While holding as firmly and unreservedly to the belief that a revelation is a possibility that has actually been realised, I am becoming more aware of the partial and limited view which any single individual can have of the significance of such a revelation; and with this conviction comes a desire not to hinder by any words or prejudices of mine the education of one to whom I owe more than I at present know. Yet, as I believe that no individual life is beyond the wise ordering of a Divine economy, I am sure that he must have lessons to learn from me as well as I to learn from him. Hence I dare not refrain from suggesting to him--often in answer to questions that he puts to me--sides of truth which, as I believe, I have been allowed to apprehend. The knowledge of truth (in however small a degree) is a trust that we hold for the sake of others. What I fear for him and for you--for you even more than for him--is not that you will form wrong opinions on religious or ethical subjects, but that you will lack that moral earnestness that forces a man, whether he will or not, to look the facts of life in the face, that deadly earnestness that refuses to allow us to contemplate creeds as works of art, but forces us to ask whether these things be so. Life as a whole must be faced. What has induced men to {99} believe this and that tenet? Why have men craved for a knowledge of an unseen Being? Why have systems of priestcraft arisen? How is it that those who most revolt against such systems are slaves to other systems bearing different names, but in substance the same? Is there a Deliverer? Is there a unity beneath all this confusion? Can man know such a unity if there be one? Can such a unity be revealed? Has it been revealed? Why do men think it has been revealed if it has not? While I am slow to force upon those whom I most respect and love lessons which I believe that I have slowly learnt in a school in which perhaps they have not been, and never will be, educated, yet I am sure that I cannot be wrong in praying for them and in urging them to be increasingly earnest in the search for and the practice of truth. You are a man in so far as you live. You live in so far as you are self-sacrificing. You are self-sacrificing in so far as you unswervingly practise the truth you know and follow after that which you do not yet apprehend. And I am sure, if there be a unity beneath our lives, if there be One who is educating us when we are most wayward, we shall eventually be led by, it may be, very different paths to a single goal. Meanwhile each failure to be earnest, each relapse into sentimentality, unmanliness, morbidness, despair, unreality, laziness, passiveness, may itself be a discipline, making us utterly mistrust ourselves, whether at our worst or at our best, and forcing us to inquire whether there be any help elsewhere, any power that can sweep through our lives and force us to be human.