[XII]
To Tom Harding, c/o the Rev. Arthur Jake Rugby.
91b Harley Street, W.,
April 24, 1910.
My dear Tom,
I have been expecting this letter of yours for a good many weeks. It would be almost true, I think, to say that I have been hoping for it. And yet each week of delay has been making, I believe, for safety. So strongly have I been feeling this last, indeed, that now your letter has actually come, and actually contains to so large an extent the sort of material that I expected to find in it, I am more than glad that you have hesitated so long before writing it. One must always stand away a little from the burning bush to discuss its relations with an everyday world. Close beneath it, in the first apprehension of its significance, there is no room for anything but adoration. And I am afraid this letter of mine, had you received it then, would have seemed to you, if not even a little blasphemous, at any rate lacking in true reverence. For although you haven't told me so, I expect that I shouldn't be far wrong in hazarding a guess that for the first month or two after your experience at Scarborough you told yourself that your father, and perhaps even your mother, were a little wanting in a true understanding of the miracle that had befallen you. It was all so new, so overwhelming; it threw such a strange light not only upon your own individual life, past and to come, but upon the sum total of all other life as well, that you felt its wonder to be almost incompatible with the humdrum, commonplace existence that we and most of our friends appeared to be leading.
Had we known it, as it was then shining upon you, surely we should have been so different! You felt, I think, as if you had suddenly found us out. And though you didn't love us any the less for this—perhaps even loved us more, in another kind of way—you were quite sure that if you hadn't actually outstripped us by this single leap into the light, we had at any rate dropped down a little from the high plane on which, till then, you had never doubted that we lived.
How, for example, in a world that teemed with sin, could the governor be so keen on catching trout? How was it, with these dark, tremendous millions hemming him in, that you had never seen him hand away a tract, or preach the Word in season? How came it, alas, that he could even sometimes say "damn" when he broke a bootlace, or waste some unreturnable hour over a rubber of bridge? Of course with the mater it was different. Maters are different, and I'm glad you thought of that, Tom. But come now, didn't it run somehow in this way? Why naturally it did, and it meant that your discovery had already begotten another. It meant that you had suddenly realised the weak humanity of your parents. But you must try to be kind to it.
And that's how it is with all great discoveries, Tom, in every branch of life. First one is struck with their extraordinary, their dazzling, simplicity. Belief—life; acceptance—salvation; and you had never somehow thought of it before! How simple, and by its very simplicity how god-like, how utterly convincing!
And then, in this new irrefragable conception, everything (even the governor) has to be reconsidered, appraised, condemned, readjusted, and inspired afresh. What is this going to mean to me personally? What does it mean to other people? And again, what responsibility towards them does its possession entail on myself? These are the inevitable questions that follow. The putting of them is the second stage in the general process. The very fact of their being put at all shows the discovery to be already at work. And the answers, if the discovery is worth anything at all, and we have postulated it to be a great one, can be of only one kind. I must pursue it to the end. I must follow out its leading as far as my humanity will let me. And I must communicate the results to my fellows according to the best of my abilities. That is the third stage, and it is coterminous with life, Tom. Because, you see, all great discoveries, like yours, contain within them the germ-cells of a thousand others. To discover one or two of these, to nourish them, and perhaps even, if one is very fortunate, to enable them in some degree to fructify, is more than a life-work for most of us.