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.