Letters to His Friends Part 5

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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d; nay, I think all nations did in part at least.

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_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--G.o.d 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 G.o.d. This may sound as commonplace, but it is awfully real to me. I cling to G.o.d. 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 G.o.d, we shall get nearer to those whom we love, for they too are in G.o.d.

We shall be one, ever more and more really one, the nearer and the liker we get to G.o.d. . . . 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 G.o.d. G.o.d 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 s.p.a.ce 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 G.o.d here, and whom we call dead, are not dead. They are just beginning to live, because they are finding out G.o.d: they are just beginning to know us, because they see us as we are--they see us in G.o.d. 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 G.o.d.

[1] Writing to another friend at this time he says, 'He was walking with a friend, and in a moment, without any apparent pain, "G.o.d'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 G.o.d. We are real only in so far as we are thoughts of G.o.d. 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 wors.h.i.+p beauty or intellect or goodness as though they belonged to the creature; we thereby lower ourselves and the persons whom we wors.h.i.+p.

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 G.o.d. 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 'G.o.d 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.

G.o.d 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. G.o.d is One. And the comfort comes in when one knows that 'in the image of G.o.d made He man.' Our life is a copy; G.o.d's life is the original. Because G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d, for 'G.o.d 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, G.o.d is there; we see G.o.d, we are in G.o.d. 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.

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_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.

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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 n.o.bler 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 cla.s.s 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 fellows.h.i.+p 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 compet.i.tion--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, G.o.d does all--that everything is a sacrament of the grace of G.o.d. 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 G.o.d's image--made in His likeness. And as we speak to them, when they answer purely and simply, the Word of G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 n.o.blest 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 G.o.d is--for here we have an exquisite though imperfect copy of the family life of G.o.d. Thank G.o.d when you see a good or a beautiful man or woman, a pure and a simple family--thank G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 n.o.ble soul. What does it all mean? How in a world, where the outward and visible is but a manifestation of the {79} good G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d.

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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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, G.o.d 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d in a too often graceless world--you will be taught lessons which I cannot even suggest; for G.o.d knows so much more than any of us what unsearchable riches He has as an inheritance for us. Let us enter upon that inheritance. G.o.d 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 G.o.d, we are transformed into His {82} image, we partake of His life. Only let us be what we are--sons of G.o.d.

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 G.o.d as the centre, G.o.d 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.