To H. J. B.
Christ's College, Cambridge: August 26, 1902.
The worst of seeing you for some time is that I feel it all the more impossible to live without you. I realise now as never before that you are out and away before me, and better than I am; and yet I feel that you are part and parcel of my life. You mustn't be too hard on me if I can't come up to your ideal.
Intellectually the Hebrew and Greek ideals may be irreconcilable. Yet 'life is larger than logic;' and practically we may become heirs of both ideals. The man who loses the world, who gives up all without any desire for gain, is often given the whole back again transfigured, glorified by sacrifice. To get you must forget. If you love God absolutely with all your being, you inherit the life that is as well as that which is to come. If all is not given you, yet enough is given for the development of character. But there must, it seems to me, be an absolute sacrifice—a surrender of your whole being—whatever the result may be. There must be no calculation.
High Heaven rejects the lore
Of nicely calculated less and more.
You must love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind: you must trust Him to do the best by you. You say the Hebrew ideal does not appeal to you. But I know better; for you half like me, and I am a Hebrew of the Hebrews! There must be a dash of recklessness about the man who gains the other world. 'All or nothing' is the requirement of the kingdom of Heaven. To gain yourself you must throw yourself away—'lose your soul.' You must have faith. 'He who loves makes his own the grandeur that he loves' is a sentence of Emerson which consoles me when I think of my love for you.
To a friend at Cambridge.
40 Upperton Gardens, Eastbourne: September 8, 1902.
I have been thinking of you. I keep myself from becoming morbid by making most of my thoughts into prayers for you. The glory—wonder—strangeness of being loved by a man from another and a better world fills me with gratitude to God. Sometimes it seems a dream, and I half dread that I shall wake up and find that you have ceased to care for a worthless creature. But phobos ouk estin en te agape, all he teleia agape exo ballei ton phobon. I need not fear. I know that you will love me, whatever happens.