Letters to His Friends

by Forbes Robinson

To the same when he had just accepted a mastership at Eton.

Brislington, Bristol: 1901.

.… How good of you to write and tell me of your future work!… The responsibility of such a life is to my mind almost overwhelming. 'Who is sufficient for these things? Our sufficiency is of God.'

I am thankful that the offer came as it did—unsought by you. You will feel happier in accepting it. 'Infinite sympathy is needed for the infinite pathos of human life'—more especially of a boy's life. The first, second, third, requisite for a master is, in my judgment, sympathy. As I look back on my own school days, I cannot help feeling that most of my masters were either lacking in it or else strangely incapable of manifesting it in a form which I could understand. Sympathy with the dull, unpromising boy is a divine gift, and I trust that Holy Orders will confer upon you this grace also. I thank God that you are taking orders, and finding your work in teaching. Forgive this lecture from one who has no right to speak, and who is himself strangely deficient in sympathy.

To D. B. K.

Eastbourne: September 1901.

I am glad that you have been home. I feel that home is a revelation—a means whereby the Eternal Father shows us Himself and His purposes, a strengthening and refreshing of our tired souls.… I have prayed earnestly for you that your faith and love may not fail. I feel intensely the same difficulty as you, and I am only slowly learning to overcome it. I do not think we can learn to love people who are altogether different from us in many respects, all at once. I love some men with a strange, unsatisfied affection. All my thoughts about them I am gradually learning to resolve into prayers for them, and I want to live longer that I may pray for them more.

Well, it seems to me that God gives us this affection that we may learn to do to others as we would do to these. I cannot pretend to care for many with whom I come into contact as much as I do for the few. But I can pray for them, and the feeling will more or less come in time. Just try to pray for some one person committed to your charge—say for half an hour or an hour—and you will begin really to love him. As you lay his life before God, as you think of his needs and hopes, and failings and possibilities, as you pray earnestly for him as you would for some one whom you feel intense affection for; at the end of the time you will feel more interested in him, you will think of him not as one of a class but as a separate, mysterious person. You will not, it may be, have time to pray for many in this way, but you will learn imperceptibly to extend your sympathy—to feel real love for many more. I advise you to keep a record of these prayers. It is quite worth your while to take practically a day off sometimes, and to force yourself to pray. It will be the best day's work you have ever done in your life. Remember that!

Don't be troubled by comparing yourself with other clergymen. I think you are like me—not ecclesiastically minded. I don't have the sort of feelings which a large number of persons have about their work and their preaching. I can't put the difference into words, yet I feel it. But I must serve God in my own way, and I am sure that He will use me to do the work for which I am best fitted. And the same is true of you. Try to refer all your actions to His standard; and test your work in His presence; and don't ask what So-and-so thinks of it.

I very much wish you had some gentlemen to associate with besides parsons. You must keep up as much as possible with your college friends; and use every opportunity which reasonably presents itself of seeing some 'society.' God knows what is best for you at present.