MY DEAR FRIEND,—I think you will not have misunderstood my silence since your last letter. Your heart will have told you that no news could be pleasanter to me than that you would undertake to bring the last sevenfold child of my English love into public notice. This can of course only be during the Parliamentary recess. You know better than any one what is the unity of the seven volumes, and what is the aim and result. Your own is a certainly not unimportant, and an independent part of it. But you have with old affection worked yourself and thought yourself into the whole, even where the particulars were of less interest to you. Lastly, as you have told me to my delight, Jowett has begun to interest himself in the work, and you have therefore one near at hand who, from one point of view, can help you as reflecting English opinion. Ewald told me that I had wished to give a Cosmos of the mind in that work. At all events, this idea has floated before me for many years, and is expressed in the Preface to the “God Consciousness.” Only it is not more than _a study_ for that which floats before me. My two next volumes will give more of it. If I only knew what to do with the work for Germany! My task was arranged for England. It seemed to me important, under the guidance of the rediscovered Hippolytus, whose form first rose clearly before me during the first work, to show the organic development of the leading ideas of Christendom in the teachers and heroes, beginning from the first Pentecostal feast; in order to sift the ground, and show to my readers— _a._ That the old system of inspiration and the Theodice of the Middle Ages, that is to say, that of the seventeenth century, has no _support_ in ancient Christianity, but just the _contrary_. That is now a fact. _b._ That we have something infinitely more reassuring to put in its place. Truth instead of delusion; reality instead of child’s play and pictures. _c._ That it is high time to be in earnest about this. _d._ That for this, _clear insight_ and practical purpose, also reasoning and moral earnestness, will be required on the part of the spiritual guides. _e._ But that before all things Christianity must be introduced into the reality of the present; and that the corporation of the Church, the life of the community in its worship as in its mutually supporting work, must become the centre whence springs the consciousness of communion,—_not_ a system of theology. Christianity is nothing to me but the restoration of the ideal of humanity, and this will become especially clear through the antecedent forms (præformations) of the development in language and religion. (See “Outlines.”) There is a natural history of both, which rests on laws as sure as those of the visible Cosmos. The rest is professional, philological,—_legitimatio ad causam_.