~GREEK SMALL LETTER KAPPA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~} [independence] (which the
Greeks carried into the moral world). Now that sense is reversed;
it seems as if I must, God knows how reluctantly, lay burdens upon
others; and as if capacity were, so to speak, dealt out to me
mercifully--but by armfuls.

Old age until the very end brought no grave changes in physical
conditions. He missed sorely his devoted friend, Sir Andrew Clark, to
whose worth as man and skill as healer he had borne public testimony in
May 1894. But for physician's service there was no special need. His
ordinary life, though of diminished power, suffered little interruption.
"The attitude," he wrote, "in which I endeavoured to fix myself was that
of a soldier on parade, in a line of men drawn up ready to march and
waiting for the word of command. I sought to be in preparation for prompt
obedience, feeling no desire to go, but on the other hand without
reluctance because firmly convinced that whatever He ordains for us is
best, best both for us and for all."

He worked with all his old zest at his edition of Bishop Butler, and his
volume of studies subsidiary to Butler. He wrote to the Duke of Argyll
(Dec. 5, 1895):--

I find my Butler a weighty undertaking, but I hope it will be
useful at least for the important improvements of form which I am
making.

It is very difficult to keep one's temper in dealing with M.
Arnold when he touches on religious matters. His patronage of a
Christianity fashioned by himself is to me more offensive and
trying than rank unbelief. But I try, or seem to myself to try, to
shrink from controversy of which I have had so much. Organic
evolution sounds to me a Butlerish idea, but I doubt if he ever
employed either term, certainly he has not the phrase, and I
cannot as yet identify the passage to which you may refer.

_Dec. 9._--Many thanks for your letter. The idea of evolution is
without doubt deeply ingrained in Butler. The case of the animal
creation had a charm for him, and in his first chapter he opens,
without committing himself, the idea of their possible elevation
to a much higher state. I have always been struck by the glee with
which negative writers strive to get rid of "special creation," as
if by that method they got the idea of God out of their way,
where