Produced by Andrew Sly

Etext preparer’s note:  This text was first published anonymously in 1886.

  Memoirs of
  Arthur Hamilton, B.A. 
  Of Trinity college, Cambridge

  Extracted from his letters and diaries, with reminiscences of his
  conversation by his friend Christopher Carr
  of the same college

  By
  Arthur Christopher Benson

     “Pro jucundis aptissima quaeque dabunt di;
     Carior est illis homo quam sibi.” 
        Juvenal

DEDICATION

To H. L. M.

My dear Friend,

When you were kind enough to allow me to dedicate this book to you—­you, to whose frank discussion of sacred things and kindly indifference to exaggerations of expression I owe so much—­I felt you were only adding another to the long list of delicate benefits for which a friend can not be directly repaid.

My object has throughout been this:  I have seen so much of what may be called the dissidence of religious thought and religious organization among those of my own generation at the Universities, and the unhappy results of such a separation, that I felt bound to contribute what I could to a settlement of this division, existing so much more in word than in fact—­a point which you helped me very greatly to grasp.

I have been fortunate enough to have seen and known both sides of the battle.  I have seen men in the position of teachers, both anxious and competent to position of teachers, both anxious and competent to settle differences, when brought into contact with men of serious God-seeking souls, with the nominal intention of dropping the bandying of words and cries and of attacking principles, meet and argue and part, almost unconscious that they have never touched the root of the matter at all, yet dissatisfied with the efforts which only seem to widen the breach they are intended to fill.

And why?  Both sides are to blame, no doubt:  the teachers, for being more anxious to expound systems than to listen to difficulties, to make their theories plain than to analyse the theories of their—­I will not say adversaries—­but opponents; the would-be learners, for hasty generalization; for bringing to the conflict a deliberate prejudice against all traditional authority, a want of patience in translating dogmas into life, a tendency to flatly deny that such a transmutation is possible.

Fortunately, the constructive side is in no want of an exponent; but I have tried to give a true portrait in this arrangement, or rather selection, of realities, of what a serious and thoughtful soul-history may in these days be:  to depict the career of a character for which no one can fail to have the profoundest sympathy, being as it is, by the nature of its case, condemned to a sadder sterner view of life than its uprightness justifies, and deprived of the helpful encouragement of so many sweet natures, whose single aim in life is to help other souls, if they only knew how.