was something
altogether larger and deeper and truer than is generally understood by
the word.  It was so holy a thing that it is hard to write of it.  He
knew, and the knowledge is perhaps rarer than is supposed, what in all
its fulness was the meaning of the love of one man for another.  This
is why he could enter into the spirit of Tennyson's "In {46} Memoriam"
as almost no one else could.  Tennyson's experience might have been so
entirely his own.  His love for his friends was indeed a wonderful,
sacred thing, beautiful to see.  With Henry Drummond he felt that it
was better not to live than not to love.  Love was to him a part of all
his being: for in him dwelt "the strong Son of God, Immortal Love,"
compelling him to love his fellow-men.

'It was to him a real grief that (as he often quite wrongly supposed)
one or two of those, for whom he would quite willingly have cut off his
right hand if in any way it could have advantaged them, cared not at
all for him, nor ever understood how he cared for them.  But he found
relief from the strange unsatisfied longing, engendered in him by this
belief, in intense continuous prayer for those whom he loved.  He
prayed, it is certain, as few men pray.  Prayer was to him the very
breath of life.  And his prayers, like his life, must have been utterly
selfless.  Many do not understand the amount they owe to his prayers.
Some of us may some day realise the magnitude of the debt; at present
it is not seen.  But he prayed with all the effort of his being for his
friends: eagerly, passionately, unceasingly he prayed.  "Pray for him,
believe in him; believe in him, pray for him," he was never tired of
saying to those who spoke to him of some disappointing friend.  And his
own life was a proof of the power which lay behind such prayer.

'To those reading this who did not know Forbes Robinson it may seem
that a man of such intensity of feeling and holiness of life would be
more likely {47} to frighten away than to attract to close quarters the
"average undergraduate" (whose existence he denied).  This most
certainly was not the case.  For, if there was in him something utterly
divine, he was also human as ever man could be.  He admired, like the
veriest freshman, the physical strength and powers of the athlete.  In
his presence the man of bodily attainments and strength of limb
experienced the strange sensation of being looked up to by one whom he
knew to be utterly superior to him.  But perhaps nearly all who knew
him experienced this at one time or another; for he must have been one
of the most humble men that have ever lived.  His humility was almost a
fault.  It led him to depreciate himself so far.  And yet how beautiful
a thing it was!  He did indeed count all men better than himself.

'He easily condoned offences which in some eyes, and especially the
eyes of dons, loom as a general rule heinous and large.  And the
riotous undergraduate, who cuts chapels and lectures, found that a
don--yes, and a junior dean--could be a friend of his.

'He possessed too a keen and real sense of humour.  He could, and often
did, laugh with all his heart.  He chaffed continuously his large
circle of undergraduate friends.  When he was questioning a man in the
lecture-room, you felt that all the time he was half chaffing him.  He
addressed us all in lectures as "Mr.," in a half serious, half amused
style.  "It is the only chance for some men to retain any
self-respect--to address them as 'Mr.'"--he would say, after the
discovery of some more than usual piece of {48} ignorance in his class
of "special" men; "for how can a man have any self-respect unless
addressed as 'Mr.' who does not know which are the Pastoral Epistles,
or who is the Bishop of Durham (then Bishop Westcott)?"

'He could not remember the name of his best friend on occasions, and he
would recount with real glee how he had been known successfully to
introduce two men, not knowing the name of either.  On one occasion it
fell to him to introduce to each other a low-caste West African native
and a particularly high-caste Brahmin rejoicing in a lofty sounding
polysyllabic title: of course he transposed the names--with results, so
he declared, almost fatal to himself.

'He would display with humorous pride to his athletic friends a
photograph of himself coming in second in a toboggan handicap race at
St. Moritz, which he always maintained he morally won.  He was full of
spontaneous humour.  When he greeted you, when he looked at you, when
he talked with you, it was always with a half smile on his face.  It
was his sense of humour which procured him a quick entrance into many a
man's life and heart.  It was his sense of humour which made the
hostile undergraduate, hauled for cutting lectures or chapels, forget
his hostility and the presence of the don; though at the end of the
interview he, probably for the first time, began to think whether
chapel-going had any meaning, whether a lecture, if listened to, might
conceivably profit the listener.  It was his sense of humour which made
all feel at home with him, which at the first attracted the most
unlikely men, {49} which inspired with confidence the shyest, and made
the most frivolous and thoughtless not afraid of him.  Yet while he
would laugh, and make us laugh, for as long as ever any one wished,
through all his unaffected merriment he made men feel the strange
earnestness of his life.  And all knew that, while he never obtruded on
us religious or even serious matters, he was ready at a moment's notice
to speak with us of spiritual things.  And most men felt something of
what a friend of his wrote of him after his death: "He understood of
'the things that matter' more than any man that I shall ever meet."
And many men who owe to Forbes Robinson their first serious thoughts of
and their first insight into "the things that matter" must feel the
same.  It is this fact that makes it impossible to measure the
far-reaching deep influence of his life.  For the greatness of that
life lay not in any large influence on any large body of
undergraduates, though the undergraduate life of Christ's College must,
as a whole, have felt his real influence; nor was his life great simply
because he was a scholar and a thinker.  But his life was great, and
will for all time remain great, because it was an inspiration--there is
no other word: it was, and is, a lasting, vivid, real inspiration to a
few.  What Bishop Westcott did on a large scale, Forbes Robinson did on
a small.  He inspired men--inspired them to search for and hold to the
realities of life.

'To sum up: a man admitted into the inner chamber of his life learnt
there something of these three things: (_a_) The value of his own
personality, (_b_) the meaning of love, (_c_) the power of prayer.

{50}

'_a. The value of his own personality._--A man, as he talked with
Forbes, was taught with increasing clearness the amazing possibilities
of life for any one who has tried to think what it means to say that
"this is I."  Many of us, conscious in ourselves only of very ordinary
attainments, of no very high ideals, of weaknesses of character, learnt
from our friend that in spite of all this, our own personality was
God's greatest gift to us.  We learnt from him that our own particular
commonplace life was, with all its failures and inconsistencies, a
tremendous enterprise, big with opportunities.  He taught us this by
his belief in us.  He held (again like Bishop Westcott) through
everything to the faith of "man naturally Christian." By his belief in
a man he forced him at last to believe in himself.  For he taught us
that we were, each one, two men--the real "Ego" and the false--and that
the real self must in the end have the mastery over the false, because
that real self was the Christ.

'_b. The meaning of love._--It is impossible for lesser natures to
enter into all that the word "love" meant to Forbes.  His love for his
friends was "wonderful, passing the love of women."  He loved some men
with an intensity of feeling impossible to describe.  It was almost
pain to him.  If he loved a man he loved him with a passionate love (no
weaker expression will do).  We undergraduates found our natures too
small to understand it.  Yet, as we learnt to know him more and more,
we began too to learn a little of what real love is--we began to learn
what can be the meaning and the wonder and the power {51} and the depth
of the love of man for man.  And we understood in time that his love
for us and his belief in us sprang from the same high source--from the
Christ in him, in us.

'_c. The power of prayer._--This last lesson explained the other two.
Perhaps only a few of those who knew Forbes as undergraduates learnt
it.  Yet an intimate knowledge of him must have forced almost any man
to the belief that 'more things are wrought by prayer than this world
dreams of.'  He prayed for those he loved, it is certain, for hours at
a time.  All his thoughts about some men gradually became prayers.  He
could not teach us everything that prayer meant to him; he could not
teach us to pray as he prayed.  Yet through him one or two at least of
his undergraduate friends saw a little further into the eternal mystery
of prayer.  And men must sometimes--with all reverence be it said--have
experienced in his presence the same kind of a feeling of some great
unseen influence at work as that which the disciples must have
experienced in the presence of Christ after He, apart and alone, had
watched through the night with God in prayer.  For many an hour of his
life did Forbes spend like that, striving with God for those he loved.
He believed--he knew (this was his own testimony)--that he could in
this way bring to bear upon a man's life more real effective influence
than by any word of direct personal teaching or advice.  So did he
prove once more that the man of power in the spiritual world is the man
of prayer.

'These are the great lessons of Forbes Robinson's {52} life--lessons
which many a careless undergraduate learnt in a greater or less degree,
and, learning, caught from the teacher something of his passion for
life and love and prayer, for service of God and man.

'There must be many who will not soon forget the lessons; there must be
many in whose lives the influence and inspiration of that saintly life
will be for ever a power making for holiness and high ideals of living;
there are, it is certain, very many who will thank God continually that
they were, in their undergraduate days, allowed to call Forbes Robinson
friend.

'How many of us, when we heard with a shock of almost horror that he
had passed from us, conjured up before us the picture we shall never
see again--the picture of our friend sitting any evening at his table
in Darwin's historic rooms at Christ's, dimly lighted with candles!  We
shall remember long the quick look up at our entrance, the half-smile
on his face, the welcome of a man's love in his eyes, however busy and
tired he might be.  Then, though it cost him later hours out of bed,
the invitation to sit down, followed quickly by an indignant
remonstrance as we ousted his cat from the best arm-chair.  And then
the talk that followed: sometimes almost trivial; sometimes (but only
if we wished it) deeply serious; sometimes--and these occasions were
precious--a kind of soliloquy on his part, as he spoke of God, of the
realities of life, of love, of prayer.  Then, with still the same
half-smile, he would bid us "Good night," and watch us out of the room
with the same look of love in his eyes with which he welcomed us, {53}
as he turned back to his table to work and think and pray far into the
night.

'So many a one of us has left him again and again, to return to the
merry, careless, selfish undergraduate world a nobler, better man.  And
now he has passed from us--"dead ere his prime" we should say, did we
not understand that somewhere the faithful, hopeful, loving soul has
better work to do.  He is, as he ever was, "in Christ."  He lives.  His
life remains here and beyond.  His faith in God, in prayer; his hope
for every man; his utterly wonderful, amazing love,--they still remain.
For _nuni menei_ (nothing can rob us of the word) _pistis, elpis,
agape, ta tria tauta; meizpon de touton he agape_.'


[Transcriber's note: The above Greek phrases were transliterated as
follows: _nuni_--nu, upsilon, nu, iota; _menei_--mu, epsilon, nu,
epsilon, iota; _pistis_--pi, iota, sigma, tau, iota, final sigma;
_elpis_--epsilon, lambda, pi, iota, final sigma; _agape_--alpha (soft
breathing mark), gamma, alpha, pi, eta; _ta_--tau, alpha; _tria_--tau,
rho, iota, alpha; _tauta_--tau, alpha, upsilon, tau, alpha;
_meizpon_--mu, epsilon, iota, zeta, omega, nu; _de_--delta, epsilon;
_touton_--tau, omicron, upsilon, tau, omega, nu; _he_--(rough breathing
mark) epsilon; _agape_--alpha (soft breathing mark), gamma, alpha, pi,
eta]



{54}

LETTERS


_To A. V. R._

Brislington Hill, Bristol: September 24, 1890.

. . .  I have been persuaded to try the Semitic Languages Tripos.  I
have been learning German and Syriac a little this Long with that aim
in view. . . .  I don't really know what to do.  I am trying to do what
will best fit me for my future work.  It is hard to know what is right.

. . .  The only thing I want is not to develop into a mere
bookworm. . . .  The atmosphere of Cambridge so tends to deaden one,
and to make one unsympathetic with humanity; and yet the Church today
does so need men who know something, men who can express with no
uncertain sound the truth of Old Testament and New Testament criticism.
I want so to find out what the Old Testament is, and how far we can
believe in it, in its essential truth, in its historical accuracy.  The
question can only be settled by scholars--by scholars filled with the
spirit of humility and understanding.  It cannot be settled by the
so-called spiritual faculty alone, but only by the intellect guided by
the Spirit of Truth.

I have been reading St. John's Gospel in Greek and Syriac, and more and
more I become convinced {55} that what it says is truth:
_zoe_--life--anything worth calling life--anything that can
last--anything that is of use here and hereafter--is to be gained alone
by actually eating and drinking the Body of the Son of Man.  The
expression is awfully strong--the expression in itself.  I am not
talking of all sorts of modern explanations of the expression.  Take it
as it stands in the original: 'You have no life, unless you eat and
drink. . . .'

[Transcriber's note: The word _zoe_ in the above paragraph was
transliterated from the Greek letters zeta, omega, eta.]

I wish there could be a small Greek Testament reading in the College
for considering what the New Testament really means, apart from modern
interpretations.  Is it possible to find out the true, original meaning
of that book, and to understand its problems a little and its
solutions?  'Quid importat scientia sine timore Dei?'



_To T. H. M._

Aldeburgh House, Blackheath: March 20, 1891.

I am gradually finding out how ignorant I am of the meaning of the New
Testament, and how miserably I have read my own miserable notions and
glosses into the words of St. Paul.  I am sure that the solution of the
greatest problems which concern humanity is to be found in his
Epistles, if we could only approach them without bias and with more
childishness.  I feel certain that the Incarnation is the great fact of
the world's, and probably of the universe's, history.  'The Word was
made flesh.'

  And so the Word had breath, and wrought
    With human hands the creed of creeds
    In loveliness of perfect deeds,
  More strong than all poetic thought.


{56}

The death on Calvary must have had effects far beyond this particular
world.  'He descended into hell.'  He claimed His power over all parts
of His universe.  The Good _has_ conquered.  The Bad _is_ defeated.



_To T. H. M._

Christ's College, Cambridge: July 18, 1891.

We have but lately heard that my missionary brother[1] has passed away
into the eternal world.  He died in Africa.  He gave up all, he gave up
his life for Christ.  Terribly as we feel the loss, and shall feel it
still more, I cannot help thanking the Eternal Father that He has
accepted the life-sacrifice, and feeling that He calls upon us here and
now, each day and moment of our lives, to offer up ourselves on the
altar of universal thanksgiving.  Life is sacrifice, renunciation: true
life is dependence on God.  Sin is isolation, death--a failure to
recognise and act on our dependence.  I do feel as I seldom felt before
something of the love of the Father, the grace of the Son, the
communion of the Spirit.  We _must_ learn that an individual hope,
aspiration, ambition, is against the law of the universe--the law of
self-sacrifice.  We _must_ learn that our wills are ours to make them
God's; that if we have a single hope or thought which He does not
inspire, which true humanity cannot share, the hope and thought are
wrong.  God grant that you and I may renounce {57} our individual
lives, and become truly ourselves by martyrdom, by allowing the Christ
in us to live.

I am to be ordained in September.  Pray for me.  There is no power like
prayer.  Let us pray for one another.  The great Father longs for
simple lives, simple piety, perpetual thanksgiving.  And we have so
much to be thankful for--so much here and now.  I do long to offer
body, mind, soul, affections, will, hope, to Him as a thanksgiving.
Self-renunciation, life in a Church, a Body, is the only life.  God
grant we may live it!


[1] John Alfred Robinson, formerly a scholar of Christ's College, who
died at Lokoja on the River Niger, on June 25, 1891.



_To T. H. M._

Christ's College, Cambridge: November 17, 1891.

Do you know that it isn't a bad thing to feel a babe?  We must all
become simple little children before we enter the kingdom of heaven,
because God, who lives in that kingdom, has the simplest heart in all
the wide universe--the most childlike, for God is Love.  He has no
cross purposes.  Though He is stronger and better and bigger than we
are, He is simpler.  He will love a poor, simple old woman in His
simple way with a wonderful affection.  He is so simple, because He
does not know what sin is.  God never sins.  God is Light, and in Him
is no darkness at all.

It is this simplicity, this love of One who is omnipotent, uncreate,
illimitable, eternal, that makes me reverence Him, adore Him, live for
Him, love Him.

Simplicity is wonderfully attractive.  The man who knows least of sin
is most helpful to me, because {58} he is most simple and Godlike.  The
'man of the world' is most repulsive, because he is most like the Devil.



_To E. N. L., on the occasion of his ordination._

Cambridge: March 10, 1892.

It gives me great pleasure to think that on Sunday next you will be
made a Deacon in God's Church.  I thank God that He has called you to
one of the highest offices on earth, that henceforth you will be 'in'
or (shall we say?) 'under' orders--God's orders--that you willingly
renounce your life, your thoughts, your hopes, your ambitions to Him.
You will probably hear much and be told much at this time.  I have
nothing to say that you have not heard and will not hear said far
better by others.  Our Church gives the keynote in the collect for
Sunday: 'We have no power.'  I never realised my weakness, my pride, my
hollowness so much as I did at my ordination.  God has been teaching
me, even in the short time since I was ordained, wonderful
lessons--lessons of strength being perfected in weakness.  He alone
knows the depths of our hypocrisy, our vanity, our atheism, and He
alone can help us.  To get nearer to Him, to know Him better--this is
what I want, this is eternal life.  As we believe in a Person who is by
our side, who is helping us, training us, we shall be able to proclaim
Him to others.  Do not mind about feelings.  You may have beautiful
feelings at your ordination time.  Thank God if you have.  He sends
them.  You may have none.  Thank God if you have not, for He has kept
them back.  We do {59} not want to _feel_ better and stronger; we want
to _be_ better and stronger.  And He _has_ made us better and stronger.
He has given us His Spirit as we knelt before the bishop.  We must go
forth in that strength.  We must use it, live on it, and it will be
ours.  _Kata ten pistin humon genetheto humin_.  When we feel most
hopeless, most wretched, most distant from God, remember 'feelings
don't matter.'  Remember that God's Son felt the same temptation,
remember that He too was forsaken by His God.  And when all seems lost,
Satan seems master, we are misunderstood; remember that 'I believe in
the Holy Ghost,' who is stronger than separation or death, than
feelings, than our hearts.  All our feelings and thoughts and wishes
are nothing.  God is everything and in all.  All our conceptions will
be shattered, all our schemes overthrown, that a Great Person behind
may be revealed.  To know, to love, to make known, to make men love
that Person is our work in life . . . .

[Transcriber's note: The Greek words in the above paragraph were
transliterated as follows: _Kata_--Kappa, alpha, tau, alpha;
_ten_--tau, eta, nu; _pistin_--pi, iota, sigma, tau, iota, nu;
_humon_--(rough breathing mark) upsilon, mu, omega, nu;
_genetheto_--gamma, epsilon, nu, eta, theta, eta, tau, omega;
_humin_--(rough breathing mark) upsilon, mu, iota, nu]

We are men sent from God.  We come to bear witness of a Light.  Do not
let us confuse ourselves with our message.  The message is everything;
we are nothing.  The Light simply shines through us.  We must be glad
to be shattered, rejected, if so be that the Light shining through us
may be manifested.

One suggestion I make: that you do what I believe you are expected by
the words of the Prayer-book to do--say the Morning and Evening Prayer
daily _always_, unless you are ill, at home or in church, and the
Litany on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday.  You will find this a greater
help than almost anything else--a help against superstition,
narrowness, bigotry, {60} heartlessness.  If you decide not to do so,
do it with some _really_ good reason, and not because others do the
same, or because it is a bother.

And now good-bye.  And may God grant us to know Him on earth, so that
we may together know Him better hereafter.



_To W. A. B._

Blackheath: April 30, 1892.

. . .  No amount of philosophical theories are worth much compared with
a simple picture of home life.  It is these common relations of life
which are most awful and sacred.  The highest life we know is, I think
I may say with reverence, family life--life of Father and Son; family
life on earth is a faint picture of something better in heaven.  We
shall be surprised some day to find that, while we have been searching
for the noble and divine, we have it all the while at home.  The
relations of brother and brother, son and father, are eternal
realities, which we shall never fathom, for God Himself is below them.
'Omnia exeunt in mysterium,' as Kingsley says in 'Yeast.'  I am very
pleased with that novel.  The description he gives of the sufferings
and squalor of villages is positively awful.  We do want men who
believe that self-sacrifice, not selfishness, is at the top of all, who
are sure that family life is made in heaven and is made in the image of
God's life, who know that in the present is the eternal, to go and live
and work and die in our villages.  But Kingsley shows it is not enough
to give alms or other social benefits--we must do more than that, we
must raise their whole {61} life and condition.  I believe myself that
this can only be done from inside.  Thus, when God wished to redeem
man, He did it from inside.  Man himself fought and conquered.  Deity
entered into humanity.  It is not merely that we must live simply,
think simply, work, as they do.  That is well, but we must do more.  If
we want to look at them from the inside, I know only one way--the old,
old way which God Himself adopts.  We must love them, love the Christ,
the Spirit in them--not the beast, the devil in them.  Like attracts
like.  To love and to detect that, we must have some of that Spirit,
that Christ.

That means to say that to help others from the inside, we must be right
inside ourselves.  And yet none of us are right inside.  But there is
that in us which is right, that in us which is not ourselves, but is
deeper than ourselves.  A Son who will make us true sons, a Brother who
will teach us how to be brothers, a Human Being who will show us what
is in all human beings; a Love who will teach us what we always fancy
we know, but what we don't know (else we should be divine)--how to
love; a Man who will make us saints and gentlemen--the Man Christ
Jesus.  Yes, and there is in us a Great Spirit who is uniting us by
invisible bonds to all that is good and healthy and Godlike, a Spirit
who disciplines our will when it is weakest and most self-indulgent,
who trains our spirit and fights our battles against the evil spirit, a
Person who makes us persons.  How then do men differ?  If in every man
there is the Light which lightens him, the Christ, the Spirit, what is
the difference between good and bad men?  Does {62} a good man possess
religion, or faith, or love?  No, the best men would tell you they were
possessed by faith and love, rather than that they possessed them.
What faith or love they have is not a possession--it is in them, not of
them, not belonging to them.  It comes from the Christ in them.  The
difference between men is not that one is inspired and another is not,
but that one yields to the Spirit, another does not.  We begin to obey
when we lose ourselves in that Spirit and forget all but God.  We ought
never to settle any detail in life without taking Him into account: we
are fools if we do.  How can we be logical?  For He is in that detail,
and not to think of Him is not to understand that detail.  For every
detail is more than a detail--it is the expression of a Person.

I have wandered into a train of thought suggested by 'Yeast,' and in
part copied directly from it.  Forgive me.  I was half thinking aloud.
That is my one excuse for saying what I am trying to think.

I never played golf.  I do that sort of thing by deputy.  K---- is the
sort of man to do it for me.  At any rate, I trust him with my football
and rowing.  It doesn't tire you so much if you do it that way.  Only
let me give you one piece of advice, which I only wish I acted upon:
'Don't do your thinking by deputy:' do your rowing, golf, football,
cricket, skittles, talking if you like, but not your thinking.


{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, 8,000_l._ 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 5_s._ 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 fêted.  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 10_l._, 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.

Well, I hope that the hair of my godchild is growing, and that she has
now more than her god-father.  His is coming to an untimely end.



_To F. S. H; who had recently become a chaplain in the Navy._

St. Leonards: January 11, 1900.

I am thinking of you in your new, difficult, and interesting life, and
wondering how you like it.  Or, rather, I am sure that you like it in
its main features.  There are in every life drawbacks and
discouragements, for we live by faith and not by sight, and faith must
be perfected in the midst of perplexities and contradictions.  The
mists are useful.  It would not do to have brilliant sunshine all the
time.  For in that case, where would faith come in?  Steering towards
our port in the fog means trusting the Pilot.  'Mercifully grant that
we, which know Thee now by faith, may after this life have the fruition
of Thy glorious Godhead.'  I suppose that none of us fully {120} knows
what this prayer means.  I think that there will be more need of faith
hereafter than we usually think.  Can we ever apprehend the Father or
the Son without faith?  The deepest truths are grasped by faith not
sight.  The man who has learned to exercise faith here will have fuller
scope for his faith hereafter.  What a shock to wake up in the next
world and to find that the riddles of life still need faith for their
solution!  Yet I imagine that it will be so.  Only faith will be able
to go deeper than here.  The faith perfected in the mists of life will,
in the sunshine of eternity, see deeper into the meaning of events.  I
wish I had more faith.  Not sudden flights of faith annihilating time
and space and rising up to the throne of heaven.  But I wish I could
ground all my actions on faith, and regularly see the invisible and
live as one who could see always and everywhere the Unseen.  We are
schooled in different ways.  We cannot attain to perfection in a night.
As we advance in the Christian life progress seems slower.  In some
sense it is so.  It is easier to cast off a number of definite bad
habits clearly inconsistent with the ideal just at first, than to
perfect self-sacrifice, humility, and self-discipline.  But we are
advancing, though we know it not.  If the engines are always kept
working, we shall reach our goal!



_To C. N. W; who had recently been ordained._

St. Leonards-on-Sea: January 12, 1900.

You must remember how much your future efficiency is dependent upon a
judicious use of your {121} strength during the next two or three
years.  I am sure you are right in looking back upon your life and
tracing in its developments a higher than human guidance.  It is a
helpful thing to trace now and anon God's hand in our individual life.
It brings Him nearer to us, and it is an awful thought that He is
actually working within us.  It makes us trust Him for time to come
even when the prospect is gloomy.  I think that we do well to spend
some time in trying to interpret details of our past life.  As years go
on, we should have such a firm faith founded on the rock of experience
that we will not be lightly shaken.  Peace should be a characteristic
of our life--the joy and peace which come from a certainty that there
is a Purpose in all events.  The sense that God has been with us in the
past is a help in interpreting the history of our nation.  Even our
troubles are a proof that He is disciplining us.  For the service of
Intercession, which my brother uses in Westminster Abbey at the time of
this war, the opening sentence is 'The Lord our God be with us,' and
the answer is, 'As He was with our fathers.'

The College is getting on well.  You must come up and see me this year,
while you still know a number of men.  I have now a little evening
service--compline--in my rooms at 10 o'clock; Masterman asked me to
have it.  He asked men to come, and they asked others.  I purposely
refrained from asking any one.  We are sometimes a goodly number.  I
think it is helpful to those who come.  It is, I know, to me.  We have
a hymn when we have sufficient musical talent!



{122}

_To G. J. C._

Christ's College, Cambridge: 1900.

Gwatkin has exploded Anthony, 'who never existed.'  But for all that I
think Anthony is much like Adam and Eve.  The originals may 'never have
existed.'  Yet their story belongs to all time.  And there will be
Anthonies and Adams and Eves to the end of time.  It comforts me to
feel that that which makes for evil is not my true self, but a
wretched, cunning animal existence independent of me, existing before I
came into being, although capable of appealing to me--a serpent.

I am half glad and half sorry to hear of your harmonium.  Public
worship is a terribly difficult thing, and it is well at times that we
should realise its difficulties, and have it stripped bare of many
helpful accessories.  Yet worship in a village church impresses me.  As
in a college chapel, I realise then the continuity of the race.  An old
church tells me of generations of men who lived my life, to whom the
present was everything, and the dead almost nothing, who never could
seriously believe that some day the world would whirl and follow the
sun without them.  It tells me more than most things of what St. Paul
means when he said that we were all making one perfect man.  And I am
humbled and thankful to know that I in my generation can do something
towards the Christ 'that is to be.'

Read the Old Testament itself.  Nothing will {123} atone for lack of
knowledge of the Bible.  Robertson Smith's and Adam Smith's books
(especially the latter's) on the Old Testament Prophets ought to prove
useful. . . .  When I call a man by his Christian name, I usually make
it a rule to pray for him.  I shall do so in your case.  I will try to
pray every day.  I wonder whether you would sometimes pray for me: I
believe immensely in the power of prayer.  It is the greatest favour I
can ask of you, and I know I have no right to prefer the request; but
it would be kind of you if you could occasionally.  One needs all the
help one can get in this strange life up here.  Now I will end.  I have
written you a strange, unreserved letter.  Forgive me.  How I wish this
dreadful war was at an end!  U----'s going was a blow to me; but I am
sure he did the right thing.  I admire and love that man. . . .



_To G. J. C._

Castleton, Swanage: 1900.

. . .  You will not have misinterpreted my silence.  I could not answer
your letter until I had secured a time for quiet thought and for
prayer.  When I try to write, I feel the uselessness of words.  I am
doing better when I am praying for you than when I am writing to you.
Yet I must write. . . .  It is strange that God should have made us
thus.  To those whom He honours most He gives largest capacity for
love, and therefore largest capacity for suffering.  It is still more
strange that we would not wish to be {124} without the love in spite of
the agony which it brings.  It must be because

    All loves are shadows cast
  By the beautiful eternal hills
    Of Thine unbeginning past.

I feel this truth 'in seasons of calm weather.'  But at other times I
ask myself, I ask God, angrily, Why should some men have no obstacle to
their love?  Why should another suffer more than any one can tell--more
than, it sometimes seems to me, can ever be requited?  I cannot answer
the question.  But I often think of the great unsatisfied heart of God,
and then I think of this poor unsatisfied heart made in His image, and
I feel that He understands me, and that I understand Him better than I
used to do, before this terrible hunger of love began.

I pray God that He will deal tenderly with you, G----, and I am sure
that He will.  It cuts me to the heart to think of your suffering, and
I would stop it this moment if I could.  So would God--for He loves you
more than I do--unless it were the best thing for you.  It is written
of the Son of man, _emathen aph on epathen_.  May the same words be
true of you and of me!  God bless you and give you Light and Peace!

  Peace is something more than joy,
    Even the joys above;
  For peace, of all created things,
    Is likest Him we love.

[Transcriber's note: The Greek phrase in the above paragraph was
transliterated as follows: _emathen_--epsilon, mu, alpha, theta,
epsilon, nu; _aph_--alpha, phi; _on_--emega, nu; _epathen_--epsilon,
pi, alpha, theta, epsilon, nu]


This letter may appear cold to you.  It is not.  I feel more deeply
than I write. . . .  Some day, if {125} you care to hear, I will tell
you something about my own imperfect life.  I can't write it down.
Later the day will dawn.  But God sends the darkness that we may learn
to trust Him, I have never yet found Him to fail.  We cannot trust Him
too much.



_To the mother of a friend, after having been present at his funeral._

Cambridge: April 22, 1900.

I feel I must write and tell you how grateful I am to you for your
kindness in allowing me to be present on Thursday.  Whenever I think of
your son who has passed away, that text comes into my mind: 'Blessed
are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.'  He was pure in heart,
and I cannot think of him as lifeless, but as actually seeing
God. . . .  I am thankful to have been allowed to be his friend.  I
shall never forget him; his life remains a source of strength and
inspiration to me.  It comforts me now to know that he is sinking
deeper and deeper into the peace of God, which passeth all
understanding.  You were talking to me about W----; I could not say all
that I wished to say. . . .  I am very, very slow to suggest ordination
to a man.  I realise the responsibility of doing so, but there is no
man whom I desire to see ordained more than W----; he has been to me
more help than I can possibly say.  I dare not try to tell you all that
he has done for me, because you would think I was exaggerating.  I
cannot help feeling that, if he helps me so much, he might help others
also, and that, if he were ordained, {126} he would have singular
opportunities for rendering such help.  But I do not press him in the
matter, because I might do wrong; but I pray again and again that, if
God wishes him to be ordained, He will make His purpose clear, and I am
quite sure that He will not leave us in the dark.



_To C. T. W._

Cambridge: July 1900.

I was delighted to read in the paper yesterday of your election to a
fellowship. . . .  The life will be a harder one than that of an
ordinary parish clergyman; it will be easier to lose sight of ideals.
But the importance of the work is in proportion to its difficulty.
Blessed is the man who finds his work, and does it; and you will be
blessed. . . .

You should read St. Patrick's 'Confession,' a genuine work of my
distinguished countryman.  It is full of humility and zeal.  I give you
a quotation: 'After I had come to Ireland I used daily to feed cattle,
and I often prayed during the day.  More and more did the love of God
and the fear of Him increase, and faith became stronger and the spirit
was moved; so that in one day I said as many as a hundred prayers, and
in the night nearly the same. . . .  And there was no sluggishness in
me, as I now see there is, for at that time the spirit was fervent
within me.'  Pathetic--that last part.  He might have been living at
Cambridge!  But I hope better things for you.

{127}

_To C. T. W._

Thirlmere: September 1900.

My thoughts are with you now--and my prayers.  'He had seven stars--in
His right hand,' was the thought which comforted me at my own
ordination, when I felt, as seldom before, my own hollowness and
incapacity.  We can shed light--we are safe--because we are 'in His
right hand.'  'The eternal God is our refuge, and underneath are the
everlasting arms.'  We can never go beyond His love and care.  In
moments of perplexity and uncertainty, although we cannot feel His
presence, He is there.  'In His right hand.'  'They that turn many to
righteousness shall shine as the stars for ever and ever.'

May God give you the power to love and the power to pray!  Much prayer
and much love are needed for a successful ministry.  Good-bye, and God
bless you and make you a true and faithful pastor!  Remember St. Paul's
words: _he dunamis en astheneia teleitai.  edista oun mallon
kauchesomai en tais astheneiais, hina episkenose ep eme he dunamis tou
Christou; hotan gar artheno, tote dunatos eimi_.


[Transcriber's note: The Greek phrases above were transliterated as
follows: _he_--(rough breathing mark) eta; _dunamis_--delta, upsilon,
nu, alpha, mu, iota, final sigma; _en_--epsilon, nu;
_astheneia_--alpha, sigma, theta, epsilon, nu, epsilon, iota, alpha;
_teleitai_--tau, epsilon, lambda, epsilon, iota, tau, alpha, iota;
_edista_--eta, delta, iota, sigma, tau, alpha; _oun_--omicron, upsilon,
nu; _mallon_--mu, alpha, lambda, lambda, omicron, nu;
_kauchesomai_--kappa, alpha, upsilon, chi, eta, sigma, omicron, mu,
alpha, iota; _en_--epsilon, nu; _tais_--tau, alpha, iota, final sigma;
_astheneiais_--alpha, sigma, theta, epsilon, nu, epsilon, iota, alpha,
iota, final sigma; _hina_--(rough breathing mark) iota, nu, alpha;
_episkenose_--epsilon, pi, iota, sigma, kappa, eta, nu, omega, sigma,
eta; _ep_--epsilon, pi; _eme_--epsilon, mu, epsilon; _he_--(rough
breathing mark) eta; _dunamis_--delta, upsilon, nu, alpha, mu, iota,
final sigma; _tou_--tau, omicron, upsilon; _Christou_--Chi, rho, iota,
sigma, tau, omicron, upsilon; _hotan_--(rough breathing mark) omicron,
tau, alpha, nu; _gar_--gamma, alpha, rho; _artheno_--alpha, rho, theta,
epsilon, nu, omega; _tote_--tau, omicron, tau, epsilon;
_dunatos_--delta, upsilon, nu, alpha, tau, omicron, final sigma;
_eimi_--epsilon, iota, mu, iota]



_To W. D. H._

Dale Head Post Office, Thirlmere, September 20, 1900.

My thoughts and my prayers are with you at this time.  I remember how
at my own ordination, when I felt as never before my own utter weakness
and incapacity, the thoughts in the first chapter of the Revelation, of
Christian ministers as 'stars in His {128} right hand' comforted and
supported me.  In His right hand--with His power we can do all things.
As the lesson for to-day says, _he dunamis en astheneia teleitai_,
strength is perfected in weakness.  _hotan astheno tote dunatos eimi_.

[Transcriber's note: The Greek phrases above were transliterated as
follows: _he_--(rough breathing mark) eta; _dunamis_--delta, upsilon,
nu, alpha, mu, iota, final sigma; _en_--epsilon, nu;
_astheneia_--alpha, sigma, theta, epsilon, nu, epsilon, iota, alpha;
_teleitai_--tau, epsilon, lambda, epsilon, iota, tau, alpha, iota;
_hotan_--(rough breathing mark) omicron, tau, alpha, nu;
_astheno_--alpha, sigma, theta, epsilon, nu, omega; _tote_--tau,
omicron, tau, epsilon; _dunatos_--delta, upsilon, nu, alpha, tau,
omicron, final sigma; _eimi_--epsilon, iota, mu, iota]

You will feel more, as years go on, the greatness of the task which you
are undertaking--the overwhelming responsibility--the dread lest
through any carelessness on your part one of the least of the sheep may
be lost.  But you will also feel more and more that you are 'in His
right hand.'  And if the eternal God is your refuge and underneath are
the everlasting arms, you need not fear what the devil or man can do
unto you.  I pray that God may be with you and give you the spirit of
prayer and the spirit of love.  Your ministry will only be effective if
you pray much and love much.  And if you make mistakes, yet if you love
much your sins will be forgiven.



_To his brother, a doctor in South Africa._

September 1900.

When I feel what the grace of God has done for my life, what it is
doing, what it will do, I can despair of no one else.  I am filled with
wonder and amazement and thanksgivings and hopes.  I am sometimes so
thankful that I still live, that in a world of light and dark shadows I
can show my faith in God, before the other world dawns with its full
day and unclouded brightness--and most of all that I can here and now
pray for those whom He has taught me to love.  I cannot conceive this
world without prayer.  It is {129} worth while making any efforts,
however desperate, to learn to pray.  When the Day dawns, how wonderful
it will be to look back and trace the path through which He has led us
in the Twilight!



_To F. J. C._

Christ's College, Cambridge: 1900.

The more He tries you by His silence, the greater to my mind is the
proof that He believes in you.  He knows you will come through.  He has
great work for you to do, and therefore you need a strong perfected
faith, and He is trying to give you it.

I am so sorry at what you tell me about prayer.  But do go on.  When
things are at their darkest light comes.  After all God knows how much
you can bear, and He will not, if you will only persevere, allow you to
be utterly confounded.  Don't be in the least discouraged at your
inability to concentrate your attention.  Even a man who had lived in
the presence of God for years has told us that

  The world that looks so dull all day
    Glows bright on me at prayer,
  And plans that ask no thought but these,
    Wake up and meet me there.
  My very flesh has restless fits;
    My changeful limbs conspire
  With all these phantoms of the mind
    My inner self to tire.


Do you expect to fare better, when you are exercising faculties which
have been for long more or less dormant?  The same man goes on to
say--and I {130} think it is a comforting truth--that God sees further
than we do, sees what we mean:

  These surface troubles come and go,
    Like rufflings of the sea;
  The deeper depth is out of reach
    To all, my God, but Thee.


Even if your conscience condemns you, remember that God is greater than
your conscience.  He sees that you _want_ to pray, and the battle is
half won when there is even the want.  I like these old words of the
hymn:

  Satan trembles when he sees
    The weakest saint upon his knees,

even if he can't collect his thoughts.  I find it usually easier to
pray for others than for myself.  I believe in beginning by praying for
what is easiest.  I don't kneel down.  I find it more possible to
concentrate my attention when I am walking about or sitting down.  And
I tell God what I know about a man, and how I want him to live a better
life.  Sometimes I seem to struggle for him as though for very life.  I
go on and on and on--sometimes repeating the same request.  I try to
copy the poor widow who wearied out the dishonest judge.  I am not
distressed when my thoughts wander, I know that they will always wander
without God's help.  The distress occasioned by wandering thoughts, and
the attempt to trace the stages by which they wandered, I regard as
temptations of the devil. . . .  I go back as calmly as possible to the
matter in hand.

Excuse my 'egoism.'  I put it in the first person, {131} because I
believe my own experience will help you more than rules derived from
the experience of others.

Suppose you spend half an hour in this way, and only really pray for
three or four minutes, your efforts will be more than rewarded.  You
will have done more than you know for the person for whom you have
prayed.  And the next half-hour you will find that you can concentrate
your attention for a minute or two longer.  Don't think too much about
yourself when you pray.  You must lose your soul if you would save it.

There is probably some one thing or some one person easier than others
for you to pray for.  Begin with that.

I never try, as some people do, to classify and enter into details
about my sins.  I bring the whole contradictory, weary, and
unintelligible mass of them to God, and leave them with Him.  I am
quite sure I shall never do better without Him.  But I know that He
believes in me, and will help me in spite of myself.  He believes in
you too, dear old fellow!  May God bless you for your kindness to me!
Write me just a short note to tell me that you don't despise me in
spite of what must seem to you rather unintelligible and ridiculous
confessions.

I can't help it.  And if you can bring yourself to do it, call me too
by my Christian name.



_To the same._

Christ's College, Cambridge: September 28, 1900.

I feel more and more the necessity of being alone occasionally for some
time--to get time enough to {132} pray.  I think my supreme desire is
to be a man of prayer.  You must help me to accomplish the desire:
'Gutta cavat lapidem non vi, sed saepe cadendo.'

So it is with prayer.  As the stone gets worn away, not by the force of
the drop of water but by its constant trickling, so prayer often
renewed must at length attain its end.  It is a wonderful privilege to
be able to state all one's wishes and hopes for others in prayer--to
know that there can be there no possibility of misunderstanding--to
tell to God the incomprehensible depth of one's love, and to feel that
He knows what it means, because He Himself is love.  It is glorious to
be made in His image, and to be sure that all one's highest yearnings
are a reflection--however broken, partial, and unsightly--of His own
marvellous life.  We have indeed cause to be grateful for our
'creation.'  I often look at the poor dumb creatures, and thank God
that He has given me such full powers of love, which they cannot
understand: for I would rather have the pains of love than any other
pleasure.



_To F. S. H., a chaplain in the Navy._

Cambridge: November 4, 1900.

I ought to have written before this.  The fact that I did not answer at
once is partly accounted for by my having a good deal of work to do,
and partly by physical weakness.  I have not been very well this term.
It is cruel of you to suspect me of having forgotten all about you.  I
am not that sort.  I owe too much to you in the past ever to forget
you.  {133} I don't think that you really suspected me of inconstancy.
I am so sorry that you are sometimes lonely and very miserable.  I feel
at times weak, physically weak.  I think that at such times one can
lean back, as it were, on the Divine arms.  He understands our weakness
and weariness.  He knows what loneliness and sadness mean.  And He is
not extreme to mark what we do amiss.  He knows that we are but flesh.
And He 'dwells not in the light alone, but in the darkness and the
light.'  Even when the darkness hides Him and we cannot find where He
is, we can, as it were, reach out our hands to Him, and we are safe.
God has much to teach us while we are teaching others.  And life is not
exactly the same as we thought at the beginning.  He teaches us by
unexpected experiences.  But the comfort is that He never changes; we
may be weary, but He never slumbers nor sleeps.  Sometimes we feel very
fit and capable.  Then is the time to pray and to rise to the heights.
Later, when we are incapable, although it is hard to rise, we need not
fall.  When the mist clears we can go on again, and it may be that we
shall find that even in the mist we had gone further than we thought.
The deep snow and the long dark rainy days are necessary for the
perfecting of the fruit, as well as the sunshine.  And we do need
sunshine.  I feel more and more grateful and thankful to God for His
goodness.  He has been so good to me, and I don't deserve it.  And I
think that if you look back and look forward you will feel more and
more His marvellous sympathy and affection.  I am glad you have been
reading Robertson's Life.  Though he {134} may have been almost morbid
at times, he was a great man and did a great work. . . .  You will find
later that your work has been far more effective than you expected.
Don't try to rush it.  You can't help men much until you know them very
well; and when you know them you find how utterly different they are
from what you had expected them to be.  At least I do.  No two men are
alike.  Each man that you come really to know is utterly different from
any man you have ever met or will meet.



_To F. J. C._

Christ's College, Cambridge: November 5, 1900.

It is good of you to think of me and above all to pray for me.  I need
your prayers--and most of all when I am run down and unable to pray
myself.  I can see the mountain top at times: then the mist comes down,
and I cannot see the way; I try to keep where I am, though I may not be
able to advance; and when the mist clears I go on again.  Possibly,
sometimes, we may be going forward even in the mist, although we seem
to be making no progress, or going backward.

  God judges by a light
  Which baffles mortal sight.

I often wish I had more physical strength and was able to do what other
men can do; but I can't.  And I have no doubt that all is well--that I
am made to do one particular piece of work, and that I have strength
enough for that--and thank God for that.

{135}

_To a brother in South Africa._

December 1900.

It is a marvellous thought that God can reveal Himself to man--even
primitive man.  In those stories Jehovah is very near to man.  He walks
in the garden at nightfall.  He shuts Noah into the Ark.  He comes down
to see the city and the tower 'which the children of men builded.'  He
talks with Moses face to face as a man speaketh to his friend--and a
ladder connects heaven and earth, and the angels, instead of using
wings, walk up and down the ladder--and, behold, Jehovah stood above
it.  At any moment you might meet Jehovah Himself.  Three men come to
see Abraham--and Jehovah has appeared to him.  A man wrestles with
Jacob, and he has seen God face to face.  They were right when they
thought of God as very near to man, of man as capable of reflecting
God's likeness.  Ye too shall see heaven opened and the angels of God
ascending and descending upon--the Son of man.  It is good for us as
children to read these stories to realise that heaven is very near to
earth.  It is good for us as men to read them again to realise that
heaven is even nearer earth than we thought as children.  As I said
before, how marvellous it is that God can reveal Himself to man and
through man, that He has revealed Himself entirely, 'the perfect man,'
as Maurice says, reflecting the perfect God--God and man so near one to
the other that men can look upon the Son of man and see God--see Him in
His perfection!  Our years ought to be bound each to {136} each by
natural piety.  The child should surely be the father of the man.

  With age Thou growest more divine,
    More glorious than before;
  I fear Thee with a deeper fear
    Because--I love Thee more.

I have been reading Moody's Life.  It has much the same effect as
Finney's used to have in days gone by--it creates a longing to work and
live for God, to bring men nearer to Him, to come nearer to Him myself.
Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and there is none upon earth that I
desire in comparison of Thee.

What a wonderful thing that we, as a family, are so united--that our
Ideal is so much the same--isn't it?



_To F. S. H._

St. Moritz: January 6, 1901.

I have succeeded in unfreezing my ink, so I can write and--although it
is late to do so--wish you a happy new century.  It is only once in a
lifetime that one can do that sort of thing!  I am out here for my
health.  I wasn't up to much last term.  However, I am as fit as a lord
now, and return to Cambridge this week.  I have been reading out here
two very different kinds of books.  One is Wellhausen's 'History of
Israel,' the other Moody's Life by his son.  Wellhausen's book gives
you in outline the position of modern advanced criticism of the Old
Testament.  I have never before studied the history from the critical
point of view really seriously.  The study has proved extraordinarily
interesting, and I {137} must say that in the main I agree thoroughly
with Wellhausen's position.  You will see it more or less clearly put
in that 'History of the Hebrew People' in two small volumes by Kent
which I recommended to you before.  The history of the gradual progress
of the divine revelation to the human race is a marvellous study: the
way in which that people were educated to become the teachers of the
world is utterly different from anything which we should have devised.
I am struck more and more by the marvellous fact that God can and does
reveal Himself--in His essential moral nature--to man; that we are so
made that we can apprehend the revelation; nay, that we in turn can in
measure reveal Him to men!

Moody's Life stirs me up to realise more the worth of the individual,
the surpassing value of man's moral and spiritual nature.  I long to
help men to see what I see, to love Him whom I love, and the failure of
my efforts is largely, I feel, due to defects in myself.  Still I do
not despair of doing something.



_To his brother Edward in South Africa._

Brislington, Bristol; April 10, 1901.

I was much interested in . . . (your letter) and in seeing a little
into your life.  There is a strange family reserve among us which I
sometimes deplore.  Perhaps it must always be so, that we can tell most
readily to strangers our deepest thoughts and feelings.  Yet I feel
that we ought, as far as we can in this short life, to understand one
another.  We have been led by different paths to understand different
aspects {138} of Truth.  Yet, when we have climbed to the top of the
hill, I dare say we shall find that our paths were nearer to one
another than we ever realised.  At any rate, we shall meet on the top.
I often think that your whole method of gaining truth must be unlike
mine.  I use my reason, but I am more than half affection, and it is
that which helps me most.  My strange love for some men makes me seek
to live their lives, to see the world as they see it; above all, it
forces me to pray.  Prayer never seems to me irrational; yet I do not
pray so much because my reason bids me as because my affection forces
me.  I sometimes feel that I should go mad if I didn't or couldn't.
And then, again, I am incapable of telling them all I feel, and I have
to find some one to tell it to, and I feel forced back on One who knows
me through and through, and I find comfort in pouring out my soul to
Him--in telling Him all, much that I dare say to no one else--in
letting Him sift the good and evil--in asking Him to develop and
satisfy the good, and to exterminate the evil.  I cannot help trusting
Him.

  I know not where His islands lift
    Their fronded palms in air;
  I only know I cannot drift
    Beyond His love and care.


You will tell me perhaps that I am too much like a woman in matters of
faith.  Yet so I am made.  I must follow the lead of my whole
being--not of my mind alone.  I often wonder how it is that I love with
such a strange, passionate, unutterable affection, and whether many men
are like me.  {139} I am most pleased to hear of your doings,
especially of your whist parties.



_To F. S. H., chaplain on board H.M.S. Canopus._

Brislington; April 10, 1901.

I am glad that you like your 'parish.'  I feel more and more that I
should prefer being among sailors to being among soldiers.  I am afraid
that I should do little good among either.  Still I like, or think that
I should like, naval officers even more than army officers.  If they do
talk a great deal of 'shop,' that is a healthy sign.  I only wish our
officers in the army were--I will not say more proud of their
profession (for they have, I dare say, sufficient pride)--but more
anxious to learn and to think out matters connected with it.  I dare
say the naval officer is obliged to act more independently and to think
for himself in an emergency; for the army discipline is carried to such
an extreme that the man for some years has seldom any occasion to act
on his own initiative--to rise to an occasion.  He simply has to ask a
superior what to do next.  He tends to resemble the Hindu
station-master who telegraphed 'Tiger on platform; please wire
instructions.'  If their talking shop is worrying occasionally, yet be
of good comfort, it is on the whole a good sign.  It is better than
talking golf or polo all day, and better far than loose and unmanly
conversation.  The more you are interested in the matters yourself, not
simply because you want to be all things to all men, if by any means
you may gain one or two, but because you are a man {140} and a
Christian, and therefore all things human have an interest to you, the
more you will enjoy such 'shop.'  We want not only to affect an
interest in what is of vital concern to our neighbours, but to feel it.
I begin to realise more now than I used to that I must not simply watch
football matches, or run with the boats, because I want to show
interest, but because I am learning--however late in the day and
however imperfectly--to feel a real concern for such matters.  And,
strange to say, I am more interested in them than I used to be.  Since
the Lord took human flesh and interested Himself in all human life, He
has left us an example that we may follow in His steps.  We must call
nothing, and no man, common or unclean.  My own life and my own
interests are terribly contracted.  Sometimes I have been foolish
enough to glory in the fact, and to think that I honour God in caring
only for my brother's soul and not for his whole life.  But love has
taught me that this is a low and incomplete view.  God numbers the very
hairs of our head, and he who loves and tries to help another must
enter into his life and care for all that he cares for.  I hope that
God will spare me a little longer to work in College, and to learn to
become one with others--to see life with their eyes, to let them teach
me--that so, if it please Him, I may gain some of them for His service.

The disciple cannot expect to be above the Master.  The Master was not
popular.  He explained His deepest teaching to a few--a very few.  If
you have one or two to whom you can explain part of your being, thank
God.  You will find that {141} one man understands one side, another
appreciates another side.  It is a comfort that there is One who knows
us through and through.  What a terrible blank life would be if we had
no God to whom to pour out our whole soul!  There are sides of our
being which no one but God seems to be able to apprehend.  I am feeling
now comfort at nights in simply telling Him all--feelings which I
cannot explain to any one else, asking Him to interpret, to sift, to
allow the better to live, to annihilate the untrue.  I do not cease to
expect great things from Him, to expect that He will do for my 'parish'
as a whole more than I have dreamed of or wished for.  But then I am
content if He works slowly, and does what I did not wish or expect to
happen.  He works slowly in nature, and I am not surprised if human
nature is still more stubborn material for Him to work upon.  But what
a joy it is when one character in which we are interested, for which we
have prayed and wrestled in prayer, shows slight but sure signs of
healthy development!  I feel inclined to shout for joy at the
miracle--for it is a miracle--and I thank God and take courage.  He
does not let us see many results, but He lets us see just enough to
help us to go forward.  It is a help when what is clear and true to us
begins to dawn upon another.  'My belief gains infinitely,' says
Novalis, 'when it is shared by any human soul.'

Let your 'parish' clearly see that 'it is one thing to be tempted,
another thing to fall.'  Vile, foul thoughts which come to us are not
in themselves a sign that we are falling.  They are first of all from
{142} outside, and are suggestions entirely alien in origin from
ourselves; they are from the devil.  They only become wrong when
entertained, when welcomed in the least degree as guests and allowed to
stay.  Our aim is to bring every thought at once into captivity.

I have just come back from the seaside, and as I looked at the sea I
thought more than once of 'the ocean of Thy love.'  The waves of the
sea beat against a stubborn rock and seem to make no impression.  But
in a few years' time the rock begins to yield.  The constant wash of
the waves wears it away.  So with our hard, stubborn wills.  The ocean
of His love will reduce them slowly but surely, and likewise the
stubborn wills of men around us, thank God!  When you are tired and
human strength gives way, remember 'the best of all is--God is with
us.'  I often feel worn out, and then I love, as it were, to lean back
upon Him--without speaking--as a child on its mother's arms.

  I know not where His islands lift
    Their fronded palms in air;
  I only know I cannot drift
    Beyond His love and care.

  O brother! if my faith is vain,
    If hopes like these betray,
  Pray for me that I too may gain
    The sure and safer way.

  And Thou, O God, by whom are seen
    Thy creatures as they be,
  Forgive me if too close I lean
    My human heart on Thee.[1]

{143}

I am, I fear, but a poor friend.  I wish you had some one who loved you
as well as I did, and who was less weak and selfish.  You must not give
me up in spite of my defects.  I love you and am proud of you--proud to
think that you are doing work among men whom I should be powerless to
influence.  Easter once more brings new life and hope.  May the God of
all life, of all peace, of all hope, be with you and all your flock!
May He guide pastor and sheep!  Don't despair; go on manfully; you are
doing greater work than you know, and if your eyes were open that you
could see, you would find that the host that was with you was more than
all that were against you.  Into His keeping I commit you.  Good-bye.
Your friend

FORBES.


[1] Whittier.



_To W. O._

Brislington: April 1901.

I am glad that the lot has fallen to you in fair places.  'It has been
said with true wisdom that God means man not only to work but to be
happy in his work. . . .  Without some sunshine we can never ripen into
what we are meant to be.'  So writes Dr. Hort.  I am reading his Life
with great joy.  He drank deep of life, and I want to do so also.  I
want to live in the present--in the sunshine of eternity.  I feel more
and more inclined to thank God for life and all the good things it
brings, and for the friends He has given me, and the measure of
strength and health to use in the service of man.

I had no idea where that Essay had gone.  I {144} suppose it is most
immature and unsatisfactory; yet the central idea, however imperfectly
expressed, must surely be true.  He took Manhood--in its weakness and
strength--up into God.  He was tempted.  That thought helps me
immensely.  'It is one thing to be tempted, another thing to fall.'  We
often accuse ourselves wrongly when foul thoughts spring up within us.
They are temptations from without--from the devil.  They only become
sins when entertained as welcome guests.  I have lately thought that
Christ's life, like ours, was a life of faith, that it needed a real
and constant effort of faith for Him to realise His relationship with
the unseen Father.  Here and hereafter human life is based on faith.
If we get this idea into our minds, Christ's temptations become more
real.  They are temptations to faithlessness.  I like your idea that
Christ has entered into our manhood, into the phases (if there be such)
'of the life to come.'

Rest in the Lord.  This thought comes home to me more than it used to
do.  I like to bring all the perplexities of life--the thoughts and
feelings which I can explain to no one--of some of which I cannot say
whether they are right or wrong, or where the right shades into
wrong--and to leave them with Him to develop (if right), to sift, to
correct.  What a blank life would be without God! . . .

Easter brings fresh hope and life.  It is glorious to begin existence
in a world which has been redeemed.  I am sure--since He rose and
defeated death--we ought to trust to life, to delight in it.  'I am the
Life.'

{145}

Breathe in the fresh air.  It is one of the best gifts that the good
God has bestowed upon us.  We want fresh air not only in our lungs but
all through, if I may say so, our being.  I long to be more natural and
happy--not that I wish for 'religious happiness,' but something quite
different--the happiness which comes in the right exercise of power and
in conscious dependence upon Him in whom we live.



_In reply to a letter from H. P., a master at Clifton College, who was
in doubt whether he ought to resign his mastership and go down to the
College Mission in Bristol._

Christ's College, Cambridge: May 1, 1901.

I have not had time to think over the matter yet, but my first feeling
is that you ought to be very slow to move.  If men in your position,
who feel keenly interested in the highest welfare of their pupils and
long to influence them in spiritual matters, all go away to parish
work, what is to become of our public school boys?  Masters are only
too anxious to leave for more 'directly spiritual' work, as they say.
But in doing so they leave a work of exceptional difficulty and
importance behind, and who is to take their place?  I understand and
appreciate your feelings, but I am not at all sure that you have any
call to go.

How much directly 'spiritual' work have you with the boys?  Could you,
if you desired, get more?

I will pray over the matter.  Do be slow before you decide to leave.  I
believe you ought to stay, {146} although it may be more difficult to
maintain your own spiritual life and ideals in a school than in a
parish.  You may be doing more good than you know.  It is easier to
find men to do parish work than to do school work of the highest kind.

There is a sermon of Lightfoot's in which he urges clergymen at the
University not to go away, because it is hard to maintain their
spiritual ideals at Cambridge, and because they seem to have so little
direct spiritual influence.  May not this apply to your work also?



_To one about to be ordained._

Cambridge: May 1901.

It seems so clear to us that you have a call, that I find it hard to
realise that you yourself are uncertain.  But the very fact that you
have been 'counting the cost,' and that you have no ecstatic joy at the
prospect before you, encourages me.  I am glad you realise the
difficulties beforehand.  What you don't fully see is the strength upon
which you will be able to draw.  I often think of those lines of
Tennyson:--

  O living Will that shalt endure
    When all that seems shall suffer shock,
    Rise in the spiritual rock,
  Flow through our deeds and make them pure.[1]

That Will can transform our will, and the very weakness of our natural
will is then a help.  The strength {147} is seen and felt to come from
an invisible source: 'Thy will, not my will.'

The terrible need of men to fight against the forces of evil impresses
me.  The call is so loud on every side.  And if men like you cannot
hear it, I am driven almost to despair. . . .  I often think of my
father's words on his deathbed: 'If I had a thousand lives I would give
them all--all to the ministry.'

The thought that gave me comfort at my own ordination was a text
suggested to me by my brother: 'He had in His right hand seven stars.'
In His right hand--we are safe there.  I felt such a worm as I had
never felt before.  'But fear not, thou worm Jacob.' . . .  Don't look
for happiness or peace at this time, but for the presence and power
(whether felt or unfelt) of that God whom we both love and try to love
better.  Do not persuade yourself that you do not love God.  You do,
more than you have any idea of.  The part of your 'Ego' which you would
least wish to lose is not even your love for men--but for God.  If you
had your choice now, and had to decide what part of your being you
would retain for eternity, it would be the latter.  Beloved, if our
heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart. . . .  'He who loves
makes his own the grandeur that he loves.'

_He had in His right hand seven stars_.  He is the Judge, but He also
is our refuge and strength and hope.


[1] _In Memoriam_, cxxi.


{148}

_To D. B. K._

Cambridge: July 1901.

When we set to work to help others we discover something of our own
weakness.  But along with that discovery comes the realisation of an
inexhaustible fund of strength outside ourselves.  We are fighting on
the winning side.  God must be stronger than all that opposes.  It is
uphill work, especially at first.  But just as in learning a language
or learning how to swim, after toiling on with no apparent result,
there comes a day when suddenly we realise that we can do it--how we
know not: so it is in spiritual matters.  There is effort still,
sometimes gruesome effort; but it is all different from what it was.
We find the meaning of the paradox, 'Whose service is perfect freedom.'
Love takes the place of law, and, although it is hard at times to serve
God, it is still harder to be the permanent servant of Satan.

Your enthusiasm ought to increase, the more you look life in the face
and see its sin and misery.  'God,' said Moody, 'can do nothing with a
man who has ceased to hope.'  Our hope in the possibilities of the
individual and of society ought to grow brighter and saner as time goes
on. . . .  Missionary work--I have often wished to do it myself, but
have been 'let hitherto.' . . .  It is a tremendous help to me to know
that we are both serving the same Master and that I can trust you to
His love.

{149}

_To an Auckland 'brother' after Bishop Westcott's Death._

Cambridge: August 1901.

My thoughts are with you at this time.  I am most thankful that you
have been a year with that man of God, and have gained ideals and
inspiration for work which will haunt you all your life long.  In
moments of weakness, at times 'when your light is low,' the memory of
his strenuous, holy life will be a power making for self-discipline and
righteousness.  And it is more than a memory.  For he taught us by word
and deed that we are all one man, that those who have realised what it
is to belong to the body here will enter more fully into its life
there.  'We feebly struggle, they in glory shine'--yet we are verily
and indeed one.  That thought is often a comfort to me.  When I feel
the contradictions and perplexities and weaknesses of my own life, I
love to think that I am part of a whole--that I belong to the same body
and share in the same spirit as some other man who is immeasurably my
superior.

When one whom we have known and venerated on earth passes to the
eternal home, it seems more like home than it was before.  It is
peopled not only with countless saints of whom I have heard, but with
one whom I have known and seen, and hope to see again.  His prayers for
us, his influence upon us there are more effective than they could have
been here.

The great triumph of Christianity is to produce a few saints.  They
raise our ideal of humanity.  They {150} make us restless and
discontented with our own lives, as long as they are lived on a lower
plane.  They speak to us in language more eloquent than words: 'Come up
higher.'



_To F. J. C._

_Belvedere Hotel, St. Moritz: Sunday, December 15, 1901._

I feel more and more thankful that I have not had to wait till the next
world to know God's true nature and character and will.  It is passing
strange that He should love us so much, and wish to unveil Himself to
us, 'that we might be a kind of firstfruits of His creatures.'  But
that phrase 'stewards of His mysteries' almost appals me.  A steward
must be faithful, and must render an account of the way in which he has
used his master's goods.  God grant that at the final reckoning we may
not be found unprofitable servants.

How those simple words in the twenty-third Psalm satisfy us more and
more as life advances, and as we realise that He is not our Shepherd
only, but the chief Shepherd of the whole flock, and that He has yet
other sheep whom He is looking for, and whom He will teach to hear His
voice amid the babel tongues of the world.  It is a comfort to me to
feel that He has no private blessings for me apart from the rest of the
family--that we are one in Him, and that each blessing unites us not
only to the Head of the family, but to all the brothers within it.

I suppose at first it is hard to realise the unseen world for long
together.  But gradually that world {151} dominates our being, and
interprets the world we see, and makes all life intelligible and well
worth the living.



_To H. J. B._

Hotel Belvedere, St. Moritz: December 16, 1901.

I feel a new man now in this fresh mountain air.  If I always lived
here I might be good for something.  What a parable of life!  If we
could live in the higher world and breathe in its air, what strong,
healthy men we should be!  I stayed a night once with Westcott, and it
seemed to me that he lived and moved and had his being in a higher
region, to which I now and then came as a stranger, and he could see
habitually, what I sometimes saw, the way of God in human life.  I am
sure we are meant to have our home in that higher world, and that we
only see life sanely, steadily, and in its true proportions, when we
view it from that vantage ground.  I have always been thankful that I
spent that night with Westcott, and thereby gained, not simply fresh
inspiration, but a radically new revelation of human life and its
possibilities.  It gave me an insight into the dignity and the destiny
of our common human nature.

You have never been long absent from my thoughts, and at last I have
had time and strength to begin to pray for you as I could wish.  It is
the only way in which I can show my gratitude to you.  I don't
understand much about prayer, but I think of that strange, bold parable
of the unrighteous judge and the widow, and I take my stand on that.  I
shall {152} not be content until your true self is formed; and I think
that God must be very ready to answer the prayer, however imperfect its
form may be, of one who loves another more than he can understand.  I
like St Paul's words: _teknia mou ous odino mechris ou morphothe
Christos en humin_.  Only I wish I were not such a worm myself.
However, the thought of you compels me to live a better life.  If I
could only make all my thoughts of you into prayers and actions for you
I should be more content.

[Transcriber's note: The Greek phrase in the above paragraph was
transliterated as follows: _teknia_--tau, epsilon, kappa, nu, iota,
alpha; _mou_--mu, omicron, upsilon; _ous_--omicron, upsilon, final
sigma; _odino_--omega, delta, iota, nu, omega; _mechris_--mu, epsilon,
chi, rho, iota, final sigma; _ou_--omicron, upsilon; _morphothe_--mu,
omicron, rho, phi, omega, theta, eta; _Christos_--Chi, rho, iota,
sigma, tau, omicron, final sigma; _en_--epsilon, nu; _humin_--(rough
breathing mark) upsilon, mu, iota, nu]

Don't imitate Uriah Heep with 'Yours most humbly.'  I won't stand that
nonsense! and you give yourself away just a few lines above, when you
assert that you are too proud to confer a favour on me, and read Greek
Testament with me.  What a funny chap you are!  Can't you see, you
idiot, what a pleasure you give me?  We shall have to compromise, and
I'll have to make some concession to your pride.  Neither ---- nor I
know much about your section, but we could help you in your first part
papers.  Of course, he could do it miles better than I can; but, all
the same, you are going to be my pupil.  Promise me that you won't make
any arrangement with him until you have talked the matter over with me.
I'll make some compromise for the sake of your miserable pride, you
wretched creature.

Write to me soon again, if it isn't a great bore.  I can't recall as
much as I could wish of your conversations with me.  In fact, I have
the unpleasant feeling sometimes that I did too much of the talking!
But one or two things that you said to me live in {153} my memory, and
make me wish to be more fit to talk to you.

St. Moritz is much as usual.  It is a strange little world in itself.
The comic and the tragic are blended weirdly together, and nature is
unimaginably beautiful.  I wish you could see this snow.  It has an
attraction for me, and I am sure it would have for you.  I think you
understand more about the meaning of beauty than I do.  When I see a
magnificent landscape, I want to share the sight with some one else.  I
feel quite lonely when I am interpreting it alone.  I wonder why that
is?



_To F. J. C._

Hotel Belvedere, St. Moritz: December 21, 1901.

Christmas seems to mean more to me, the longer that I live.  I gaze
with bewilderment on that stupendous mystery of love--the very God
entering into and raising our human nature.  My whole conception of the
meaning, the possibilities of our common human nature is transformed,
as I see that it can become a perfect reflection and manifestation of
the Divine nature.  'The Word became flesh, and lodged _in us_.'  The
manger at Bethlehem reverses all our human conceptions of dignity and
greatness.  'The folly of God is wiser than men.'  It is to the
humble--to babes--that God can reveal Himself.  In them He can find His
home.

    O Father, touch the East and light
  The light that shone when Hope was born.

It is in Christmas that Tennyson found the birth of {154} Hope.  It is
Christmas that, as life goes on, bids us never despair--of our own or
of human nature around us.



_To a friend at Cambridge._

Hotel Belvedere, St. Moritz: December 30, 1901.

I shall never forget this last Christmas Day, for your letter came in
the evening.  I read it again and again, and wonder at it more each
time I read it.  I can't tell you what I feel about it.  I knew that
you more or less liked and respected me, but I didn't know that you
loved me.  I've got what I wanted.  When you merely respected me, I
dreaded the day when you would find that I was different to what you
thought I was.  But now I feel I am safe _phobos ouk estin en te
agape_, however imperfect you find me.  I know now that I can trust you
not to throw me off.  And love is not extreme to mark what is amiss,
_hoti agape kaluptei plethos amartion_.  I can't thank you for your
kindness, but I thank God for giving me the most precious gift in the
world, a human soul 'to love and be loved by for ever.'  As I look at
your letter I feel a mere worm, and my one wonder is how on earth a man
like you can call me your friend.  I can't thank you; but I'll do my
best to live up to the standard you expect of me, and to be a true
friend to you.  And my idea of friendship is, as you know, prayer.  I
can't, worse luck, do much for you, but I do pray for you, and
'whatever ye ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.'  It has been
truly said that the _how_, the _where_, and the _when_ are not told us,
but only the {155} _what_.  And I am quite certain that every prayer I
offer for you is heard and answered, when I believe what I say; but the
manner, the place, and the occasion of the answer--of these things I
know nothing.  I am sure that God loves to see us happy, and the pure
joy of the knowledge that such a man as you loves me is almost more
than I can bear.  It throws a new light on life here, and on that
fuller life to which God is leading us hereafter; like you, thank God,
I cannot complain of lack of friends, but I have never had one who has
written me such a letter, full of an affection for which I crave.  The
worst is, I can't repay your kindness.  You bring me nearer to God, you
make me realise in the strangest way His affection, you make me feel
the worth and mystery of a human soul.  I wish I could return your help
somehow or other.  Do show me the way.  I wish you did not find it so
difficult to pray for me.  I am sure you are right in going back to
such a man as St. Paul for subjects of prayer.  The opening chapters of
his letters to the Ephesians and Colossians give the kinds of requests
which it is worth making on behalf of any one.  There is surely no harm
in finding that, as you pray for another, your own faith is growing.
There is nothing selfish in that.  It is rather the result of the law
_didote kai dothesetai humin_.

[Transcriber's note: The Greek phrases in the above paragraph were
transliterated as follows: _phobos_--phi, omicron, beta, omicron, final
sigma; _ouk_--omicron, upsilon, kappa; _estin_--epsilon, sigma, tau,
iota, nu; _en_--epsilon, nu; _te_--tau, eta; _agape_--alpha, gamma,
alpha, pi, eta; _hoti_--(rough breathing mark) omicron, tau, iota;
_agape_--alpha, gamma, alpha, pi, eta; _kaluptei_--kappa, alpha,
lambda, upsilon, pi, tau, epsilon, iota; _plethos_--pi, lambda, eta,
theta, omicron, final sigma; _amartion_--alpha, mu, alpha, rho, tau,
iota, omega, nu; _didote_--delta, iota, delta, omicron, tau, epsilon;
_kai_--kappa, alpha, iota; _dothesetai_--delta, omicron, theta, eta,
sigma, eta, tai, alpha, iota; _humin_--(rough breathing mark) upsilon,
mu, iota, nu]

Your faith can only grow with exercise, and you exercise it by praying
for others.  You would only be selfish if you prayed for some one else
_in order that_ your own soul might be benefited.

But don't think too much of selfishness.  Bring {156} all your half
selfish desires to Him who knows us through and through; and in His
presence, almost unconsciously, your motives will gradually be
purified.  You will learn to walk in the light as He Himself is in the
light.  As I look back on this letter, a large part of it seems
selfish.  I expect much is; but, even in the selfish parts, there is
something more besides.  I can only just say what I feel, and ask God
gradually to eliminate what is wrong.  In His light I shall see light.

Life is large, and I am fearful lest, in attempting a rough and ready
asceticism, I should exclude as wrong some elements which are in
reality God-given.  I feel that in the case of our affections and our
longing for beauty.  They are implanted in us, and tended and watered
by One who is perfect Love and perfect Beauty.  They easily lead us
into sin, but that fact does not imply that they are wrong in
themselves.  We have to bring them to their source that He may
interpret them, 'Too late have I sought thee,' said Augustine, 'thou
Beauty, so ancient and so new, too late have I sought thee.'  I cannot
understand the mystery of your life, dearest, but I feel that all that
craving for beauty is in some kind of way a craving for God.  Only God
demands the first place in your life before He will give you any
satisfying interpretation of that aspect of His life.  You must love
Him for what He is--not simply because He is Beauty.

  I slept and dreamed that life was Beauty,
  I woke and found that life is Duty.

{157}

They are not really contradictory conceptions.  Nay, Duty has a
spiritual beauty of her own.  But sometimes they seem for a moment
divergent, and then you must at all costs choose the latter, and you
will find that

  The topmost crags of Duty scaled,
  Are close upon that shining tableland
  To which God Himself is shield and sun.

And, if I am not mistaken, that land will be utterly full of an
absolutely satisfying beauty.

But I feel that I scarcely yet understand anything about the meaning of
Beauty.  All I can do is to relate it immediately to God.  If I see
beautiful scenery, I am usually thinking of God and thanking Him.  If I
see human beauty, I feel that I am on holy ground, and I always try to
pray for a face that attracts me.  I feel that I have a duty in return
for the revelation that has been given.  But, as you see, I can explain
but little.  These are merely rules of practical life which we very
imperfectly carry out.  I cannot explain the relation of physical and
spiritual beauty in human beings.  I feel, of course, that there ought
to be, there very often is, some such relation.  But sometimes there is
something utterly wrong, and apparently no such connective.  The
connection, I take it, is more perfect in nature; but in man, why,
something has occurred, something anomalous, which mars the whole.  Sin
has come in somewhere, I suppose.

I can't express on paper what I feel, or give you any real conception
of what you are to me.  You {158} would be startled if you knew.  God
bless you, and work out in you, not my miserable ideal of what I think
you ought to be, but His own ideal, which exceeds all our thoughts and
imagination, of what you are to be.



_To G. J. C._

Christ's College: 1901.

. . .  I was never so pleased to hear of any engagement as of yours.  I
thank God with all my heart.  I cannot put my joy into words, but
somehow or other it seems to bring me nearer to the source of all joy.
I feel more than ever that He cares for us and is educating us, and I
feel that He has been so good to you, because He loves you.  The older
I grow the more I am impressed by His infinite sympathy and concern for
us.  And when He gives us not only love but a return of love, it seems
to me that He is giving us the very best thing that He has--a part, as
it were, of Himself.  'The merciful and gracious Lord hath so done His
marvellous works, that they ought to be had in remembrance.'

I cannot tell you how glad I am.  But I thank God in my prayers for
you; and I am sure that if He has been so good to you in the past, He
will not forget you in the future.



_To the same when he had just accepted a mastership at Eton._

Brislington, Bristol: 1901.

. . . .  How good of you to write and tell me of your future
work! . . .  The responsibility of such a {159} life is to my mind
almost overwhelming.  'Who is sufficient for these things?  Our
sufficiency is of God.'

I am thankful that the offer came as it did--unsought by you.  You will
feel happier in accepting it.  'Infinite sympathy is needed for the
infinite pathos of human life'--more especially of a boy's life.  The
first, second, third, requisite for a master is, in my judgment,
sympathy.  As I look back on my own school days, I cannot help feeling
that most of my masters were either lacking in it or else strangely
incapable of manifesting it in a form which I could understand.
Sympathy with the dull, unpromising boy is a divine gift, and I trust
that Holy Orders will confer upon you this grace also.  I thank God
that you are taking orders, and finding your work in teaching.  Forgive
this lecture from one who has no right to speak, and who is himself
strangely deficient in sympathy.



_To D. B. K._

Eastbourne: September 1901.

I am glad that you have been home.  I feel that home is a revelation--a
means whereby the Eternal Father shows us Himself and His purposes, a
strengthening and refreshing of our tired souls. . . .  I have prayed
earnestly for you that your faith and love may not fail.  I feel
intensely the same difficulty as you, and I am only slowly learning to
overcome it.  I do not think we can learn to love people who are
altogether different from us in many respects, all at once.  I love
some men with a strange, unsatisfied affection.  All my thoughts about
them I am {160} gradually learning to resolve into prayers for them,
and I want to live longer that I may pray for them more.

Well, it seems to me that God gives us this affection that we may learn
to do to others as we would do to these.  I cannot pretend to care for
many with whom I come into contact as much as I do for the few.  But I
can pray for them, and the feeling will more or less come in time.
Just try to pray for some one person committed to your charge--say for
half an hour or an hour--and you will begin really to love him.  As you
lay his life before God, as you think of his needs and hopes, and
failings and possibilities, as you pray earnestly for him as you would
for some one whom you feel intense affection for; at the end of the
time you will feel more interested in him, you will think of him not as
one of a class but as a separate, mysterious person.  You will not, it
may be, have time to pray for many in this way, but you will learn
imperceptibly to extend your sympathy--to feel real love for many more.
I advise you to keep a record of these prayers.  It is quite worth your
while to take practically a day off sometimes, and to force yourself to
pray.  It will be the best day's work you have ever done in your life.
Remember that!

Don't be troubled by comparing yourself with other clergymen.  I think
you are like me--not ecclesiastically minded.  I don't have the sort of
feelings which a large number of persons have about their work and
their preaching.  I can't put the difference into words, yet I feel it.
But I must serve God in my own way, and I am sure that He will use me
to do the work for which I am best fitted.  And the {161} same is true
of you.  Try to refer all your actions to His standard; and test your
work in His presence; and don't ask what So-and-so thinks of it.

I very much wish you had some gentlemen to associate with besides
parsons.  You must keep up as much as possible with your college
friends; and use every opportunity which reasonably presents itself of
seeing some 'society.'  God knows what is best for you at present.

  God nothing does or suffers to be done
  But thou wouldest do thyself, couldest thou but see
  The end of all events as well as He.

I am sure that He will not forget you.  He knows what is best for your
development.  It may be that He takes you away from friends that you
may learn to pray for them more and to see Him more clearly.

I think you will influence many men whom a more ordinary parson would
not touch. . . .  I am quite certain that if you have infinite
hope--hope against hope--you will be a tremendous power in the place
where God has put you.

Get as much exercise as you can, and always get a clear day off in the
week, and don't give up any of your old interests.  Don't always read
'religious' literature. . . .  When the long day is done and we stand
before the judgment seat, I believe that many will rise up and call you
blessed.  Only pray for individuals--for a long time together.  To
influence, you must love; to love, you must pray.



{162}

_To one about to be ordained._

Eastbourne: September 1901.

I shall indeed remember you on Sunday next.  The words of the lesson come
home to me to-day--_kai eireken moi Arkei soi he chariu mou; he gar
dunamis en astheneia teleitai_.

We are poor creatures, but there is Grace--and we can come into contact
with it--and that is all we need.  We may have failed in the past, but
Christ offers a new childlike life and endless hope.

I am glad to think that you will be returning to your difficult post at
Cambridge.  I am sure that you will return to it with fresh humility and
courage--_en pleromati eulogias Christou_.

[Transcriber's note: The Greek phrases in the above paragraphs were
transliterated as follows: _kai_--kappa, alpha, iota; _eireken_--epsilon,
iota, rho, eta, kappa, epsilon, nu; _moi_--mu, omicron, iota;
_Arkei_--Alpha, rho, kappa, epsilon, iota; _soi_--sigma, omicron, iota;
_he_--(rough breating mark) eta; _chariu_--chi, alpha, rho, iota, final
sigma; _mou_--mu, omicron, upsilon; _he_--(rough breathing mark) eta;
_gar_--gamma, alpha, rho; _dunamis_--delta, upsilon; nu, alpha, mu, iota,
final sigma; _en_--epsilon, nu; _astheneia_--alpha, sigma, theta,
epsilon, nu, epsilon, iota, alpha; _teleitai_--tau, epsilon, lambda,
epsilon, iota, tau, alpha, iota; _en_--_en_--epsilon, nu;
_pleromati_--pi, lambda, eta, rho, omega, mu, alpha, tau, iota;
_eulogias_--epsilon, upsilon, lambda, omicron, gamma, iota alpha, final
sigma; _Christou_--Chi, rho, iota, sigma, tau, omicron, upsilon]



_To W. D. H._

St. Moritz: January 4, 1902.

I hope that you are now less overworked than you were in October.  You
must at all costs make quiet time.  Give up work, if need be.  Your
influence finally depends upon your own first-hand knowledge of the
unseen world, and on your experience of prayer.  Love and sympathy and
tact and insight are born of prayer.  I am glad you have a Junior Clergy
S. P. G. Association.  Try to take an intelligent interest in it, and
mind you read a paper before long.



_To his brother Edward in South Africa._

Hotel Belvedere, St. Moritz: January 7, 1902.

I am glad to think that we are now in many respects agreed about the
general question of the {163} war.  I suppose in any great historical
upheaval there are at the time a number of people who are attempting to
make capital for themselves out of the misfortunes of others; there are
many who are working for their own hand; and yet, when we look back on
the crisis and judge it as a whole in the calm light of history, we see
that a large and rational purpose has been worked out.  At the time of
the English Reformation--as some one was saying to me lately, pointing
the parallel which I am working out--there must have been a number of
honest and pure souls who held aloof from the whole of what appeared to
be political jobbery and fortune-making at the expense of religious
sentiment.  Yet now most of us feel that the movement could not have had
the effects that it had, unless down below all there was a strong
upheaval of the national conscience.  You will no doubt see many defects
in this historical parallel; but the thought is at any rate suggestive,
and full of what we require in these latter days--hope.  Of course I feel
that injustice, dishonesty, cruelty, selfishness are in no way palliated
because they take cover and occasion in a real movement of national
feeling.

I feel for you much in your work for examinations.  It must come very
hard with ill health and in a hot climate, with the freshness of youth to
some extent passed.  But

  O well for him whose will is strong,
  He suffers, but he shall not suffer long;
  He suffers, but he cannot suffer wrong

{164} It needs more courage than you were required to show on the field
of battle.  But the reward is sure.  I feel strongly that this life is
but the prelude to a larger life, when each faculty will have its full
exercise.

  Ah yet, when all is thought and said,
  The heart still overrules the head;
  Still what we hope we must believe,
  And what is given us receive;
  Must still believe, for still we hope,
  That in a world of larger scope,
  What here is faithfully begun
  Will be completed, not undone.

These words come from dough--the soul of honesty.



_To H. J. B._

Derwent Hill, Ebchester, Durham: April 14, 1902.

It seems to me a truism to say that we ought to look at life in the light
of eternity.  Only then does the true significance of the meanest action
in life appear.  Life is redeemed from triviality and vulgarity.  So far
from worldly possessions losing their value, and ordinary occupations
appearing insignificant, their importance is realised as never before.
If man does not live for ever, his character and actions seem of
comparative unimportance.  If he does live for ever, it is rational for
him to look at each action in the light of that larger life which he
inherits.  If something like class distinctions are eternal, it is an
inducement so to use your distinctive privileges here in a worthy manner,
that hereafter you may use them for nobler ends.

{165}

I have expressed myself badly, but you will see what I want to say.  My
relations to you surely become not less, but more important, when I
realise that I am only beginning to know and love you here.  The eternal
element in them--the knowledge that there is throughout an implicit
reference to a Third and Unseen Person in all that I say to you or think
of you--fills me with a sense of awe, and makes the relations more real
because more spiritual.



_To the mother of his godchild, Margaret Forbes._

July 6, 1902.

I cannot tell you what a pleasure it was to see my godchild. . . .  I
feel she has a strength of purpose and a desire to know the truth which
will fit her for high service in God's kingdom on earth.  I pray for her,
and I shall do so in the future with fuller understanding and with great
hope.  What God hath begun He will assuredly bring to perfection.  I hope
that some day she will learn to pray for Uncle Forbes.  I should value
her prayers.  It is good to feel that in the midst of your weary time of
weakness God has given you such a child as a pledge of His affection for
you, as an assurance that He believes in you.  To give you a little child
to train for Himself is a proof that He trusts you very much.  I do not
know that He could have given a greater proof of His confidence in you.
And it is God's implicit trust in us that draws out our trust in turn.
We trust and love Him, because He first trusted and loved us.  I wonder
more and more at the way in which He trusts us.  To allow us to suffer
without {166} telling us the reason, when He knows that we shall be
inclined to think harshly of Him--that is, perhaps, the greatest proof
that He believes in us.  He can try our faith and perfect it by
long-continued trial, because He knows that we shall respond, that we
shall prove 'worthy to suffer.'



_To H. J. B._

Christ's College, Cambridge: August 26, 1902.

The worst of seeing you for some time is that I feel it all the more
impossible to live without you.  I realise now as never before that you
are out and away before me, and better than I am; and yet I feel that you
are part and parcel of my life.  You mustn't be too hard on me if I can't
come up to your ideal.

Intellectually the Hebrew and Greek ideals may be irreconcilable.  Yet
'life is larger than logic;' and practically we may become heirs of both
ideals.  The man who loses the world, who gives up all without any desire
for gain, is often given the whole back again transfigured, glorified by
sacrifice.  To get you must forget.  If you love God absolutely with all
your being, you inherit the life that is as well as that which is to
come.  If all is not given you, yet enough is given for the development
of character.  But there must, it seems to me, be an absolute
sacrifice--a surrender of your whole being--whatever the result may be.
There must be no calculation.

  High Heaven rejects the lore
  Of nicely calculated less and more.

{167}

You must love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind:
you must trust Him to do the best by you.  You say the Hebrew ideal does
not appeal to you.  But I know better; for you half like me, and I am a
Hebrew of the Hebrews!  There must be a dash of recklessness about the
man who gains the other world.  'All or nothing' is the requirement of
the kingdom of Heaven.  To gain yourself you must throw yourself
away--'lose your soul.'  You must have faith.  'He who loves makes his
own the grandeur that he loves' is a sentence of Emerson which consoles
me when I think of my love for you.



_To a friend at Cambridge._

40 Upperton Gardens, Eastbourne: September 8, 1902.

I have been thinking of you.  I keep myself from becoming morbid by
making most of my thoughts into prayers for you.  The
glory--wonder--strangeness of being loved by a man from another and a
better world fills me with gratitude to God.  Sometimes it seems a dream,
and I half dread that I shall wake up and find that you have ceased to
care for a worthless creature.  But _phobos ouk estin en te agape, all he
teleia agape exo ballei ton phobon_.  I need not fear.  I know that you
will love me, whatever happens.

[Transcriber's note: The Greek phrases in the above paragraph were
transliterated as follows: _phobos_--phi, omicron, beta, omicron, final
sigma; _ouk_--omicron, upsilon, kappa; _estin_--epsilon, sigma, tau,
iota, nu; _en_--epsilon, nu; _te_--tau, eta; _agape_--alpha, gamma,
alpha, pi, eta; _all_--alpha, lambda, lambda; _he_--(rough breathing
mark) eta; _teleia_--tau, epsilon, lambda, epsilon, iota, alpha;
_agape_--alpha, gamma, alpha, pi, eta; _exo_--epsilon, xi, omega;
_ballei_--beta, alpha, lambda, lambda, epsilon, iota; _ton_--tau,
omicron, nu; _phobon_--phi, omicron, beta, omicron, nu]

I want you to be one of the best men that ever lived--to see God and to
reveal Him to men.  This is the burden of my prayers.  My whole being
goes out in passionate entreaty to God that He will give me what I ask.
I am sure He will, for the request {168} is after His own heart.  I do
not pray that you may 'succeed in life' or 'get on' in the world.  I
seldom even pray that you may love me better, or that I may see you
oftener in this or any other world--much as I crave for this.  But I ask,
I implore, that Christ may be formed in you, that you may be made not in
a likeness suggested by my imagination, but in the image of God--that you
may realise, not mine, but His ideal, however much that ideal may
bewilder me, however little I may fail to recognise it when it is
created.  I hate the thought that out of love for me you should accept my
presentation--my feeble idea--of the Christ.  I want God to reveal His
Son in you independently of me--to give you a first-hand knowledge of Him
whom I am only beginning to see.  Sometimes more selfish thoughts will
intrude, but this represents the main current of my prayers; and if the
ideal is to be won from heaven by importunity, by ceaseless begging, I
think I shall get it for you.  But it grieves me to think that I can do
nothing else for you.  To receive so many favours from you, and to be
incapable of doing more in return--this is what saddens me.  I feel an
ungrateful brute.  You have brought new joy, hope, power into my life,
and I want to show my gratitude.  You would be doing me a real kindness
if you would tell me how I could show it.

Don't think by what I have said that I simply care--as an 'Evangelical'
would say--for your 'soul.'  Every part of your being--everything you do
or say--all that you are--has a strange fascination for me.  Only I feel
that the whole of it is a revelation of {169} God; and I want that
revelation to be clearer, truer, simpler.  I am sure God does not only
care for our souls.  It is every part of our complicated being--all sides
of our manifold life--that attracts Him.  He loves our home life, our
affection for the dear old Mother Earth which He made, our interest in
the men and women whom He formed in His own image.  He longs that all
those interests should be developed--that we should live genuine, sane
human lives.  But true development here or elsewhere--the law of
existence in heaven or on earth--is life through death.  'Verily, verily,
I say unto you, Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it
abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit.'  You must
give up all.  As I think of you, those words keep ringing in my ears: 'If
any one cometh to Me, and hateth not his own father and mother, yea, and
his own self also, he cannot be My disciple.'

I cannot tell you what they mean.  You must find them out for yourself.

If I were a true disciple of Christ, you could see what they mean by
looking at me.  But I am not.  You must learn their meaning for yourself.
Your mother's life will speak louder than words of mine.  Only I know
they are true.  Christ will recreate the world, recreate the home, human
beings, dear Mother Earth; but He cannot do so until you have been
willing to give up all--until He has caused you to be 'born again.'  When
the ruler asked how these things could be, Christ could only repeat His
words.  The man must work it out for himself.

But I am sure that he that willeth to do the will {170} shall know
whether the teaching be true.  There are no doubt some mere intellectual
obscurities in the ideal which I might make simpler if I were not such a
duffer.  But finally a paradox would be left--a paradox which can only be
solved by living the ideal out, and finding it work.  It is the pathos of
our love, of God's love for us, that each man, however much he is loved,
must work out the ideal for himself.  No man can save his brother's soul.

I do not like to weaken the paradoxes of the Gospel.  I think there is
more in Christ's words concerning 'loving one's life' or 'self' than you
suggest.  You say it means 'self-denial.'  Yes, that is true, but what a
tremendous meaning 'deny one's self' has!  To disown your identity, that
is not much easier when you come to think of it than to lose your life.
I know you will find out what it all means, and that human love, beauty,
home, social service, will be more real than ever before, because you
will see the eternal reality underneath.  You will be a 'new creation.'

Now I must stop without satisfactorily answering your question, without
entering into any casuistical questions concerning conformity such as you
suggest.  I should like you to think out that problem in casuistry more
for yourself, before I attempt to answer it.  Forgive me for talking so
much about myself.  When all is said and done, words fail me.  I can only
thank God that you exist, and that you let me love you.

{171}

_To H. P., a Clifton College master who had given up school work in order
to devote himself to the School Mission in Bristol._

40 Upperton Gardens, Eastbourne: September 30, 1902.

. . .  I am glad that you feel you have done right in giving up your
school work.  I am sorry that you left Clifton, but you thought you
_ought_ to go, and that is an end of the matter.  I can only hope that
you are in some measure a connecting-link between the school and its
mission. . . .  Don't forget me in my very different work--and yet work
for the same Master--at college.  I have need of your prayers.  It is so
easy to blunder, and to drive a man further from the kingdom by lack of
sympathy and love.  I feel more than I used to my weakness, and my
absolute need of prayer.



_To his brother Edward in South Africa._

40 Upperton Gardens, Eastbourne: October 1, 1902.

The October term has an interest of its own, bringing, as it does, a
batch of freshmen.  I try more and more not simply to impose my ideals
upon them, but to find out their ideals and to quicken them with all my
power.  But assuredly 'infinite sympathy is needed for the infinite
pathos of human life;' and my sympathies are as yet imperfectly developed.

Still, as years go by, I think I can sympathise more with those who have
been trained up in other schools of thought and experience.  I was
reading in a book lately that we are largely responsible for our {172}
own experiences, that we have a duty to get them of the right kind.  The
book was by an American lady on social questions.  I think there is truth
in her words.



_To D. B. K., head of a Public School Mission._

Eastbourne: October 1902.

I delight to know men better, because I find so much more in them than I
had expected.  They differ from me, and I try to get out of the habit of
making them in my own image, and try to find the image in which God is
making them.  I have been praying for you.  I want a spirit of sanity and
sacrifice to possess you, that you may be able to see the good works
which God has prepared beforehand that you should walk in them. . . .

I am struck by the sacrifice which Christ demands.  Unless the man hates
father, mother, family, friends, yea, and himself also, he 'cannot be'
His disciple, Christ gives them all back again--only 'with persecutions.'
We find more in the world, when we are 'crucified to it,' than ever
before; but there is a something added.  We have a deeper joy in home
ties, in human love, in social life, in the changing seasons, in the dear
old earth.  Only the joy has a note of sorrow, a pathos, which Christ
calls 'persecutions.'  We see more in life, and yet we are in a measure
out of sympathy with our surroundings.  We have heard and we can never
forget the sorrows of those who are 'one man' with us.  There is more in
that word 'persecutions' than this, as no doubt {173} you have found.
But this, I think, is part of its signification, isn't it? . . .

I believe in your 'mission' even more than you do.  It is men like you,
who through great tribulations strive to enter the Kingdom, that God
uses.  The fact that you are two men, and that the true man--the
Christ--is painfully yet surely being 'formed' in you, means that you
will be able to appeal to others who are painfully conscious of their
double consciousness and are often the slaves of the lower, inhuman self.
Your wealth of affection will make you feel as St. Paul did--_teknia mou,
ous palin mechris ou morphothe Christos en humin_.

[Transcriber's note: The Greek phrases in the above paragraph were
transliterated as follows: _teknia_--tau, epsilon, kappa, nu, iota,
alpha; _mou_--mu, omicron, upsilon; _ous_--omicron, upsilon, final sigma;
_palin_--pi, alpha, lambda, iota, nu; _mechris_--mu, epsilon, ch, rho,
iota, final sigma; _ou_--omicron, upsilon; _morphothe_--mu, omicron, rho,
phi, omega, theta, eta; _Christos_--Chi, rho, iota, sigma, tau, omicron,
final sigma; _en_--epsilon, nu; _humin_--(rough breathing mark) upsilon,
mu, iota, nu]

These words sum up for me, better than any others, my deepest wish for my
friends.  I fall back with desperate energy upon prayer, as the one power
by which my wish can be realised.

You seem to look ahead almost more than is necessary.  I delight in the
feeling that I am in eternity, that I can serve God now fully and
effectively, that the next piece of the road will come in sight when I am
ready to walk on it 'I do not ask to see the distant scene.'  I hate the
unsettled feeling that I have not yet begun my main work.

Don't measure work by human standards of greatness.  Your present
occupation might well be the envy of angels--if they could envy.

But now I am lecturing.  So it is time to shut up. . . .

I fear that the origin of evil is more of a mystery to me now than when I
wrote that essay!  But I still think that we are fighting a real being,
one whom {174} we can best describe as personal.  His will, it seems to
me, must be given to him by God.  He has identified it with a hitherto
unrealised potentiality for disobedience.  In plain language, his will is
free, and therefore capable of resisting God.  I should like to have a
talk with you some day about it.  But, as you see, the problem is beyond
me. . . .

It is a strength to me to feel that you are fighting the devil in
yourself and others up in ----, and that I am 'one man' with you.



_To D. B. K._

St. Moritz: January 1903.

It is getting on for your birthday, isn't it?  Congratulations.  I wish I
knew the exact day.  I think more and more that a birthday is a subject
not--as poor Job thought--for anathemas, but for congratulations.  To be
a reasonable human being--with capacity for seeing something of God's
purposes for the race--with power to forward them--with opportunities for
love and sacrifice and prayer--oh!  I am so glad that I was not a mere
animal.  And to be born at the end of the nineteenth century--I prefer
that period even to Apostolic times.  We can know more of God's purposes,
enter more deeply into His mind and even His heart, than primitive
Christians.

I have been reading to-day Temple's essay on 'The Education of the World'
in 'Essays and Reviews.'  Get hold of an old copy of that book, and read
it.  It is strong and manly, and rings true.  I {175} love that old man
with his tenderness, simplicity, thoughtfulness, and will of steel.  I
thank God for him.  There is something about utter goodness which makes
me worship, and fills me with the challenge, 'Go and do thou likewise.'
Goodness is as infectious as any disease.

I have been thinking lately of the self-sacrifice of God's life.  I
suppose that is the reason why He can enter into our lives--see them from
the inside.

  Thou canst conceive our highest and our lowest,
  Pulses of nobleness and aches of shame.

It must have been the wealth of His self-sacrifice which made Him give us
selves--wills--of our own.  Then He makes them His own by more
self-sacrifice.  We are made in His image--made to go out of self, and
find our self by losing it.  Other men at first seem to limit our
freedom, but later we find that the apparent limitations are only just
scope for realising our true self.  Each time we go out of self, and
enter into another 'ego,' we return the richer for our sacrifice.  We
take up other lives into our own, and are richer than a millionaire.

I think that when the other 'ego' is most unlike our own--when at first
sight the man is repulsive, and (worse still) uninteresting to us--when
the sacrifice is great, if we would see life through his eyes, share his
ambitions, fears, longings, and mental outlook, then is the time when we
are peculiarly rewarded for our pains.  Our consciousness is larger, more
human, more divine than before.

'By feeblest agents doth our God fulfil His {176} righteous will' is the
thought suggested by some of our brother-clergy.  God does not choose the
agents we should choose.  Or perhaps the latter do not respond to His
choice.  Yet I feel that I am one of them, and that it is my faults writ
large which I detest in them.  I feel that, with all the riches of the
revelation which I possess, I have that same self-satisfaction and lack
of sympathy which I loathe in others.  It is my life which is the
stumbling-block to my message.  They have often far less light than I
have, but walk in it more simply than I do.  The rafter in my own eye
troubles me even more than the speck in theirs.  But it is hard, God
knows, sometimes to feel His presence in their presence.  But the forces
of good must be united ('Keep, ah! keep them combined.  Else . . .'), and
if by any effort we can enter into their lives, and transcend the
barriers between us, we are not only enriching our own life, but we are
doing our best to show a combined front against the almost overwhelming
forces of evil.

Even the Apostles must have found it hard to work together.  We know they
did.  Look at Peter and Paul.  Yet the spirit of unity was stronger than
all that opposed Him, and the One Body was in some measure realised.
What was difficult in the childhood of the Body is still more difficult
in its manhood.  And Englishmen, with their strong sense of
individuality, find it a terrible lesson to learn.

But pray.  You enter then into another man's 'ego.'  You see him in God.
You see him as an end in himself.  Remember Kant's maxim--a wonderful
maxim from one who would not, I suppose, be {177} technically called a
Christian--'Treat humanity, whether in thyself or in another, always as
an end, not simply as a means.'  Put aside a certain amount of time, and
pray for one man.  If your thoughts wander, do not be disturbed, do not
try to find when they began or how they began to wander; do not despair,
go back to the subject in hand.  And God will have mercy.  Your
influence, your life, your all, depends on prayer.

We must faint sometimes.  But let your saddest times, your deepest
struggles be known to God.  Gain there the strength and quietness which
you need for life.  But don't let men see the agony--let them see the
peace which comes from wrestling alone with God--wrestling for them.

You are not one man, but two or three.  Thank God for that.  It means
that you will have a hard life--an awful struggle with self or selves:
but it also means more influence, more power to enter into man's life.
So many of the finest men owe their attractiveness to their diverse,
many-sided nature.  You will be able to feel for such, and perhaps to
help them.  You are half a Greek with your yearning for beauty and
knowledge, half a Hebrew with your loathing for sin and love of God.  The
Greek in you must not be annihilated, but it must be subordinated to the
Hebrew.  Conscience must be absolute master.  You must sacrifice the
'Greek' to Christ; but He will give you back what is best in the Greek
ideal, all the better for the mark of the Cross on it.  He will give it
you back partly in this world, partly in the next, when you have learnt
to renounce it--if need {178} were, for ever--for His sake.  But you must
give up all for Him without thought of reward.  He can give no reward to
the man who is looking for it.  The thought of your life helps me.  Go
on, for the night cometh when no man can work.  Thank God it is yet day.



_To his brother Edward in South Africa._

Mühlen, Switzerland: January 11, 1903.

I found walking a pleasant change after reading philosophy, which I have
been doing during my holidays.  I seem to have been getting my ideas a
little clearer, and am no longer as content as I was with the Kantian
doctrine, that our knowledge in speculative matters never gets beyond
'appearances.'  I feel that at every turn we do get to that which
_is_--to an underlying reality.  I cannot feel that Kant's hard and fast
division between 'speculative' and 'moral' reason holds good.  The
external world, because it is intelligible, must be akin to us; there
must be an intelligence in it, otherwise it would never become an object
of knowledge to our intelligence.  It is not only in our ethical life
that we come across the absolute consciousness.  I feel now more than
ever how we cannot divide up ourselves into water-tight compartments, and
think of reason, will, and feeling as separate things, lying side by
side.  They can be separated--abstracted--in thought, but in actual life
you never find one without the other.  We cannot think without some
degree of attention, and attention involves an exercise of will, and will
cannot {179} be exercised without desire, and desire involves feeling.

I think faith also cannot be regarded as a separate faculty.  Reason,
will, and feeling are all involved even in the faith of a poor cottager;
much more does reason enter into the faith of a thoughtful man.

I have been reading Butler, and hope when I go back to study Hume.  What
a wealth of light the conception of 'Development' has shed upon the
problems which exercised the eighteenth century!  I have read half
through Leslie Stephen's 'Thought in the Eighteenth Century,' and I have
been struck again and again at the new aspect that the old questions take
when looked at from the standpoint of Evolution.

I feel also that we need to study more the evolution of _thought_--the
necessary phases that reason (like man's physical life) must pass through
before perfection. . . .

I think you are right, that education must now include instruction in
imperial ideas--in our relations with that larger social life which is
dawning upon us--a step towards a still larger social life to be realised
in the brotherhood of nations.



_To F. J. C._

Christ's College, Cambridge: February 1, 1903.

I am slow to suggest to another man that what seems bad luck is in
reality the voice of God making itself felt in his busy life, calling him
to fuller sacrifice.  But I am sure that we are right when we interpret
it {180} thus for ourselves.  I share your wish for 'some really strong
man' to come as a prophet and read the writing on the wall, and tell us
'what it all means.'  Yet the absence of human help is not accidental.
It must be designed, in order that we may learn to fall back on the
everlasting arms--to find by experience that the unseen is more real than
the seen.

  There is an arm that never tires
  When human strength gives way.

I like that phrase, 'worthy to suffer.'  It is to those whom God loves
best and most that He gives--as He gave to His Son--the chance of
suffering.  Sympathy, strength, reality--these are some of its fruits for
those who allow them to grow.  'He cannot be My disciple.'  I can't help
sometimes thinking of these words.  Unless the man is prepared to make
sacrifice the basis of his life, he _cannot_ be Christ's disciple.  I
don't think we always realise the 'trans-valuation of values' found in
Christ's teaching.  'Blessed are the poor--the hungry.  He that would
save his life shall lose it.  He that loseth, saveth.  He that would be
greatest shall be least.  It is more blessed to give than to receive.'
As I think over such statements as these, I find that I have again and
again to revise, as it were, my moral arithmetic--to change my standards,
to revise my ideas of great and little, happiness and misery, importance
and insignificance.

I am sure that nothing but the highest will satisfy you.  God has given
you singular powers of influence and of attracting others.  He will
demand an account {181} of those powers.  You know Matthew Arnold's lines
on his father.  I believe the day will come when men will say like words
of you.

  But thou would'st not _alone_
  Be saved, my father! alone
  Conquer and come to thy goal,
  Leaving the rest in the wild. . . .
  Therefore to thee it was given
  Many to save with thyself.

That is what I want you to be--a tower of strength--strength perfected,
it may be, in weakness--weakness forcing you to despair of self, and find
the Rock of Ages.  You have been so much to me, and helped me so often,
that I feel you must be born to help others as well.  And this quiet
time, it may be that God is using it to call you closer to Himself, to
teach you to revise your 'values,' to show you a new fund of strength.

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

You must--literally must--let His will overpower your will.  Nothing but
complete sacrifice will satisfy you or Him, and I believe in you
profoundly.  I am sure that, whatever be the ghastly struggle, you will
go through with it, and find your strength in Him.  I pray for you.



_To his mother._

Cambridge; March 15, 1903.

The term is almost over . . .  I am enjoying a quiet Sunday.  What a
blessing these Sundays are {182} to us--a foretaste of a fuller life of
service and worship hereafter!  I have been thinking lately with comfort
of the quiet perpetual work of the Holy Spirit, silently but surely
leading us on to higher things--comforting, correcting, guiding.  It
gives ground for hope in dealing with men, this knowledge that there is
One who perfects what we feebly struggle to begin, who watches over men
with a love that will not let them go.  We are not alone in our work; we
have omnipotence and illimitable wisdom on our side, forwarding our
efforts.  When I consider what the Spirit has accomplished in my own
life, I have large hope for others.  The argument from personal
experience is singularly convincing.  'The fellowship of the Holy
Ghost'--it is He who unites men and interprets them one to the other.  It
is He who gives spirit and life to our words.



_To H. J. B._

Bexley House, Cromer: March 31, 1903.

It was good of you to send me that card from Florence.  You don't know
how glad it made me.  To know that you were thinking of me was a strength
to me.  Your love for me comes as a perpetual surprise and inspiration.
I feel a brute compared with you, but the knowledge that you care for me
more than you do for most men makes me feel that I must try to be good.
'In Italy of the fifteenth century renaissance we see in strange
confusion all that we love in art, and all that we loathe in man!'  Greek
history was short compared {183} with the Hebrew: I suppose because
intellectual and artistic ideals are more easily realised than ethical
and religious.  It takes time to make a saint.  It is part of the
discipline of life to find the two sets of ideas apparently antagonistic.
There is a higher unity in which they are blended--in God Himself.  It
must be right to follow the dictates of conscience when it bids us lose
our soul if we would gain it.  We cannot trust God too much.  If we
forget our self, He will see that our truest self is ultimately realised.

I can't express myself well, for I have just finished a spell of hard
work.  I have sent away my tripos papers to-night.  I am going up to
Edinburgh on Friday or Saturday.  I fear I shall not see you until April
21.  Will you tell Armitage that I will, if convenient to him, sleep at
Westminster that night instead of going straight to Cambridge?  The
hopelessness of ever showing my gratitude to you or of ever making you
realise how much I love you oppresses me.  I don't know what I should do
if I had not One Higher than I am to confide in--if I could not leave you
in His hands--if I could not gain strength and life for you by appealing
to Him.

  O brother, if my faith is vain,
    If hopes like these betray,
  Pray for me, that I too may gain
    The sure and safer way.

  And Thou, O God, by whom are seen
    Thy creatures as they be,
  Forgive me if too close I lean
    My human heart on Thee!

{184} I lean closer and closer as life goes on.  I feel that our hope
lies in despair--despair of self.  The vessels which contain the treasure
are, as to-night's lesson says, earthen, 'that the excess of the power
may be God's and not from us.'  And there is a power, there is a life
working in us.  It is the quiet, sane, constant work of the Spirit in and
upon our spirit, that never hastes and never tires: which gives me
comfort for you, for myself, for all of us.  The same life that is at
work in the hedge across the road is in us, only in us it attains full
self-consciousness and freedom.  We can deliberately use it or refuse it.
Forgive the length of the letter.  But I felt so tired that I thought it
would do me good to write to you, selfish brute that I am.

I expect you enjoyed your time in Italy immensely.  I should have liked
to be with you.  I wonder if ever we shall be there together?  Some day
we shall be in a world where the barriers of space are broken down:
'There shall be no more sea.'  Yet it seems to me that we have not
altogether to wait for that other world.  They are half broken down
already; and if we had faith as a grain of mustard seed, we should
realise the meaning of a unity deeper than any special or temporal bond.
If we fail to realise its meaning now, shall we realise it then?  Is not
life here a training for life hereafter?  If we learn nothing in this
school, we shall not be able to take our places in that school of
'broader love.'  The best part in me does not complain.  I thank God for
His thoughtful goodness in bringing you near to me.  I thank Him for the
mystery of life, which enables me to realise that {185} Power 'which
lives not in the light alone, But in the darkness and the light.'  I
become more and more inclined to thank Him as I see Him more clearly.



_To F. S. H. on his accepting the post of chaplain at the Royal Naval
College, Osborne._

Cambridge: April 30, 1903.

I am satisfied with your decision.  I thought over the matter, but I
could not see my way quite clearly to say anything more definite, so I
did not write again.  Don't think that my silence was due to slackness.
I did what I thought was better than writing.  I spent an hour in praying
over the matter.  Now that the matter is settled I can tell you what a
keen pleasure it is to me to have my dear old ---- near me in England,[1]
and doing a piece of work which is full of hope and joy.  I would not say
this before, because I did not wish to influence your decision by private
considerations.  Get some quiet time for prayer before September 1, that
when you go to Osborne you may go _en pleromati eulogias Christou_
('filled full with the blessing of Christ').  I feel increasingly the
need of such times to learn to walk by faith without stumbling, and to
accustom myself to the atmosphere of faith, to see things as they appear
to a man who has faith 'as a grain of mustard seed.'

[Transcriber's note: The Greek phrases in the above paragraph were
transliterated as follows: _en_--epsilon, nu; _pleromati_--pi, lambda,
eta, rho, omega, mu, alpha, tau, iota; _eulogias_--epsilon, upsilon,
lambda, omicron, gamma, iota, alpha, final sigma; _Christou_--Chi, rho,
iota, sigma, tau, omicron, upsilon]

Westcott records a visit (see 'Life,' i. 249) to his old schoolmaster,
Bishop Prince Lee.  '"People quote various words of the Lord," said the
Bishop, "as containing the sum of the Gospel--the Lord's Prayer, {186}
the Sermon on the Mount, and the like; to me the essence of the Gospel is
in simpler and shorter terms: _me phobou, monon pisteue_.[2]  Ah!
Westcott, mark that _monon_," and his eyes were filled with tears as he
spoke.'  Ah!  S----, mark that _monon_! . . .  God bless you in your new
work and make you a blessing to others as you have been to me.

[1] He had been offered work in South Africa.

[2] 'Be not afraid, only believe.'

[Transcriber's note: The Greek phrases in the above paragraph were
transliterated as follows: _me_--mu, eta; _phobou_--phi, omicron, beta,
omicron, upsilon; _monon_--mu, omicron, nu, omicron, nu; _pisteue_--pi,
iota, sigma, tau, epsilon, upsilon, epsilon]



_To J. K._

_St. Thomas's Home, St. Thomas's Hospital: August 28, 1903._

. . .  I am most grateful for your kind words, though I know full well
how little it is that I have done for you.  We clergymen so often seem to
be working in the dark.  There are no clear results to show, as _e.g._ a
doctor can comfort himself with, when he has visibly cured a patient.
And I for one am too easily inclined to despair, and to wonder whether
the work is not in vain.  But 'trust is truer than our fears.'  Yet it
does me good when I feel I have done anything, however tiny, for a man.
After all, results are best left in God's hand.  He gives us enough to
help us the next step onward, but not enough to exalt us, and to make us
think we can do anything without His assistance.  Work 'in the Lord'
cannot be in vain.

I am glad you have been reading Bishop Westcott's life.  He was a man of
God, and his life is an inspiration, and a prophecy of what our life
may--nay, some day--will be. . . .  I like that passage {187} when he
goes to see his old schoolmaster, Bishop Prince Lee, who tells him with
tears in his eyes that to his mind the whole Gospel message is summed up
in the words '_me phobou, monon pisteue_.'

[Transcriber's note: see the previous letter for transliteration notes on
the above Greek phrase.]



_To a friend who had been an international athlete._

St. Thomas's Home: September 5, 1903.

We had a fairly good 'Long' in spite of the miserable weather.
Congratulate me.  I won my first athletic distinction last 'Long'--a
ten-shilling prize.  I am thinking of chucking work and becoming a
professional.  It was a second prize in a tennis tournament.  I had (I
must own) the best player in College as my partner.  I want to get a very
conspicuous object as prize.  What do you suggest?



_To C. T. W._

St. Thomas's Hospital: September 1903.

I am getting on first-rate, and I hope to be up early next week.  I
believe you are right.  We should do well if we had more regularity and
self-discipline in our life at Cambridge, and we should have more power
over others.  Pray for me. . . .

You needn't pity me.  I am having a very good time.  It is jolly to do
nothing, and not even to have to dress and undress--both exhausting and
monotonous occupations.  It has been a glorious day, and although it is
almost 7 P.M., I am still out on the balcony enjoying the cool breezes.



{188}

_To W. O._

Alassio; December 1903.

Death has come near to my family lately.  I told you that my sister--the
Deaconess--had passed away from us.[1]  It is not all sorrow, when we
know that the life has been spent in walking with God, when we know that
this corruptible puts on incorruption, and that what is sown in intense
bodily weakness is raised in strength--eternal strength.

I am so glad that God has given to you His highest blessing.  I long to
meet your future wife.  It makes me very happy to think of the happiness
in store for you--to know that you are in the best of all schools.  I
thank God.  Love will bring you both nearer to the source of Love. . . .
This new blessing, as you say, is 'the gathering up of the best that God
gives.'  I can't express my thoughts as I would, but I am very, very
glad. . . .

Illness teaches one many lessons.  I trust I have learned some.  I have
been amazed at the goodness of my friends!

[1] His sister, Deaconess Cecilia, 'passed away' at the Deanery,
Westminster, on September 8.



_To W. P., an officer in the Army._

Hotel Salisbury, Alassio, Italy: December 21, 1903.

I don't think things happen by chance.  Indeed I am sure they do not.  I
have never felt so humbled to the earth.  One sees one's life as a whole,
when one is helpless and can do nothing, and the whole looks very poor
and mean.  It is like the {189} judgment-day--only with this grand
exception, that life is not yet over, that the night has not yet come in
which 'no man can work,' that you have still a chance to make the future
better, more honest, more noble than the past.  Then, again, I learnt the
utter and wonderful kindness of my friends.  I felt so selfish and so
surprised at the goodness they showed me.  Again, I saw something of the
mystery of pain.  My own was so trivial compared with that which some
others had to bear.  Yet I had enough to startle me that such a fact
should be permitted on earth at all.  I don't suppose we can understand
its meaning; but my consolation was that it is not necessarily a sign of
God's displeasure--that the highest life was a life of suffering, that
the Son of Man was a 'Man of Sorrows.'  Everything seems to me to depend
upon the way in which one takes the pain--if one voluntarily says, 'Thy
kingdom come, Thy will be done,' then one is entering into the highest
life, and the pain becomes a new method of serving and knowing God.  But
physical pain, if prolonged, is a terrible thing; and there is no time on
a bed of sickness for praying or thinking much of God unless one is
accustomed to do so in health.  The needs of the poor body press in upon
one.  Death-bed repentances are realities, but I am inclined to think
that they are very rare.  It is terribly dangerous to defer being good
until we are ill.  Illness does not necessarily make us good.

I am afraid I was but a poor coward, and yet my faith did not utterly
fail.  God is the one hope for a man who is ill, and He is true to His
word.  He {190} hides His face behind the clouds; but even when I
couldn't see Him at all, I felt that He was there.  Pray for me; at
present I feel too weak to pray much for myself.  I want--I do want--to
be a better man, to help others nearer the kingdom.  I want, when life is
over, to have a better record to look back upon than I had in hospital.



_To F. S. H._

Alassio, Italy; January 2, 1904.

Your letter came to me at a time when I was rather low.  I had to have a
second operation.  However, after fifteen weeks of Nursing Homes I
escaped, and, as soon as I could, made my way to St. Moritz.  For once
the place didn't seem to suit me very well.  So, after little more than a
week, I came down into Italy.  I am so far recovered now that I quite
hope to be able to go back to college at the beginning of this term.

Illness and pain have taught me some lessons--at least I hope so.  I feel
solemnised, startled, when I think of how life looked when I could do
nothing for the time.  Pray for me that I may be more real.  I learnt,
too, how futile it is to put off repentance till sickness.  It is hard at
such a time to think of aught save self and physical pain.  And my own
pain was so trivial compared with that of others.  O God! it is a
terrible thing.  Some day shall we be able to understand, if not with the
head, with the heart, part of its meaning?  Meanwhile the individual can
say, however feebly, 'Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done.'

{191}

_To his brother, a doctor in South Africa._

Alassio, Italy: January 7, 1904.

At last I am beginning to get tired of doing nothing.  I hope that
eventually I shall be stronger than I have been for some years past.  At
any rate I hope a little first-hand experience of pain will make me more
sympathetic.  Pain seems to me now a greater mystery than ever before.
But I comforted myself with the thought that in the highest Life ever
seen on earth, there was a full measure of spiritual, mental, and
physical pain.  Also it was a comfort to feel that when one accepted, not
simply with resignation but with faith, certain suffering, one was in
sympathy with the will of the universe, 'working together with God' in
some mysterious way.  What a strange place a hospital is!  How wonderful
the Gospels are, with their hope and comfort on every page--hope for the
physical as well as the mental side of man's life!  I like more than ever
now to read how Jesus went about healing all manner of diseases and all
manner of sickness and bringing life and strength wherever He came,
showing us that Heaven is on our side in our wrestle with all that
deforms and degrades human nature.

I certainly don't regret my illness.  Besides showing me the marvellous
kindness of friends, it has, I hope, taught me much.




{193}

APPENDIX

The following letter addressed to the Editor of this volume was
received from the Rev. H. Bisseker, chaplain at the Leys School,
Cambridge, too late for insertion in an earlier portion of the book:


'Your brother's friendship, as you must have heard so often during the
past few months, was valued in Cambridge beyond that of most men, and I
am probably only one of many who still look to that friendship as among
the prominent facts of their time up here.  Though personally I did not
learn to know Mr. Robinson when I first came up, his brotherliness so
deeply impressed me during the four years for which our friendship
lasted, that I still find it difficult to believe that he is no longer
to be found in the familiar rooms at Christ's, and has ceased to be a
part of our Cambridge life.  And yet, in another sense, he has not
ceased to be a part of that life; for one feels that during his
residence up here he managed, if one may so express it, to put a bit of
himself into more than one man, and that in this way he will continue
to live among us long after he himself has been removed.

{194} 'I have often thought about him and his quiet, strong influence
since we heard that we had lost him, and almost invariably the same
three of his characteristics assume the uppermost place in my thought.
Different sides of his nature would appeal to different men: I can best
serve your purpose by mentioning those which made the deepest
impression on my own mind.

'One of the chief causes of your brother's influence was unquestionably
_his sense of the value of the individual_.  He used to take men one by
one and make a separate study of each.  The consequence was that he
_knew_ his men.  On any given visit the acquaintance did not, as it
were, have to be begun over again.  On the contrary, the acquaintance
once formed, some common ground already existed; for so great was your
brother's power of sympathy that, where at the first no such common
ground appeared to exist, he soon learnt to find a standing-place
himself on that assumed by the man he was seeking to know.  And not
only did Mr. Robinson possess this power of valuing the individual, but
he also was able to inspire the objects of his influence with the
knowledge of his particular interest in them.  Thus they soon dropped
the idea of acquaintanceship, and began to think of him as friend, and
there you have in a word the secret of his wide influence.  He was
interested in _men_, but what he loved was a _man_.

'Mr. Robinson was no less marked off from the majority of men by the
stress which he laid upon the reality and power of prayer.  We used
from time to time to have long talks together on this subject, so {195}
that I can speak with some little knowledge of the place which he
assigned it in his life.  With characteristic modesty he not
infrequently distrusted himself in his active contact with men.  His
very anxiety to help others towards the ideals by which his own life
was dominated led him to see the risk of placing hindrances in their
way by an injudicious intrusion into the secret places of their hearts.
Drawn in different directions, therefore, by his passionate desire to
win men for Christ and his cautious fear lest untimely words of his
should hinder rather than help, he found refuge in giving himself up to
earnest prayer on their behalf.  And prayer to him meant more than a
light repetition of words.  He used often, I believe, to spend as long
as half an hour at a time in seeking blessing for a single man.  We
cannot doubt that, in the strong influence which he himself exerted
upon so many of those who knew him, such persistent prayer received at
least a part of its own answer.

'The last element in your brother's individuality which always
impressed me was his restrained, but genuine, mysticism.  In the few
accounts of his life that I have read I do not remember any allusion to
this characteristic.  That he possessed it, however, and this to no
usual degree, seems to my mind quite patent; in fact, it was this
suggestion of mysticism that first attracted me to him.  The mysticism
one sees around one is often so unregulated and so ignorant that it was
refreshing to find a mystic who was also an enlightened scholar and
thinker.  It confirmed the feeling, instinctive in one's heart, that,
despite the abuse of caricature, a deep, intelligent {196} apprehension
of unseen realities is of the essence of the fulness of religion.  Mr.
Forbes Robinson appeared to possess an unusually certain cognisance of
the unseen world.  How well I remember the way in which, again and
again, tea over and our pipes lighted, he would curl himself up in one
of his or my own big chairs and discuss questions of interest to us
both with a far-away look in his eyes altogether suggestive of a
genuine otherworldliness!  And this familiarity with unseen verities
seemed to run through all those parts of his life with which I was
acquainted, and indeed to be to him the most real fact of all
existence.  To use the simple language of olden days, I believe that
"he walked with God": and that explains his life.

'These, then, were the three characteristics of your brother which more
than any others have impressed themselves upon my mind.  I do not think
that they were three separate sides of his personality: I should say,
rather, that they were three different expressions of one fundamental
attribute.  It was because he walked so closely with God that he so
loved the individual sons of God.  It was because he so loved the Great
Father and each child of His that he had so strong a faith in the power
of prayer and such unwearying patience to persist in it.

'A life like your brother's, if I may say one thing more, forms, I
sometimes think, one of the strongest pledges of human immortality.  In
one sense, it is true, he seems to have done so much; and yet, in
another sense, those of us who knew the faculties which he had
cultivated, his knowledge and patient {197} scholarship, his sympathy
and insight, his tact and passion for men, and, most precious of all,
his power with God, were looking for even greater things in years to
come.  Such fitness for influence as he possessed is not acquired in a
day, and just when its worth was being proved he was taken from us.
Surely these gifts and graces are not now as if they had never been, or
as if, once granted, they had been idly wasted!  Can that earnest,
patient cultivation really have been gratuitous, and the unselfish
instinct that inspired it mistaken?  Were it so, the whole universe
looks out of joint.  The more I consider such lives as that of your
brother--lives, I mean, which, bearing promise of so rich a harvest,
are yet cut off before the full harvest can possibly have been
realised--the more my conviction grows that the passing of such men as
he is not death, but only "the birth which we call death."'




{199}

INDEX


  Anthropomorphism in the O.T., 135
  Average man, the, 43


  Beauty, natural, 153, 156 _sq._
  Beauty, origin of personal, 78-81
  Boers, religion of the, 110 _sq._
  Boer war, the, 162 _sq._


  Christmas, meaning of, 153
  Christ's College Magazine, extract from, 10
  Clough, quotation from, 164
  Communion of saints, 69
  Continuity of work, 106 _sq._
  Cornwall, open-air preaching in, 25
  Criticism of O.T., 54, 136 _sq._


  Daily service, repetition of, 59


  Eternity, life in the light of, 164


  Faith, function of, 120
  Fitzpatrick, Rev. T. C., sketch by, 36-42
  Friendship, permanent character of, 84
  Friendship, the, of Christ, 89 _sq._
  Future life, the, 69, 117 _sq._, 125, 149, 150 _sq._


  Gordon, General, in S. Africa, 116 _sq._


  Hebrew and Greek ideals, 166 _sq._, 183
  Holy Spirit, work of the, 182, 184
  Home life, significance of, 60, 77 _sq._, 84, 110, 118, 159
  Humour, sense of, 47 _sq._


  Incarnation, results of his belief in, 45
  Influence upon others, 75


  James, Dr., sketch by, 7 _sqq._


  Kant, philosophy of, 176, 178
  Kittermaster, Rev. D. B., sketch by, 42-53
  Kruger, interview with, 112


  Law as revealed to the Jews, 63 _sqq._
  Letter-writer, St. Paul a, 82
  _Letters_--
  H. J. B., 151, 164, 166, 182
  W. A. B., 60, 74, 77, 86, 113
  F. J. C., 129, 131, 134, 153, 179
  G. J. C., 122, 123, 158
  J. L. D., 91, 93, 95, 109
  G. F., 104
  A. W. G., 69
  F. S. H., 102, 103, 105, 106, 119, 132, 136, 139, 185, 187, 190
  J. C. H., 117
  W. D. H., 127, 162
  D. B. K., 148, 159, 172, 174
  J. K., 108, 186
  E. N. L., 58, 68
  T. H. M., 55, 56, 57, 76, 100
  W. O., 143, 188
  H. P., 145, 171
  W. P., 188
  A. V. R., 54
  D. D. R., 63, 88, 98
  C. N. W., 120
  C. T. W., 107, 111, 126, 127, 187
  Anonymous, 114, 125, 146, 149, 162
  To a friend at Cambridge, 154, 167
  To his brother Edward in S. Africa, 137, 156, 171, 178
  To his brother, a doctor in S. Africa, 128, 135, 191
  To his mother, 116, 181
  To the mother of his godchild, M. F., 110, 118, 165
  Life, _zoe_ as used in St. John, 55
  Life, the Divine, manifested, 101 _sq._
  Love, his, for his friends, 45 _sq._, 50, 154, 182
  Love, meaning and scope of, 73, 76, 113 _sq._, 124, 142
  Love, the action of the Divine, 142


  Motto, family, 1.


  National life, significance of, 66
  Natural beauty, eternal, 105
  Naval officers, life of, 139 _sq._


  Ordination, letters to candidates for, 58, 127 _sq._, 146, 162


  Pain, mystery of, 189, 191
  Parties in the Church, 109
  Person, God revealed as a, 71 _sq._, 75
  Prayer, his habit of intercessory, 29, 40, 51, 123, 138, 151,
      154, 167 _sq._, 173, 185
  Prayer, need of, 95, 97, 129-132, 160 _sq._, 162, 177
  Providence revealed in life of individuals, 121


  Sacraments, the, their significance, 76 _sq._, 80
  Saints, called to be, 96, 149 _sq._
  Schoolmaster, the work of a, 86 _sq._, 145 _sq._, 158
  Selfishness, tendency of, 92 _sq._
  Self-sacrifice, 166, 170
  Self-sacrifice of God, 175
  Simplicity of the Divine nature, 57
  Suffering, a proof of the Divine love, 165 _sq._, 180
  Sunday evening 'at homes,' 39 _sq._
  Sympathy, meaning and need of, 91 _sq._, 106, 140, 171, 175-7
  Sympathy, silent, 23 _sq._


  Tancock, Dr., impressions of F. R., 3 _sq._
  Temptations of Christ, 144
  Thackeray's novels, 103 _sq._
  Think, attempts to teach men to, 12
  Toft, work at, 25 _sq._
  Toleration, 26 _sq._
  Trinity, significance of doctrine of, 71, 75


  Unity of all men in God, 70


  Walk from London to Cambridge, 19 _sq._
  Worship, public, 122











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