40 Upperton Gardens, Eastbourne: September 30, 1902.
… I am glad that you feel you have done right in giving up your school work. I am sorry that you left Clifton, but you thought you ought to go, and that is an end of the matter. I can only hope that you are in some measure a connecting-link between the school and its mission.… Don't forget me in my very different work—and yet work for the same Master—at college. I have need of your prayers. It is so easy to blunder, and to drive a man further from the kingdom by lack of sympathy and love. I feel more than I used to my weakness, and my absolute need of prayer.
To his brother Edward in South Africa.
40 Upperton Gardens, Eastbourne: October 1, 1902.
The October term has an interest of its own, bringing, as it does, a batch of freshmen. I try more and more not simply to impose my ideals upon them, but to find out their ideals and to quicken them with all my power. But assuredly 'infinite sympathy is needed for the infinite pathos of human life;' and my sympathies are as yet imperfectly developed.
Still, as years go by, I think I can sympathise more with those who have been trained up in other schools of thought and experience. I was reading in a book lately that we are largely responsible for our own experiences, that we have a duty to get them of the right kind. The book was by an American lady on social questions. I think there is truth in her words.
To D. B. K., head of a Public School Mission.
Eastbourne: October 1902.
I delight to know men better, because I find so much more in them than I had expected. They differ from me, and I try to get out of the habit of making them in my own image, and try to find the image in which God is making them. I have been praying for you. I want a spirit of sanity and sacrifice to possess you, that you may be able to see the good works which God has prepared beforehand that you should walk in them.…
I am struck by the sacrifice which Christ demands. Unless the man hates father, mother, family, friends, yea, and himself also, he 'cannot be' His disciple, Christ gives them all back again—only 'with persecutions.' We find more in the world, when we are 'crucified to it,' than ever before; but there is a something added. We have a deeper joy in home ties, in human love, in social life, in the changing seasons, in the dear old earth. Only the joy has a note of sorrow, a pathos, which Christ calls 'persecutions.' We see more in life, and yet we are in a measure out of sympathy with our surroundings. We have heard and we can never forget the sorrows of those who are 'one man' with us. There is more in that word 'persecutions' than this, as no doubt you have found. But this, I think, is part of its signification, isn't it?…