les
at Munich and at Stuttgart, of the supreme interest of spiritual
things:--

In my wanderings my thoughts too have had time to travel; and I
have had much conversation upon church matters first at Munich and
since coming here with Mrs. Craven and some connections of hers
staying with her, who are Roman catholics of a high school. All
that I can see and learn induces me more and more to feel what a
crisis for religion at large is this period of the world's
history--how the power of religion and its permanence are bound up
with the church--how inestimably precious would be the church's
unity, inestimably precious on the one hand, and on the other to
human eyes immeasurably remote--lastly how loud, how solemn is the
call upon all those who hear and who _can_ obey it, to labour more
and more in the spirit of these principles, to give themselves, if
it may be, clearly and wholly to that work. It is dangerous to put
indefinite thoughts, instincts, longings, into language which is
necessarily determinate. I cannot trace the line of my own future
life, but I hope and pray it may not always be where it is....
Ireland, Ireland! that cloud in the west, that coming storm, the
minister of God's retribution upon cruel and inveterate and but
half-atoned injustice! Ireland forces upon us those great social
and great religious questions--God grant that we may have courage
to look them in the face, and to work through them. Were they over,
were the path of the church clear before her, as a body able to
take her trial before God and the world upon the performance of her
work as His organ for the recovery of our country--how joyfully
would I retire from the barren, exhausting strife of merely
political contention. I do not think that you would be very
sorrowful? As to ambition in its ordinary sense, we are spared the
chief part of its temptations. If it has a valuable reward upon
earth over and above a good name, it is when a man is enabled to
bequeath to his children a high place in the social system of his
country. That cannot be our case. The days are gone by when such a
thing might have been possible. To leave to Willy a title with its
burdens and restraints and disqualifications, but without the
material substratum of wealth, and the duties and means of good, as