The great thing is to get the life where we shall develop best all our powers--viz. the life in which we shall have most opportunities of sacrifice. Can you get, can you _use_, opportunities of self-sacrifice in your school life? Can you get fuller and better elsewhere? . . . Of course, if you find that you have more influence over boys than you would be likely to have over other folk, that might alter the case. Have you found that you can influence them more for good than you would be likely to influence others? Our one work in life must be to advance God's glory, God's kingdom. The time is short. The night {88} soon comes. The great problem is how to do most in that short time; how we ourselves can best lose ourselves in the little time that we have for losing ourselves. 'He that loseth himself, findeth himself.' _To D. D. R._ 14 St. Margaret's Road, St. Leonards; January 10, 1893. I have been thinking to-day of that strange statement 'I no longer call you slaves . . . but I have called you friends.' To understand any one you must be their friend: you are able then to judge their life from the inside, to see why and how they do what they do; all their actions which seemed disconnected and purposeless before are seen to be part of a plan, to have an end, a goal. We cannot understand the riddle of life, the necessity of all the details in the great scheme of redemption, the reason for certain means of grace, the real significance of the hope of glory, while we are slaves. The whole appears so purposeless, such waste of energy, such unintelligible and irrational self-sacrifice. Why must the Christ suffer? Why could not sin be overcome in a less costly way? Why is the victory of the Christ so incomplete? Why do some, who are better than we, take so little interest in the eternal? We cannot answer these and a thousand other questions while we are slaves. All is a hopeless enigma, a play without a plot, a novel with no plan. But become a friend of a man and all is changed. Each act in his life, each thought in his life, each word from his lips--they have not ceased to be a problem, {89} they are ten thousandfold more wonderful than they ever were before: they are still a problem; but there is, there must be, we feel, a purpose running through the whole. We have but one object--to understand him more, to see what divine ideal he is trying to work out in all the details of his common life. Each detail is important; each thought, however wayward, must be recognised and understood. All are seen in the clear, dry light of eternity; each is seen in something like its right proportion. We feel that his life is our life--nay, more interesting than our own miserable life--that if we are ever to know ourselves we must know him first. So, too, become a friend of Him who alone is, and all is changed. Gradually, perhaps painfully, yet surely, as we become like very little children, the meaning of the whole dawns upon us.