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.


It sometimes happens to me--I suppose it happens to every one--to