a person, absolutely
renouncing your life for another. It means living the best life you
can conceive of for the sake of one you love; knowing for certain that
your life is flowing into that other person, though you may never see
him again in this world. Love is purifying yourself that another may
be pure. Love for one person, if it be true love, leads you at once to
God, for 'God is Love.' I do not know what that means, but I do know
that the little meaning I can see in it explains everything. As we
love, God is there; we see God, we are in God. So we are led on from
unselfish love on earth to that unselfish family life of Three in One
in heaven; we are led on to Him in whose image we are made, and whose
image we never so clearly reflect as when we love most. I could go on
talking on this subject almost for ever, but I think I had better not
tax your patience.

{74}

_To W. A. B._

Christ's College, Cambridge: July 5, 1892.

How very jolly for you to get out right away into the country! I hope
some day to be able to do the same. But I think, on the whole, _I_ am
better suited for retiring from the world than you are! If it were right
to wish it, I might almost wish to exchange places with you. But yet I
don't. It is very curious--I dare say you have thought of it--how very,
very few people, if any, you would deliberately wish to change into, if
you could. One admires many people, and would like to have their
goodness, their intellect, or their beauty or strength--but how few of
them one would really be: to cease at once to be yourself, and suddenly
to be some one else--to look at life with _their_ eyes, to have _their_
past, _their_ hopes for the future, _their_ sins, _their_ inmost
thoughts, _their_ anxieties. There is only about one man in the world,
whom I know, whom I would like to be--and even of that I am not sure. It
is the wonderful sense of personality. We abuse 'me'; we often vaguely
say we would rather be some one else; yet very few of us wish to lose
'me': and most of us perhaps never will.

Liddon is, I should think, somewhat stiff and uninteresting. Gore's
Bampton Lectures on much the same subject are far more interesting to my
mind, far more human. Lectures IV, V, VI of Gore would perhaps interest
and educate you on the subject.

Are you so sure that your course at Cambridge is 'over'?

I looked behind to find my past,
And lo, it had gone before.

{75}

You will