of sin, His awful and stainless holiness.  How unreal, how utterly false!  It is no more reasonable than to inculcate in human beings a sense of His hatred of weakness, of imperfection, of disease, of suffering.  One might as well say that God’s courage and beauty were so perfect that He had an impatient loathing for anything timid or ugly.  If one said that being perfect He had an infinite pity for imperfection, that would be nearer the truth—­but, even so, how far away!  To believe in His perfect love and benevolence, one must also believe that all shortcomings, all temptations, all sufferings, somehow emanate from Him; that they are educative, and have an intense and beautiful significance—­that is what one struggles, how hardly, to believe!  Those childish sins, they were but the expression of the nature one received from His hand, that wilful, pleasure-loving, timid, fitful nature, which yet always desired the better part, if only it could compass it, choose it, love it.  To hate one’s nature and temperament and disposition, how impossible, unless one also hated the God who had bestowed them!  And then, too, how inextricably intertwined!  The very part of one’s soul that made one peace-loving, affectionate, trustful was the very thing that led one into temptation.  The very humility and diffidence that made one hate to seem or to be superior to others was the occasion of falling.  The religion recommended was a religion of scrupulous saints and self-torturing ascetics; and the result of it was to make one, as experience widened and deepened, mournfully indifferent to an ideal which seemed so utterly out of one’s reach.  It is very difficult to make the right compromise.  On the one hand, there is the sense of moral responsibility and effort, which one desires to cultivate; on the other hand, truth compels us to recognise our limitations, and to confess boldly the fact that moral improvement is a very difficult thing.  The question is whether, in dealing with other people, we will declare what we believe to be the truth, or whether we will tamper with the truth for a good motive.  Ought we to pretend that we think a person morally responsible and morally culpable, when we believe that he is neither, for the sake of trying to improve him?

My own practice now is to waste as little time as possible in ineffectual regrets, but to keep alive as far as I can in my heart a hope, a desire, that God will help to bring me nearer to the ideal that I can perceive and cannot reach.  To-day, turning over the pages of the old Manual, with its fantastic strained phrases staring at me from the page, I cannot help wishing that some wise and tender person had been able to explain to me the conditions as I now see them.  Probably the thing was incommunicable; one must learn for oneself both one’s bitterness and one’s joy.

May 2, 1889.