There we may look for the realisation of our earthly endeavours, as Abt Vogler teaches. I wonder if you read Browning. I wish you had a Browning Society.—With much sympathy, ...’
To one who had written of the ‘Intolerance of Church people’:—
‘July 1884.
‘ ... But it does seem to me quite impossible in education to leave religion an open question, i.e., to teach without hypothesis. How could we unite into one coherent whole the teaching of optics, unless we presuppose the undulatory theory? Or the facts of astronomy without the theory of gravitation? Yet both may be, and are questioned. For some philosophical theory must underlie all things, and no one can, it seems to me, teach history, or geography, or science without it. We who believe in Christian philosophy, and feel that it alone makes the universe intelligible, and life worth living for ourselves or others; who think that it is the power needed to give life to the world, and to deliver us from evil and all the misery which oppresses us, naturally desire with all the energy of our being to teach it, and we most of us would not let little differences hinder our working with those who acknowledge the immeasurable blessings of Christ’s teaching. Here I found dissenters wishing that the teaching of our College should be Church; because they said there must be some basis; that they would rather let their children hear sometimes what they disagreed with, and judge for themselves, than that there should be no definite teaching. They thought our Church was on the whole the most liberal.
‘I am so grieved, dear friend, that any of us should bring disgrace on our Teacher by our faults, but when we do what our Master, the Truth, disapproved, the blame should not rest on Him. It would not be just to you if we called a child who was in your class and loved you, by your name when she told a lie. Nor should you say, “See what Christians do,” when they sin against Christ. In so far as they are untruthful they are un-Christian.
‘Then, had you not, even as you admit, condemned utterly those whose conduct admitted of a more favourable interpretation? We are not utterly truthful, unless we do more than act up to our convictions, unless we do our utmost to make those convictions as near the truth as we are able. And do you know I felt so disappointed after talking to you the other day, because it seemed to me as if you had not cared to search into the depths of things, as if you were content to float about instead of searching for the rock beneath the flood. Our apprehension of the truth regarding the goodness of God, and His purpose for us, and our duty to our Father and to one another, seems to me the priceless pearl. I found you had not read what I thought you would have read, the works in which the ages have indeed drawn for us pictures of those who wrestled with God in the darkness and cried—“Tell me Thy Name.” And now you disappoint me again, as some other of my dear Agnostic friends. They seem wanting in the tenderness of those who ever look up to Jesus Christ, and therefore learn to feel in the light of His example. This our miserable failure, the habitual self-examination and definite confession of sin, helps us to. There, I have told you what is in my heart. The former on thinking over our conversation I meant to say, because I love you. The latter, (the want of sympathy,) I did not know of. I wonder if you will misunderstand me now,—perhaps,—but I have felt you did not before.’
The following was written to a former student, who after a time of great religious privilege had been assailed by special temptation:—
‘August 1888.
‘My dear Friend,—I am grieved that you have suffered so much, and yet it was not sent you in vain. It was to correct faults in yourself, and to help you in your vocation to correct those in others. You did not, I feel sure, yield to the wrong, but fought against it, and temptation is not sin.