ershadow them, the stuff of their lives, the influence of their
emotions. It has long been thought, and it is still thought by many
narrow precisians, indelicate and egotistical to do this. And the result
is that we can find in books all the things that do not matter, while
the thoughts that are of deep and vital interest are withheld.

Such books as Montaigne's Essays, Rousseau's Confessions, Mrs. Carlyle's
Letters, Mrs. Oliphant's Memoirs, the Autobiography of B. R. Haydon, to
name but a few books that come into my mind, are the sort of books that
I crave for, because they are books in which one sees right into the
heart and soul of another. Men can confess to a book what they cannot
confess to a friend. Why should it be necessary to veil this essence
of humanity in the dreary melodrama, the trite incident of a novel or
a play? Things in life do not happen as they happen in novels or plays.
Oliver Twist, in real life, does not get accidentally adopted by his
grandfather's oldest friend, and commit his sole burglary in the
house of his aunt. We do not want life to be transplanted into trim
garden-plots; we want to see it at home, as it grows in all its native
wildness, on the one hand; and to know the idea, the theory, the
principle that underlie it on the other. How few of us there are who
MAKE our lives into anything! We accept our limitations, we drift with
them, while we indignantly assert the freedom of the will. The best
sermon in the world is to hear of one who has struggled with life, bent
or trained it to his will, plucked or rejected its fruit, but all upon
some principle. It matters little what we do; it matters enormously how
we do it. Considering how much has been said, and sung, and written, and
recorded, and prated, and imagined, it is strange to think how little
is ever told us directly about life; we see it in glimpses and flashes,
through half-open doors, or as one sees it from a train gliding into
a great town, and looks into back windows and yards sheltered from the
street. We philosophise, most of us, about anything but life; and one
of the reasons why published sermons have such vast sales is because,
however clumsily and conventionally, it is with life that they try to
deal.

This kind of specialising is not recognised as a technical form of it at
all, and yet how far nearer and closer and more urgent it is for us than
any other kind. I have a hope that we are at the beginning of an era of
plain