mbering that if you
find yourself repining at the distressful circumstances in which you are
placed, you may be dishonouring Him who has placed you where you are. I
do not, of course, mean that such reflection will make you condone and
excuse the lukewarmness of others, but you will grasp the truth that God
uses even the sin of this world as an instrument in the education of His
people, and that you yourself may have your character formed partly
through the faults of others, for whom you are still bound to pray.
{101} This great Christmas festival that is past must be a power to us in
the year that is coming on. We must enter into and be penetrated by the
Life that has been manifested. For it is life that you and I need. Our
own puny individualistic life of morbid self-consciousness and
sensibility must be transformed by the fuller Life in which all may have
a share; and thus we shall come to think less of ourselves, our
successes, our failures, what others think about us and what others ought
to think about us--we shall forget all this because we shall share in the
Universal Life, which penetrates through all and which makes men forget
themselves and their ills, and be pure, simple, healthy, unselfish. And
this life has been realised and men have seen it, and it is still with us
to-day. In so far as we share in it we shall become natural, unaffected,
human. Nay, more. Because the life there manifested is divine as well
as human, we shall realise also with fuller force what it is to be a
child of a Father who is in heaven. It is life, not a system, that we
need. It is life which is given us when we are adopted as sons; it is
life that we receive when the Source of all life gives us Himself to feed
upon; it is life that Christ bestows upon us when we gradually realise
our position as members of a society in which no man can live for himself
alone. Life is life in so far as it is unselfish. May He who has called
us and given to us all our privileges teach us to live out that which we
know and believe!

{102}

_To F. S. H._

Cambridge: August 4, 1895.

Life will not be the same without having you up here. I am very
dependent upon others, and I soon begin to be downcast if I have not
some one to help or to be helped by. But happily He who takes away is
the same as He who gives, and His great heart of affection understands
our manifold and seemingly contradictory needs. Life would be
intolerable if we