s only three
years--some consolation and encouragement in my distress.

This little volume is the result. I am well aware that the busy years which
have intervened have taken the edge off some of my recollections, while the
lapse of time has possibly touched others with a sunset glow. That can
hardly be avoided, and I am not sure that I wish to avoid it.

I am not here concerned with either criticising or endorsing Father Payne's
views. I see both inconsistencies and fallacies in them. I even detect
prejudices and misinterpretations of which I was not conscious at the time.
I have no wish to idealise my subject unduly, but it is clear to me, and I
hope I have made it clear to others, that Father Payne was a man who had a
very definite theory of life and faith, and who at all events lived
sincerely and even passionately in the light of his beliefs. Moreover, when
he came to put them to the supreme test, the test of death, they did not
desert or betray him: he passed on his way rejoicing.

He used, I remember, to warn us against attempting too close an analysis of
character. He used to say that the consciousness of a man, the intuitive
instinct which impelled him, his _attack_ upon experience, was a thing
almost independent both of his circumstances and of his reason. He used to
take his parable from the weaving of a tapestry, and say that a box full of
thread and a loom made up a very small part of the process. It was the
inventive instinct of the craftsman, the faculty of designing, that was
all-important.

He himself was a man of large designs, but he lacked perhaps the practical
gift of embodiment. I looked upon him as a man of high poetical powers,
with a great range of hopes and visions, but without the technical
accomplishment which lends these their final coherence. He was fully aware
of this himself, but he neither regretted it nor disguised it. The truth
was that his interest in existence was so intense, that he lacked the power
of self-limitation needed for an artistic success. What, however, he gave
to all who came in touch with him, was a strong sense of the richness and
greatness of life and all its issues. He taught us to approach it with no
preconceived theories, no fears, no preferences. He had a great mistrust of
conventional interpretation and traditional explanations. At the same time
he abhorred controversy and wrangling. He had no wish to expunge the ideals
of others, so long as they were sincerely