"Thou wouldst not seek Me," says the Saviour in the "Mirror of Jesus," "if thou hadst not found Me." Do you know the quotation? I came upon it by chance the other day as repeated by Bourget in a book that I happened to be reading. And it seems to me to contain very simply--if only we might give it something more than an academic consent--just the one conception that is needed for the true and permanent sweetening of all our religious relationships. For they _are_ seeking, these pig-headed people who annoy us so much--I think that, nowadays, we most of us can admit as much as that. Methodist, Sacerdotalist, Hyde-Park Agnostic, Christian Socialist, Roman Modernist, Traditional Romanist, High, Low, Broad, Middle, Open, Closed (I wonder if God laughs sometimes at our resounding definitions), or Free Lance--we cannot help pitying them, of course, according to our several lights; but in so far as their sincerity is manifest, we do behold in them the signs of a mistaken search. And yet, by that very fact, have they not really found? Not our particular little glimpse of the Almighty and the Eternal, but some other little glimpse--something, at any rate, that is evidently making them strive for more; and something that they, like we, are desperately anxious to share. Or why these dusts of conflict? And yet, perhaps, the dusts are inevitable, after all--the surest sign that the Building grows beneath its million workers, and that the mallets and chisels are being busy against that great day of Affirmation when the Temple shall stand complete at the meeting-place of all our roads. And meanwhile Molly and Rupert, at any rate, are feeling very happy--with a proud humility, carefully concealed. His years have seldom weighed heavily on Molly's future husband, though as a matter of bald fact he is Mr. Pickwick's senior. And lately he has been dropping them by handfuls. Molly, however, must have picked some of them up, I fancy, and is wearing them with an appropriate dignity. Your affect. cousin, PETER HARDING. XXX _To Hugh Pontrex, Villa Rosa, Mentone._ 91B HARLEY STREET, W., _December_ 25, 1910, 10.30 p.m. MY DEAR HUGH,