on for
you, as an assurance that He believes in you. To give you a little child
to train for Himself is a proof that He trusts you very much. I do not
know that He could have given a greater proof of His confidence in you.
And it is God's implicit trust in us that draws out our trust in turn.
We trust and love Him, because He first trusted and loved us. I wonder
more and more at the way in which He trusts us. To allow us to suffer
without {166} telling us the reason, when He knows that we shall be
inclined to think harshly of Him--that is, perhaps, the greatest proof
that He believes in us. He can try our faith and perfect it by
long-continued trial, because He knows that we shall respond, that we
shall prove 'worthy to suffer.'

_To H. J. B._

Christ's College, Cambridge: August 26, 1902.

The worst of seeing you for some time is that I feel it all the more
impossible to live without you. I realise now as never before that you
are out and away before me, and better than I am; and yet I feel that you
are part and parcel of my life. You mustn't be too hard on me if I can't
come up to your ideal.

Intellectually the Hebrew and Greek ideals may be irreconcilable. Yet
'life is larger than logic;' and practically we may become heirs of both
ideals. The man who loses the world, who gives up all without any desire
for gain, is often given the whole back again transfigured, glorified by
sacrifice. To get you must forget. If you love God absolutely with all
your being, you inherit the life that is as well as that which is to
come. If all is not given you, yet enough is given for the development
of character. But there must, it seems to me, be an absolute
sacrifice--a surrender of your whole being--whatever the result may be.
There must be no calculation.

High Heaven rejects the lore
Of nicely calculated less and more.

{167}

You must love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind:
you must trust Him to do the best by you. You say the Hebrew ideal does
not appeal to you. But I know better; for you half like me, and I am a
Hebrew of the Hebrews! There must be a dash of recklessness about the
man who gains the other world. 'All or nothing' is the requirement of
the kingdom of Heaven. To gain yourself you must throw yourself
away--'lose your soul.' You must have faith. 'He who loves makes his
own the grandeur that he loves' is a sentence of Emerson which consoles
me when I think