I was reading, the other day, an ecclesiastical biography.  The subject of it, a high dignitary of the Church, had attended the funeral of one of his episcopal colleagues, with whom he had had several technical controversies.  On the evening of the day he wrote a very tender and beautiful account of the funeral in his diary, which is quoted at length:  “How little,” he wrote, “the sense of difference, and how strong my feeling of his power and solid sense; how little I care that he was wrong about the Discipline Bill, how much that he was so happy with us in the summer; how much that he was, as all the family told me, so ‘devoted’ to my Nellie!”

That is a thoroughly human statement, and preserves a due sense of proportion.  In the presence of death it is the kindly human relations that matter more than policies and statesmanship.

And so it may be said, in conclusion, that we cannot taste the fulness of life, unless we can honestly say, Nihil humani a me alienum puto.  If we grow absorbed in work, in business, in literature, in art, in policy, to the exclusion of the nearer human elements, we dock and maim our lives.  We cannot solve the mystery of this difficult world; but we may be sure of this—­that it is not for nothing that we are set in the midst of interests and relationships, of liking and loving, of tenderness and mirth, of sorrow and pain.  If we are to get the most and the best out of life, we must not seclude ourselves from these things; and one of the nearest and simplest of duties is the perception of others’ points of view, of sympathy, in no limited sense; and that sympathy we can only gain through looking at humanity in its wholeness.  If we allow ourselves to be blinded by false conscience, by tradition, by stupidity, even by affection, from realizing what others are, we suffer, as we always suffer from any wilful blindness; indeed, wilful blindness is the most desperate of all faults, perhaps the only one that can hardly be condoned, because it argues a confidence in one’s own opinion, a self-sufficiency, a self-estimation, which shut out, as by an opaque and sordid screen, the light of heaven from the soul.

XII

PRIESTS

I have been fortunate in the course of my life in knowing, more or less intimately, several eminent priests; and by this I do not mean necessarily eminent ecclesiastics; several famous ecclesiastics with whom circumstances have brought me into contact have not been priestly persons at all; they have been vigorous, wise, energetic, statesmanlike men, such as I suppose the Pontifex Maximus at Rome might have been, with a kind of formal, almost hereditary, priesthood.  And, on the other hand, I have known more than one layman of distinctly priestly character, priestly after the order of Melchizedek, who had not, I suppose, received any religious consecration for his ministry, apart from perhaps a kingly initiation.