But we grow so miserably stereotyped and mannerised.  My cautious colleagues are dreadfully afraid of anything which they call revivalistic, and, indeed, of anything which is unconventional.  I should like to see the Sunday sermon made one of the most stirring events of the week, as Arnold made it at Rugby.  I should like preachers to be selected with the utmost care, and told beforehand what they were to preach about.  No instruction is wanted in a school chapel—­the boys get plenty of that in their Divinity lessons.  What is wanted is that the heart should be touched, and that faint strivings after purity and goodness should be enforced and helped.  To give the spirit wings, that ought to be the object.  But so often we have to listen to a conscientious discourse, in which the preacher, after saying that the scene in which the narrative is laid is too well known to need description, proceeds to paint an ugly picture out of The Land and the Book or Farrar’s Life of Christ.  The story is then tediously related, and we end by a few ethical considerations, taken out of the footnotes of the Cambridge Bible for Schools or Homiletical Hints, which make even the most ardent Christian feel that after all the pursuit of perfection is a very dreary business.

But a brave, wise-hearted, and simple man, speaking from the heart to the heart, not as one who has attained to a standard of impossible perfection, but as an elder pilgrim, a little older, a little stronger, a little farther on the way—­what cannot such an one do to set feeble feet on the path, and turn souls to the light?  Boys are often pathetically anxious to be good; but they are creatures of impulse, and what they need is to feel that goodness is interesting, beautiful, and desirable. . . .  Ever yours,

T. B.

Upton,
Oct. 5, 1904.

Dear Herbert,—­It is autumn now with us, the sweetest season of the year to a polar bear like myself.  Of course, Spring is ravishingly, enchantingly beautiful, but she brings a languor with her, and there are the hot months to be lived through, treading close on her heels.  But now the summer is over and done; the long firelit evenings are coming, and, as if to console one for the loss of summer beauty, the whole world blazes out into a rich funeral pomp.  I walked to-day with a friend to a place not far away, a great, moated house in a big, ancient park.  We left the town, held on through the wretched gradations of suburbanity, and then, a few hundred yards from the business-like, treeless high-road, the coverts came in sight.  There is always a dim mystery about a close-set wood showing its front across the fields.  It always seems to me like a silent battalion guarding some secret thing.  We left the high-road and soon were in the wood—­the dripping woodways, all strewn with ruinous gold, opening to right and left; and soon the roofs and towers of the big house—­Puginesque Gothic, I must tell you—­came in sight.