23rd July, 1879.
Thanks for your note and your kind feelings. But you ought to know more about me.
I profess to be a teacher; as you profess also.
But we teach on totally different methods.
You believe what you wish to believe; teach that it is wicked to doubt it, and remain at rest and in much self-satisfaction.
I believe what I find to be true, whether I like or dislike it. And I teach other people that the chief of all wickednesses is to tell lies in God's service, and to disgrace our Master and destroy His sheep as involuntary Wolves.
I, therefore, am in perpetual effort to learn and discern—in perpetual Unrest and Dissatisfaction with myself.
But it would simply require you to do twenty years of such hard work as I have done before you could in any true sense speak a word to me on such matters. You could not use a word in my sense. It would always mean to you something different.
For instance—one of my quite bye works in learning my business of a teacher—was to read the New Testament through in the earliest Greek MS. (eleventh century) which I could get hold of. I examined every syllable of it and have more notes of various readings and on the real meanings of perverted passages than you would get through in a year's work. But I should require you to do the same work before I would discuss a text with you. From that and such work in all kinds I have formed opinions which you could no more move than you could Coniston Old Man. They may be wrong, God knows; I trust in them infinitely less than you do in those which you have formed simply by refusing to examine—or to think—or to know what is doing in the world about you; but you cannot stir them.
I very very rarely make presents of my books. If people are inclined to learn from them, I say to them as a physician would—Pay me my fee—you will not obey me if I give you advice for nothing.