The step which you contemplate taking is one with far-reaching issues--reaching away through time and beyond it. I advise you to try and gain a general idea of the meaning of the first half of St. Paul's {94} second letter to the Corinthian Church--to try and enter into its general spirit. Few things will humble you more: you will see something of the unspeakable dignity of the office of him who represents God to his fellow-men, and of the tremendous enthusiasm and love which a man must have if he would be the minister that St. Paul would have him be. I do not know what St. Paul means when he says that we are ambassadors on behalf of Christ: but the more I think of what the words seem to mean, the more I am startled at the awful responsibility that we have laid upon us. To represent Christ, to treat with men, to attempt to arrange--if one may so speak--terms, to use all our powers in performing the work of the embassy--this at least is involved in the words. What strikes me so much in the letter is the manner in which St. Paul literally loves the Church; how he longs to communicate his own enthusiasm to it; how he would die, almost does die, himself to bring life to them. All his hopes are bound up with theirs--his salvation with their salvation. He seems to 'fail from out his blood, and grow incorporate' into them. We are called to the same office as St. Paul, we have the same power working in us as he had working in him: we too shall have success in so far as we love--as we identify ourselves with those whom God has given us to take care of. The more we are disciplined and yet enthusiastic, the more capable shall we be of love--of getting out of self--of working our way into others--of representing the Christ to them--of understanding and making allowances for them--of seeing them in the ideal, the only real, light in {95} which God sees them--seeing them in the Christ, in whom we live--mind that, with all your intellectual training, you don't forget the other. Now is the time to learn, to force yourself to learn, to pray--to pray not for a few minutes at a time, but to pray for an hour at a time--to get alone with yourself--to get alone with your Maker. We shall not have to talk so much to others if we pray more for them. We talk and we do not influence, or we influence only for a time, because our lives are not more prayer-full. _To J. L. D._ Aldeburgh House, Blackheath, S.E.: December 16, 1893.