Church of England -- Clergy -- Correspondence; Clergy -- England -- Correspondence; Robinson, Forbes, 1867-1904 -- Correspondence
'He would display with humorous pride to his athletic friends a
photograph of himself coming in second in a toboggan handicap race at
St. Moritz, which he always maintained he morally won. He was full of
spontaneous humour. When he greeted you, when he looked at you, when
he talked with you, it was always with a half smile on his face. It
was his sense of humour which procured him a quick entrance into many a
man's life and heart. It was his sense of humour which made the
hostile undergraduate, hauled for cutting lectures or chapels, forget
his hostility and the presence of the don; though at the end of the
interview he, probably for the first time, began to think whether
chapel-going had any meaning, whether a lecture, if listened to, might
conceivably profit the listener. It was his sense of humour which made
all feel at home with him, which at the first attracted the most
unlikely men, {49} which inspired with confidence the shyest, and made
the most frivolous and thoughtless not afraid of him. Yet while he
would laugh, and make us laugh, for as long as ever any one wished,
through all his unaffected merriment he made men feel the strange
earnestness of his life. And all knew that, while he never obtruded on
us religious or even serious matters, he was ready at a moment's notice
to speak with us of spiritual things. And most men felt something of
what a friend of his wrote of him after his death: "He understood of
'the things that matter' more than any man that I shall ever meet."
And many men who owe to Forbes Robinson their first serious thoughts of
and their first insight into "the things that matter" must feel the
same. It is this fact that makes it impossible to measure the
far-reaching deep influence of his life. For the greatness of that
life lay not in any large influence on any large body of
undergraduates, though the undergraduate life of Christ's College must,
as a whole, have felt his real influence; nor was his life great simply
because he was a scholar and a thinker. But his life was great, and
will for all time remain great, because it was an inspiration--there is
no other word: it was, and is, a lasting, vivid, real inspiration to a
few. What Bishop Westcott did on a large scale, Forbes Robinson did on
a small. He inspired men--inspired them to search for and hold to the
realities of life.
'To sum up: a man admitted into the inner chamber of his life learnt
there something of these three things: (_a_) The value of his own
personality, (_b_) the meaning of love, (_c_) the power of prayer.
{50}
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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