day that
perhaps a man who never wrote letters never could appreciate St. Paul.
He was a great letter-writer. Copy him. Read him. Read him fairly
quickly. Get into him. Find out his motive power, his real meaning.
Read the Greek, not from a critical point of view only, but read the
Greek. Do not trouble too much about the dictionary and accurate
translations, but keep reading and perhaps saying aloud the Greek. St.
Paul knew so much of God. Read him, and as you read, a greater than St.
Paul will come into you, interpret {83} him, explain him. St. Paul
himself will be with you, I think, trying to show you what he meant, and
what he has found out that he means now.

But do write me a proper letter. We are just beginning life, and we have
so much to learn from and to teach each other. Everything is new to us.
Everything is strange. Already it seems to me I have been trained in a
hard school--harder, I hope, than you will ever need to be trained in--to
understand what God and love mean. I seem to have had a rough time of
it, perhaps rougher than most; and even now I am trained in a way which
is not attractive to me, trained to throw myself not on any merely human
love, but on Him who is perfectly human and perfectly divine. May God
train you in a less rough school, if possible! But at any rate, may He
train you--train you to get out of self, bring you into deeper
sympathies, stronger attachments, simpler earnestness! He alone can give
unity to all our thoughts and desires. He alone can give stability. And
we poor little creatures, who seem to have twice as much affection as we
have mind, how we do need that stability! We want not to be blown hither
and thither by every manifestation of strength, beauty, brain--we want to
be able to enter into the meaning of what we see and cannot help
admiring, without becoming the slaves of the visible and the finite. We
must build on the one foundation that is laid. We must lay our
affections deep down in the man Christ Jesus. As we see Him in men--and,
when we cannot see that, see men in Him--we shall be more stable, less
childish, less fickle. We never go deep enough. We skim over {84} life.
We must get into its heart. We must never begin an affection which can
have an end. For all affection must draw us into God, and God has no
end. The moment we see any one whose strength, grace, goodness, beauty,
or simplicity attracts us, we have deathless duties by that pe