February 20. Many things to remember these last weeks: Mr. Whittier’s visit, and my almost daily glimpses of him, and talks with him,--a friendship that grows more satisfactory as the years deepen life. Separateness of life makes communion of thought almost truer and more inspiring than when people live near each other, and frequently meet. I have more admiration and reverence for such a man, from having found a higher standard in life for myself from which to look across and up to him. I think everybody who has largeness of character like his needs perspective; juxtaposition is not acquaintance.
April 27. The weeks pass too busily for record; also I have not been well. Read with Miss H---- Maurice’s “Gospel of the Kingdom,” Fairbairn’s “Studies in the Life of Christ,” Neander, “Life of Christ;” and came to Maurice’s “Lectures on the Gospel of St. John,” which is left for future study.... A clearer light has come, and yet the sadness of not living wholly in the light: the bitterness of error and failure!
I will not be morbid; I know that there is always a better self than myself, waiting to be set free. But the riddles of life are perplexing. Who are we? What are we struggling for?
I think Maurice one of the most illuminating writers I ever knew. He looks into a truth, and you see what he sees, if you see anything.
This stirring up of theological questions at Andover is a phenomenon of the time; a movement towards a simpler holding of truth, and let us trust a greater honesty in us all in our statements of belief. Opinions change, but faith lives in the heart of the truth, not in its outward expression. I wish some formulas could be laid aside, and that we could come into a real unity of faith.
May 26. Closing days of a lovely visit at Melrose, at the house of two of the most delightful people,--a true home.
The woods close the house in around my window, and the birds sing close by. A squirrel has fearlessly come in to visit me once or twice; a flying squirrel, they say it is. The people I am with show me how beautiful it is to live truth, justice, and sympathy. They belong to no Church, but their lives are most beautifully harmonized with the spirit of Him who was, and is, the expression of God’s love to man. When with them I almost feel as if it were better not to profess religion in churches,--this living testimony is so far beyond what most Christians can show; but then I remember that it is because God in Christ is in the world, because the divinity has revealed itself in humanity, that they are what they are. How else have truth, honor, tenderness, and unselfishness, been kept alive in the human hearts, but by that revelation of the one life as the divine standard? And if the churches were all forsaken now, we should see a sad falling off from among us of such people as these, for most of us need constant reminders that we are the children of God. We need the Word, the coming together, the loving, uniting memories of Him who is our life.