But do write me a proper letter. We are just beginning life, and we have so much to learn from and to teach each other. Everything is new to us. Everything is strange. Already it seems to me I have been trained in a hard school--harder, I hope, than you will ever need to be trained in--to understand what God and love mean. I seem to have had a rough time of it, perhaps rougher than most; and even now I am trained in a way which is not attractive to me, trained to throw myself not on any merely human love, but on Him who is perfectly human and perfectly divine. May God train you in a less rough school, if possible! But at any rate, may He train you--train you to get out of self, bring you into deeper sympathies, stronger attachments, simpler earnestness! He alone can give unity to all our thoughts and desires. He alone can give stability. And we poor little creatures, who seem to have twice as much affection as we have mind, how we do need that stability! We want not to be blown hither and thither by every manifestation of strength, beauty, brain--we want to be able to enter into the meaning of what we see and cannot help admiring, without becoming the slaves of the visible and the finite. We must build on the one foundation that is laid. We must lay our affections deep down in the man Christ Jesus. As we see Him in men--and, when we cannot see that, see men in Him--we shall be more stable, less childish, less fickle. We never go deep enough. We skim over {84} life. We must get into its heart. We must never begin an affection which can have an end. For all affection must draw us into God, and God has no end. The moment we see any one whose strength, grace, goodness, beauty, or simplicity attracts us, we have deathless duties by that person. For the attraction is the outward sign of a spiritual connection--a sign that we ought to pray for that person, to thank God for the manifestation of His character, which we see in a riddle, through a glass in that life, that human life.