I cannot tell you what a pleasure it was to see my godchild. . . . I feel she has a strength of purpose and a desire to know the truth which will fit her for high service in God's kingdom on earth. I pray for her, and I shall do so in the future with fuller understanding and with great hope. What God hath begun He will assuredly bring to perfection. I hope that some day she will learn to pray for Uncle Forbes. I should value her prayers. It is good to feel that in the midst of your weary time of weakness God has given you such a child as a pledge of His affection 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}