I have since reflected that this makes a beautiful parable of our lives.  Some element comes into our experience, some suffering, some anxiety, and we tend to say impatiently:  “Well, whatever happens, this at least can never appear just or merciful.”  But God, like a wise and perfect artist, foresees the end in the beginning.  We, who live in time and space, can merely see the rough, crude tints flung fiercely down, till the thing seems nothing but a frantic patchwork of angry hues; but God sees the blending and the softening; how the soft tints of face and hand, of river and tree, will steal over the coarse background, and gain their strength and glory from the hidden stains.  Perhaps we have sometimes the comfort of seeing how some old and ugly experience melted into and strengthened some soft, bright quality of heart or mind.  Staring mournfully as we do upon the tiny circumscribed space of life, we cannot conceive how the design will work itself out; but the day will come when we shall see it too; and perhaps the best moments of life are those when we have a secret inkling of the process that is going so slowly and surely forward, as the harsh lines and hues become the gracious lineaments of some sweet face, and from the glaring patch of hot colour is revealed the remote and shining expanse of a sunlit sea.

May 14, 1889.

There used to be a favourite subject for scholastic disputation:  Whether Hercules is in the marble.  The image is that of the sculptor, who sees the statue lie, so to speak, imbedded in the marble block, and whose duty is so to carve it, neither cutting too deep or too shallow, so that the perfect form is revealed.  The idea of the disputation is the root-idea of idealistic philosophy.  That each man is, as it were, a block of marble in which the ideal man is buried.  The purpose of the educator ought to be to cut the form out, perikoptein, as Plato has it.

What a lofty and beautiful thought!  To feel about oneself that the perfect form is there, and that the experience of life is the process of cutting it out—­a process full of pain, perhaps, as the great splinters and flakes fly and drop—­a rough, brutal business it seems at first, the hewing off great masses of stone, so firmly compacted, fused and concreted together.  At first it seems unintelligible enough; but the dints become minuter and minuter, here a grain and there an atom, till the smooth and shapely limbs begin to take shape.  At first it seems a mere bewildered loss, a sharp pang as one parts with what seems one’s very self.  How long before the barest structure becomes visible! but when one once gets a dim inkling of what is going on, as the stubborn temper yields, as the face takes on its noble frankness, and the shapely limbs emerge in all the glory of free line and curve, how gratefully and vehemently one co-operates, how little a thing the endurance of mere pain becomes by the side of the consciousness that one is growing into the likeness of the divine.