The interview affected me deeply and poignantly.  The man’s patience and courage are very great; but he has lived, frankly and laboriously, for perfectly definite things.  He never had the least sense of what is technically called religion; he was strong and temperate by nature, with a fine sense of honour; loving work and the rewards of work, despising sentiment and emotion—­indeed his respect for me, of which I was fully conscious, is the respect he feels for a sentimental man who has made sentiment pay.  It is very hard to see what part the prospect of suffering and death is meant to play in the life of such a man.  It must be, surely, that he has something even more real than what he has held to be realities to learn from the sudden snapping off of life and activity.  I find myself filled with an immense pity for him; and yet if my faith were a little stronger and purer, I should congratulate rather than commiserate him.  And yet the thought of him in his bewilderment helps me too, for I see my own life as in a mirror.  I have received a message of truth, the message that the accomplishment of our plans and cherished designs is not the best thing that can befall us.  How easy to see that in the case of another, how hard to see it in our own case!  But it has helped me too to throw myself outside the morbid perplexities in which I am involved; to hold out open hands to the gift of God, even though He seems to give me a stone for bread, a stinging serpent for wholesome provender.  It has taught me to pray—­not only for myself, but for all the poor souls who are in the grip of a sorrow that they cannot understand or bear.

March 14, 1889.

The question that haunts me, the problem I cannot disentangle, is what is or what ought our purpose to be?  What is our duty in life?  Ought we to discern a duty which lies apart from our own desires and inclinations?  The moralist says that it ought to be to help other people; but surely that is because the people, whom by some instinct we deem the highest, have had the irresistible desire to help others?  How many people has one ever known who have taken up philanthropy merely from a sense of rectitude?  The people who have done most to help the world along have been the people who have had an overwhelming natural tenderness, an overflowing love for helpless, weak, and unhappy people.  That is a thing which cannot be simulated.  One knows quite well, to put the matter simply, the extent of one’s own limitations.  There are courses of action which seem natural and easy; others which seem hard, but just possible; others again which are frankly impossible.  However noble a life, for instance, I thought the life of a missionary or of a doctor to be, I could not under any circumstances adopt the role of either.  There are certain things which I might force myself to do which I do not do, and which I practically know I shall not do.  And the number of people is very small who, when circumstances suggest one course,