e to have the preponderance,
but he would not cut them out. No life is inspiriting that is not
occasionally weak and faulty. What would David be without his sins;
Peter, without his fall? There was no depth of the despairing spirit,
I say it deliberately, that Arthur had not sounded--and he had not
been, as it were, lowered--deaf, blind, and unconscious--into the
abysmal deeps; it was with an eye alert to mark every ledge of the
dark walls, an ear quick to catch the smallest murmur from below, a
sense keen to experience and record every new depth gained, every
qualm of heart-sickness encountered. Naturally prone to serious
contemplation of life's enigmas, there was not one that life did not
bring with shocking vividness to his touch.

Further, I believe that some will be found to say, "The teaching of
this life is so selfish; it is all self-contemplation, miserable
self-weariness, gloomy reveries bounded by the narrowest horizons.
If ever he turns to others' evil case, it is with the melancholy
satisfaction of the hypochondriac, who finds his own symptoms
repeated with less or greater variations in others' cases." To these
I could only reply, "You have totally misunderstood the life. It is
not a selfish one. The deepest self-communings are necessary to one
who would know human nature, because self is the only human creature
that can be known with a perfect intimacy. 'No one but yourself can
tell,' as Arthur once wrote to me, 'what ruled the lines in your
face.'" But Arthur, above all others that I have ever known, had
passed from the particular to the general. Plato's praise of love
was based on the principle that the philosopher passed from the love
of one fair form to the love of abstract beauty. The fault is that
so many never pass the initiation. Arthur did cross the threshold;
he passed from the contemplation of his own suffering to the
consideration of the root of all human suffering. He found his best
comfort in doing all he could (and God allowed him little latitude)
to alleviate the sufferings of others. I have letters from various of
his friends, dealing, with his firm and faithful touch, with crisis
after crisis in their lives. No one who had trusted him with his
confidence once, ever shrank from doing it again. I am forced to
admit that, far more than many of his authorized brethren, he
discharged the priestly office. He was self-constituted, or rather
called, to be a priest of God.

The great mystery of