“Words are such wretched things, my dear friend, in crises like this.  I can only beg of you, with all my heart, to resolutely set your face against thinking what might have been.  Try to feel, I will not say happy, but stronger in the thought that your punishment is atoning for your past every hour.  Throw remorse and fear down, if you can; they are only keeping you from God.  Many, too many souls are in a far worse case.  Some have more to reproach themselves with.  On some it has come with what appears to be fearful injustice.  Accept your present condition; brace yourself to bear it.  I know how much can be borne.  Give your sufferings to God nobly.  Your patience is none the less noble because you have brought this on yourself; nay, it makes it even nobler....

“Don’t say that many worse sinners go unpunished.  How can you tell?  How do you know they are not suffering?  There are only, I suppose, two men in the world, besides yourself, who know that you are suffering now, and why.  God visited me with suffering once; He has brought me through, and I have never ceased to thank Him for it; and He will bring you through, too, dear friend, I know.  ’Pro jucundis aptissima quaeque dabunt di; carior est illis homo quam sibi.’  That thought has left me patient, if not glad, in many a bitter hour....  You are never out of my thoughts.”

And this letter leads me naturally to the second great principle that pervaded all his writings—­“the education of individuals.”

“One is inclined to believe that there is a great deal of hopeless irremediable suffering in the world—­suffering of a kind that seems wantonly inflicted, purposeless anguish....  That ’regret must hurt and may not heal’ is a terrible thought, which, when we get our first glimpse of human anguish, seems almost sickeningly true.  But I have seen a great deal lately of such suffering, and it amazes me to discover how extraordinarily rare it is to find the victim taking this view of his case.  Either it seems to be a due reward for past action—­that ‘invita religio’ which wells up in the blackest heart, or the sufferer gains a kind of onlook into sweet plains beyond, into which the troubled passage is taking him, and which can only thus be reached....

“Of animal suffering, unconscious tortures, it is harder to speak—­of the innocent, for so they are, victims of lust and brutality in Babylon here, whose sense of suffering is almost gone, and is succeeded by nothing but the desire for rest; all this seems so meaningless, so futile....

“It is one of the problems I take up and let drop—­take up and let drop a thousand times; but all sacrifice seems essentially good, and I do not throw the enigma aside in anger; I will wait for it to be explained to me.

“Ah, death, death, if we are enlightened enough by that time, what a storehouse of secrets, dear secrets you will have to tell us!  I thrill all through, in moments like these, to think of it.”