One suggestion I make: that you do what I believe you are expected by the words of the Prayer-book to do--say the Morning and Evening Prayer daily _always_, unless you are ill, at home or in church, and the Litany on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. You will find this a greater help than almost anything else--a help against superstition, narrowness, bigotry, {60} heartlessness. If you decide not to do so, do it with some _really_ good reason, and not because others do the same, or because it is a bother. And now good-bye. And may God grant us to know Him on earth, so that we may together know Him better hereafter. _To W. A. B._ Blackheath: April 30, 1892. . . . No amount of philosophical theories are worth much compared with a simple picture of home life. It is these common relations of life which are most awful and sacred. The highest life we know is, I think I may say with reverence, family life--life of Father and Son; family life on earth is a faint picture of something better in heaven. We shall be surprised some day to find that, while we have been searching for the noble and divine, we have it all the while at home. The relations of brother and brother, son and father, are eternal realities, which we shall never fathom, for God Himself is below them. 'Omnia exeunt in mysterium,' as Kingsley says in 'Yeast.' I am very pleased with that novel. The description he gives of the sufferings and squalor of villages is positively awful. We do want men who believe that self-sacrifice, not selfishness, is at the top of all, who are sure that family life is made in heaven and is made in the image of God's life, who know that in the present is the eternal, to go and live and work and die in our villages. But Kingsley shows it is not enough to give alms or other social benefits--we must do more than that, we must raise their whole {61} life and condition. I believe myself that this can only be done from inside. Thus, when God wished to redeem man, He did it from inside. Man himself fought and conquered. Deity entered into humanity. It is not merely that we must live simply, think simply, work, as they do. That is well, but we must do more. If we want to look at them from the inside, I know only one way--the old, old way which God Himself adopts. We must love them, love the Christ, the Spirit in them--not the beast, the devil in them. Like attracts like. To love and to detect that, we must have some of that Spirit, that Christ.