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 Goodhasconquered. The Badisdefeated.
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. Wemustlearn that an individual hope, aspiration, ambition, is against the law of the universe—the law of self-sacrifice. Wemustlearn 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 renounceour 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, becausehe 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 donot want tofeelbetter and stronger; we want tobebetter and stronger. And Hehasmade 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 dailyalways, 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,heartlessness. If you decide not to do so, do it with somereallygood 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 wholelife 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? Doesa 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.
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 fromany 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.,nowwe 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.Therefore St. Paul uses indifferentlynomosandho 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 restrictednomosto 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 toillustrate 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 seenin 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' isthething 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 regardedalllaw as coming from God; nay, I think all nations
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 areall 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,theman, 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. ARoman 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 thespiritual 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 simplytryingto be, weareone. All we have to do, I believe, is to act as though we were one. We haveproofs 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 weinfluence—into whom our lifeflows 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 wereworthknowing, 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 sayexactlywhat 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 soeasily 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
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,Iam 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 withtheireyes, to havetheirpast,theirhopes for the future,theirsins,theirinmost thoughts,theiranxieties. 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.
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 weinfluenceanother, our lifeflows intoanother: 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,verymuch 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,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, anddomore. 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 thoseI 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—thecommunion 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 thegood 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,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 andvisible 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.Weare utterly worthless and vile, but when united, as weareunited to God, we are transformed into Hisimage, 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 pasthasgone 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, interprethim, 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 overlife. 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 relationshipin 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 seeGod 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 becontemplating 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,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 besomuch, he may besolittle 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.