I want you to be one of the best men that ever lived--to see God and to reveal Him to men. This is the burden of my prayers. My whole being goes out in passionate entreaty to God that He will give me what I ask. I am sure He will, for the request {168} is after His own heart. I do not pray that you may 'succeed in life' or 'get on' in the world. I seldom even pray that you may love me better, or that I may see you oftener in this or any other world--much as I crave for this. But I ask, I implore, that Christ may be formed in you, that you may be made not in a likeness suggested by my imagination, but in the image of God--that you may realise, not mine, but His ideal, however much that ideal may bewilder me, however little I may fail to recognise it when it is created. I hate the thought that out of love for me you should accept my presentation--my feeble idea--of the Christ. I want God to reveal His Son in you independently of me--to give you a first-hand knowledge of Him whom I am only beginning to see. Sometimes more selfish thoughts will intrude, but this represents the main current of my prayers; and if the ideal is to be won from heaven by importunity, by ceaseless begging, I think I shall get it for you. But it grieves me to think that I can do nothing else for you. To receive so many favours from you, and to be incapable of doing more in return--this is what saddens me. I feel an ungrateful brute. You have brought new joy, hope, power into my life, and I want to show my gratitude. You would be doing me a real kindness if you would tell me how I could show it. Don't think by what I have said that I simply care--as an 'Evangelical' would say--for your 'soul.' Every part of your being--everything you do or say--all that you are--has a strange fascination for me. Only I feel that the whole of it is a revelation of {169} God; and I want that revelation to be clearer, truer, simpler. I am sure God does not only care for our souls. It is every part of our complicated being--all sides of our manifold life--that attracts Him. He loves our home life, our affection for the dear old Mother Earth which He made, our interest in the men and women whom He formed in His own image. He longs that all those interests should be developed--that we should live genuine, sane human lives. But true development here or elsewhere--the law of existence in heaven or on earth--is life through death. 'Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit.' You must give up all. As I think of you, those words keep ringing in my ears: 'If any one cometh to Me, and hateth not his own father and mother, yea, and his own self also, he cannot be My disciple.' I cannot tell you what they mean. You must find them out for yourself.