The following passage from a letter about a leading politician will illustrate this: 

“I have always admired him intensely,” he writes, as an instance of a public man who has succeeded by sheer adherence to principles.

“You can’t ensure success; three parts is luck, the genius of time and place.  The only thing you can do seems to me to work hard, and always take the highest line about things.  The highest line, that is to say, not the line you may feel to be highest, but the line that you recognize to be so.  Not what your fluctuating emotions may commend, but that which the best moral tact seems to pronounce best.  You can’t always expect to feel enthusiasm for the best, so be true not to your sensations, but your deliberate ideals—­that is the highest sincerity; all the higher because it is so often called hypocrisy.”

But his Determinist, almost Calvinistic, views were mellowed and tempered by a serene and deep belief in a providence moving to good, and ordering life down to the smallest details with special reference to each man’s case; in fact, as he said, the two were so closely connected that they were like the convex and concave sides of a lens.

He wrote to me, “I often feel, when straining after happiness, just like the child who, anxious to get home, pushes against the side of the railway carriage which is carrying him so smoothly and serenely to the haven where he would be, while all he effects is a temporary disarrangement of particles.

“Life shows me more and more every day that there is something watching us and working with us, so that now and then in unexpected moments when I have felt particularly independent for some time back, I come upon a little fact or incident that reveals to me that I am like a mouse in the grasp of a cat, allowed sometimes to run a few inches alone—­or more truly like a baby walking along, very proud of its performance, with a couple of anxious, loving arms poised to catch it.  The extraordinary apportionment not only in balance but in kind of punishment to sin—­long-continued, secret, base desires, punished by long-hidden suffering—­the sharp stress of temptation yielded to, requited by the sharp pang—­the glorious feeling which I have once or twice felt—­the sin once sinned and the punishment once over, as one is assured supremely sometimes that it is without doubt—­of trustful freedom, and fresh fitness for battling one’s self and helping others to battle—­a mood that is soon broken, but is an earnest while it lasts of infinite satisfaction.  The extraordinary delicacy with which the screw of pain and mental suffering is adjusted, just lifted when we can bear no more (not when we think we can bear no more, but when God knows it) and resolutely applied again when we have gained strength which we propose to devote to enjoyment, but which God intends us to devote to suffering.  The very beauty, too, of pain itself—­the strange flushes of joy that it gives us, which can only thus be won—­the certainty that this is reality, this is what we are meant to do and be—­happiness of different kinds, art, friends, books, are delusive; they play over the surface; in suffering we dip below it.”  This latter thought expanded is the subject of a passage of a letter to myself that gave me wonderful comfort.