_effectiveness_ he never solved, I think, quite
to his own satisfaction. His life has solved it for me ever since I was
able to regard it _en masse_. It was a great puzzle to him what to
make, for instance, of infants who died at or before birth. "'Saved
from this wicked world' is such a horrible statement in such cases,"
he used to say. "If that is the best that can happen to us, what
_can_ we make of life?" And so he was always very urgent about the
influence of example opposed to the influence of precept. "My
father," he said to me, "once spoke to me rather sharply about not
attending at family prayers. He did not attend very closely himself.
I was an observant boy, and I knew it. The very fact that he should
have noticed me proved it. So all I felt was that prayer didn't
matter really, but that, however I felt, I must behave as if I was
devout; whereas, if he had prayed in rapt fervency, unconscious of
anything, I should have been ashamed, I think, to wander. I should
have perceived the beauty of prayer. Ah, my dear friend," he added,
"never speak to a child about a thing unless you _know_ you always
do it yourself, and even then with extreme and tender caution."

Acting then, on this principle, he did not give us lectures and
rules: but we saw how a man was meeting life, not shirking any of its
problems, and beset by most of its trials. And we wondered what was
the secret spring of his well-being; and when we came to examine it,
we were amazed to find that it was in the strength of principles
resulting from a rigid and logical classification of phenomena.

So much is said nowadays about the dissidence of the spiritual and
intellectual worlds. Many people, conscious of intellect, are yet
strangely at sea when they are told of their _spiritual_ side. There
appears to be nothing within them answering to that description.
There are, indeed, certain qualities or characteristics, but those
seem not to exist independent of their intellectual and physical
economies, but to permeate both. They do not understand that what is
meant is the faculty of emotional generalization. _That_ they could
understand. Arthur arrived at his principles purely through logical
methods and intellectual operations. He could not, he often
confessed, separate the intellectual and the spiritual. From some
expressions, however, which dropped from him in a letter, part of
which is given on p. 209, I am vaguely aware that he was
reconsidering that p