“When I lived in England I was for a short time the member of a professional circle of men engaged on high educational aims.  They held, so far as any teachers can be said to hold, many futures in their hands.  We know that lives teach more than words; and how did these men set themselves to live?

“First, to perform their work with rigid accuracy:  I will do them justice—­to do it perfectly; but granted that, as speedily as possible:  and, their work over, to amuse themselves—­literally:  to play games that they enjoyed with childish keenness, and fill up all the day with them; to read the papers; to play whist; to smoke in the sun; to get through a certain amount of general reading for conversational purposes, and to gossip about one another and their doings, and talk about their work, in which, it must be confessed, they were enthusiastically interested, only in a gossipy detailed way, amassing incident rather than arriving at principles.  There was only one who was engaged in serious work of a kind involving scientific research, and he forfeited much of his doctrinal and all his social influence thereby; ‘A man should stick to his work,’ they said, ’not pretend to do one thing while he is thinking about another.’

“A low ideal, faithfully carried out, is the most effective; not because the high ideal is high, but because so few are capable of carrying it out; and in that Western world success in aims proposed is the highest that a man can aspire to.

“And suppose we do make ourselves famous, what then? how do we use our fame?  To make life happier?  It might be so, but is it?  No, for ordinary minds the strain is too strong.  ‘I will gain fame,’ the pure young soul said once, ’as an engine of power, that I may have a platform where men will listen to me;’ but the effort of struggling thither has been too much, and once arrived there, what is his object now? merely to remain there, and among the crowd of pushing selfish figures, that have lost in the fight the very signs of their humanity, monstrari digito, to have the gaze of men, to feel somebody.

“All this I throw aside, and go straight to God.  All around us in natural things—­in the curve of that rose-stem and the passionate flush of its petals—­in those white bells there, looking as if blown out of veined foam—­in the luscious scents that wind and linger round the garden, He has set, as in a language, the secrets of His being and ours, of our why and wherefore, if we could but read them.  Like the characters and monuments of a bygone age staring from a waste of sand or the front of a precipice, these words and phrases seem to say, not ’There was a king who was mighty, but whose throne is cut down,’ but ’There lives a God who would be all tenderness if He could, and is more beautiful in His nature than anything you have ever seen or dreamed of.  Win your way to Him, if you can; do not let Him go till you have His secret.  That is a talisman indeed, that shall shut you in palaces of delight where no torment shall touch you.’