Letters to His Friends Part 17

We had a fairly good 'Long' in spite of the miserable weather.

Congratulate me. I won my first athletic distinction last 'Long'--a ten-shilling prize. I am thinking of chucking work and becoming a professional. It was a second prize in a tennis tournament. I had (I must own) the best player in College as my partner. I want to get a very conspicuous object as prize. What do you suggest?

_To C. T. W._

St. Thomas's Hospital: September 1903.

I am getting on first-rate, and I hope to be up early next week. I believe you are right. We should do well if we had more regularity and self-discipline in our life at Cambridge, and we should have more power over others. Pray for me. . . .

You needn't pity me. I am having a very good time. It is jolly to do nothing, and not even to have to dress and undress--both exhausting and monotonous occupations. It has been a glorious day, and although it is almost 7 P.M., I am still out on the balcony enjoying the cool breezes.

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_To W. O._

Ala.s.sio; December 1903.

Death has come near to my family lately. I told you that my sister--the Deaconess--had pa.s.sed away from us.[1] It is not all sorrow, when we know that the life has been spent in walking with G.o.d, when we know that this corruptible puts on incorruption, and that what is sown in intense bodily weakness is raised in strength--eternal strength.

I am so glad that G.o.d has given to you His highest blessing. I long to meet your future wife. It makes me very happy to think of the happiness in store for you--to know that you are in the best of all schools. I thank G.o.d. Love will bring you both nearer to the source of Love. . . .

This new blessing, as you say, is 'the gathering up of the best that G.o.d gives.' I can't express my thoughts as I would, but I am very, very glad. . . .

Illness teaches one many lessons. I trust I have learned some. I have been amazed at the goodness of my friends!

[1] His sister, Deaconess Cecilia, 'pa.s.sed away' at the Deanery, Westminster, on September 8.

_To W. P., an officer in the Army._

Hotel Salisbury, Ala.s.sio, Italy: December 21, 1903.

I don't think things happen by chance. Indeed I am sure they do not. I have never felt so humbled to the earth. One sees one's life as a whole, when one is helpless and can do nothing, and the whole looks very poor and mean. It is like the {189} judgment-day--only with this grand exception, that life is not yet over, that the night has not yet come in which 'no man can work,' that you have still a chance to make the future better, more honest, more n.o.ble than the past. Then, again, I learnt the utter and wonderful kindness of my friends. I felt so selfish and so surprised at the goodness they showed me. Again, I saw something of the mystery of pain. My own was so trivial compared with that which some others had to bear. Yet I had enough to startle me that such a fact should be permitted on earth at all. I don't suppose we can understand its meaning; but my consolation was that it is not necessarily a sign of G.o.d's displeasure--that the highest life was a life of suffering, that the Son of Man was a 'Man of Sorrows.' Everything seems to me to depend upon the way in which one takes the pain--if one voluntarily says, 'Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done,' then one is entering into the highest life, and the pain becomes a new method of serving and knowing G.o.d. But physical pain, if prolonged, is a terrible thing; and there is no time on a bed of sickness for praying or thinking much of G.o.d unless one is accustomed to do so in health. The needs of the poor body press in upon one. Death-bed repentances are realities, but I am inclined to think that they are very rare. It is terribly dangerous to defer being good until we are ill. Illness does not necessarily make us good.

I am afraid I was but a poor coward, and yet my faith did not utterly fail. G.o.d is the one hope for a man who is ill, and He is true to His word. He {190} hides His face behind the clouds; but even when I couldn't see Him at all, I felt that He was there. Pray for me; at present I feel too weak to pray much for myself. I want--I do want--to be a better man, to help others nearer the kingdom. I want, when life is over, to have a better record to look back upon than I had in hospital.

_To F. S. H._

Ala.s.sio, Italy; January 2, 1904.

Your letter came to me at a time when I was rather low. I had to have a second operation. However, after fifteen weeks of Nursing Homes I escaped, and, as soon as I could, made my way to St. Moritz. For once the place didn't seem to suit me very well. So, after little more than a week, I came down into Italy. I am so far recovered now that I quite hope to be able to go back to college at the beginning of this term.

Illness and pain have taught me some lessons--at least I hope so. I feel solemnised, startled, when I think of how life looked when I could do nothing for the time. Pray for me that I may be more real. I learnt, too, how futile it is to put off repentance till sickness. It is hard at such a time to think of aught save self and physical pain. And my own pain was so trivial compared with that of others. O G.o.d! it is a terrible thing. Some day shall we be able to understand, if not with the head, with the heart, part of its meaning? Meanwhile the individual can say, however feebly, 'Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done.'

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_To his brother, a doctor in South Africa._

Ala.s.sio, Italy: January 7, 1904.

At last I am beginning to get tired of doing nothing. I hope that eventually I shall be stronger than I have been for some years past. At any rate I hope a little first-hand experience of pain will make me more sympathetic. Pain seems to me now a greater mystery than ever before.

But I comforted myself with the thought that in the highest Life ever seen on earth, there was a full measure of spiritual, mental, and physical pain. Also it was a comfort to feel that when one accepted, not simply with resignation but with faith, certain suffering, one was in sympathy with the will of the universe, 'working together with G.o.d' in some mysterious way. What a strange place a hospital is! How wonderful the Gospels are, with their hope and comfort on every page--hope for the physical as well as the mental side of man's life! I like more than ever now to read how Jesus went about healing all manner of diseases and all manner of sickness and bringing life and strength wherever He came, showing us that Heaven is on our side in our wrestle with all that deforms and degrades human nature.

I certainly don't regret my illness. Besides showing me the marvellous kindness of friends, it has, I hope, taught me much.

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APPENDIX

The following letter addressed to the Editor of this volume was received from the Rev. H. Bisseker, chaplain at the Leys School, Cambridge, too late for insertion in an earlier portion of the book:

'Your brother's friendship, as you must have heard so often during the past few months, was valued in Cambridge beyond that of most men, and I am probably only one of many who still look to that friendship as among the prominent facts of their time up here. Though personally I did not learn to know Mr. Robinson when I first came up, his brotherliness so deeply impressed me during the four years for which our friendship lasted, that I still find it difficult to believe that he is no longer to be found in the familiar rooms at Christ's, and has ceased to be a part of our Cambridge life. And yet, in another sense, he has not ceased to be a part of that life; for one feels that during his residence up here he managed, if one may so express it, to put a bit of himself into more than one man, and that in this way he will continue to live among us long after he himself has been removed.

{194} 'I have often thought about him and his quiet, strong influence since we heard that we had lost him, and almost invariably the same three of his characteristics a.s.sume the uppermost place in my thought.

Different sides of his nature would appeal to different men: I can best serve your purpose by mentioning those which made the deepest impression on my own mind.

'One of the chief causes of your brother's influence was unquestionably _his sense of the value of the individual_. He used to take men one by one and make a separate study of each. The consequence was that he _knew_ his men. On any given visit the acquaintance did not, as it were, have to be begun over again. On the contrary, the acquaintance once formed, some common ground already existed; for so great was your brother's power of sympathy that, where at the first no such common ground appeared to exist, he soon learnt to find a standing-place himself on that a.s.sumed by the man he was seeking to know. And not only did Mr. Robinson possess this power of valuing the individual, but he also was able to inspire the objects of his influence with the knowledge of his particular interest in them. Thus they soon dropped the idea of acquaintanceship, and began to think of him as friend, and there you have in a word the secret of his wide influence. He was interested in _men_, but what he loved was a _man_.

'Mr. Robinson was no less marked off from the majority of men by the stress which he laid upon the reality and power of prayer. We used from time to time to have long talks together on this subject, so {195} that I can speak with some little knowledge of the place which he a.s.signed it in his life. With characteristic modesty he not infrequently distrusted himself in his active contact with men. His very anxiety to help others towards the ideals by which his own life was dominated led him to see the risk of placing hindrances in their way by an injudicious intrusion into the secret places of their hearts.

Drawn in different directions, therefore, by his pa.s.sionate desire to win men for Christ and his cautious fear lest untimely words of his should hinder rather than help, he found refuge in giving himself up to earnest prayer on their behalf. And prayer to him meant more than a light repet.i.tion of words. He used often, I believe, to spend as long as half an hour at a time in seeking blessing for a single man. We cannot doubt that, in the strong influence which he himself exerted upon so many of those who knew him, such persistent prayer received at least a part of its own answer.

'The last element in your brother's individuality which always impressed me was his restrained, but genuine, mysticism. In the few accounts of his life that I have read I do not remember any allusion to this characteristic. That he possessed it, however, and this to no usual degree, seems to my mind quite patent; in fact, it was this suggestion of mysticism that first attracted me to him. The mysticism one sees around one is often so unregulated and so ignorant that it was refreshing to find a mystic who was also an enlightened scholar and thinker. It confirmed the feeling, instinctive in one's heart, that, despite the abuse of caricature, a deep, intelligent {196} apprehension of unseen realities is of the essence of the fulness of religion. Mr.

Forbes Robinson appeared to possess an unusually certain cognisance of the unseen world. How well I remember the way in which, again and again, tea over and our pipes lighted, he would curl himself up in one of his or my own big chairs and discuss questions of interest to us both with a far-away look in his eyes altogether suggestive of a genuine otherworldliness! And this familiarity with unseen verities seemed to run through all those parts of his life with which I was acquainted, and indeed to be to him the most real fact of all existence. To use the simple language of olden days, I believe that "he walked with G.o.d": and that explains his life.

'These, then, were the three characteristics of your brother which more than any others have impressed themselves upon my mind. I do not think that they were three separate sides of his personality: I should say, rather, that they were three different expressions of one fundamental attribute. It was because he walked so closely with G.o.d that he so loved the individual sons of G.o.d. It was because he so loved the Great Father and each child of His that he had so strong a faith in the power of prayer and such unwearying patience to persist in it.

'A life like your brother's, if I may say one thing more, forms, I sometimes think, one of the strongest pledges of human immortality. In one sense, it is true, he seems to have done so much; and yet, in another sense, those of us who knew the faculties which he had cultivated, his knowledge and patient {197} scholarship, his sympathy and insight, his tact and pa.s.sion for men, and, most precious of all, his power with G.o.d, were looking for even greater things in years to come. Such fitness for influence as he possessed is not acquired in a day, and just when its worth was being proved he was taken from us.

Surely these gifts and graces are not now as if they had never been, or as if, once granted, they had been idly wasted! Can that earnest, patient cultivation really have been gratuitous, and the unselfish instinct that inspired it mistaken? Were it so, the whole universe looks out of joint. The more I consider such lives as that of your brother--lives, I mean, which, bearing promise of so rich a harvest, are yet cut off before the full harvest can possibly have been realised--the more my conviction grows that the pa.s.sing of such men as he is not death, but only "the birth which we call death."'