d find no
forgiveness.

I had a personal instance of this the other day which illustrates so
clearly what I mean that I will quote it. I wrote a book called _The
Child of the Dawn_, the point of which was to represent, in an
allegory, my sincere belief that the after-life of man must be a life
of effort, and experience, and growth. A lady wrote me a very
discourteous letter to say that she believed the after-life to be one
of Rest, and that she held what she believed to be my view to be
unchristian and untrue. The notion that ardent, loving, eager spirits
should be required to spend eternity in a sort of lazy contentment,
forbidden to stir a finger for love and truth and right, is surely an
insupportable one! What would be the joy of heaven to a soul full of
energy and love, condemned to such luxurious apathy, forced to drowse
through the ages in epicurean ease? If heaven has any meaning at all,
it must satisfy our best and most active aspirations; and a paradise
of utter and eternal indolence would be purgatory or hell to all noble
natures. But this poor creature, tired no doubt by life and its
anxieties, overcome by dreariness and sorrow, was not only desirous of
solitary and profound repose, but determined to impose her own theory
upon all the world as well. I blame no one for desiring rest; but to
wish, as she made no secret that she wished, to crush and confound one
who thought and hoped otherwise, does seem to me a very mean and
wretched point of view. That, alas, is what many people mean when they
say that they _believe_ a thing, namely that they would be personally
annoyed if it turned out to be different from what they hoped.

I am sure that we ought rather to welcome with all our might any
evidence of strength and energy and joy, even if they seem to spring
from principles entirely opposite to our own. The more we know of men
and women, the more we ought to perceive that half the trouble in the
world comes from our calling the same principles by different names.
We are not called upon to give up our own principles, but we must
beware of trying to meddle with the principles of other people.

And therefore we must never be disturbed and still less annoyed by
other people finding fault with our tastes and principles, calling
them fantastic and sentimental, weak and affected, so long as they do
not seek to impose their own beliefs upon us. That they should do so
is of course a mistake; but we must recognise tha