I know you will forgive me if I still mingle
something of the paternal with my fraternal admonitions. I watched you
closely. I have still my old diaries of the St. Matthew's days, and I
have been looking at them to remind me of what you once were. It was my
custom to note my early impressions of all the men who worked with me,
because I have a firm belief in the soundness of first impressions and
the considerable risk one runs of having them obscured by the accidents
and habituations of constant intercourse. I found that quite early in
your days at St. Matthew's I wrote against your name 'enthusiastic, but
a saving delicacy.' After all our life-long friendship I would not write
anything truer. I would say of you to-day, 'This man might have been a
revivalist, if he were not a gentleman.' There is the enthusiast,
there is the revivalist, in you. It seems to me that the stresses and
questions of this great crisis in the world's history have brought it
nearer to the surface than I had ever expected it to come.
"I quite understand and I sympathize with your impatience with
the church at the present time; we present a spectacle of pompous
insignificance hard to bear with.
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