y at all costs to recognise it, to sympathise
with it, to put ourselves in touch with it, even though it takes forms
unintelligible and even repugnant to ourselves.

Let me try to translate this into very practical matters. We many of
us find ourselves in a fixed relation to a certain circle of people.
We cannot break with them or abandon them. Perhaps our livelihood
depends upon them, or theirs upon us. Yet we may find them harsh,
unsympathetic, unkind, objectionable. What are we to do? Many people
let the whole tangle go, and just creep along, doing what they do not
like, feeling unappreciated and misunderstood, just hoping to avoid
active collisions and unpleasant scenes. That is a very spiritless
business! What we ought to do is to find points of contact, even at
the cost of some repression of our own views and aims. And we ought
too to nourish a fine life of our own, to look into the lives of other
people, which can be done perhaps best in large books, fine
biographies, great works of imagination and fiction. We must not
drowse and brood in our own sombre corner, when life is flowing free
and full outside, as in some flashing river. However little chance we
may seem to have of _doing_ anything, we can at least determine to
_be_ something; not to let our life be filled, like some base vessel,
with the offscourings and rinsings of other spirits, but to remember
that the water of life is given freely to all who come. That is the
worst of our dull view of the great Gospel of Christ. We think--I do
not say this profanely but seriously--of that water of life as a
series of propositions like the Athanasian Creed!

Christ meant something very different by the water of life. He meant
that the soul that was athirst could receive a draught of a spring of
cool refreshment and living joy. He did not mean a set of doctrines;
doctrines are to life what parchments and title-deeds are to an estate
with woods and waters, fields and gardens, houses and cottages, and
live people moving to and fro. It is of no use to possess the
title-deed if one does not visit one's estate. Doctrines are an
attempt to state, in bare and precise language, ideas and thoughts
dear and fresh to the heart. It is in qualities, hopes, and affections
that we live; and if our eyes are opened, we can see, as my friend
dreamed he saw, the surface of the hard rock full of moving points,
and shimmering with threads of swift life, when the sun has fallen
from the