you—you, to whose frank discussion of sacred things and kindly
indifference to exaggerations of expression I owe so much—I felt
you were only adding another to the long list of delicate benefits
for which a friend can not be directly repaid.

My object has throughout been this: I have seen so much of what
may be called the dissidence of religious thought and religious
organization among those of my own generation at the Universities,
and the unhappy results of such a separation, that I felt bound to
contribute what I could to a settlement of this division, existing
so much more in word than in fact—a point which you helped me very
greatly to grasp.

I have been fortunate enough to have seen and known both sides of the
battle. I have seen men in the position of teachers, both anxious and
competent to position of teachers, both anxious and competent to
settle differences, when brought into contact with men of serious
God-seeking souls, with the nominal intention of dropping the
bandying of words and cries and of attacking principles, meet and
argue and part, almost unconscious that they have never touched the
root of the matter at all, yet dissatisfied with the efforts which
only seem to widen the breach they are intended to fill.

And why? Both sides are to blame, no doubt: the teachers, for being
more anxious to expound systems than to listen to difficulties, to
make their theories plain than to analyse the theories of their—I
will not say adversaries—but opponents; the would-be learners,
for hasty generalization; for bringing to the conflict a deliberate
prejudice against all traditional authority, a want of patience in
translating dogmas into life, a tendency to flatly deny that such a