Going through a churchyard one afternoon I noticed that nearly all the people who were buried there, if the inscriptions on the tombstones might be taken to represent the thoughts of the departed when they were alive, had been intent solely on their own personal salvation.  The question with them all seemed to have been, shall I go to heaven?  Considering the tremendous difference between heaven and hell in the popular imagination, it was very natural that these poor creatures should be anxious above everything to know whether they would be in hell or heaven for ever.  Surely, however, this is not the highest frame of mind, nor is it one to be encouraged.  I would rather do all I can to get out of it, and to draw others out of it too.  Our aim ought not so much to be the salvation of this poor petty self, but of that in me which alone makes it worth while to save me; of that alone which I hope will be saved, immortal truth.  The very centre of the existence of the ordinary chapel-goer and church-goer needs to be shifted from self to what is outside self, and yet is truly self, and the sole truth of self.  If the truth lives, we live, and if it dies, we are dead.  Our theology stands in need of a reformation greater than that of Luther’s.  It may be said that the attempt to replace the care for self in us by a care for the universal is ridiculous.  Man cannot rise to that height.  I do not believe it.  I believe we can rise to it.  Every ordinary unselfish act is a proof of the capacity to rise to it; and the mother’s denial of all care for her own happiness, if she can but make her child happy, is a sublime anticipation.  It may be called an instinct, but in the course of time it will be possible to develop a wider instinct in us, so that our love for the truth shall be even maternally passionate and self-forgetting.

After all our searching it was difficult to find anything which, in the case of a man like John the waiter, for example, could be of any service to him.  At his age efficient help was beyond us, and in his case the problem presented itself in its simple nakedness.  What comfort is there discoverable for the wretched which is not based upon illusion?  We could not tell him that all he endured was right and proper.  But even to him we were able to offer something.  We did all we could to soothe him.  On the Sunday, at least, he was able to find some relief from his labours, and he entered into a different region.  He came to see us in the afternoon and evening occasionally, and brought his boy.  Father and son were pulled up out of the vault, brought into the daylight, and led into an open expanse.  We tried above everything to interest them, even in the smallest degree, in what is universal and impersonal, feeling that in that direction lies healing.  We explained to the child as well as we could some morsels of science, and in explaining to him we explained to the father as well.  When the anguish begotten by some outbreak