Part 6 (1/2)

Paul knew so much of G.o.d. 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, and G.o.d 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 G.o.d for the manifestation of His character, which we see in a riddle, through a gla.s.s in that life, that human life.

And then we shall be prepared to realise deeper relations.h.i.+ps, more wonderful mysteries of love--to see with clearer eyes the heart of the Supreme. We cannot make relations.h.i.+ps too spiritual. We cannot be too careful to see them in G.o.d and G.o.d in them. Think what it is to see a relations.h.i.+p _in G.o.d_, 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 relations.h.i.+ps--brother and brother, brother and sister, father and child, husband and wife, all thoughts of G.o.d, 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 _G.o.d 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. G.o.d in them--all that is good and attractive--not their own, but G.o.d'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, G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d's glory, G.o.d'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 G.o.d. {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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d Himself had provided inst.i.tutions 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 G.o.d; let us first be the friends of G.o.d, and then in the light of undying friends.h.i.+p 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!