ystems are slaves to other systems bearing different names,
but in substance the same? Is there a Deliverer? Is there a unity
beneath all this confusion? Can man know such a unity if there be one?
Can such a unity be revealed? Has it been revealed? Why do men think it
has been revealed if it has not? While I am slow to force upon those
whom I most respect and love lessons which I believe that I have slowly
learnt in a school in which perhaps they have not been, and never will
be, educated, yet I am sure that I cannot be wrong in praying for them
and in urging them to be increasingly earnest in the search for and the
practice of truth. You are a man in so far as you live. You live in so
far as you are self-sacrificing. You are self-sacrificing in so far as
you unswervingly practise the truth you know and follow after that which
you do not yet apprehend. And I am sure, if there be a unity beneath our
lives, if there be One who is educating us when we are most wayward, we
shall eventually be led by, it may be, very different paths to a single
goal. Meanwhile each failure to be earnest, each relapse into
sentimentality, unmanliness, morbidness, despair, unreality, laziness,
passiveness, may itself be a discipline, making us utterly mistrust
ourselves, whether at our worst or at our best, and forcing us to inquire
whether there be any help elsewhere, any power that can sweep through our
lives and force us to be human.

For this reason I would impress on you the {100} necessity of trying to
think out your position, of asking yourself how you may be most human and
best serve God (if, indeed, you believe that this is possible) and your
generation. There are around you social forces making for good. Ought
you to be--nay, can you be--isolated? Does isolation give greater
strength? Does it enable you to do more or to be better? These
questions are not merely suggested by me. They have already suggested
themselves in one form or another to you. I am frightened of their not
receiving the attention they merit.

_To T. H. M._

8 Alexandra Gardens, Ventnor: January 3, 1894.

The fact that you have not all the sympathy and manly help and advice
that you could wish for from those around you will, I trust, force you to
depend with simpler confidence upon the unchanging Ground of all human
sympathy. You will, I hope, take all these experiences without grumbling
as a real and necessary stage in your education; reme