Further, I believe that some will be found to say, “The teaching of this life is so selfish; it is all self-contemplation, miserable self-weariness, gloomy reveries bounded by the narrowest horizons.  If ever he turns to others’ evil case, it is with the melancholy satisfaction of the hypochondriac, who finds his own symptoms repeated with less or greater variations in others’ cases.”  To these I could only reply, “You have totally misunderstood the life.  It is not a selfish one.  The deepest self-communings are necessary to one who would know human nature, because self is the only human creature that can be known with a perfect intimacy.  ’No one but yourself can tell,’ as Arthur once wrote to me, ’what ruled the lines in your face.’” But Arthur, above all others that I have ever known, had passed from the particular to the general.  Plato’s praise of love was based on the principle that the philosopher passed from the love of one fair form to the love of abstract beauty.  The fault is that so many never pass the initiation.  Arthur did cross the threshold; he passed from the contemplation of his own suffering to the consideration of the root of all human suffering.  He found his best comfort in doing all he could (and God allowed him little latitude) to alleviate the sufferings of others.  I have letters from various of his friends, dealing, with his firm and faithful touch, with crisis after crisis in their lives.  No one who had trusted him with his confidence once, ever shrank from doing it again.  I am forced to admit that, far more than many of his authorized brethren, he discharged the priestly office.  He was self-constituted, or rather called, to be a priest of God.

The great mystery of effectiveness he never solved, I think, quite to his own satisfaction.  His life has solved it for me ever since I was able to regard it en masse.  It was a great puzzle to him what to make, for instance, of infants who died at or before birth. “’Saved from this wicked world’ is such a horrible statement in such cases,” he used to say.  “If that is the best that can happen to us, what can we make of life?” And so he was always very urgent about the influence of example opposed to the influence of precept.  “My father,” he said to me, “once spoke to me rather sharply about not attending at family prayers.  He did not attend very closely himself.  I was an observant boy, and I knew it.  The very fact that he should have noticed me proved it.  So all I felt was that prayer didn’t matter really, but that, however I felt, I must behave as if I was devout; whereas, if he had prayed in rapt fervency, unconscious of anything, I should have been ashamed, I think, to wander.  I should have perceived the beauty of prayer.  Ah, my dear friend,” he added, “never speak to a child about a thing unless you know you always do it yourself, and even then with extreme and tender caution.”

Acting then, on this principle, he did not give us lectures and rules:  but we saw how a man was meeting life, not shirking any of its problems, and beset by most of its trials.  And we wondered what was the secret spring of his well-being; and when we came to examine it, we were amazed to find that it was in the strength of principles resulting from a rigid and logical classification of phenomena.