would. ... Beloved friend, you know that great expectations are formed of
you. It is hard, most hard, not to let this draw you into great
intellectual effort, from which I fear much. For your literary lecturing,
of course, I have no word of dissuasion. But let me assure you that in
your preaching there is _superfluous_ intellectual effort. It would be
spiritually more effective if there were far less perfection of literary
beauty and less condensation of refined thought and imaginative metaphor.
I hear again and again from _intellectual_ persons the complaint that the
effort to follow your meaning is too great, and impairs both the pleasure
and profit of listening to you. I myself am conscious that wonder and
admiration of your talent is apt to absorb and stifle the properly
spiritual influence, and when I _read_ your sermons, I often pause so long
on single sentences as to be fully aware that I could have got little good
from _hearing_ them. I know that no two men's nature is the same, and
habit is a second nature. Do not imagine that I wish you not to be
yourself. (There is no danger of that.) But I am sure that by cultivating
more of what the French call 'abandon'--by preparing with less
_intellectual_ effort for each separate sermon--though, of course, not
with less devotional purpose--and by letting your immediate impulse have a
large play in comparison to your previous study, there will be less danger
of overworking your mind and fuller effect on those who are to benefit.
... I dare say you received from me the new volume of _Religious Duties_.
Its author seems to me _primitively_ to have belonged to what you call the
class of ethical minds, but to have passed beyond it, and now to be at
once Passionate and Spiritual. And is not this the natural and rightful
thing, that though we begin with a fragmentary, we tend towards an
integral religion? This book has been to me most delightful and
profitable, and I trust you will also find it so. Such a revelation of a
pure, tender, ardent spirit is itself an inexpressible stimulus, and has
given me quite a flood of joy and sympathy.