e of young men who sow their wild oats and then repent
and marry innocent ladies and live virtuously and die in the odour of
sanctity--on the whole the story does not seem to correspond to the
ideals which haunt me, even though I do not act up to them. Surely
life is something utterly different from all this. Surely somewhere
there is a picture of {104} human life, somewhere in the mind of God
Himself, where the young man grows up without any harvest of wild oats,
with clear and unselfish ideals, with a longing to make the world purer
and diviner than he found it, a picture which is in some measure
realised around us to-day. May God deliver us not only from vicious
but from selfish thoughts! I believe Thackeray saw something of that
picture, but he didn't draw it with the colours I could have wished.
There is a solemn text in Ezekiel, which came in the lesson lately,
'The righteousness of the righteous shall not deliver him in the day of
his transgression.' Past religious experiences are of little value
without present righteousness.

_To his cousin G. F._

Clovelly, N. Devon: September 12, 1895.

I am in perhaps the quaintest and one of the loveliest villages in
England, just doing nothing, and enjoying the simple life around me.
You would like this village, with its one steep, narrow, picturesque
street, the great sea far down below, the little stone pier jutting out
and helping to form a small harbour. Then on either side of the
village are woods reaching down to the cliffs--beautiful woods, where
oaks, and in places heather, are glad to grow. St. Paul says in the
lesson to-day that the things which are seen are temporal, but the
things which are not seen are eternal. And one feels how true are his
words--how the trees, woods, flowers fade and die; how the old sea
wears slowly away the cliffs; how men and {105} their dwellings pass
away; how all these things which are seen are temporal; and yet the
beauty, the love, the joy, the purity, are more permanent than the
particular manifestations of them are. The beauty which is manifested
in the country around is eternal. The life which is seen in man has a
future beyond this world.

As we enter in behind the veil, as we see that life and love which are
expressing themselves in objects around us, we are already in the
eternal, in that which endures.

It is not, as we are constantly thinking, the things that are _present_
which are temporal, and the thin