and the
liker we get to God. . . . My dear friend, words are poor comfort at a
time like this, when we see into eternity. A Person is our only hope,
and that Person is God. God often takes those whom He loves best home
to Himself as soon as He can. In the process of their development they
break through the bonds of space and time. He has taken your brother,
but not taken him away from you. We are {69} all in the same
home--praying for, knowing, loving each other. . . I believe in the
communion of saints--I believe that those who began to know God here,
and whom we call dead, are not dead. They are just beginning to live,
because they are finding out God: they are just beginning to know us,
because they see us as we are--they see us in God. They are with
Jesus, and Jesus is a human being. Because they are with a human
being, a man, _the_ man, the Son of man, they must, they do, take a
deep interest in the affairs of the sons of men, and--may we not
believe?--in us, whom they knew below. . . . These are truths which
sorrow helps me to make my own. I pray that you may never, never 'get
over' the sorrow, but get through it, into it, into the very heart of
God.

[1] Writing to another friend at this time he says, 'He was walking
with a friend, and in a moment, without any apparent pain, "God's
finger touched him and he slept."'

_To A. W. G._

Blackheath: June 27, 1892.

I have more and more come to the conclusion for some time past that the
only reality underlying and explaining the world must be personal. I
know that I am a person, and that it is persons--especially a few
particular persons--not things, who have influenced me and had a power
in my life. All my ideas of justice and purity and goodness are
inseparably bound up with persons. At last I have come to the
conclusion that nothing exists except the personal, and that below all
is One who is personal. That means to say that the world and things in
it are only real in so far as they are thoughts of God. We are real
only in so far as we are thoughts of God. A {70} Roman Catholic poet,
speaking of the Virgin Mary, says:

If Mary is so beautiful,
What must her Maker be?

I look round the world and I see persons who attract me in a wonderful
way--persons who are more gracious and simple than I am; and then I
cannot help feeling that they all are a kind of faint picture of One
who is better than all of them, One in whose image they