O.W. Never! You misunderstood me. “See himself” is what I said; and, seeing himself naked but not ashamed, learn the terrible meaning of his own soul—how it exists to torment and divide him against himself, but always as a stranger within his gates, remote, inscrutable, unnatural. For this thing, which he can never understand, goes deeper than the consciousness of self—it is something primitive, atavistic, fierce, and savage with a fanatical faith in gods whom this world tries no longer to believe in, but still fears, lest they should become true. When news of Matthew Arnold’s death came to Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa, he said (for he was a Scotsman with a fine sense of humour): “How dreadful! He won’t like God.” You smile; and yet there was a very real truth in it. The theology of Matthew Arnold was a terrible mistake; it arose out of that insistence on trying to know himself: he wanted also to know God. And just as trying to know yourself savours of social snobbery—being an attempt to know the person you think the most important in the world, so in the other attempt there is a certain spiritual snobbery. It is surely quite sufficient that He should know us, without any pretended recognition on our part, which, in any case, would be futile. For if a man cannot know his own soul with real understanding, still less can he know with real understanding that which directs its ministry of pain—that constant intolerable reminder that we can never, unless we would choose only to be dust, belong separately and entirely to ourselves. Man’s destiny is to be haunted; however deserted of his fellows, he is never for a moment alone. Matthew Arnold, in one of his poems, made that beautiful but ridiculous statement which appeals to us, perhaps, as true because we would so much like it to be true: Yes, in this sea of life enisled, We mortal millions live alone! We don’t: we live with a familiar who is a stranger, always eating out of our hand, always defrauding us of the joys of life while denying us the reason. And we never know from day to day whether that stranger is going to murder us in cold blood, or make us become saints. R.R. Why not both? To me they sound almost synonymous. O.W. Robbie, you must not interrupt me, saying clever, sensible things like that: you put me out. People who want to say merely what is sensible should say it to themselves before they come down to breakfast in the morning, never after. L.H. That was when Lewis Carroll’s “White Queen” used to practise telling herself all the things she knew to be impossible. R.R. I always thought that meant saying her prayers.