THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES 'yV ^^^ LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS, D.D. ^^ LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS, D.D, (LATE PRINCIPAL OF NEW COLLEGE. EDINBURGH) (1895-1909) Selected and Edited by his Son MARCUS DODS, M.A. ADVOCATE COMPANION VOLUME TO EARLY LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS HODDER AND STOUGHTON ST. PAUL'S HOUSE, WARWICK SQUARE LONDON, E.G. MGMXI PREFACE In the preface to the collection of early letters of Dr. Marcus Dods which was published last autumn, it was suggested that another volume might follow, containing letters of later date, which should complete a kind of autobiography of the writer. That scheme has turned out to be impracticable. From 1864 to 1889 Dr. Dods was the busy minister of a large and growing congregation in Glasgow, and of those twenty-five years as a whole it can be said that he wrote fewer and shorter letters during than he did before and after them. For several of the earlier years of his ministry at Renfield Free Church his chief correspondent, his sister Marcia, was living with him. In 1871 he married. His letters to and from his wife were, with a few casual exceptions, destroyed by himself after her death. The references to his work in the correspondence of this period are 13048 S8 CVlfvJ^ vi PREFACE comparatively few and slight, consisting mainly of what might almost be called statistics, of the progress of various departments of Church work or of the subjects on which he was writing. The idea of presenting an autobiography having been abandoned on these grounds, it has been thought best to omit the whole Glasgow period, and to offer a selection from the large number of letters which have survived from the closing and practically contemporary period of Dr. Dods's life. It will be found that many of the letters in this volume consist wholly or in part of brief discussions of matters of faith or religious experience. The editor is very sensible of the responsibility involved in the pubhcation of a miscellaneous collection of such passages, and of the risk of misinterpretation by readers who . may happen to fix upon isolated expressions of ■VsJ^ opinion which may not represent the deliberate \ and customary mind of the writer as elsewhere recorded. The letters were %vritten in various moods, in various states of bodily health, and, by no means least important, to various PREFACE vii people ; and they reflect those varying con- ditions with a perhaps unusual degree of candour. The editor's very cordial thanks are rendered to Miss Crum of Danefield, Largs, who has spared no trouble in adjusting the letters written to herself and to various members of her family ; to Mr. Andrew Marshall, whose advice and co-operation have again, as in last autumn, been of the greatest help ; to the Rev. Dr. W. M. Macgregor ; and to Mr. George C. Maclean, who has been good enough to read the final proof-sheets. Edinburgh, October 1911. INTRODUCTORY NOTE The date of the beginning of the present selec- tion of letters is quite an arbitrary one, and marks no event or change in the life of the writer. Dr. Dods was minister of Renfield Free Church, Glasgow, from 1864 to 1889. In the summer of that year his congregation gave him, in recognition of his twenty-five years' service, a six months' holiday and a cheque for £1000. While he was on the Continent enjoy- ing the rest which his people had so generously provided for him, he was elected to the Chair of New Testament Exegesis in New College, Edinburgh. In August he took up his residence at 23 Great King Street, Edinburgh, where he lived for the rest of his life ; and he began his professorial work in October of the same year. In May 1907 he succeeded Principal Rainy as Principal of the College, retaining his own Chair ; but the illness which ultimately proved 2 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS fatal had already begun, and he hardly per- formed any of the duties incidental to the post. During the winter of 1907-8 his lectures were read, and his work at the College done for him by Professors Martin and MacEwen. In 1908 he resigned his Chair, but was persuaded to retain the Principalship. He died on 26th April 1909, at the age of seventy-five. On 6th September 1871 Dr. Dods married Catherine Swanston, eldest daughter of James Swanston of Marshall Meadows, Berwick-on- Tweed. Mrs. Dods died on 17th January 1901, leaving one daughter, Mary Christian (' Mamie ' in the letters), who in 1897 became the wife of the Rev. A. H. Gray, and three sons, Marcus, John Henry, and Francis Palliser. The last mentioned died in Canada on 29th June 1910. ' Doodle ' was a wire-haired fox-terrier of birth and beauty and of nearly human sagacity, who was the devoted companion of the last dozen years of Dr. Dods's life. To Professor Henry Drummond Edinbuegh, 1st June 1895. I suppose you have already both seen The Scotsman and received accounts from friends here of the discussion^ on Thursday. It was not satisfactory. It came on later than was right. Rainy' s was a fine manifesto in the direction of showing the unwisdom of taking to do with scientific questions. All the other speeches proved Rainy's position by themselves illustrating how utterly incom- petent the Ghurch is to enter on such matters. The things that were said made one shiver and faint with hopelessness. I was fully charged, and had I been permitted would have explained some things that seemed much in need of explanation. But probably it was well I could not speak, although it was irritat- ing to hear men speaking so patronisingly of the book. Several voted on the other side whom one would not have expected to find ^ In the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, relative to Professor Drummond's book, The Descent of Man. 4 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS there ; but a good many people are staggered, and will not read and enquire. Assemblies are dreadful — at least they dis- agree with me in a high degree. The reports about your health are not as satisfactory as could be wished. Do you not yourself think you would derive benefit from electricity ? Walter Taylor tells me nothing touched his sciatica till he tried it. Another friend owes the use of his hand to it ; and if it is * neurasthenia ' that affects you, as they say it is, is not electricity the thing ? I wish you were in London among the experts. In obscure or chronic disease I think it is one's duty to go to ' many physicians.' The weather has been superb since the Assembly began. We hope to leave, / must leave, on Friday for Cambridge, thence on the 11th for Interlaken. What a holiday it would be if you were well enough to join us. With much affection from all here . . , To the Rev. Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll Edinbukgh, 6th October 1895. Pharaoh might have taken lessons from you ; LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 5 of the possibilities of sweating he had after all the faintest conception. And appealing to me in your weakness (which I sincerely hope is rapidly disappearing — ' take a little wine,' etc.), that is the cutest cut of all. But is it not too bad of you frightening me about John in the beginning of the week, and in the end of it asking for more work ? I assure you John is a heavier handful than you seem to think. However, as usual I am putty, and if you wish to turn me into a young men's counsellor — so be it. I see my way to one thing, perhaps to two ; the third must invent itself. I suppose if I send you the first in six weeks, or before Christmas, it will do — but I '11 try to do it soon. I am working for Hastings' Bible Dictionary — although I think it a mistake — and I have to supply Harper of Chicago and Lyman Abbott of New York {Outlook) with papers. However, I am seeing the end of these, and will be clear for John and you immediately. Do take care of yourself. I suppose you will be sending me Hort's book for The Expositor. PS. You would not care for a somewhat stupid paper on the Bible and other sacred 6 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS books, I suppose ? No, it 's a stupid subject, and I have sunk under it to an even unusual depth. To the Same (Postcard) EDmBURGH, 29fA October 1895. I am very sorry to disappoint you, but it is out of my power to provide you with an article. I am very busy with College work. I can't do more than ten hours a day, and I need that. To Professor Henry Drummond Edinbubgh, 2Uli December 1895. This is to wish you all good this Christmas and during the coming year. May it be your best in every way. Our Christmas here would be ' merrier ' were we assured you were well. On Sunday Andrew Marshall came in as of old about eight, and stayed till past eleven. He was sorry to hear no better news of you. Just a little ago I have heard that Dr. Duns is dangerously ill — bronchitis and pneumonia. He is wandering and in quite a critical condition. I hope Dr. Barbour is with you by this time. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 7 He told me he was going during the hoUdays. I suppose you won't be able to flit to sunnier climes for a bit yet. It is most lamentable to think of you needing to go. Your friends the Yanks are having a high ' stars and stripes ' time. We are having a lot of them, together with all the Parthians, Medes and Elamites, to dinner to-morrow. There are too many of them at College this year ; I wonder if they learn anything. I hope to write again soon. Meanwhile I am interrupted. To the Rev. Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll Edinburgh, 31st December 1895. I suppose you were joking when you asked me to produce fifteen sermons to young men. In any case, of course you recognise the impracticability of the request. I cannot write sermons to order, and I have given you all I have. I could give you perhaps another little book, but not a big one, to young men. Your other request is reasonable, and I must try and keep it in view. Drummond is, I fear, going slowly from bad to worse. He has had recently some bad 8 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS symptoms. But I shall be better informed when Dr. Barbour, who is now with him, returns. Drummond never says anything about himself. It is terribly sad. Last New Year he spent here, and was often in much pain and looked ill, but then we thought it lumbago. With best wishes for the New Year, and success to all your enterprises . . . To the Same [Edinburgh, n.d.] I wish you would find a man who would undertake the Old Testament literature for The Expositor. I am quite unfit to undertake it, having neither knowledge nor time enough. Dr. Driver's Deuteronomy should be put in competent hands, and I will gladly forward the copy you sent to any person you name. I feel too much of a sham when writing on Old Testament subjects. Did you see Drummond before he left London ? He is at Tunbridge Wells now, and rather despondent. His is a truly frightful lot. Poor Rainy is in great trouble — one son dead, another not strong, and a daughter LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 9 ordered abroad. This with the care of the churches — To Professor Henry Driimmond Edestbubgh, 25th October 1896. I hope it is not so long since I wrote as it looks, and that however long it is, you forgive, and believe we are always thinking and speak- ing of you here. The truth is, I have been much down for three months, doing my work with difficulty, pain, and anxiety, and I am still bad. But it is a great joy to us all to hear of even a slight improvement in your condition. Barbour, George Smith, Robert Gray, all re- port favourably ; and could we only believe you had taken the turn and were now to go up the hill, however slowly, it would be the best news we could hear. Poor Candlish seems in a very bad way. Whyte is greatly delighted with his colleague, and says if the church was twice the size, they could let every sitting. NicoU continues to tyrannise, and I have just sent off 100,000 words on the Greek Text of John, and a two-months work condensed into about 200 remarks which no one will read. 10 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS This Kate Carnegie of Watson's is a fall- ing off from his earlier performance. Short sketches are his forte. Whyte preaches for him next Sunday, and is shrinking from it, feeling he cannot give them anything in the same latitude as Watson. Mrs. Simpson asked a lot of people to meet Marie Corelli last week. She came in with a toy-terrier under her arm. I was introduced, but had almost immediately to make way for Dr. Matheson, who knew her, and carried her off, and we heard his guffaws pealing along the lobbies. Your appointment of Arthur Thomson was highly approved of by the College Committee. With much love. . . . PS. Have you read The Heart of Princess Osra — Anthony Hope ? To Miss {A) 1 Edinbtjrgh, 4:th December 1896. Why do you tantalize me ? It would give me the greatest pleasure to be with you, but ^ Several of Dr. Dods's correspondents have preferred to remain anonymous. The letters to each of these are all marked with the same index-letter. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 11 it is quite out of my power. I cannot keep pace with my class even with the time I have, and I never go out even here except one night a week. To preach away from home during session is also beyond my power. But could you not come through for a night or two and stay with us ? I had a most enchanting hour with Prof. Jones a month ago. His address to our students was most characteristic, as he discoursed really just on his own profoundest convictions. But he was kind enough to stay for an hour's talk after his address, which is about the best thing I have had this autumn. Tiele has been lecturing here, and I have met him twice or thrice, and like him. He is not so grimly earnest and combative as Pfleiderer, nor perhaps so incisive, but he is decidedly interesting, and has with him a charming Frau, who has won all our hearts. But I am falling asleep philosophically and am greatly in need of a talk with you to wake me up. Where are you now ? and what are you working at ? What millstone are you seeing through ? To me it seems all millstone, and as the millstones increase, the milestones (alas !) 12 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS decrease. It's a queer, topsy-turvy, incom- prehensible, interesting life. Now do come and have some talks. To the Rev. Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll Edinburgh, 24^A December 1896. Your Christmas cards are of so sumptuous a kind that I am quite put to the blush. I can do no more than thank you, and this I do very cordially. I am always interested in Napoleon, and had a vague idea I would buy Baring-Gould. But your kindness has anticipated me. It is a sumptuous book indeed, and I shall always be proud of having it from you. This week I have been busy with a * Survey ' ^ in obedience to the chiding of The Scotsman, and I hope to send it you in three or four days ; but there is not a great deal of importance, although some interesting things. I hope you are feeling yourself the better of j^our American trip. I have not been well, and still defy the doctors. That was a most capable review of Kipling's ^ A Survey of Literature on the New Testament, which Dr. Dods wrote for The Expositor for some years. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 13 Seven Seas by your friend Wise. Who is he ? And why does he not do something big ? With best wishes for you and yours . . . To Professor Henry Drummond Edestbhrgh, 4th January 1897. I am not so much ashamed as you might suppose for sending you no Christmas or New Year's greeting, because I knew you had friends with you, and as I have been, as usual, thinking of you most of the time and wishing you all manner of good in 1897, I have not felt the need of writing. Jim Simpson told me he was going to see you. His article in Blackwood ^ is a great success — one of the kind that appears once in two or three years, breaking into a new world and distancing all the little story-tellers and vampers up of pot-boilers. How do you feel ? Hopeful at any rate, I trust. There is a general impression abroad, originating presumably with yoiu'self, that you are to get well this summer. May it be true. That you have at any rate not gone back for so long now is surely a good sign. With much love and best wishes . . . 1 Vol. clxi., ' The Great Siberian Iron Road.' 14 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS To the Same [Edinburgh, 28fA February 1897.] I have been too long in writing to you. From time to time we have been hearing of you, sometimes good tidings, sometimes not so good. I hope when spring fairly comes in that the better will prevail and that you will go steadily on. Our last news of you was through J. A. W., who had seen your brother. My spouse has been very bad. She went to Bath, but that as yet seems only to have made her worse, and some days she has been unable to move without considerable pain. I have been enjoying a nice little attack of sciatica for the last four weeks, which, I suppose, is my share in the general seediness which this change- able winter has induced. I am sorry to hear Candlish is worse — very ill indeed. I have been reading Nansen — not such a fine book as Kane, nor so fine a man, but a good Viking. There was a fineness about Kane, and also a pathetic strain in all that happened to him, which one misses in Nansen. But he had a tremendous reception here. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 15 I am working away at the inexhaustible Paul, and correcting the proof of John for Nicoll's Greek Testament, which is worrying work. We mean to take Frank and a companion over to Bonn in April, and if I may I will come and see you — probably the first week of May. Marcus is resolved to get Frank to Cambridge — he is so enchanted with it himself. Somerville is giving his Cunningham Lectures — very good and very well put. It is impossible to predict what will be done by the Assembly. It will almost certainly legitimise union with the U.P. Church. With much love and best wishes . . . To his sister Marcia Edinburgh, \2th March 1897. I suppose the news of Drummond's death has reached you. Just as Candlish was being carried to his grave, the news came. It is a sore blow to everybody who knew him, and no one had more numerous friends. I have to go to Stirling to-morrow to preach his funeral sermon. The two men whom I used to think 16 LATER LETTERS OF I\1ARCUS DODS of as life personified, Elmslie and Drummond, are both gone, and I am left — at least for a bit. To John M. Grant [Edinbtirgh, ? April 1897.] A poor dissenting teacher of theology is naturally elated at being asked by a West- minster J. P. to dine with a Bishop — a Lord Bishop — and in all seriousness I should like to meet the man Creighton, however much I may think apron and gaiters a shade out of date outside a lunatic asylum. But the truth is, since writing you last my plans have been all upset. Something has gone wrong in my interior, and the doctor doubts whether I shall be able to leave home. I am under observation at present, and cannot know for some days what they are to make of me. I fear this will prevent my going to Germany, but I will let you know as soon as possible. Meanwhile you had better fill up my place at your hospitable board with some more satisfactory person. Even if I do not go to Germany I should like to have some days with you, as I nowhere get LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 17 a truer holiday. But as I say, I will write again soon. To the Rev. Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll Edinbubgh, 21th April 1897. Your most kind letter was very welcome. I did not reply yesterday, because I have no gumption for journalistic matters and thought it much safer to let you decide as to printing Martin's testimonial. ^ I devoutly trust the matter will go right. It will make a world of difference to me. I am downstairs again, and although ' feeble and sore broken,' I hope a week or two in the country will put me right. I hope to be allowed to go to-morrow to Marshall Meadows, and while there I could do a little reading for Expositor ' Survey ' if you have any nice books lying for it. You are perfectly right to express yourself only in The British Weekly. Indeed the charm of the paper is that it is so individual. As to giving it up, it is not to be thought of. It is the one thing in the week I wait for. You can ^ The reference is to Dr. Martin's nomination for the Chair of Apologetics in New College, Edinburgh. B 18 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS put your whole self into it, and obviously it is your life-work, and an immensely important one. Have you read Jowett's Life carefully? There are some very fine bits about work, and about approaching age. More than most men he controlled and formed and guided himself. Of course the constant reference to Greek literature gives the book an interest to me. Speaking of which, you would find a deal of sparkle and a deal of new truth in Murray's Oreeh Literature. I did not know he had so much knowledge or such a style. I must stop, but remain . . . To Ms son Frank [Edinburgh, ? Maij 1897.] We are very glad to hear you have a prospect of some teaching and some pay. You will find the teaching excellent for yourself. Like Mercy it is twice blessed, blessing both him that gives and him that receives. Also the pay will no doubt be useful to you. Be sure you let us know if it comes off, and generally how you are getting on at the 'Varsity and elsewhere. Does Lewis like the place ? I do LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 19 wish I could come and get heated through, and see the dear old Rhine and hear the night- ingales and wander through the Bonn book- shops. (Some day get a catalogue or two for me.) There is one in the Poppelsdorfer AUee, and another away down opposite the other end of the University building, near where Coblenzer Strasse begins. To the Same Marshall Meadows, Berwick-on-Tweed, lUh May 1897. You say in your last you are rather swinging towards publishing. The main thing is to choose some line of life which you can heartily go in for, because as you go on in life you will find that your daily work is what you must mainly depend upon for enjoyment as well as for telling on your fellows. Also, the more good you can do in any profession, the longer you can be satisfied with it. To the Same Edinburgh, \Uh June 1897. I do not by any means wish to discourage you from looking forward to publishing, which 20 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS I believe to be an eminently useful and also pleasant life-work. But I would like you to choose what you choose with clear recognition of the facts. And I think that one difference between being an accountant and a publisher is that the one business is sure, the other speculative. I mean that an accountant is sure of work, and plenty of it, whereas a publisher nowadays has to push tremendously, both to get books to publish and also to get people to buy them. In other words, it is not so much a profession as a trade, and as in other trades so in publishing you have to push and bargain. To the Same Edinburgh, \Wi July 1897. Mr. Duthie called here yesterday, and he and I had a long talk about your affairs. He hopes also to spend a week at Bonn immediately after the Academy breaks up, so that he will be able to explain to you all his views and discuss the whole matter with you. He is pretty strongly of opinion that you should stick to actuarial work, as it opens good prospect of profitable LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 21 work. He has no doubt you could pass the exam, if you worked hard this winter. But you must not commit yourself to Duthie unless you feel pretty sure that you could find some pleasure in actuarial or insurance work. Because of course a man's life is largely his daily work, and if he is not happy in it, life becomes a bondage. It is no doubt to be also considered that human nature is so adaptable that whatever we work at and put our heart into becomes interesting. But if you think anything else would suit you better, do not hesitate to say so. The main thing is, as I said before, to be hearty about something. To his sister Marcia Marshall Meadows, Berwick-on-Tweed, nth August 1897. Just a line to let you know that yesterday Kate and I went to Belford by train and drove to Bamburgh. At Belford we went into the Churchyard and found our father's grave in very good order. Marcus had told the sexton to look after it, and apparently he had done so to purpose, according to his lights. We also went to the old house and found it looking 22 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS beautiful, inhabited by the Vicar. I felt quite enamoured of my birth-place, and Kate could scarcely be dragged away. Bamburgh is great ; a more magnificent castle I never saw — the situation superb. Alto- gether we had quite a notable day, and I am the better of it. To Miss (A) Edinburgh, 1th September 1897. Your wail moves me much — it expresses so entirely my own chronic condition. To be baffled in one's endeavours to know is only what may be expected, and I am becoming more and more convinced that although the craving for truth is unquenchable and in- eradicable, the attainment of truth is beyond us ; and moreover we cannot be culpable for the failure of honest and heart-breaking endeavours to find the truth. Failures in con- duct are the puzzle ; but is it not the case that all that failure is necessary, as the child can only learn to walk through many falls and stumbles ? And I believe the result of all the constantly renewed striving will suddenly appear, as in many physical processes the LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 23 result is sudden, and up to the very point at which the result appears all seems chaotic and useless. In any case there is nothing for it but renewal of strife ; for certainly, however beaten and indisposed to strive longer, there is a force compelling us onwards. It is some- times a blessing not to know when we are beaten. Besides, if you will allow me to say so, it is the very earnestness of your striving, and the sense of reality imparted to your character by the strife and failure, that make you so helpful to others. I greatly relished the way in which you turned the tables on materialism by the help of your true materialism. Your theory of ' nerves ' is, I think, true ; and however little an individual may be inclined to exculpate himself on that ground for any slackness or insensibility, his neighbours are bound to take account of the whole man, including his ' nerves.' To the Same EDmBUBGH, 31si December 1897. Thank you much for The Pain of the Worlds ^ A paper by Mary Clifford, read to the National Union of Wonaen Workers, and published by the Church Army, 1897. 24 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS You are one of the people who are Hable to be torn by it ; and the corrective of excessive sympathy, or perhaps one should say fruitless and morbid sympathy, is to be found in right explanations of suffering and in activities for relieving it. But it is difficult to be optimistic and to believe that in every case the result is for the greater good. I meant to write to-day and thank you again for Dr. Moberly's book.^ This is my last holiday, and although I have not found time to finish Moberly, I know I shall not be able to find time to write to you after work at College begins again. The book is a good one. It has that mellow richness which one finds only in the writing of cultured Englishmen. I think he is wrong in several of his contentions, but I would need more time to criticise him with any confidence. His chapter on Outward and Inward is most instructive. Where I find him least satisfactory is in his notes of difference between clergy and laity. He seems to take for granted that all those who perform some organic function of the Body of Christ must be ordained men. ^ Ministerial Priesthood, by R. C. Moberly, D.D. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 25 This certainly is not Paul's view ; and the whole of Moberly's structure depends on the differentiation of laity and clergy. But I mean to read the whole again carefully, and I hope we may some day have a good talk about it. With best wishes for your New Year ... To his son-in-law, the Rev. A. H. Gray [Edinburgh, n.d.] I send you per parcels post what should suffice for your Interesting Men of the Early Church. Nowadays, of course, the best accounts of all of them are to be had in the Dictionary of Christian Biography, which you could see in the Free Library. (This is disgusting paper, and I can't write on it.) For the Bible Lectures, if you add Myers' Catholic Thoughts on the Bible and Theology, and Reuss's History of the Canon, you should do. If you cannot easily get these I can send them, but Myers is a man to make a friend of and keep by you. I think you will find they take more interest in the Canon if you take it up as v. Romanists. 26 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS That allows you to emphasise Luther's position, which was grand, also Calvin's, also the West- minster Confession's. On the general subject there are two cheap books, 1/- each or so, Paterson Smyth's How God inspired the Bible, and Dr. Clifford's The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible. These should be enough. I could bring you some more books when I come, or I could send them if you wish, but I positively cannot write more with this pen. Macgregor is preaching magnificently, but the church is far from full. What a public ! PS. I have been writing a brief set of lectures on Paul's idea of the Church, and also on the officers of the Church. Now I must try and get Hebrews begun for Nicoll. To his daughter, Mrs. Gray Edinburgh, 14th July [1898]. I should have written yesterday to thank you for your kind treatment, but I had so many letters to write and such a mountain of books to sort and smell that I could find no time. I wish you were near enough for me to come LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 27 often, and then I would show you how I can empty a church. Your house is as pretty and comfortable as Mother said it was, and it was an immense pleasure to see you so happy in it. I hope you may have many happy days in it. To his son Marcus Aberfoyle, 21171 September 1898. Your letter, this morning received, has been eagerly and repeatedly read. I have been almost ceaselessly thinking of you this last week, and am not by any means astonished to hear that you do not find great attraction in your work. That you do not actively dislike it, I am glad to hear. The prospect of spending your life in such work is certainly damping, but it is a prospect you ought not to view. Your present employment should only be a stepping stone to something more to your taste and more important (although Arnold used to set his best men to the lowest forms that their influence might be most felt and might put the boys at once on good lines). I have no doubt that in a short time you will find something more to your mind, but every 28 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS one must begin at the bottom rung of the ladder. Besides, you will get interested in the boys ; working with persons is always more interesting than working with things, and I fancy that before Christmas you will find that a pretty close tie has been formed between you and some of the small men. At the same time I should grieve to think that all your mental energies were to be absorbed in teaching small boys. Read the best books, and opportunities of influencing men will necessarily arise, and if you know whero men are intellectually and spiritually, yo ^vUi, whatever your position be, find ways of being of use to them. I think it is very often in the extras of life, not in one's main employment, that the best work is done. At the same time I believe strongly that a man should have as his main work something he finds pleasure in. To the Same Edinburgh, 14^A October 1898. I sent you to-day the most educating book ^ I know, a boolc you can read 500 times in fair ^ The English Humourists. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 29 weather and foul, sickness and health, by day and by night, on Sundays and Saturdays. But probably you will not find in Thackeray all I found in him. However, try. To John M. Grant [Edinburgh, 2'^rd December 1898.] I admire your enterprise,^ and may help you, but I doubt whether I can. I am a backslider. I used to enjoy prayer, but for years I have found myself dumb. Of course one can always make a prayer, as I do every morning for my class, but prayer in the sense of asking for things has not been in my case a proved fo? e. The things I have chiefly prayed for all my life I have not got. Communion with the highest and consideration of Christ are of course efficacious to some extent; but I pray now not because my own experience gives me any encouragement, but only because of Christ's example and command. Ask K. S. Simpson of the Free High here. Stalker, W. M. Macgregor of Free St. Andrew's, Edinburgh. We begin our holiday to-day. The College is in better trim this year than I have ever ^ The compilation of a volume entitled Family Prayers for Morning Use. 30 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS seen it. Some dozen Americans from Yale, Princeton, etc., excellent, hardworking and handsome men. Our own students get fewer and fewer. The entrance examination to the University is too severe for the Highlanders. With best Christmas wishes for yourself and Mrs. Grant . . . To his son Marcus [Edinbukgh, January 1899.] I hope 3'^ou are not very low going from Cambridge and its cultured leisure to Liverpool and its grimy grind. Don't consider yourself booked through at Greenbank. There is a regular law in life, a law of progress and of gradually attaining what you are best fit for. By doing well the first tasks set you, you inevitably take a step, purchase a degree higher, and you are fortunate to have at your age remunerative work of any kind. Frank solaced himself for your departure by staying at his office till 1-30 on Friday morning, thereby winning the plaudits of his two bosses. Last night (Friday) Leonard came in and comforted him with billiards. Doodle LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 31 is, I think, very low ; cats alone would arouse him. To Mrs. Stothert ^ Edinburgh, 18th March 1899. You have greatly gratified me by your letter and its accompaniments. It is an intense satisfaction to have your minute account of the closing days of my life-long friend. It is sixty years ago since I first made his acquaint- ance, and even then learned to admire his burn- ing energy and zeal and conscientiousness. The point in his career that most impressed me, and has always been first to rise in my memory, is the time when he began to study for the ministry. I had a correspondence with him at that time that fixed my own future, and that gave me insight into the purity of his motives and the depth of his religious conviction. His attainments, too, far surpassed those of any of our contemporaries, both in language (where he was an easy first) and in philosophy. His goodness was always a rebuke to me, and I should have been surprised had there been any - long clouding of his faith at the close. That ^ Widow of the writer's old college friend, the Rev. R. Stothert. 32 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS there should have been any is a great encourage- ment to me. I have read with great interest your little memoir of your daughter, and Mrs. Dods is very glad to have it and grateful to you for sending it. The face at the beginning is singularly taking. Well, they are two beautiful characters you have helped to train, and now nothing can bring them into hazard again, and it must be an undying satisfaction to you to have been con- nected so intimately with two such characters. Let me again assure you that I am very grate- ful for your kind thought in sending me these memorials. To his son Marcus Edinburgh, 21^1 March 1899. I am not very sure how I would answer your boy. Those stories in Genesis are of course merely pictures of the growth of the race, and of its connection with God, true as pictures in a general way, but not true as historical fact. The fall is a picturesque account of the point in man's career at which from being innocent, because without developed conscience, he LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 33 became conscious of a moral law. In the growth of every child the same transition must be made from ignorant innocence to a sense of moral responsibility, and this stage or transition is generally, perhaps always, accompanied by or contemporaneous with wrong-doing. It is by breaking the law that the child first becomes conscious of the law. It is a fall which is at the same time a rise. So in the development of man there came a time when he became aware of God and of God's law, a law which he found himself unable to keep ; he became conscious of sin, of which he had known nothing before ; he had done the same things, but done them in ignorance that they were wrong, but now in doing them he consciously trans- gresses a law. But how you are to explain this to a small boy, or whether you ought, I am scarcely prepared to say. His parents may not wish him to know the truth about those Genesis stories, and it would be difficult to get him to hold the truth they contain while rejecting the fiction. On the whole I think I would say to a boy asking such a question, ' There are some things 34 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS you Ccannot understand till you grow up, and this is one of them.' I send Genesis, and two others for padding. To his daughter, Mrs. Gray Edestbttrgh, 22nd December 1899. Your mother insists on my sending you the enclosed as a Christmas gift. I know it 's only to give her a little more confidence that she will see that atom of yours who has become the real centre of her life. She has been enjoy- ing herself greatly making up parcels with her photo for various people. I did not count how often she kissed the image. Some of the photos may, I fear, be blurred like the toe of St. Peter in Rome. Copy-line : — Extravagant adulation obliterates the finer lines of character. I hope you still like your dog. I wish you liked it so much that you would take also his brother, who resides in the kitchen and whom Frank finds it difficult to palm off on any of his friends. Frank has a bad cold, but hopes to play it out of him to-morrow. Did you observe that they beat Cambridge University on Monday LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 35 last ? I never saw the Academicals play better. They would be invincible if they always played so. We are having some foreigners on Christmas day to early dinner. One ends his acceptance with ' Je suis tres touche de votre affectueuse pensee.' Good-bye, with best Christmas wishes. To Mrs. Watson ^ Edinburgh, 2Uh December 1899. I have just read Dr. Watson's sermon which you so kindly sent me, and I cannot tell you how I rejoice to recognise the old precision, insight, and vigour, which show that he is him- self again. Long may he continue to help young and old by such words. The sermon sends me back once again to \st John — the book. I have also been reading, as no doubt you too have been reading. Principal Caird's Gifford Lectures, and am pleased to see how orthodox he is. The style is wonderful, in every clause classically pure. It is very pleasant to think of being with you. You will so delight in one another, and I ^ Wife of the Rev. Charles Watson, D.D., Largs. 36 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS am sure there is on earth no better tonic for her than the Largs household. Most sincerely do I hope that this will soon appear in her restored health. No doubt her brother's captivity is a strong pull in the other direction — still there is also a safety in being off the field, though one is almost ashamed to say so. All the youths here are dying to go out. But what a miser- able, anachronistic barbarity war is, after all. I console myself, to that small extent to which consolation is possible, by reading again the wars of the early years of the century, when so many thousands of lives and hundreds of millions of treasure were expended. With love and best wishes for the incoming year to yourself and Dr. Watson . . . To the Rev. Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll Edinburgh, 5th February 1900. May I take the liberty of playing jackal to your lionship and putting you on the scent of very big game to be found in Free St. Andrew's in the shape of W. M. Macgregor ? All his sermons would go into print as they are de- livered, but he is preaching a set on John the LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 37 Baptist which would interest readers of The Expositor, and he is also delivering a set of lectures to a training school here on the Creed. I have not heard them, but I have heard much in their praise, and I am sure if you could get them for The Expositor you would do your readers a benefit. I am glad you are back to your post. The South African column was the only bit of life in The British Weekly while you were away. You were wise to evade the very worst January on record, and I hope you are strong and hearty. To his niece, Mrs. Young Edinburgh, 5ih April 1900. Here I am again at the old bit, but with a very pleasant time to look back upon. Your views, your walks, your books, your ways — and in some measure also yourselves — are delightful, and have been a true haven, a little heaven below without a jarring note. It will last me a long time. Your sandwiches did not, for I devoured them before I got to Bellingham with an appetite determined to abolish the re- proach you cast upon it. 38 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS Frank and Doodle welcomed me with effusion, Frank with his arm in a sling. He has come through a year's football and a month's rough- riding without injury, and slipped a sinew play- ing at billiards ! — the folly of trying to escape fate. I hope Mr. Young has already lived down, or I should say slept down, the evil effects of breakfasting at 9 on a Monday, and that no permanently serious consequences have ensued. It was most delightful to see your Mother looking so well. To Miss {B) Edinburgh, April 1900. I think that by this time we might have got over the panic we were in at the Reformation. Each Easter I feel ashamed of my Church separating itself from Christendom. But we are improving, and ' Go slow go far ' is not a bad motto in ecclesiastical matters. To the Rev. Ernest F. H. Capey Edinburgh, Uh May 1900. My dear Sir, — I have now read Miss Craw- LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DOBS 39 ford's Studies,'^ but they are in a region of which I know so little that I do not feel qualified to pronounce a judgment on them. Any one can see that they are written out of full knowledge and with great critical faculty. Unfortunately the writers she admires I find myself quite unable to read. Tolstoi's War and Peace, for example, I have again and again tried to plough through, but have failed. It does not lay hold of me and carry me on. That of course may be my fault. Russian novelists seem to prefer handling the pathological aspects of life, and one wearies of that. To set Ibsen where Miss Crawford does seems to me monstrous. Life as he depicts it is not only exceptional, but impossible. In fact I believe in the future made for us by our own best writers, starting from their pure and healthy and hopeful view of things — Tennyson, Browning, Miss Fowler, Stanley Weyman — the objective writers, not the ana- lysts and introspectionists. This I know is not the approved view. I have all the critics against me, but I can't cordially admire their deities. ^ Studies in Foreign Literature, by Virginia M. Crawford. 40 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS To Miss [A] Edinburgh, \^th September 1900. The looming questions are those that hang round the central theme of our Lord's know- ledge. If He was not perfectly informed on every matter which in any way touched His Kingdom, how far did this ignorance extend ? Must we be content with a revelation in char- acter ? I know that many of the best men among us have already reconciled their minds to this, but I dread the turbulent panic which shallower natures will occasion when we can no longer avoid the open discussion of such themes. To the Rev, D. M. Ross Edinbubgh, 18^^ December 1900. My Dearly Beloved, — This is not business. I yesterday sent my valuable approbation of Sherwell & Co. to another of their agents, Mr. Gardner. My recommendation can do no man much good, but I have the very highest opinion of the book ; in fact it is by far the most cautious, sane, and informative book I ever read on the Temperance question, and their proposals are more worth considering than LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 41 any others I am acquainted with. The second of their proposals I have for thirty years con- sidered the only effectual counter-pull to the public house. PS. Please ask George Smith if it was one of his students who gave the answer ' Lupercalia is the name given to the she-wolf that suckled Romeo and Juliet.' To the Rev. Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll Edinburgh, 2ith February 190L How you find time to write so fully to me I cannot understand, but I can assure you your words could not be sent to any quarter where they could be more valued. Your letters give me one of the best fillips I ever get. Thank you very much. Pretty regularly I walk with Innes and Whyte on Saturdays. Whyte is looking very old — though he says he is only sixty-four— but he is very hale and doing a lot of work. His class of 800 men and almost as many women is his great joy, and without it he would go down — or retire. His interest in literature is as great as ever — keen about all new books in theology 42 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS or criticism, and always looking to you for information about journals and journalists. Coleridge is at present his subject for his class, and he has unearthed what you probably know, but I had not seen, a very powerful essay by Martineau on Coleridge, Newman and Carlyle. Moffatt's book is a stupendous piece of work for a young man, but I wish there were more help in it. He leaves us just where Jiilicher and the rest leave us — and that, to my mind, is a most insecure position. It 's rather striking how this type of literature should always spring from our Church ? I am glad to hear The British Weekly gains ground. Campbell's column is a good and interesting addition, but it is your own pen that sells the paper. To his daughter, Mrs. Gray S.S. 'Cymric,' Begun Monday, 15th April [1901]. It seems several centuries since we left you kind people in the cold wind, and during these centuries we have had varieties of weather and of experience. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 43 Tuesday Evening. — This has been a day of glorious weather, and the ship and the sea continue to be the great wonder to me. The people are of all the kinds that are fairly common everywhere. But the amount of water astounds me, and the steadiness of the ship, and its roominess and contrivances for everything. Wednesday. — I think we are all enjoying our trip. The boys never seem to find time heavy on their hands. For myself, I confess to be more in sympathy with Mr. 's refrain on our Italian trip, ' It all comes too late for me.' So constantly I find myself asking ' But what 's the use of enjoying with none to share ? What 's the use of succeeding if no one shares your success ? ' It 's weak, of course, but it 's there. Now there 's the dinner bugle, so I must go. Thursday. — I have chummed up with the chief engineer, of course a Clyde man, a U.P., and full of information, who delights to speak about his ship, and is very proud of it; and indeed for steadiness she beats even her own reputation. Friday. — To-day has been very hot — sultry, with a quiet sea and a beautiful sky. We 44 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS never meet a ship, and never see a bird, and Columbus was certainly a great man. Saturday Night. — I expect to receive some notice from you at Montclair. It 's an awful way for a letter to come. To his sister Marcia 13 W. 57th Street, New York, 30th April [1901]. Please excuse pencil, as there is evidently one thing they can't make in New York, that is ink. I go off to Chicago this afternoon, 1000 miles to deliver one address, and return here on Saturday, to preach on Sunday in a swell church here, which things — both of them — I hate. But the people are so effusively hospitable it is difficult to say ' No ' to their requests. Yesterday I lectured in Union Seminary to a very good audience, many ministers and students, and last night I dined in much the grandest house I ever was in — the decorations quite unspeakable — kind of Arabian Nights business altogether. Frank and Jack were included, and I was glad they had the opportunity of seeing the inside of a swell house here. Of such houses there is no LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 45 end, street after street of mansions or palaces ; indeed the superabundant wealth of this city is something I never conceived to be possible. It has come very hot, but only for a spell, I suppose. In this house I am cared for with a thoughtful hospitality which makes me feel ashamed, and which would, if anything could, mitigate the sense of desolation that often comes over me ; it is so abrupt and sore a blow I get when I wish to go and speak to Kate about anything that pleases me ; and all enjoyment and profit seems so useless without her to share it. To the Same Bible Teachers' College, MoNTCLAER, N.J., Qtli May 1901. Here I am at last at Montclair, and I ought to be eminently well satisfied with my surroundings. It seems a very pretty place, villas with unfenced gardens round them and unfenced roads running through their democratic purlieus, everything open and unashamed. I have just unpacked my bags and read my lectures for to-morrow, and sit down to write with the sun shining through a pellucid air, and dazzling white blossom looking 46 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS in at my window. Nor is it too hot as yet, comfortable but not excessive. I found your letter of 26th April, for which ten thousand thanks. I have had a delightful time with Coffin,^ who is one of the most charming of human beings and one of the best. I have had under his roof a taste, or rather a prolonged draught, of American hospitality, and nothing could sur- pass the comfort in which I have been living, or the friendliness of Coffin and his household. It has made all the difference to me, and I hope I shall ever be grateful for it, and learn friendliness to strangers. It 's so strange to hear English from many persons who are quite Continental or Jewish in appearance, but often one hears German or Swedish, and I understand there are whole towns of Hungarians, and ditto of Bohemians. I would vastly enjoy it all were it not for the constant feeling that it 's no use, that there is no one to share it, and that to enjoy anything I have to forget what it formerly was a joy 1 Now minister of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, and Associate Professor of Homilotics at Union Theological Seminary, New York. Mr. Coffin studied for two winters under Dr, Dods at New College, Edinburgh. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 47 to remember. But I am not down or dulL The people are extraordinarily frank, polite, and kind. Of course I have moments of utter blank desolation, but they are only moments. To his son Harry 65 FULLERTON A VENUE N., MONTCLAIR, N.J., ISth May 190L I begin this on the 18th, but there is no mail till the 22nd, so I may keep it open till then — only I wish to thank you for your letter, and to ask another, also to thank you for the photo of mother and child, although the mother might with advantage have shown more of her face. The babe has a look both of you and of Clarence, although stouter than either of you. She is evidently thriving physically, whatever her moral development is. I congratulate you on getting them home again. I wish you could have so good a holiday as I am having. I lecture every day, and three days a week I lecture twice, but it 's an easy kind of thing, and they pay liberally, and I am most comfortably housed with a good and pleasant family. Frank and Jack Bell are in 48 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS the next house. They took us a drive yesterday, that is, the three girls from this house and me — two horses and one of the Ught buggies they use here. Frank drove, and we had a very lovely drive. This is an exquisitely pretty town — long, endless avenues of trees, at present all freshly green and completely shutting out the scorching sun ; but as yet there has not been much scorch. Frank and Jack have only three more days, and will go home with this letter in the Oceanic. Partly I wish I were going with them, but I am not sorry to stay on among people so very hospitable, kind, and frank as the Americans I have met are. To-day Mr. Merritt, the owner of this house, is to entertain his typewriters and other busi- ness girls from New York, nine or ten of them ; one of them gets 30 dollars a week — £6. Think of that. Another 20, and another 15, which is the common wage of a young girl. But living in New York is about twice the cost of living with us. I heard the other day of a man who pays £4000 a year for a flat ! They live largely in flats or apartments like the London flats, and in fashionable quarters the rent is monstrous. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 49 Frank and Jack are off to-day to Princeton to see a baseball game, and to view the Uni- versity buildings, which are very fine. You should see the horses here, small, fine, swift, and active — a capital breed — also the auto- mobiles, which are as common as mosquitoes in New York. By the way, please let me know if you had anything to pay on a book I sent you. I was told you would not, but one never fathoms a Custom-house officer. I got such a fright coming into this country that I am afraid to make any purchases lest the Liverpool men take as much more out of me. To his brother-in-law J. A. Wilson 65 N. FULLERTON AVENUE, MoNTCLAiR, N.J., 2Srd May 1901. Although I have nothing special to say, your letter has put me so much en rapport with things at home that I cannot but write. I am very well, although they work me hard and I am rather afraid of the heat, especially when I go to Chicago, but the novelty of every- thing is worth sacrificing something to see. They are a grand people, however, and if they 50 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS can settle they will command the globe yet. I never cease wishing you and Carrie were here. I don't know any one who would enjoy the whole thing more than you would. I am glad to think there is even a chance for Dr. MacEwen. To-day you will be meeting, and I do pray with all my heart that that Chair may be worthily filled. As I see how amply some of the Colleges here are equipped, I cannot but envy them their niulti-millionaires. I fancy I am seeing but the fringe of American society, and only one little bit of the fringe ; but there is a great deal of genuine goodness in the people I am seeing — a little inclined to sensation and gush, but their native humour keeps that in place. I have shaken hands with many thousands of people here, been asked for my signature, and had the funniest questions put to me in writing about the King, etc. To his sister Marcia [MoNTCLAiR, N.J., 2Uh May 190L] I am beginning this on Friday, 24th May, on which day I posted a card to you, and this begun letter is evidence that my shame for LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 51 that is sincere. I am sitting in my shirt- sleeves, thermometer at 86° or 90°, but here in my airy and delightful room with a delicious breeze rustling among the trees outside, it is by no means bad. Then the sky is so intensely blue and the trees so freshly green, though they say that in the heat of summer everything is brown. Our mode of life here is very healthy, bath at 6-15 ; breakfast at 7 (at least prayers at 7) ; breakfast — strawberries, porridge, fish, coffee, hot muffins; lectures at 10 and 11; lunch at 12-20 — soup, some light dish, rice or macaroni, prunes or such ; then Browning, if I am not in New York; at 3-30 or 4 an hour's walk with the girls here, or a drive or a call ; dine at 6-30 ; and generally an evening lecture of some kind, either by myself or somebody else ; and so the day is done. Time passes swiftly, and the men who come to lecture are excellent, and most friendly. The people in the house are delightful. I could not have been more congenially set down, though there are many nice people here. Andie would rejoice in the roses and blossom here, and any lover of his fellow-creatures would rejoice in the variety of birds — gold-finches, orioles. 52 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS cardinals, kingfishers, woodpeckers, and lots of others. I think the tradespeople and casuals are civiller than with us, more self-respecting and more respectful. Everywhere there is an air of happiness and youth, although in New York the energy is too energetic and bustling, and the youthfulness too self-asserting and material. We here are all in tears that our stay in Montclair is ending. We have been so happy together. And I cannot get up much interest in going back to that dreary old house and recommencing a different kind of life. This is the 32nd anniversary of the marriage of the couple who own this house — a good man and a good woman. To Mrs. Merritt 13 W. 57th Street, New York, ^.nd June 190L When the inexorable train drew me out of Montclair yesterday and away from the three Graces who so graciously saw me off, and from the kind (though I fear arm-sore) boy who carried my bag, I felt quite homeless, and have not yet overcome a feeling of desolation. I LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 53 can truly say I never lived in so congenial a family, where I was made to feel so much at home. I went to you somewhat down in spirits, and had I been during this last month in uncongenial surroundings I should have sunk deeper and deeper. Instead of this I have enjoyed my work in Montclair immensely, and I shall never forget the kindness you have shown me. I owe a great deal also to your dear daughter and her friends, who have not only given me a month's unalloyed pleasure, but have permanently raised my conception of the American women who devote themselves to religious work. Please tell Mr. Merritt I count upon a visit from him next summer, and if he brings you with him he will be doubly welcome to yours very gratefully . . . To John M. Grant Buffalo, 6th June 190L I have lectured and preached about forty times during the month of May, and as the weather has been atrocious, pouring rain most of the time, I have not been comfortable. It 54 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS is rather an ordeal going through all this in which I expected to have Kate with me, and sometimes I am desolate enough. But people are very kind, and the family I stayed with in Montclair quite congenial. I think I must have been introduced to two- thirds of the total 50,000 ministers of the country. I hope Mrs. Grant and you are both well, and that you are looking forward to a good holiday. I often think with longing of that hammock in your back garden. This is a great country, and will, I think, soon show us a clean pair of heels in many things, but I doubt if they will ever breed as fine a race of men and women. The mixture of races is not all for good. But I have been greatly impressed by the energy and vitality everywhere apparent. But you don't want impressions of one who has just skipped across and skipped back again, so I may just sign myself . . . To his sister-in-law y Mrs. Wilson Chicago, 15th June 190L Together with your own most welcome letter came one from Mamie, so I feel as much up to LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 55 date in my news as can be expected in this remote and magnificent city. Yesterday I had a long hot journey from Delaware, where I had to address an audience of 2500 with the thermometer at 96° in the shade, all the women and most of the men using fans. In this weather both men and women go about with their pocket hand- kerchiefs stuffed round their neck to save their collar, but one is damp before he is dry from his bath. In the evening there was a reception of about 250 people in rooms calculated to reach the stuffy point at 50. After standing for two hours shaking hands with people I shall never see again, and of whom I could not even catch the names, I was limp as a wet rag, and like Alice's Cheshire cat, nothing left of me but the fixed grin. A humorous girl with whom I had struck up an acquaintance came up about six times during the evening, each time with the formula ' I have read all your books with such pleasure.' I was staying with the President, who has a handsome house, in every respect comfortable, and in some respects beautiful, but the only servant who ever appeared was a little nigger boy of ten with bare 56 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS legs and feet, who waited at table with much judgment. When we went in to dinner we found him reclining in a deep arm-chair with a salver on his lap, and far from being abashed he lay as he was till the blessing was asked, and then adapted himself to the situation. At the railway station and on the main street one of the Professor's sons was selling papers, a witty brat of eight or so who has been brought up speaking German, but when asked to talk with one of the Professors declined, saying it would spoil his Hebrew accent. I am getting tired of the long railway journeys and constant meeting of new people, and you dear people at home are more and more dear — ' At each remove I drag a lengthening chain,' and at times I feel pretty lonely, mainly because no one I meet knows anything about you and I have felt sometimes as if I must speak about you all, and especially about Kate ; and while every one is kind to the point of overdoing, yet I never was so shut up in myself before. I must be off to a function with the great Rockefeller, so good-bye, with love to Jack and the boys, to whom perhaps you might show this and save me writing to them. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 57 To his daughter, Mrs. Gray Hotel Del Prado, Chicago, 18iA June 190L It seems a long time since I wrote ' Mrs. Gray ' on an envelope, and I fear I have been trusting too much to some of the others sending on their letters to you. And now I am writing not because I have anything to say, but because I want company. The University here is doing its Decennial Celebration, and the days are crammed with functions and festivities (they gave me a Degree to-day to fill up the time). As one speaker said, ' The idea seems to be, When in doubt lay a foundation stone.' Actu- ally six have been laid for various new build- ings. The consequence is no one has any time to speak to me, and the President cannot take me into his house, and I am in a hotel close by. And it is maddeningly lonely to see crowds of people and hear them laughing and talking and have not a soul that Avould know what I meant if I said * I wonder what Kitty ^ is doing.' This, however, will end to-morrow, when all this nonsense stops and a new Session ^ His eldest grandchild. 58 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS begins and my lectures proceed — no more speechifying or trying to make four thousand people in a tent hear you, or to eat your lunch in comfort with a gale blowing through it as if the poles would give. This is a great place, and a great people, and there are all sorts, godless and godly, pretty and plain, rich and poor (though the latter don't appear). To his sister Marcia The University, Chicago, 2\st June 1901. I hope it does not seem quite as long to you as it does to me since I wrote to you, but my days and weeks have got all mixed with this perpetual moving and being introduced to the teeming myriads of this vast country. I am now, I trust, settled for at least ten days here in the President's lovely home, in which there is allotted to me a bedroom as large as my own at home, with four windows on one side looking out to greenery and letting in the continual sound of frogs and students — a delightful bathroom (with the softest water. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 59 that tempts me in these hot days to stay there all day). Grand as the room is I feel it some- thing of a prison, as I get my breakfast alone in it and have no actual call to see any of my fellow-creatures till lunch at one, at which hour the President (who is as strong as a young bull) comes in from his four hours' teaching. Some of the professors whom I have met are very attractive men, and their wives of course charming — of the best class of American women. I dined with one of them last night, and felt much at home. My lecture is daily at 3-30 or 4-30, and the audience is almost wholly com- posed of ministers. This University is open all the time, and new courses are announced every quarter. Though only ten years old they have a magnificent staff, over 200 pro- fessors and lecturers. Crowds of young women are studying here, and though the buildings are not nearly completed, it will be a very great affair before it calls a halt. Indeed this University is one of the most characteristic things I have seen, and gives me a profound impression of the inexhaustible vigour of this country. (Here enters the President's secretary telUng me I am expected to address a meet- 60 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS ing at ten, and as it is now past nine I must stop.) 11 o'clock. Well, I have had my meeting — about 250 present ; one sweet-faced girl from Texas and two or three men thanked me. They always shake hands after a meeting here. It seems I am to take their devotional meeting every morning, which I did not bargain for ; neither did I bargain for the constant speech- making which has fallen to my lot during the past four days of their Decennial Celebration. However, that is over. The students, men and women, performed As you like it, and it was most entertaining, excellently done. I would not have missed living and working in this University. The wide-awakeness and activity and ready adaptability to the wants of the students are most admirable. The crowds here oppress me; the classes are huge ; 4000 were in the tent on Sunday, and I am to preach on Sunday to another bumper. It makes you feel that you are in a city of 2,000,000 and a country of limitless population, all thirsting for knowledge, but it makes me feel old and solitary, and your letters and Andie's all the more refreshing. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 61 To the Same The University, Chicago, 3rd July 190L It is 20 minutes to 8 a.m., and I have just finished my breakfast, a large saucer of brambles and cream, also toast and coffee ; don't you wish you had been with me ? Perhaps, however, you will give up the brambles, when I tell you that the heat has been such that on Monday there were ninety-six deaths in New York alone, and hundreds of cases of sunstroke which were not at once fatal. On Tuesday, yesterday, from midnight to noon there were sixty-two deaths, and countless horses fell in the streets dead. Here one lightning flash killed eleven people, and the noise was such that I could scarcely make my- self heard while lecturing, for of course the storm began just as I began to lecture. In fact I have struck an unprecedentedly hot wave, and just as at Montclair they said I was the Jonah who had brought the torrents of rain and the cold, so now they blame me for the heat. They seem to feel it more than I do, although I don't like being sticky all day and soaking all night. To-morrow is Independence Day, and I wait 62 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS to hear the Eagle scream, although my last lecture is to-day. I have found some very nice people here, whom I am sorry to leave ; some of the men are as good as anything we turn out ; the average is perhaps not so good, but they are extraordinarily appreciative. I am sorry to leave so busy and congenial a place ; even the * nigs ' at the hotel where I go to get my boots ' shined ' are pleasant, intelligent, friendly men, with beautiful eyes, affectionate and pathetic. To his son Harry Edinburgh, 22nd August 190L To get a letter from you is not quite as refreshing as having you here, but as a second best it is a fairly good substitute, and worthy of being ' highly commended.' I enjoy hearing of all your doings, and of the growth and dental acquisitions of Dorothy Elizabeth. That is rather long ' to run about the doors wi',' but I don't see any tolerable abbreviation. Perhaps she will invent one for herself that will stick. This evening I got an invitation to go back to America in spring. Would you go with me for a month if I paid your way ? Could you LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 63 get away for any decent length of time ? Let me know. I believe I would go if you would come. To the Same Edinburgh, \^th November 190L Your letter as usual was most welcome as a relish to breakfast and an aid to digestion. I do pity you having to make speeches. I think you should have something extra for that. But you will get hardened in time — though indeed I never have, and hate it as much to-day as when I was your age. I congratulate you on getting the puppies off your hands. I think, were I you, I should claim all you realise by them, as I am sure their keep, adver- tisement and travelling expenses, not to speak of mental worry, must amount to quite as much as you will get. Frank is at Oxford to-day. Here enters a telegram, ' Oxford four tries. Academicals one goal.' I fear the long reign of the ' Accies ' is over and they are on the down grade. I think it is a great sign of prudence in Beth not to walk soon. She is fairly heavy and might bend her ankles if she tried too soon. 64 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS I am sorry you are not to be with us at Christmas. It would have done us all good to have had Clarence and you, not to speak of Beth. We must try and do something in common in summer, if all 's well. To the Same Edinburgh, 25^A November 190L Your letter as usual gave us a good start for the week. Thanks, I won't need the knickers, as I don't intend to accept the chair ^ — not solely on account of the objectionable dress. I am being abused all round for not doing so, but I am not in fault, as I was never told that my name was to be put up, else I should have stopped it. Yes, I '11 send you in a day or two some magazines and readable matter. It 's delightful to hear of Beth's attainments. She must be a great treat to you and a continual joy. Tell me fully of all her doings. I have a good deal to write to-night yet, so I must stop. 1 The Moderatorship of the United Free Church. 1 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 65 To the Rev. Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll Edinbtjbgh, 24:th December 190L I have just been reading your column in The British Monthly, and must thank you for your generous words. The hyperboles of friendship are more pleasant to read, even if as wide of the mark, than the misrepresentations of enemies. At this season painfullest memories crowd in and benumb me with irresistible frost, and your words do much to warm and cheer yours with best wishes . . . To his son Harry Edinbttegh, 2ith December 190L Beth has just arrived, and brightens up my study and my heart. It 's one of the prettiest photos I have ever seen, and I prize it highly. What a comical little phiz she has, and what a strong independent little woman she looks. Take care of her. Thank Clarence most cordially. I could not have got anything I would have had more pleasure in. To Mrs. Watson Edinburgh, 1st January 1902. There is no question that one of my first duties this new year is to thank you for the E 66 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS delightful break my days at Largs have made in the monotony of my life. You partly know what a very great pleasure it is to sit at Dr. Watson's feet and to live in the atmosphere of your considerate and reviving kindness, but I think you cannot quite understand how much it is to me. I am greatly set up by my visit, which in every part of it was thoroughly enjoyable. On Sunday I preached twice in the ' Temple.' ^ I do not remember that I ever had the privi- lege (?) of saying my say out of an alabaster pulpit before, and certainly I never accompanied so large and gorgeously surpliced a choir nor so loud and aggressive an organ. But by some strange influence which pervades Baptist churches I was not put out by the grandeur, but rather enjoyed the services — and had abundant congregations. To John M. Grant Edinburgh, ^th January 1902. How are you and Mrs. Grant getting through the winter ? Well, I hope, and verifying the rash statement that ' health is in the dwellings of the righteous.' 1 Coats Memorial Church, Paisley. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 67 Good pens are not a speciality of the houses of the righteous. Hence this writing, or is it the paper ? I think the paper. We have got to work again after a busy hoHday, and things are running at their usual pell-mell speed, leaving no time for quiet think- ing — perhaps as well, for quiet thinking leads to nothing generally, only to indolence and self- satisfaction and severance from the world. I wish I could live as a spectator through the next generation to see what they are going to make of things. There will be a grand turn up in matters theological, and the churches won't know themselves fifty years hence. It is to be hoped some little rag of faith may be left when all 's done. For my own part I am some- times entirely under water and see no sky at all. Kindest regards and best New Year wishes to yourself and Mrs. Grant. To a Granddaughter^ aged 3J Edinburgh [March 1902]. Darling Kitty, — Not for a long time have I seen anything I was so glad to see as your 68 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS letter which came this morning. We are all so glad to hear you are getting well again, and very glad to hear too that you have been so good taking your medicine and not making a fuss about your poultices. You know I once knew a nice little boy who when he was ill would not take his medicine, and so he never got better at all. Tell ' Miss Pussy Cat ' that we are all deeply in her debt for taking such good care of you and being so kind to you and making you well again. Jessie wants to know when you wish some more of her jelly, so tell Mother to let us know. And what do you think ? Uncle Frank is in bed to-day with a bad cough, and Uncle Marcus is coughing too and has a sore throat, and he has to go out to-night to sing, at least to croak, to 300 or 400 young women who work for Nelsons the publishers. Tattie is coming to take tea with me to-day, and Aunt Marcia and Miss Stewart, and they will all ask me, first thing. How is Kitty ? So do keep well that I may be able to say ' Oh, Kitty is just the same " protoplasmic primordial globule " as ever, and as merry as a grig.' Good-bye, my little duck, and take great care LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 69 of yourself so as to be soon and soundly well ; and pick off the hundred dozen of kisses hidden in this letter from your loving grandfather . . . To his daughter, Mrs. Gray Edinburgh, 4^/i Afril 1902. This is most distressing. I can do nothing but sit and think of you and the dear little patient. I hope you have got the nurse back ; it 's far too much for you, as the anxiety will be more wearing than the watching ; and the bitter pain of seeing her suffer will be worse than either. How empty everything seems when sickness like that comes in. If your Mother had only been with us what a comfort she would have been. But I hope the Doctor's confidence that she will get safely through will be justified by the event. Certainly these relapses look as if there were some evil he had not yet got at. We can but hope and pray. To the Rev. Henry Sloane Coffin Edinburgh, 1th April 1902. I have delayed writing to you partly through 70 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS lack of time, partly because I wished to give you time to make up your mind to spend your holiday here this summer, and partly because I wished to see Macaskill in his manse before writing. Yesterday I preached for him, and in the evening we had a walk and a good talk about you, and the personality of God, and some other matters. He is doing very well, as of course you know, and I greatly enjoyed being with him. The people are already quite in love with him. I hope you see your way to come over here. I have kept August free from entanglements with greedy, sermon-requesting ministers, and would be overjoyed to spend some of it or all of it with you. It would make for me quite a good holiday. I am still living in the memory of the enjoyment you gave me last year ; and oftener than you know I am in 13 W. 57th Street, although alas ! only in spirit. Do say you will come, and when. We have had a pleasant enough session — though College is a different place with Davidson gone and Rainy only occasionally appearing. I hate all changes, and the world is all change. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 71 I was much ashamed of the Lectures on Paul I gave at Chicago, and have been re- writing some of them. But I find it very hard to get to his standpoint and see with his eyes. I must now set to, and finish Hebrews, and then I wish to write on ImmortaHty and the Eg3rptian Papyri, two subjects (please), not one. I have an invitation to Holland House ^ to dinner with the President of the Bible Teachers' College next week, but I think it 's rather far to go in a dress coat. To the Same Edinburgh, 20th May 1902. No letter I have received this century has given me greater pleasure than that which yesterday reached me and conveyed the infor- mation that you will be here on the 26th July. The calf is not very fat in comparison with those of New York production, but such as he is, he shall be killed. Edinburgh will be empty, I fear, by that time, but we shall hope to find means of helping your holiday. By that time surely we shall have some warm ^ Hotel in New York. 72 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS weather ; at present we are held by the most persistent cold I ever remember ; sleet, showers and bitter wind prevail. I am interested in your discovery of the exalted Christ, and there is much to talk over in that direction. I doubt if we can make much of a personal Spirit interposed between Christ and us ; you notice how Paul oscillates between Christ and the Spirit, and scarcely relieves the difficulty by ultimately saying ' The Lord is the Spirit.' I am going to Oxford to-morrow, to read a paper on the Trustworthiness of the Gospels, and to preach on Sunday at Mansfield College. Have you read Contentio Veritatis by six Oxford tutors ? I think you would find a good deal in it. To his daughter, Mrs. Gray [Edinburgh, May 1902.] I have had a great time at Oxford ; met everybody I ever heard of. Dined in Lincoln, Exeter, John's and Mansfield. Read a paper to the Society of Historical Theology. Saw the College eights race two nights, the Australian match another day, and had some LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 73 of the best talks I ever had with some of the dons I was introduced to, besides seeing more pretty and prettily dressed girls than ever I saw at one time before ; and got eight guineas for enjoying myself. I fear I have only brought home about three of them, and a fearful cough. I was staying partly with A. J. Carlyle, who goes to Manchester to lecture on political economy. Herbert should seek him out ; he would find great spoil in him. To Mrs. {G) Edinbtirgh, Ylth July 1902. I should sooner have thanked you for your ' consolatory ' letter, but I have done little but groan since I got it — not because of it, for it was consolatory in so far as it was interesting, and the whole three sheets were that. But I have really been having what the boys call a very ' thin ' time, doing little else but groan and try new devices for sitting, lying, or stand- ing at ease. I have not yet found any posture which can cheat the devil which men call sciatica. I agree that people often pride themselves 74 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS on the quality they are deficient in. What has interested me more is another form of the same thing, that they desire to excel and are proud of excelling in trivial and alien pursuits. Samuel Johnson was far prouder of being able to ride to hounds than of writing the Dictionary and leading the literature of England. The reason is the craving to be complete. But I am not going to moralise, though I delight in your moralisings, and gape like three nestfuls of callow birds for more. To the Same Edinburgh, 16fA August 1902. Can you take me in on Wednesday the 20th for a few days ? You promised to be frank if it was not convenient, so I trust to your telling me if it is not. Please say also what train and what station would best suit you. I have not answered your letter, not because, as your highly educated daughters might in- sinuate, I have not yet been able to read it all, but because I wished to see my way ahead a little in arranging my movements. I ought to go now to a Hydropathic to be ' finished,' but LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 75 to my secret joy I find the Peebles place is full, and I conclude without further enquiry that all the others are also full. But I am almost quite well. I think a day or two with you will be delightful, as I am strong enough to stand the longest conversation, and even to bear up against the gibes of the younger generation, or the treacherous attacks of the kitten. Hoping to see you soon . . . To Miss {C) Edinburgh, \Wi August 1902. Your letter, received this morning, has given me so much pleasure that I must write at once to thank you for it. It is delightful to picture you having so good a time in your country home with all the glow of Northfield in your heart. I wish very much I could have been there, and I think with regret of the fine talks I might have had with you ; but I am sure John Kelman would be better for you, and I have heard from other quarters how valuable his services on your side of the ocean have been. The atmosphere generated by such a gathering as Northfield is of real value for the kindling 76 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS of feelings and resolutions which do not flourish readily in colder temperatures. ' We cannot kindle when we will The fire which in the heart resides ; The spirit bloweth and is still ; In mystery our soul abides. But tasks in hours of insight will'd Can be through hours of gloom fulfill'd.' It is the carrying out and expression of the great life God gives us in the heart which is the difficulty and the test. For you, I like to picture a beautiful and happy life, full of love and growing strength of character, and yet the reality will likely be quite different. The comfort is to know that out of a life quite different from that which fancy sketches, the greatest results can be won ; and I am glad to see that opposite your birthday in my text- book are the words ' All things are yours.' My good wishes for your birthday come rather late, as I did not know when it was, but they are none the less sincere, and my sons join in wishing you the utmost of your desires. We very often talk of you, and as this summer came on, ' How I wish Miss was to be here again ' was frequently heard from one or other of us. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 77 Frank is with me, and goes off this week. I am going away too for a bit. Frank takes great care of me, mothers me in fact — especially at present, as I have not been quite well. Thank you very much for the photos. They give a most attractive idea of your home. I hope this will find you there. Please give my very kind remembrances to your Father and Sister, and accept for yourself a great deal of love ; and please write very soon again, telling all about yourself and your doings, which are always of great interest to your affectionate friend . . . To Mrs. [G) Edinburgh, 2&th August 1902. I was very sorry to bring my visit to a close and return to my dreary habitation. The welcome given me by my extravagantly affec- tionate dog was touching, but seems only to accentuate the absence of what made four walls a home. This house often seems to me the very ' abomination of desolation,' and I am proportionately grateful to those kind friends who take me out of it for a space. I enjoyed my time with you very much indeed. 78 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS You should be a very thankful woman, and I suppose you are. 's suffering face rather haunts me, and must pain you continually, but surely she will light upon some wise man who can give her relief. Meanwhile she is in a greatly educating school — the highest form. You told me to let you know how my garden looked to an eye carrying in it still the images of sweet peas and begonias. Well, I can only say that I am thinking of throwing it open to the public these fine days, for I feel sure that if I don't, florists will find their way in, and the temptation to purloin would be too great. I have not yet visited my vinery, as a kind friend has given me more grapes than I know what to do with. I think summer has really come at last, and I hope you may all fully enjoy it. With grate- ful regards to Mr. and yourself, and all the others who gave me so happy a time , . . To the Rev. Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll Edinburgh, 1st November 1902. I am sorry to bother you when you have so heavy a handful already, but I have made up LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 79 my mind that my connection with The Expositor, so far as regards looking after the literature, must cease. So please send me no more of the books sent for review in The Expositor. Of course you will find it easy to get some one to do it better than I have done. Since I was ill in summer I seem to have dropped into old age, at least I cannot rejoice in work as I once did. I have great pleasure in my College work, but when I am through with it I seem to have no pith left. To the Rev. Henry Sloane Coffin [Edinburgh, ? December 1902.] Just a line to thank you for Prof. Brown's book. It is full of meat. I have read two chapters, not the first two, with admiration and profit. The students at Union are to be envied. Jim Simpson has come home on fire with enthusiasm for all things and persons American, wishing to go back at once, and to make his home among you. He has seen every one, and is full of matter. Things wag on with us as of yore. We have no geniuses in College, but a lot of steady 80 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS workers. Sometimes I am greatly depressed about the whole state of things in this country. What all the changes will end in, who can tell ? I have just had two days in the country with Whyte. He is so busy with his class work — this year the Stoics and chiefly Cicero (!) — that he has no thought for things in general ; but it is most inspiring to be with him. He is so en- tirely alive. I hear that your fate is decided, that you are to go deeper into New York. I think that is the place for you, and oh ! to have your powers and your opportunities. Every week I feel increasingly my narrow limits, and look with despair at the mass of work to be done and that is scarcely touched. Remember you will always do a good action by writing to me. I know how busy you are, but quarter of an hour will be well bestowed on yours ever . . . To Miss Crum^ Edinburgh, 2nd January 1903. Your lovely book has come. Did you know ^ Miss J. G. Crum of Danefield, Largs, sister of Mis. Watson. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 81 that I am as fond of pictures as if I were four years old, and as fond of animals as St. Francis ? The book is very much like Seton-Thompson's, and I am charmed with it ; and as I have stopped shivering and sneezing I can enjoy it thoroughly. Thank you very much. I hope you had a pleasant New Year's Day, with something to give you fresh courage and hope, so that you may continue to diffuse these, and that in your diffusing you will remember your most sincere appreciator and friend . . . To his niece, Mrs. Young Edinburgh, 2nd March 1903. You and your mother are very Httle out of my thoughts these days, and Marcia and Andie both send on any news they get, but I am none the less grateful to you and Mr. Young for find- ing time to write. The deafness is a great aggravation, as you say, and your Mother will need all her placidity and patience and gentle- ness to bear up. But she has compensations, her every wish anticipated and everything done that love can. Then she is so sure that she is in the loving hand of her Father, and that 82 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS all is well. One really envies her her faith and patience. Your last note is the most hopeful of all, and I quite understand how changed a world it would be to you without her, and we cannot but desire her presence even though enfeebled. And yet if it is to be a burden to herself, and if she should have to go through all this again, and perhaps worse, we must be content that she should enter into rest. Please give her my fond love and try to let her understand, what I daresay she already knows, how much she has been to us all and how much happiness she has often given. To his S071 Harry EDmBURGH, 1th March 1903. This small sheet means that this is only a card of enquiry for the mother and babe. Tell Clarence how highly I appreciate her holograph note. I hope it did not tire her to write it. She and Mamie will be wishing to compare infants, and I hope they may grow up knowing one another, although both you and Mamie are likely enough to shift in course of time. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 83 Frank is anxious to come and inspect his nephew, and so am I, but we must let your home get shaken down into normal ways first. Your boy will be Marcus vii., and long may he reign. How curious it is that we should so little be able to prognosticate his future. But he is well off having you for his father. Above all make him obedient. To his son-in-laiv, the Rev. A. H. Gray Edinburgh, lOth March 1903. I don't see why I should not baptize your babe on the second Sabbath of April, not the first, although I am a very poor hand at baptisms — even worse than Paul, who evidently kept no register. I am very tired. Have been re-writing Paul, and trying to put a little more life into my lectures. All I have succeeded in doing, I fear, is to take a good deal of life out of myself. To a Grandson, aged nearly 3 [Edinburgh, March 1903.] My dear Arthur Alexander Gray, — I am very sorry to hear that you all, both Arthur, Alexander, and Gray, have been ill, but I hope 84 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS Arthur is now well, Alexander better, and Gray best. You made a great mistake in finding out you had a liver. Boys should he livers, and should not have them. No one under fifty years of age should know anything about them, so just send a P. P.O. card to yours (Mother will tell you what that is) and say * Good-bye, my dear liver, for iver and iver.' I would have sent you a box of chocolates, but you would not have been allowed to eat them, and your mouth would have watered so that your pillow would have been quite wet, which would have bothered your kind nurse. I am sure, dear boy, your Mother and nurse are giving you a fine time in bed, and I would like to look in and see that grand train I hear you have got. But I '11 tell you what will be still better ; if you get well soon, and you and Mother come in the real TRAIN to Edinburgh, and stay for a long time with your affectionate Grandfather. To his sister Andrea Edinburgh, 23rd June 1903. It was a great joy to see your hand- writing LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 85 again, but I hope you won't at once plunge into activities, weeding, etc. Remember you are over thirty. A delightful soft rain has at last come, and I suppose your garden is giving thanks. All the time I was at Kepplestone, I was longing that you could step out on to the wide lawn, shut off from all town association by high trees and lovely flowers and the singing of myriads of birds. It is a most charming residence, and just a hundred yards beyond the car line. Thirteen acres of ground well kept, the purest of air, a carriage and pair always awaiting you, and kind, hearty, intelligent people inside. Mr. Ogilvie gave me two hats, a silk hat and a clerical felt, and I got two guineas for each lecture, so I had some material return for my week of poison — the air was inexpressibly bad. . I went round the links twice. It 's a great course. Just on the blue, blue sea, and with a hot sun and a keen air ; it was altogether delightful — medicine in the pleasantest form. The School was a great success, over 200 enrolled, but you will hear all this from Kathie. I praught in the University on Sunday, and enjoyed it. The place was full, and a lot of 86 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS Professors in their finery and girl students in their summer adornments. To the Rev. Henry Shane Coffin [Marshall Meadows, Berwick-on-Tweed], 2Qth July 1903. I am truly grieved to hear of your illness, and hope that by this time you have found deliverance from both its cause and its conse- quences. Pneumonia is not a thing to trifle with, nor to get too soon well from. Don't hurry back to your work, and obey your doctor. The one result of your illness I am in doubt about is your retiring from the Church Extension charge ; but I think you are right, and it is really so difficult to measure the good one may do in various places and conditions that I am inclined to yield to providential leadings more passively than perhaps is wise. But where an illness like yours intervenes the decision is made easier. Turning from the bad news of your letter to its good news, it is a great joy to me to think you may come back with me next year. I certainly accept your invitation to stay with LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 87 you. It is a main reason for coming to America ; but probably I shall be obliged to go straight through to Lake Forest as soon as I arrive. But all this can be spoken of nearer the time. I am not going to take any engage- ments beyond the beginning of June, but if this were too early for you to leave, I could stay on doing nothing. Sometimes I feel as if it were rash in me to engage to go at all, for I have been feeling very old this summer, and very tired. We had excellent meetings at Aberdeen. Both Denney and Garvie are, I see, publishing their lectures in The Expositor. Since coming to the country ten days ago, I have been reading with much enjoyment Seeberg's Grundwahrheiten, which probably you have read long ago. It 's a great relief from the worrying at the details of the Gospels which I need to read but of which I am sick and which only does me harm. I wish somebody would stop the stream of criticism and say something convincing about the existence of a personal God. For really, if that is made sure, other things run of themselves ; and for aU other knowledge I for my part am content to wait till -HMJ" 88 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS we get a higher point of view and glorified eyes. Don't you admire a man like Sanday, who is immersed in critical enquiry and yet keeps his eye steadily on the great things and pre- serves the fineness of his feeling and devoutness ? I am so glad to hear you are reading Shakespeare. He never disappoints. He is like an elemental force in nature. Could you not get a set of sermons out of his plays ? Our man at Madras, Wm. Miller, is fond of doing this. Write again as soon as you can. I am sure no one prizes your letters more than . . . To Mrs. Lowe The Great Lone Land, [Edinburgh], St. Grouse Day [1903]. Your invitation makes me think better of the race, and would make me think better of you in particular were that possible, and the mere thought of exchanging this wilderness for the wilderness of Loch Voil, where at any rate the voice of a cock can be heard, is inspiring ; and no words could express the pleasure I would have in spending some days in your society, LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 89 for honestly it is one of the joys of a somewhat grey life ; but I don't see how I can get away. I get entangled somehow in such heaps of little things, each of which seems nothing when I engage to do it, but when it comes to perform- ance the molehill becomes a mountain which won't budge however loudly I shriek Be thou removed. At present I see no prospect of getting my head above water before College opens. Of course it is work I like, but I am very conscious of being in my 70th year, and unfit for the toil a younger man can easily undertake. We worshipped in Palmerston Place on Sun- day and heard Caiaphas. I don't mean to compare our high priest to the Jewish rascal, but the subject was ' Caiaphas ' — an old one already printed, but, as I need not say, very good. With gratitude for your heart- warming invita- tion and love to Dorothy I remain . . . To Mrs. {G) EDmBHRGH, 1th September [? 1903]. This delay in answering does not look as if 90 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS I appreciated your letter, does it ? But things are not as they seem. I have found much cheer in your letter, and hope for a repetition of it soon. We have been having the pick of the weather this August, and while floods are reported from London, from Perthshire, and everywhere else, we have been a Gideon's fleece, dry while all around is sop. I hope you have had some sunshine, and that you are all the better for it. I have been at home all August trying to prepare for our winter session, without signal success. I think I am getting mouldy. I hope you are liking Glentirran, and that you are accumulating ideas for a permanent mansion. A well-planned and pleasantly situated house is an excellent investment. When your garden is made I shall be glad to give you some valuable shoots from my well- known horticultural plots, and if you care to examine my methods you are very welcome to do so, and cannot fail to derive hints of a serviceable kind. How is Miss finding scope for her energies ? I fancy there is no golfing. If LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 91 she rides, I hope she has a horse that enters sympathetically into modern scientific progress as manifested in motors. How long are you to be in banishment ? Are you never in town ? Do your dresses never wear out ? or do you never long for the sunshine of the East ? I mean the Scottish East. Please remember me when four o'clock comes round, if you should be in Edinburgh. To Miss Crum Edinburgh, 6th October 1903. I am sure you will enjoy Moberly.^ For even if you do not agree with him he is an excellent talker, and of so high and fine a disposition that he is most profitable company. I have been spending too much time going from place to place lecturing, and must try to settle again, as I have much to do for College. One can get so very little done. What a baffling, thwarting world it is — things always so contrary to expectation and hope, and so little fitted to satisfy innocent desires. If it does not prove to be a training for some better and ^ Atonement and Personality, by R, C. Moberly, D.D. 92 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS more lasting condition, the whole thing is a freak. Write me again soon. Your letters do me good, and nothing is more needed by . . . To the Rev. Henry Shane Coffin Edinburgh, 5th December 1903. If you knew how my ' heart leaps up ' when I behold your handwriting, I am sure you would never grudge the time you spend in sending me some account of yourself. I cordially agree with you about the essentials, and I never cease to mourn that the Church had not left everything else open, to be determined by individual predilection or opinion. But I think we are getting on towards better times. I to-day posted to you a book which I think will suit you. The Larger Faiths It derives all theology from the idea of God's immanence, and it is, in my opinion, very well done, except that it does not seem to recognise the speciality of Scripture. (By the way, I hope you have nothing extra to pay for postage at your end ; it always seems to me so small a charge for ^ By the Rev. K. C. Anderson. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 93 carrying a book so far.) I have been giving the men more theology than usual this year, and have been enjoying my work. Your friend Armstrong is a very winsome character, and we have four other Americans — all of them creditable men. A movement for reform of our College has been initiated, but I fear the only thing our Reformers will be able to suggest is the lengthening of our Session. I rather think the six months' freedom from professors and text books is the most valuable part of the curriculum. It lets the men grow, gives them time to pursue their own lines of work, and affords opportunities for preach- ing. I am very glad to hear you are into your enlarged church ; as to the men not coming, how would it do to invite them to a talk on the subject, and put it straight to them ? You could do this, though other men could not; and I believe many might be won. It is strange, the drift away from Church that has set in lately. No doubt it is but a passing phase, and a reaction will some time be felt. It is very good news to hear that your brother is so successful. I don't suppose there has ever 94 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS been an age in which the laity have taken such a lift of things. I would like your views on The Larger Faith. You can't imagine how few men there are here with whom it is any good talking theology, — to whom one can say without preface, apology, or explanation, exactly what one thinks. So you may know how I value talk with you, and even letters. Certainly I am a little sur- prised you should be asked to University- preach at Princeton. But this shows how things are moving, and I believe you personally will have a great, and I hope quiet, part in a great advance of thought and of religion in America. I think the most valuable thing Paul gave us was his idea of the freedom of the sons of God. You can feel how his soul danced and exulted in that — ' All things are yours.' But if you have got thus far I am sure you are saying ' (^t/Aw^T^rt,' so I subscribe myself with much affection for yourself and all your family . . . To Miss {B) Edinburgh, December 1903. In this age the main task of a teacher is not LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 95 to feed the open mind with ascertained truths (whose number is infinitesimal), but to open the mind and stir enquiry ; and natural growth does this with the best minds. However, I am not going to viHfy my office, for I hke it, and at any rate the hard work of College keeps our men from idleness and yet gives them leisure to grow, and possibly furnishes them with a few supports on which they may lean and by which their growth may be directed. To Miss {A) [Edinburgh, 2Uh December 1903.] I wish to send you a Christmas greeting, and a very cordial one. I am sure, I know, that what lies deepest in your being contains the germ of all true and lasting happiness, and that whatever you expect in the coming year and whatever it brings, happiness in the best sense is your destiny. Seeking to know the truth and to live in it, as you do, is the straight road to the best that man can attain. I very often find myself wishing you were near enough to have a good talk with. You may fancy that in Edinburgh there should be no lack of men and women who wish to know — 96 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS but I have not the knack of unearthing them. From books one does not always get what one seeks, although lately I have fallen in with one or two which gave me new life for a time, especially Wallace's Man's Place in the Universe and Anderson's Larger Faith. I have also been reading parts of MacTaggart's Studies in Hegelian Cosmology ; and for my classes a good deal on Sacrifice, some old books (very full and good) as well as some new ones, and among them Miss Harrison's Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, a most instructive book. I suppose your sister knows her well. There is an immense amount of knowledge in the book. But alas ! I have only got a chapter of Moberly read, though I am still looking at him on my desk. There is always so much to do to bring to-morrow's lecture into shape that my time flies and leaves little accomplished. When you have half an hour to spare, please spend it in writing to one who will very highly appreciate it. To his niece, Mrs. Young [Edinburgh, 2Uh December 1903.] Thanks from here to Wark. It 's delightful 1 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 97 to have you brought so near. At first look I thought I saw you all on the lawn, but I find you are inside, where it 's best to be at present, and where I have been for three of my holidays nursing my voice and trying to get rid of a bronchial cold. I think I have succeeded, and as I have two services in Glasgow on Sunday I must do my best to get a voice. I fear I have been preaching too much, and yet I seem to be always refusing. I hope your Mother is well, and that you and Mr. Young are also enjoying Christmas. To- morrow (Christmas) I am turkeyfying two nurses from the Sick Children's Hospital and a young American minister who attends College. This is the 113th letter, I think (not positive), I have written to-day, which beats Paul for quantity at any rate. (By the way, speaking of goat's hair tents, if you read from a library, insist on getting Sven Hedin's book on Thibet. It will keep you warm all winter by con- trast, and you will be able to dispense with fires.) Much love (for I must go to the 114th) from yours ever . . . 98 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS To Mrs. {G) {Postcard) {2Uh December 1903.] My dear and only Benefactress, who alone understandest that dogs have a Christmas and love gifts, and who alone makest appeal to my deepest sensibilities by offering not a bone but a plaything, I may even say a playmate, you have my most sincere and canine thanks. My master indeed withholds your gift, and will not let me enjoy it till you can give it me with your own hand. But being a dog of virtue I can wait for that happy time. Counting on a visit from you soon, although I cannot expect you till next week, I remain your most happy and grateful Doodle. To the Same [Postcard) [26fA December 1903.] It has occurred to me that in your charity you might propose to call on Doodle on Monday or Tuesday. I don't think he has any engage- ments on these days, but I have, so I would certainly prefer if you could come on Wednesday. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 99 To a Granddaughter, aged 5 [Edinburgh, ? December 1903,] Dearest Kitty, — Very many thanks and kisses for your lovely envelope holder. It will be most useful, and will keep my envelopes clean and fresh. Can you invent anything that will keep me clean and fresh ? I fear not. Much love and many many thanks. Grandfather. To the Rev, Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll [Edinburgh, ? early in 1904.] I cannot promise you anything definitely, but I think I may pledge myself to two papers. Recently I have been writing half a dozen lectures for America, and they offer me a sum I am almost or quite ashamed to take for them. I have prepared also one or two others as occasional lectures which I may give while over there — for I am not allowed to give the ' Bross ' Lectures before I deliver them at Lake Forest, and they are to be published immediately after. Our college is in very good working order at present, the men quite keen and alive, and 100 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS the discipline perfect. Long may it be so. We have twenty-seven from various outland places, but only seventy of our own — which, however, is plenty. To his daughter, Mrs. Gray [Edinburgh], Uh March [1904]. There is distress here as well as with you, but there must be distress as long as the nation's drink bill is over 170 millions. Isn't it awful ? Where does the money come from ? There was a very sensible contributed article in The Scotsman on agriculture, giving as a reason for men going into the towns that in the country there is no hope of rising. But there is. A ploughman has two grades ahead of him, ploughman's steward and steward. A steward has a comfortable house, the best in the row and often extremely pretty, a garden, pig, and grass for two cows, etc., etc., and a man may bring up a healthy family in the greatest comfort. It 's the monotony of country life, I think, that carries men into town. They want excitement. But the whole situation is desperate. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 101 To Miss {B) Edinburgh, March 1904. ' May we offer one another make-shifts for truth ? ' I would say ' Certainly yes,' if we are to follow God's method. For He has dealt so with our race from the beginning, allowing men to believe just as much as they had grown up to. In fact we have no choice. Had you told your less experienced friend how far off we are from the very truth, and had you at- tempted to state any doctrine in a final form, you would only have scared her and made her despair. She must grope her own way with the aid you give her, and must grow to the perception that in this present life we cannot see things in their final verity. The truth given us by the Apostles in the New Testament is merely, as Matthew Arnold said, ' thrown out towards the object,' and does not completely express it. But it helps rather than hinders, it keeps us in touch with reality till we outgrow it, and for those who never outgrow it it is the very truth. One who can believe in God should be very thankful. Very often, I may say commonly. 102 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS I cannot get further than the conviction that in Christ we see the best that our nature is capable of, and must make that our own. And I am doubtful whether in this life much more is needed. We are here not to know, but to grow in character, to be and to do. It is impossible to penetrate into the things we most desire to know, but conscience with absolute assurance says this or that is the life to live. If any one believes in God, I never can see what more he wants. He must feel sure that he will be dealt with in the most loving possible manner, and is being so dealt with; in short, * God 's in his heaven, All 's right with the world.' I think I 'd be absolutely and jubilantly joyful if I clearly, firmly and unquestioningly believed in God — I won't say and in immortality, be- cause the one carries the other. To Mrs. Watson [Edinbubgh], 2Qth March 1904. I wish to say Good-bye to you and Dr. Watson before sailing for New York as I hope to do next week. I ought to have answered LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 103 your most welcome letter, but the last week or two of the Session has been a most distracting and busy time. At last we are free, Rainy winding up with an address as full of life and careful wording as anything he ever did. We see too little of him at College now, and the little we do see makes us long for more. I hope Dr. Watson shows a proper meekness and submits to being read to. To me it would be a considerable trial, even though the reading voice were no more jarring than — as welcome as — your own ; and I fancy any man who has read as much as Dr. Watson and understands the saving art of ' skipping ' would not readily submit to listen to everything a man has to say. r I find a growing desire to go back on old friends, Shakespeare and Thackeray and so on ; I suppose it is a sign of old age. The new books that appear contain so little that is new, that one begins to distrust present-day writers, though this is, I fear, a fatal mistake, and proves that one has himself degenerated. How about John ? ^ Is it really to come ? I do hope so. * Dr. Watson's First Epistle of St. John, published shortly after this date. 104 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS Even our little flower border is showing some yellow and purple through the smoke, and your garden must be lovely. In America I fear I may light upon the rainy month ; and I see that my host, the President of Chicago Uni- versity, is down with appendicitis. I trust both you and Dr. Watson will have a reviving summer ; and it would be a very happy one if you had all that is desired for you by your most affectionate . . . To A. W. McClympnt Edinburgh, 2Qth March [1904]. It is very good of you to write in the terms you do, and the reaction at the close and retro- spective survey of a session makes one painfully sensible of short-comings and open to any en- couragement. I increasingly see how much a class depends on one or two of its best men ; and your presence and that of Oldham and two or three others has been of the greatest service during the past session ; and for this you have the sincere gratitude of yours most truly . . . LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 105 To John M. Grant [Edinburgh, 2^th March 1904.] Your wail has caught me just on the wing. I leave to-morrow, spend two nights with the Formans, and sail on Friday. I am sincerely grieved that at your age you should find yourself in business straits, as if a life-time's hard work had been thrown away ; but of course, as you well know, it is the results of life in our own selves that tell, and not the results in our condition. Don't you wish you were a Professor ? I should think so — to have £600 a year with no possibility of a rise, and the possibility of finding that your Church has not the where- withal to pay you, and the certainty that she has not any provision for your retiring allow- ance, so that when you are worn out and old and bronchitic, you must all the same turn out all through winter at 8-15 and grind your soul away on teaching. I like it, but you ? No, I don't think happiness lies in that direc- tion for you. Marcus enters now on his period of waiting and probation. For though one of his cousins 106 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS hopes that ' Brief Hfe ' may be his ' portion,' I fear all advocates must be waiters for several years. He and Harry go with me to America, as I am being specially well paid and can afford to give them an outing, as in the natural order of things I shall not be able to do again. For I also am just attaining my three score years and ten. I have a good deal to do, so you will not pull a long face over this short letter, but convey my most hearty regards to Mrs. Grant, and believe me. . . . To Mrs. Lowe (Postcard) [New York, Uth Ap-il 1904.] This is written in a hot New York hotel with a snow-storm going on outside which has ter- minated three days of perfect weather since we arrived. As we were launched by your sweet smiles and ministries, which lived with us all the voyage, so we were welcomed on the quay by that sweet affectionate girl Kate Sands, who had left her house in Montclair at 6 a.m. to be in time to greet us on the ship's arrival. Even LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 107 this truly American welcome did not satisfy her, for she would have us all to spend the night in her house, which we did, much to our enjoyment. Next day the beloved Coffin took us up, and showed us a like hospitality. I told him that if he really wished to do his students good he must take a course with you, from whom he would learn what the pulpit truly needs. All you dear and kind people at home seem doubly, were it possible, trebly dear at this distance, and this fragile card now setting out on its 3000 mile travel carries with it the warm and grateful affection of your much attached friend. . . . PS. Here comes Coffin, and says I am to tell you he has quite lost his Edinburgh accent. To Miss Emily G. Kemp, F.R.G.S. Fredonia, N.Y., 2Qtli April 1904. The Forerunner'^ helped to beguile a voyage which was not wholly sunshine. In fact we struck the equinoctial gales, and although our big ship scarcely acknowledged the heavy seas, yet there were fogs and rain, when one was glad to stay under cover and read instead ^ By Dmitri Merejkowaki. 108 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS of indulging in ' shuffle-board ' or deck quoits. My sons enjoyed the voyage greatly, and so did I. They have now left me and faced home- wards, and I am in a place you are never likely to hear from again — a small town on Lake Erie. To-morrow I move on to Chicago. The cold here is intense and they are having snow- storms, an unheard of experience in mid- April. But their winter has been exceptionally severe and long, and as they keep their houses exces- sively hot, every one has cold. The Forerunner, if not a supremely artistic book, is full of remarkable things. I should say the unpronounceable author was rather a supremely learned scholar than a supreme artist. If he had taken a little more pains and thrown his work into a symmetrical whole, it would have taken rank among the immortals. But the Russians with all their realism and power fail architectonically (what a word !). They are like their own individual figures, powerful and effective, but somewhat clumsy. I felt inclined to treat The Forerunner not as a novel but as a historical treatise, keeping a note-book by me and setting down the striking things. I hope to read it again. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 109 Whenever I come to America I wonder our people don't come more frequently. You, I think, have been here. But so few understand what a surprising country it is, and how much there is in it to quicken thought. If I began about your experience of ' cutting off the right hand ' I would become tedious. Besides, these matters are better talked of than written about. But I may say that this world is unintelligible except on the hypothesis that it is for our schooling, and that he that sows in tears is the likeliest to have sheaves worth gathering. It is truly a death we must pass through, a quitting of our hold on all that once seemed life to us. And it comes to each in turn as so hard and impossible a thing that we naturally think no one could have so hard a lot as ours. But it is impertinent in me to suggest what you already know and practise so much better than your affectionate friend . . . To Ms daughter, Mrs. Gray Chicago University, 2^th April 1904. I have now had a week of Chicago, and I am quite in love with my work. Chapel 10.30, no LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS address of ten to fifteen minutes ; an hour for men or women to consult; lecture at 4. The chapel gives an audience of about 500, the lecture about 200 or 180. On Sunday I preach to the University, and then hurry up to town by train and preach at the Y.M.C.A. to about 1000. On Monday I have two addresses to give besides my usual ones, but every one is going full speed, and some of their steam gets into one and helps. The weather is now very bright, though still cold. asked me to dine with herself, her father and mother and brother, at the great settlement here. Miss Addams', I suppose con- siderably the greatest in the world. After dinner we spent the whole evening in going over it ; they have plenty room, large haUs for music and dancing and theatricals, rooms for weaving, cooking, pottery, carpentery, fencing, music, etc. etc., the whole place humming with life. I get some most interesting talks with men after my addresses at chapel. No women as yet have come, but the men are good fellows, some of them, and the usual difficulties abound. I had to talk to forty or fifty women at their LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 1 1 1 ' Twilight Hour ' on Tuesday. The women are as many as the men. They are not all models of female beauty, but some of them seem nice and good girls. You can't move in the University precincts without running up against them going at full speed, as every- thing does here. I wish you could see it all, it 's so utterly different from home ; but every one says Chicago is by itself, and not to be taken as representing other American cities. To his son Harry [Chicago, May 1904.] It was a great delight to me to get your letter the day before you sailed, and to learn that your visit to Washington had been a success. I felt sure it would be so. And it was great luck seeing Roosevelt, who is a really strong man. I am glad he recognised in you that there is some grit in the old country yet. You must not consider yourself my debtor for the trip, for your company and Marcus' on the voyage and after far more than repaid the outlay ; and the pleasure I have in thinking that you have enjoyed it is beyond price. The 112 LATER LETTERS OF ]\L^RCUS DODS dollars you may have over you can put to your bank account or to Beth's. I have no ex- penses here except car fares, or rather railway fares, for every time I wish to go into town, that is, into the shopping and business part, I have to take an express on the Illinois Central, which covers the distance in twelve or fifteen minutes. The distances are enormous, and I had twice to go yesterday right into town to meetings. I wish you could have seen Chicago. It is quite different from New York, and more cosmopolitan. There are newspapers in thirty languages issued. Last night I was at a Settle- ment close to which are 100,000 Bohemians, as many Greeks, and as many R/Ussians. The Greeks have their signs in the dear old language. This University is a marvel. The gymnasium is enormous, 100 yards long and filled with every kind of apparatus — a swimming bath that invites you in. This morning I took chapel, and had a great audience, women on one side, men on the other. I am to take it every morning while here, and it 's a grand opportunity, though a good deal of work is required even for a ten minutes' address. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 113 I hope you have had a good passage, though the Majestic is not the Celtic, and perhaps you have learned what a ' roll ' is. I had a grand letter from Frank, for which thank him heartily. It had messages to you, but I got it too late to forward them to you — at least you could not have answered them sooner than by word of mouth. I will try to write to him before long. But they keep me fairly busy here. To Miss {D) In Bed [Chicago], Qth May [1904]. Chicago has given me a new friend and a new illness. On Monday I felt I was doing a dis- courteous, as I was certainly doing a self- denying thing, in not walking with you and your mother to the station ; but I was felled with fever and could scarcely drag myself home. I struggled through Tuesday, and through chapel on Wednesday, and was promptly put to bed by the University doctor, and there I have been ever since, my chief company being a temperature, but diversified by your letter and some others. At night I have been seeing H 114 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS visions, and dreaming dreams, and wondering what a queerly constituted world this is. I have had to miss three lectures, which is hard, but to-day, though you could almost hear me cough at Washington, I think I have at last got round the corner ; but there may be several corners, and I won't be too sure. Let us see some good in this evil. Had you been here, I could not have seen anything more of you. Point 2, it has enabled me to see the excellent qualities of Mrs. Harper, who has puffed away difficulties, and treated me as if I were a father or a son or a brother. Then there is the universal lesson for which so much in this life seems intended, to humble us, to make us feel how little our work is missed (our persons, yes, but not our work), and also to elicit a spark of heroism. Well, well, the friendship more than balances the illness, and I wish before you leave your country to thank you for your most frank and kindly reception of 's friend, and for the hope that our friendship may not only afford me these few very pleasant hours of intercourse, but may become in the future a many-ramified and very fruitful plant. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 115 It 's delightful to think that there are such people as you in the world. Kindest remem- brances to your mother and yourself, and with cordial * Bon voyage ' I remain . . . To his sister Marcia c/o President Harlan, Lake Forest, Illinois, \2th May 1904. This place is a dream. Conceive three or four miles square of lawn with a good deal of wood upon it, squirrels, blue jays, mocking birds, catbirds, etc. etc., dancing and singing all round, with the lake's constant roar or moan intermingling. In this lawn set down 100 frame houses of more or less beauty at 400 yards apart. Especially remember to build a handsome school to contain 200 girls from fifteen to eighteen years of age, or twenty, with chapel and school- house ; and a corresponding boys' school and college a mile off. Picture me in one of the prettiest houses it was ever my lot to live in, close to the water, with verandahs all round, and all the ground floor made up of rooms opening into one another, all pretty, all clean and glittering. My bedroom is a joy, full of light, looking on to the Lake, the daintiest 116 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS of beds, and most seductive of couches and easy chairs, pohshed oak floors, and rugs, and a bath-room attached. I have been very well received here, first- rate audiences and very attentive ; two nice looking damsels to-day stopped me as I was walking and thanked me, and invited me to come and see their quarters in the College. Wasn't it nice of them ? I must say I immensely enjoy being here. I meet so many people who show me their best side, and I see so much that is new and so much that is interesting. Now just at present the sun is setting, making all the lake shine, and the wind is raising quite a sea that washes over the little pier below me. The trees are just beginning to come into leaf, but the buds look like gold in the sun. To his daughter, Mrs. Gray c/o President Harlan, Lake Forest, IWi May 1904. I was yesterday agreeably surprised by receiving your letter, which I thought would not appear till to-day. I am quite in love with this place. All that is needed is to have LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 1 1 7 Kitty, Arthur and Stumpy on the sands below my window, and your dear self in any one of the twenty-six comfortable easy chairs that adorn this lovely house. The change from the rush and dirt and wickedness of Chicago to this ideal home in the country is amazingly refreshing. I can prowl for miles and not see a soul, or hear any harsher noise than a cat-bird's song. The weather has become warmer, and although still the trees are so many sticks, there is a promise on some of them, and a shimmer of green. My host is the very best type of American, well-born, well-bred, acquainted with some of our best English lawyers and statesmen, a most kindly loveable gentleman. His wife is delicate, but plays Wagner and Beethoven by the mile. The Professors are mostly Scotch and entertain me to the risk of my digestion. However, I am gaining strength daily, and my cough is very much better. I feel disposed to ask President Harlan to let me stay some days beyond my term of lecturing, but I suppose when the time comes cheek will fail me. At this present moment he is entertaining a little party of children, small mites, playing musical 118 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS chairs and feeding them with ices ; himself the happiest of the crowd. He is the kind of man who makes me wish I were younger, to enjoy the prospect of some years of his friendship. He has just let his house for the summer, as most of the people here seem to do. I only wish I had a place like it for summer or winter. Everything is open, not a fence or a gate in the whole place, only miles and miles of winding roads and lovely lawns, and jonquils and tulips and daffies no end. Saturday 14th. — To-day the wind has gone back into the north, and it 's chilly and gray. But after spending the whole forenoon on my lectures and dictating abstracts to a steno- grapher, I went for a walk. It is so delightful to be so near wild nature as one is here — squirrels flirting with you round trees, and strange birds trying their songs on a foreigner. You never know whether you are walking in public or private grounds. Yesterday I lunched with one of the Professors and dined with an- other, both Scots, and I must have eaten about IJ lbs. of ice-cream, but as I had to lecture immediately after dinner, it seems to have done me no harm. The meals in this house LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 119 are served very daintily. When I was sitting a little ago in the drawing-room (40 feet by 25) the cook came in to change her volume of Sir Walter's novels. I feel rather a fraud receiving £600 for enjoy- ing a charming holiday in a lovely spot and with most desirable people. I must make an offering to appease the gods. Would it do to give an impecunious daughter a little peck at my pile ? What I fear is that when the pay day comes the President will just button his pockets and say ' This is quite too ridiculous. I '11 make it £6 without the nothings.' I preach twice to-morrow, once in the Presbyterian church, small but full, and at j&ve vespers in the College chapel. A week ago the very thought of preaching was over- whelming. I should be a very thankful man, and not least for being able to sign myself your loving father . . . To his sister Marcia Lake Forest, Illinois, 20th May [1904]. I finished my lectures last night. The audiences have been most sympathetic, and 120 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS have increased, the hall being well fiUed every night. To-day I am merely staying on with my busy and capable host and delicate, clever and musical hostess for my own enjojmient; and happily the iced winds have gone and summer, at any rate spring, has at last come. A fine rain fell yesterday, and the trees will now soon respond. I have told you what a lovely place this is, but it would be difficult to convey to you any idea of the hospitality of the people, or of their refinement, and beautiful libraries. I have dined out every night and lunched out often, and the amount of ice I have eaten is appalling to think of, but some- how it seems to agree with me, as I am now very well, save for a slight delicacy of wind- pipe, which the warm weather and the sea will quite cure. I go back to Chicago to-morrow to preach for an old New College man, and then on Monday I hope to take the Twentieth Century Limited, which does the 1000 miles to New York in twenty hours. I sail on 1st June. I wish I could see more of America, but it is to me dreary in the extreme to go about alone, so I think I shall skip Boston. I am very sorry to LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 121 leave this place. The house is so comfortable and beautiful, and the great Lake so good an imitation of the Ocean. I find I must go : this will be my last greeting, I fancy, from this side. To his daughter, Mrs. Gray R.M.S. ' Oceanic,' Uh June 1904. I hope you have got over all your Synod fatigues, and have nothing now but pleasant memories of it. Where did you get courage enough to take the chair at a meeting ? Not from me, and not from your mother. Coffin spoke so lovingly of her, and said how much all the students liked her frank and friendly ways. I have sometimes felt an awful longing for her during this lonely trip, though nothing could be friendlier than ' those delightful Americans.' To Miss [B) Edinburgh, June 1904. If evolution has done nothing else for us it has at least taught us that we are not at the end and final stage, but slowly and painfully 122 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS finding our way to something better — that is, it teaches us patience and hope. Besides, our own experience is quite definite in affirming that it is only through tribulation our kingdom can be entered on, or in plainer language, our trials are certainly the measure of our oppor- tunity of becoming better. James was justified in saying ' Count it all Jo?/,' etc., for undeniably that is the only path for such as we are to any- thing like perfect attainment. The difficulty of conquering temptation, the distress and agony of life, are in point of fact necessary. I know how hard it is to say this to the people who are day by day torn by heart-rending misery. But it must be said. It is to add misery to misery to neglect the consolation that really exists. For those who suffer by the wrong-doing of others there is the reward that they are following Christ. His atonement was nothing more than His quietly and lovingly accepting all that sin could do against Him. It is this that overcomes evil and at last breaks the heart of the sinner. Temptation is our only opportunity of growth — a very commonplace truth, but lying at LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 123 the root of our whole condition in this ^vo^ld. That some people are tempted beyond their moral strength is obvious every hour of every day, but that any one is tempted beyond his strength really (or using the word strictly, ' physically '), is impossible ; no one is com- pelled to be evil, else it ceases to be moral evil. This, which is so easy to put upon paper, is the whole of life's stress and difficulty, and the measure of our trial must always be the measure of our opportunity. It is not that one person needs discipline more than another, but that life presents to each person a special trial which forms his individual opportunity, of conquest or of defeat. Life's crown, its sole resulting gain, is to be found there. It 's often the people who least need discipline who have the heaviest burdens to bear. To Miss (D) Edinburgh, Uh July 1904. I write to you to-day not because I wish to celebrate Independence Day, although I seem to hear the explosions that have been going on 124 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS all morning in and elsewhere, but because your most welcome letter seems to bring you almost within speaking distance. How I wish it really were so. ' They also serve who only stand and wait ' is suggested by what you say of yourself. It is strange how seldom our circumstances exactly fit our capabilities ; and to a spirit like yours I fancy standing and waiting is just the difficult thing to do. But the difficulties of life are the measiu'e of its value, for nothing is so valuable an attainment as complete self-mastery ; the ability to submit and to do precisely as duty calls. One of our greatest thinkers, Butler, says very truly ' Submission is the whole of religion.' I remember what a new view I got of life when I first clearly understood that temptation is opportunity ; that is to say, that our one only path to perfectness of char- acter is by conquering temptation. With- out enemies to conquer we cannot have any victory. But in my desire to prolong talk with you, I become prosy, so I stop, not because I am weary of writing, but because I am afraid to put you to sleep. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 125 To John Colville Edinburgh, llth July 1904. I have not sooner replied to your note, be- cause the question raised is so very difficult. It is in short the question, What is the function of the Church ? Perhaps the simplest answer would be, The Church is intended to maintain in the world the spirit of Christ, and to continue His work. But when the further question is put, How is the Church to do this, is she to fulfil the charitable purposes of her Lord by leavening the minds of her members, or by herself forming organisations for the relief of all kinds of distress, difficulties crowd in. I rather incline to think with you that the latter course is impracticable. The State leaves to private enterprise a very large proportion of the work that brings prosperity and increases the welfare of the State. And the Church, as you point out, cannot undertake the manage- ment of all charitable work. No doubt, as Mrs. Colville says, the Church would be a more conspicuous institution if she were the organis- ing centre of all charities ; but for my part I think the Church as a vast institution is too 126 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS conspicuous already, and that she would in many respects be in a healthier condition if she were less conspicuous. At the same time, the Church is a company of good men, and if they see some charitable work that needs doing I don't see why they should be hindered from doing it, but they ought not to do it as belonging to any particular sect. This, you will say, is to leave the problem unsolved ; it is to refrain from drawing a sharp line beyond which the Church ought not to pass ; it does not reduce the question to a principle which applies in every case. Well, no, it does not, but I cannot find any principle that applies. To Miss {A) Edinburgh, 19th July [1904]. I have just finished a lecture on the Greek Mysteries, which has led me into some curious reading. But on the whole I have received a higher idea of the religious earnestness of the Greeks than I had — although with Sophocles and Euripides before one's eyes their religious- ness is fairly obvious. It takes a long time to LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 127 fathom the richness of the Greek genius, how- ever, and new ' pockets ' of gold are always turning up. To Miss {B) [Edinburgh, Uh August 1904.] You put the whole matter in a nutshell when you say ' It is a question now of life as opposed to ancestor worship.' Put so, surely no wise or good man can hesitate which line he should choose, and which has a future. And I fancy not one of our ministers in a hundred will have any hesitation in choosing, or in refusing to hold his church on condition of preaching in accordance with the dictates of the House of Lords. What the Court of Session may do is doubtful, but I fear they will not try anything heroic. We professors are less to be pitied than the ministers. We can easily find a house where for the present we can hold our classes. And we in Edinburgh are in no worse case than the Glasgow and Aberdeen professors, who can only hold their buildings and libraries on con- ditions which they will not accept. The mess is intolerable, and of the most 128 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS complicated kind, and only time can show all the miserable consequences of having Scottish Ecclesiastical causes tried in England. To Miss (D) Edinburgh, Qth August 1904. When your letter came in I was just sitting down to copy out for you the enclosed, which I thought ' fine ' when I first read it, impressive on my second reading, magnificent when I copied it into my book, worthy of the man and of the people when I wrote it for you. You may be proud that you belong to a country which could produce a man who could kindle so great an elegiac. My reward in writing it out has been the vision of your face aglow as you read it. Don't resent the few false or rather slightly erroneous words that occur. I don't point these out, for there are few greater pleasures in life than to have to do with intel- ligent people who don't need everything ex- plained. I am glad to hear that both you and your mother are finding the Continent restful. Here in Scotland we have had unusually dry and LATER LETTERS OF IVLVRCUS DODS 129 warm weather. But as for the peace and repose of which you speak, we have instead the most turbulent and bewildering state of affairs. By a decision of the House of Lords all our Church property and funds are taken from us and given to about two dozen of our most ob- scurantist congregations, that refused to go into a Union we lately consummated with another Church in Scotland. The decision is so monstrous and so unworkable that Parliament will probably interpose. But at present the whole country is in a ferment of excitement. Write soon that long letter you hint at. At present I find my time gone. Kindest regards to your father and mother, and all the best for yourself. The world I am sure has in store for you what will make you ashamed of ever thinking it dreary. LINCOLN, THE MAN OF THE PEOPLE ' When the Norn-Mother saw the whirlwind hour, Greatening and darkening as it hurried on, She bent the strenuous heavens and came down, To make a man to meet the mortal need. She took the tried clay of the common road, Clay warm yet with the genial heat of earth. Dashed through it all the strain of prophecy ; I 130 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS Then mixed a laughter with the serious stuff. It was a stuff to wear for centuries, A man that matched the mountains, and compelled The stars to look our way and honour us. The colour of the ground was in him, the red earth ; The tang and odour of the primal things — The rectitude and patience of the rocks ; The gladness of the wind that shakes the corn ; The courage of the bird that dares the sea ; The justice of the rain that loves all leaves ; The pity of the snow that hides all scars ; The loving-kindness of the wayside well ; The tolerance and equity of light, That gives as freely to the shrinking weed As to the great oak flaring to the wind. To the grave's low hill as to the Matterhorn That shoulders out the sky. And so he came. From prairie cabin up to Capitol One fair ideal led our chieftain on. For evermore he burned to do his deed With the fine stroke and gesture of a King. He built the rail-pile as he built the state, Pouring his splendid strength through every blow, The conscience of him testing every stroke. To make his deed the measure of a man. So came the Captain with the mighty heart ; And when the step of earthquake shook the house, Wrenching the rafters from their ancient hold, He held the ridge-pole up, and spiked again The rafters of the home. He held his place — Held the long purpose like a growing tree — Held on through blame and faltered not at praise. And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 1 3 1 As when a kingly cedar green with boughs Goes down with a great shout upon the hills, And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.' Malcolm. To Mrs. Watson The Dell, AviBMOBE, 20^A August 1904. This is a lovely spot, but without the wide outlook of Boat of Garten. I regret leaving the place, but especially the company, and really if I put on paper all my feelings about your kindness and tried to express the kind of lift I get from being with you, you would not believe me. Dr. Watson when I first knew him seemed the incarnation of wisdom, but ever since he has been growing, and I have never felt more invigorated than now by coming in contact with so utterly sane and charitable a spirit. Very many thanks for having me. To the Same The Dell, AviEMORE, 2'ird August 1904. You surely mean to break down my modesty altogether. In one sense it is a very great 132 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS pleasure to read Dr. Watson's eulogy,^ for to ^ The reference is to the following character-sketch of Dr. Dods, which, as it has not been printed elsewhere, it is perhaps permis- sible to quote here : — ' A very strong and very safe man, strong in intellect, in moral force and in religious conviction, safe as a devoted servant of truth, rejecting no opinion because it was old and formidable, accepting none because it was novel and interesting, calm and deliberate in judgment, accurate and diligent in investigation, clear and reliable in statement, open to receive all sufficient evi- dence, quick to detect all fallacy in reasoning, impatient of all that is trifling or irrelevant, rejoicing in certainty where it can be found, indifferent to the specious or remotely possible. No gladiator who fights for fighting's sake, but afraid of no adversary and of no conflict, capable of stern and dangerous wrath against aU im- morality, falsehood or trickery, but incapable of rancour, or bitterness, or revenge. A man who does not wear his heart upon his sleeve, but is full of a really exquisite tenderness of feeling. Faithful, or even more than faithful, to his friends, he often sees in them excellences which others cannot perceive, and of which they themselves are unconscious ; and to opponents giving credit for qualities which distinguish only himself. He has a real dis- taste for matters merely ecclesiastical, and indeed for all contro- versy which does not lead to a distinctly moral or reUgious issue. In ordinary intercourse of life not a great talker, hating mere gossip and caring little for what are called " good stories," yet possessing a sense of real humour when by an anecdote char- acter is revealed as by a flash. He speaks little about himself, for he never was a man who could flaunt in the market-place his deeper feelings or, above all, the facts of his intercourse with God ; yet few can spend an hour with him who do not go away stimulated and enriched ; with one voice his students acknowledge this ; with them he is far more than a real lecturer. ' The father of Dr. Dods, whose name was also Marcus, was minister of the Presbyterian Church at Belford, in Northumber- land; he might weU have occupied a far more prominent and LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 133 stand so in his eyes, even though with no true right to do so, is gratifying ; but chiefly it makes me ashamed, as it holds close to the reality an ideal which brings out all the actual flaws and blots by contrast. I take it as an evidence of his goodness of heart, but rather as a rebuke to myself. Thank you very much, however, for sending it. As a piece of literature it is of the highest class. I still look with longing towards Boat of Garten, but every one will be going south next week, I suppose ; or at least a large proportion of people will be leaving Speyside. To-morrow I go home. With much affection for you and yours . . . To the Rev. Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll [Edestbukgh, ? Autumn of 1904.] I believe that Scribner has arranged with Clark to publish my book here. Scribner did not call for me while in town. He was living with Sir John Clark somewhere in the country, and Sir John told me a day or two ago that influential position, for he was an accomplished scholar, an excel- lent mathematician, a thoroughly furnished theologian, and a very able and good man.' 134 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS such an arrangement had been made. I left a typed copy of my lectures with Harlan in the middle of May, and I do not believe one page has been set up yet. Indeed I know it has not, so that its appearance before Christmas is very doubtful. But considering the heated condition of our present atmosphere it is per- haps as well that no additional inflammatory be thrown into the blaze. You deserve well of the U.F. Church for your articles, and I think your paper is finding access — indeed I know it is finding access — where it has hitherto been excluded. I am glad you think of a pamphlet. It will do a world of good, for a mass of people lies open to instruction. I am truly sorry to hear you have been ill, and hope you will be all right soon. You have fought a good fight, but you are needed more than ever. I send you all the reviews I have. I have only one more book, and have not yet had time to read it, as I have been writing one or two new lectures — one on the relation of Church to Creed (by the way. Rainy is to open our session with an address on Creeds and Creed-making), LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 135 and one on Denney's proposed alterations of qualifications for ministry. I am going for a fortnight to England to preach in Bristol and Rochdale, and expect to be back home on 4th October. I am not very well — tired and down. To Miss {A) Edinburgh, &,h September 1904. I am always the richer for your letters. Last night's budget was most acceptable. It was delightful to see you even for that moment at Callander ; but I do wish you lived nearer, so that I might drop in for a talk or some music. I admire and love Dr. and Mrs. Watson more every time I see them. How well one understands the meaning of ' the salt of the earth ' when one knows them, and sees how evil is quenched and put an end to in them, and how good flows from them as from a pure and inexhaustible fountain. His prayers are as helpful as ever they were — so reasonable and wise and devout. One ought to be much the better for knowing them ; and for the time 136 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DOBS I am. Certainly their friendship is a vast addition to life, and it is pitiful to think how many have no such friends. I am trying to write an opening address for our Theological Society on the Relation of a Church to her Creed, and I find it not wholly plain sailing. I am clear that from our members we have no right to ask any confession save that they accept Christ as their living King. But it seems reasonable that from those who teach some guarantee should be taken that they will not teach deleterious nonsense. The question is, How much can you ask ? Must you not largely trust men in this as in all other departments ? I remember that many, many years ago a banker said to me ' You may have what system of checks and tests you like in a bank, but you cannot exclude trust in the men you employ. No mechanical checks are sufficient.' But I don't want to bore you with my lecture. To Miss Crum Edinburgh, 9th September 1904. It is waesome to think of Dr. Watson growing older, but I was greatly struck, this visit, with LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 137 his calm and wisdom. He seems to have got into an upper air altogether and to be above, as indeed he always in great measure was, all the fightings of lesser men. But amid all that must be hard for him to bear, he has not only this entrance into a higher region of life and this eternal gain in character, which is the main thing, but he has Mrs. Watson and yourself, being eyes and everything else to him. To Miss {A) [Edinburgh], \Qth September [1904]. I greatly enjoyed my day yesterday, although I had not enough talk with yourself. Com- pensation in part was made by your brother and Mr. , whose views on various matters, and especially on unity and union, I was greatly interested to hear. I wish I could see more of your brother ; there is much in him that attracts and stimulates. He is alive and real. How thankful you should be to have known your father and mother all your life. I wish I had. It is pleasant to think of you in your pre- sent lovely home, and with so many of your own family about you. These happy times cannot 138 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS be made too much of ; times come when the best of our Ufe is matter of memory, and it is well to have that well filled. Do write when you find time and inclination, and help to keep alive yours affectionately . . . To Miss Emily G. Kemp, F.R.G.8. Edinburgh, 5^/^ October 1904. It was a subdued and sad person, filled with rather gloomy thoughts, that journeyed north in my compartment yesterday ; but I found the best remedy for depression was going back in spirit to the last few days and living them over again. I cannot be too grateful to yourself and your sisters for giving me so good and pro- fitable a time. I am beginning to look upon Rochdale as a home of rest where everything tends to resuscitate what is good in one. I am also grateful to you for bringing me into ac- quaintance with your guests. If medals are given for saving life, should not medals also be given to those who renew the best life in us ? On the way north I also saw how I could have made quite a decent sermon to children out of my text. That is always the way with me ; LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 139 I see clearly how to do a thing after I have done it, and not before. A pile of letters, etc., a foot and a half high awaits attention, so I must not talk on as I should wish, but again thanking you for my delightful visit I remain . . . To Miss {A) Edinburgh, \^th October 1904, It is unpardonable of me not to have acknow- ledged your delightful note pencilled in the train, but the delay is due partly to the con- viction that you must be aware that all your letters are valued by me, and that I don't need to say so. I was particularly pleased to get my own thoughts about Dr. Watson put in your own always perfect language. I have always been struck, and never more than this summer, with the wealth of ideas for prayer which he finds in any and every passage which may be read. I will never forget one morning when after reading the 2nd Psalm he made me feel, as the Psalm did not, God's indignation at sin. What a wealth of ideas and of ex- perience lies in his mind, and how simply and unconsciously he pours it out. Say an encour- 140 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS aging word to him in my behalf ; but your pre- sence and affection must help him greatly to bear the very great privation of semi-blindness. On Sunday last I was encouraged to find 1200 men, a solid bareheaded mass, waiting to hear about the Resurrection of Christ. So there are still a few who seek truth. I was greatly encouraged also by some words of Cuthbert Hall's, ' I believe in the human need of God, and the psychological necessity of worship as a part of life. The East would have taught me this, if the West already had not done so. The souls of men must speak to God, for they are of Him.' To the Same Edinburgh, 19^7^ October 1904. Jones is most characteristic. His optimism and high spirit communicate themselves for a time at least ; and that is well. What a picturesque style he has, too. He must do immense good as a professor, inspiring his students and lifting even the sluggish and indifferent. Many thanks for letting me see his letter. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 141 You will see that we are still to be allowed, at least for four days, to continue in our College. Why they cannot allow us joint occupancy I cannot see. We could easily meet at different hours. But the University is most kindly tak- ing pity on us and offering us shelter in their buildings — an arrangement which with some dis- advantages has also very obvious advantages. Our jaunty Principal opens to-day, and he will have some racy remarks on our position. What a blessing it is to have a man for our head who has the saving grace of humour, and who never loses heart and hope. But this wretched case usurps everything — time, thought, and letters. It is not easy in the midst of it all to maintain the shining morning face, which according to R. L. S. is our first duty. But people like yourself who dwell in higher regions are an incitement and a help ; and keep meaner people from sinliing quite too low, as is the temptation of your ever affectionate . . . To the Same Edinbuegh, %ih November 1904. This time last Sunday you were brightening '■""■• 142 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS this room and its inhabitants by your presence and talk ; and missing you now as I do, I wish, so far as inadequate pen and ink may, to con- tinue our talk. But first let me thank you for your letters, always so welcome and never disappointing. I return Miss 's, and the sonnet.* I am taking the liberty too of sending you the volume in which it occurs. I have not many more years to read my books, and it is a pleasure to leave them in sympathetic hands. These translations of Symonds' are, I suppose, as well done as any can be, yet there is a loss in all translation — a loss of atmosphere and colour. I quite agree with you in thinking that furious assertion of the arguments against God's ex- istence are one manifestation of the thirst for Him. But if one could only be absolutely sure, convinced beyond all questioning or possibility of questioning, how changed every- thing would be — how easy to see all things in God and to live in Him. I have sometimes found light in Christ's reference of His holiness to God — ' There is none good but One ' — He Himself spotless, unconscious of the slightest departure from the Supreme Will, and yet as * Michael Angelo's Heart-Coldness. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 143 conscious that this was not of Himself but maintained by God. Is it possible He can have misinterpreted His own consciousness, and not known where His character came from ? Could it have been built upon any other foundation than belief in God ? But I know how weak and ineffective argument is, and how each soul has to fight its own battle and find its own way to its own resting place and its proper nutriment. How impossible, however much you love a person, to lift them to your own standing-ground, still less to a desirable height above it. To Miss Emily O. Kemp, F.R.G.S. [Edinbuegh, November 1904.] I cannot refrain from letting you know how truly I sympathise with you in the most unfortunate illness of your Mother. I do hope she is by this time past the worst ; but bronchitis, even with no touch of pneu- monia, is no trifle in one at all weakened by previous illness or by years. How you must wish you had either not left Rochdale, or reached Bordighera, but isn't this life finely contrived ^^ 144 LATER LETTERS OF JMARCUS DODS for distressing us acutely ? Well, I suppose — nay, I know — there is some good reason for it, or things would not be as they are. And what I chiefly hope for you is that you may construct, out of untoward circumstances to which ordinary people would succumb, the rich and influential character Christ destines for you. Is it not a better preparation for India, after all, than the sunshine of Bordighera ? But you need no admonitions of mine, and I feel it presumption in me to hint at counsel — only I wish to express my sympathy, of which I trust you are already assured, and that you are followed by the best wishes of . . . To his daughter, Mrs. Gray [Edinburgh, 2Qth November 1904.] Here is Saturday night again. The weeks fly, and soon wiU all have run out. I half thought Doodle's weeks were all run out yester- day. He ate no food aU day, and looked very doleful, though he would not tell us where he was sore. To-day he was the same till 5-30, when he cheered up and said the anguish had abated. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 145 Last evening, what do you think, I was at a concert, a very small, semi-private one, the Bach Society's. played, two sonatas of Bach's, and sang two bits of a Mass, both very fine. To Miss {B) Edinburgh, Uk December 1904. Paul's view [of the atonement] is quite clear — man is a guilty individual at God's bar, he is condemned to die, and Christ suffers in his room ; and considering that Paul always re- cognised his union with Christ (as few others have ever recognised it), I don't think there is much that is repulsive in that. The writer to the Hebrews finds that men are excluded by unholiness from God's presence, and that Christ by His holiness and sacrifice opens a way for them into God's presence and favour. A great deal in the Epistle seems to be written from the point of view that it is His personal worth (especially His obedience, see ch. v.), that constitutes Him priest, but that tenth chapter still rather seems to me to demand the supposition that the writer believed that Christ's death was a sacrifice in the then K 146 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS ordinarily accepted meaning of the word. In verses 10, 11 and 12, the words 'through the offering of the body of Christ ' and ' one sacrifice for sins ' fill up the ' I am come to do Thy will ' (of v. 9) with sacrificial contents. I would like to think he only meant that Christ offered His body obediently to the law of death, but it is difficult to believe that. I go over the Epistle every year, and every year I try to find that meaning in that tenth chapter, and every year I fail. To Miss {D) Edinburgh, lOth December 1904. If you are susceptible and sensitive to wireless telegraphy you must have been day by day recognising my desire to write to you, and even almost whole letters written in my mind, but to get them to paper with deliberation in a hurried life such as I have to put up with in winter is not so easy. Still, I thank you for the pleasure I have had in writing you imaginary letters — some of them containing things that your modesty forbids me to put in black and white ; which reminds me to rebuke you for the terms with which you put my modesty to LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 147 the blush in your last letter. If only you knew what I really am — but please don't ever find out, for it is half the joy and more than half the strength of life to be well thought of by those one admires and respects. And this again reminds me that we make too little of our friends. Persons are of course the only thing worth while in human life, but I have persistently believed this for years and as persistently failed to make the most of my friends. And this again brings me to say that has just left me after a most delightful visit of a few hours. Friendship with her is a late possession of mine, though I have known and admired her for many years, but I have only lately come to that point of intimacy when one can speak of the things that most concern and burden one. She is a wonderful help to me, and I am always the better of a ' two-handed crack ' with her. She is silent in company, and really the companies are rare in which one can speak of the deepest things, but when alone she throws out so many just and elevating ideas that I cannot but count her friendship one of the best things in life. Her faith is so true, and yet so free and reason- able, that she invariably gives me brighter and 148 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS more hopeful thoughts. But you know her, and I need not further sing the praises of . I quite sympathise with your admiration for the vital Greek figure — beauty of form appeals with a power all its own — but in Rome you will find that the things you most admire, or some of them, are associated with suffering and weak- ness and decay, with the spirit that conquers the squalor and disease and death of physical nature. It is a good instinct to crave for health and vitality — else why did Christ groan at the grave of Lazarus ? Slight defects in physical structure account for much of the peevishness, the cowardice, the sensuality, the cruelty of men, and improvement in vitality ought to be equivalent to improvement in morals; but it isn't — often the contrary — and what we have to learn in this life is to conquer material and physical things by that faith that overcomes the world. But I, who have never been successful in this line of things, am not to preach to you who have begun, by your nature, miles ahead of me. When you can spare time from gazing at the Djdng Gladiator, or at the Coliseum, or at your Italian orphans, and when you wish to gush a LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 149 little either about them or about yourself, you will find a very appreciative and grateful listener in . . . To Miss {A) [Edinbuegh, \2th December 1904.] I never expected I should be obliged to rebuke you, but you must not say such things about trespassing on my time, and so forth. I have no more profitable way of spending my time than in talk with you. Your talk always seems to be just what I need. It is not good to reflect too much on friend- ship ; it is better to take it as one takes the sun and the air ; so let me say once for all that your friendship is one of the best things in my life, and helps me more than I can say. So your generosity will give me as much of your company as you can. This is Monday morning, with the week press- ing, so good-bye. To his son Harry Edinburgh, I4:th December 1904. I hope your theatricals will be a success, and that you will raise a good deal of money 150 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS thereby. I think the theatre of our day has a decidedly lowering influence, making the people vulgar and lowering the moral tone. I know it chiefly through The AthencBum, which gives a weekly criticism of the new plays ; and they seem to me almost always to circle round the supposed miseries of marriage, giving people an entirely false view of married life and gradually teaching them to laugh at the best of human institutions. To the Rev. Henry Sloane Coffin Edinbitrgh, I5th December 1904. I hope this may reach you in time to serve as a Christmas greeting to you and yours. But in your republican and revolutionary and radical country one day is perhaps very like another — saving always Independence Day — and my greetings will not, I hope, turn sour, even though they do come late. It 's a comfort to wish well to those who you know must come to good, whate'er befalls. You have been born under a good star, and when Providence was tired of turning out failures and rotters and resolved for once to do its best and show what was possible in the line of American men. I LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 151 knew you would be fascinated by your work at Union if you gave it a chance, and I am per- suaded every hour you spend there will have its abundant fruit. Don't give it up unless your health threatens. Next year it will be easier, as you will have more material to fall back upon and clearer conceptions of what tells. If this scribble does no more, it will at least let you see that notwithstanding eviction from our College, and abuse generally, I am still alive — at least partially. You may have noticed that a Royal Commission has been appointed to enquire into the whole property question and recommend to Parliament. Meanwhile we so on at the University. To me this is an advan- tage, for as no class-rooms were available for me until the afternoon, I get the whole forenoon at home, and life is a new thing to me. I have found time to re-write some lectures that were sadly in want of such interposition, and I have also been writing some articles for Hastings' new Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels. We dine in the Pleasance Settlement and use one of the rooms there as a common room, so our men are being taught contentment and patience. ] 52 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS President Harlan wanted me to go out again to Lake Forest, but I think I have convinced him that that would never do. But there is a fascination in your country, and I would not wholly object to yet another visit, though I am now three score years and ten. One gets so much miscellaneous work at home in summer that the months pass and leave little behind them — but that is so with life as a whole. I hope M^Giffert is well again. I come across his name in my lectures day by day — frequently, I am sorry to say, to contradict him ; but then he is worth contradicting. Are none of your men over here this winter ? Certainly after so severe a session you will need a long rest here. Be sure you come and make a good long stay. It would make us all very happy, and I long for some good talks. To Miss {B) Edinburgh, 2\st December 1904. You are quite right, I think, in supposing that Christ has permanently lifted the world's thought of God, and has in some mysterious fashion found entrance for His thought into many minds LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 153 that know little or nothing of Himself. That we have got far beyond Aristotle is due to both the causes you mention, is it not ? both to the slowly growing thought of the world and to the revelation of Christ. Happily one cannot separate the one from the other. But what a force Aristotle has been all through the medi- aeval times ; and still there is no text book like the Ethics, used in more colleges than any other book. And may we not suppose that now he knows, and that as Sir Thomas More said ' Sancte Socrates, ora pro nobis,' believing that Socrates was now rejoicing in the light, so may we say of Aristotle ? Across the whole of my life I see Failure written — failure in all the best things, failure especially in the one clear fight I have always recognised I had to gird myself to. My own failure I can explain ; I have not striven hard enough or long enough. Resolute earnestness, that must conquer, has been spasmodic. But I know other people of whom I would not like to say this, and don't know if I should be justified in saying it. One sometimes feels as if one were very near attainment ; it is only an act of will that stands between one and 154 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS one's desire. One seems just to have to make one plunge, just to turn a bad corner, and all would be well. Still it is the problem of life. Why does Christianity do so little for men ? Prof. James mentions several cases like Colonel Gardiner's, in which men never felt any tempta- tion to old sins after conversion. That I cannot understand. The only way out that I ever see is that all the penitences and disappointments and prayers must have had some effect, and that possibly, as in some manufactures and in all fresh evolutionary epochs, we may be ripen- ing for a catastrophic, sudden change which shall give us purity and peace — like a kettle coming to the boil but for long giving off no steam, or a reservoir filling till quite suddenly it overflows and does the work required. Still it is a trying, unintelligible world, and there is nothing for it but to go on fighting ; that at any rate is right. To the Same Edinbtjhgh, 2^ih December 1904. I don't know why it is we are left drowning, with but our lips above water, and sometimes LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 155 not that. It is some encouragement to come upon this in stout old Samuel Johnson's pray- ers : — ' When I look back upon resolutions of improvement and amendment which have year after year been made and broken either by negligence, forgetfulness, vicious idleness, casual interruption, or morbid infirmity ; when I find that so much of my life has stolen unprofitably away [he was sixty- five when writing this], and that I can descry by retrospection scarcely a few single days properly and vigorously employed ; why do I yet try to resolve again ? I try because reformation is necessary, and despair is criminal. I try in humble hope of the help of God.' But I am down, and should not have begun to write — ' Taedet valde sic cotidie vivere in lite,' which might be rendered ' No words can express the irksome weariness of living all our days in pre- carious, undetermined strife.' I have come upon some words of Brother Palemon to Brother Paphnutius: 'Brother Paphnutius, I am but a miserable sinner, but I have found in my long life that the cenobite has no foe worse than sadness. I mean by that the obstinate melan- choly which envelopes the soul as in a mist, and hides from us the light of God. Nothing 156 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS is more contrary to salvation, and the devil's greatest triumph is to sow black and bitter thoughts in the heart of a good man. If he sent us only pleasurable temptations he would not be half so much to be feared. Alas ! he excels in making us sad.' The difficulty is to escape sad and bitter thoughts when one's eyes are opened to see the real motive of his past and to recognise therein the hollowness and vileness of his character. To look back and see that as you have made things, so they must now ever be ; that in large and significant parts of your life you have uttered a character thoroughly detestable and low is ' the crown of sorrow.' May you be saved from it ! But I have no right to write thus. Macgregor was preaching this morning on ' Keep yourselves in the love of God,' and his first words were I ' Walk in the sunshine.' But really that is impossible. It is not impossible to carry one's self sunnily and to act as if nothing but peace and happiness reigned within ; but to have no thoughts but sunny thoughts is impossible. One may believe in forgiveness, but that does not obliterate the past ; one may believe in the future, but the past is as solid and actual as LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 157 the future. Do you know the lines of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore : — ' Mais si de la m^moire on ne doit pas guerir, A quoi sert, o mon ame, k quoi sert de mourir ? ' But I don't know why I write you this doleful stuff, unless it is that for me this time of year is always doleful. My holiday has as usual whisked past, and left little behind but a life of Barnabas ! of all people in the world ; but a request for it came from Chicago and I could not refuse. I was two days in the country. I must finish off Barnabas. I think he must have been a very pleasant companion for Paul — handsome, generous, ' easily entreated,' but bold and loyal. To Miss Crum Edinburgh, 2Wi December 1904. You make me quite ashamed by your kind- ness. All I can say is that you could scarcely have sent Professor Bradley's book ^ to any one who would value it more highly. The very look of it is so fascinating that last night when it came I put aside for a while my examina- ^ Shakespearian Tragedy. 158 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS tion papers and took a good dip into the most delightful and charming pages. I see it is full of light, and one does crave an intelli- gent interpreter of Shakespeare — especially if theatres are not frequented, and even in theatres there must in the nature of things be much that is unintelligent and theatrical. Isn't this war becoming quite too terrible ? Have you seen The Heart of a Nation, reprinted from The Times ^ showing the secret of the Jap's power ? I am trying to get a few copies to distribute. It is a very remarkable production, even though taken with some reductions. To Miss [A) Edinburgh, 1,9/ January 1905. I am glad to have several pretexts for writing to you as the dawn of another year breaks. First and foremost to thank you for your letter, which somehow I was expecting last night, although more reasonably you might have expected me to write and thank you for the bright and happy two days I spent at . They are my holiday, and I return to my work refreshed though reluctant. I trust this year LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 159 may be a happy one to all of you, and especially that you yourself may grow steadily stronger. It is good to know that my most fervent desires for your good and the wisest wishes of all who love you are far surpassed by the Wisdom that rules yom' life and the life of us all. I sent the Little Book of Life and Death with the neat words of Thomas a Kempis, * Prudens amator non tam donum amantis considerat quam dantis amorem.' Latin is certainly neat. One is tempted to be even mean in gifts if such words in justification can be cited. Your note on Idealism is true. I have often thought that one great use of death is just what you say, that absence idealises, but I had never extended the idea to ' the present.' Obviously, when stated as you state it, it is true. Thank you for this, as for so many other ideas. Why don't you live round the corner, where I could come when empty ? That, I fear, would mean every day. But among the many true things John Foster said, he never said a truer than that this is a world which dissociates friends. You say that the weakness of the flesh seems to separate us from one another ; and that in 160 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS a sense is true ; and yet one is grateful for the many associations that gather round the appearance and looks and words of friends, for if the flesh is a veil, it is also a very power- ful and vivid medium for the spirit. To the Rev. Henry Sloane Coffin Edinburgh, 18^/i January 1905. I have delayed replying to your letters and thanking you for your gifts under the impres- sion — which has proved delusive — that I might find a good unoccupied hour to spend with you. As you know, mioccupied hours don't occur every day, or every week. At any rate I cannot wait for them any longer, but must thank you for your photo, which is much admired, though for my taste it is not suffi- ciently alive. It is as you may be seen listening to a deadly dull outline of a sermon from one of your men. Professor Wood's book^ I prize highly. I had two days in the country during the Christmas recess, and got some hours at it, but have not had time to finish it. But I like * The Spirit of Qod in Biblical Literature, by Irving F. Wood, Ph.D. I LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS IGl it greatly. It is a fine specimen of scientific method, and I have already learned much from it. For all purposes except rigidly scientific ones he might have spared some of his sub- divisions in his classifications. I am re-writing my lectures on Paul, and will get great help, I expect, from him. Thank you very much. If a book on Shakespeare by Professor Bradley is within your reach, you should read it. It is very well written, and there are in it some fine studies of character. You would, it seems to me, find a few sermons in it. By the way, do you use the Characters of Theophrastus ? or of Bruyere ? They tempt one to imitate them, and illustrate from concrete instances the foibles, weaknesses and vices of human nature, Dante filling in the more general outline. This scrap must serve as a hail from this side, and carries the assurance that you are always in the heart and thoughts of yours ever affectionately . . . To Miss {E) Edlnburgh, 20th January 1905. You will, however, of course come to Scotland. Be sure you let me know your dates, and don't L 162 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS again mix up your moons. Of course you will at once rush to Paris, or perhaps to Rome. Easter is the best time for Rome, but if once you get into Italy there will be no getting you out of it, and Scotland is much healthier. Also any one will tell you that of all cities on earth ours is the most beautiful. I am plodding along, very thankful to have got so far through our session without missing a lecture and without very serious cold or trouble. It is no doubt inconvenient not to be in our College, and not to have access to our own books, many of which I have myself given to our Library ; but after all we have the students, and it is they who make the College. A Royal Commission of three men. Lord Elgin, Lord Kinnear, and Sir Ralph Anstruther, is now sitting to collect facts about us and to report to Parhament, and I hope some justice wiU be done. I must stop. It is a great pleasure to write to you, a greater to hear from you, greatest to see you. In hope of this last I remain . . . To his son Frank Edinburgh, 2Zrd January 1905. I hope your barometer has not been sinking LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 163 as much as mine has. The house seems very empty without you, and I am inclined to wonder why it should be that the necessities of life break up famiUes to so lamentable an extent. However, I am hopeful that this may be for you the first rung of the ladder which leads to a satisfactory settlement somewhere, and I hope in Scotland. You may possibly have a good deal to put up with, though I am hopeful it may not be so. In any case it is a great happi- ness to me that I have never the smallest doubt that you will do what is right in all circum- stances, and help also to keep others straight. If you have not your mother's gaiety, you have her conscientiousness, which is better, and I can't tell you how glad I am that you do not discredit her. To Miss (D) Edinburoh, January 1905. ' Moments there are in life — alas ! how few, When, casting cold prudential doubts aside. We take a generous impulse for our guide And, following promptly what the heart thinks best, Commit to Providence the rest, Sure that no after-reckoning will arise Of shame or sorrow, for the heart is wise.' 164 LATER LETTERS OF IVIARCUS DODS I should fancy that naturally you are impul- sive, but I think I see evidence that your impulses are those of a pure and true nature, and are controlled by reason. And this answers your question about love, does it not ? For love in one person is different from love in another, or in every other. The so-called ' love ' of a selfish or sensual nature is of course not to be trusted, and is pretty sure to come to grief. But love springing out of a nature that really attaches itself only to what is good, and that has had some training in discriminating in life between what is worldly and unworldly, selfish and generous, low and high, is not, I think, likely to fix itself upon an object which will disappoint. It is quite true that the manner in which the finest of women often give themselves to shallow-hearted, evil men is astounding and perplexing. But it stands to reason that a pure nature will choose and cling to what has affinity to it. The best writer on marriage that I ever came across says, ' If there can be little that is genial or cordial in our life, married or unmarried, unless the taste be indulged, for that very reason it behoves us so to raise and purify the taste as LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 165 to be enabled to give way to it in safety and innocence.' It always seems to me that people forget that a man or woman's love must be coloured and determined by their nature ; some can't love at all, others only in a poor and unworthy way. But any one who has a sound heart may risk all that love leads to. My own married life has taught me that love at first sight may be trusted ; that love grows after marriage, and that even passion remains ; and that earth has no richer boon to bestow than the relationship formed by marriage. I could not wish you anything better than the happiness I had, and that I do wish you with all my heart, and no doubt the right man will come along if he has not already come ; but oh ! let him be a man you can respect as well as love. How delightful it must be to be in sunshine instead of as here in fog, frost, snow, slush, and all that is untoward. But we must not com- plain ; for this winter has really not been bad. You say nothing of my pets, the Dying Gladiator, the sitting Agrippina, and the rest. What would I not give for a day with you among all the beauties, and see you glow, and hear you rave — for I hope you would rave. 166 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS I shall never forget one Italian word I learned in Rome, and which should be in every voca- bulary. Going to the Coliseum at dusk and asking the caretaker if we might go up to the galleries, we were answered ' Impossibilis- simo.' Don't bother with the people you meet in Rome ; you '11 find as good at home, but fill your mind with the monuments, the old, not the new Roman world. Perhaps this is heresy. If it is, forgive. Apparently then I, as a person, and not even in Rome, have no claim on your time, so I must stop. I still hope that the fates will allow me to see you before you go back. Remember, Scotland has beauties not found elsewhere. It also contains your very sincere friend and well-wisher . . . To his daughter, Mrs. Gray University of Edinburgh, 1st February [1905], 3.15 p.m. My lecture is so bad that it is hopeless to spend half an hour patching it up, so I choose the alternative of scribbling to you, partly to thank you for your letter, which was so nice LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 167 that I sent it on to Aunt Marcia, and so want another for myself. As you see from the heading of this paper (which I have never before used) we are still in the national buildings. But ' time and the hour run through the roughest day,' as friend William observes, and sometimes I am hope- ful, generally the reverse. If it is the Christian religion that is being exhibited in the High- lands, that religion is very little worth. Has it done more for us ? To his son Harry Edinbukgh, 5th February 1905. You will see that the Principality put the leek above the thistle yesterday on the foot- ball field. I fancy it was a pretty even match. Speaking of Wales, a dozen of our students have taken this week-end to go and see what can be seen of the Revival. It seems to be extending ever3rwhere and to be in large part genuine. I wish the same kind of influence would come here. As I came home on Friday a well-dressed man pitched headlong into the gutter on the South Bridge, and before I had 168 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS gone many yards further I had to go off the pavement to clear another fellow taking its whole breadth. It 's a disgusting state of things. But it 's amazing how long a nuisance is suffered. People grow up used to it, and it 's nobody 's business to put a stop to it. To Ms daughter, Mrs. Gray Edinburgh [February 1905]. Very many thanks for your extracts from the Life and Works of Kitty and Edith M., (who must be a very amusing little person). I fear I have no very interesting books at present. It 's not the season ; ' Book shooting ends 1st Jan.' by my calendar, and only begins again about 31st March. I am looking forward greatly to being with you in April. When do you begin your painting, etc. ? Won't you need to shut the church for some weeks ? and take a hoHday ? The climate of Edinburgh is distinctly superior to any in the British Isles. Rainfall for January this year 1-35 inches ; lovely spring weather all the time just now, not clammy, but fresh, breezy, sharp, lovely weather. I wish Kit could be here, I am sure LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 169 it would set her up. And we do so need a woman in the house, and she would exactly suit requirements. I write to-day because I am to be all Sunday at Lasswade, preaching twice. It 's wicked of men to ask me, perhaps wickeder of me to agree, but I have dangerous lapses into a state of putty when I just say ' Yes ' to anything I am asked. Have you read The Circle by Mrs. Thurston ? I have not read The Garden of Allah. Indeed lately I have been devoting myself after dinner to Horace and Shakespeare, who really stand the fiftieth reading quite as well as the first. Now I must say Good-bye, with every good wish and prayer for you during the coming days. To the son Harry Edinburgh, \Qth February 1905. Doodle would long since have written to Clarence to thank her for the tennis-balls, which are far too good for him, but he has been so occupied playing with one of them and carrying it about in his mouth, as a cat her kitten, that he has found no time. But he is supremely happy, and goes and sniffs at the drawer in the lobby where they lie. 170 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS To his daughter, Mrs. Gray Edinburgh [17th February 1905]. It was very satisfactory to see your own handwriting again. As to the new man's name, I think the parents must begin their discharge of their responsibiUties by fixing that themselves. I have no such firm convictions on the point as Zacharias had, and if you call him Maher- shalal-hash-baz, I will silently endure. There is no copyright in names, and I would suggest Joseph Chamberlain Gray, or Fothergill Parmiter Gray, as very high-sounding and impressive. Dods seems to me a name not worth propagating without compulsion. To Miss {B) Edestburgh, February 1905. I posted to you yesterday a copy of my book on the Bible. 1 I feel sure there is some truth in it, though it will be abused both by the advanced critics and by the traditional orthodox. But ^ The Bible : Its Origin and Nature. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 171 at my age one is fairly independent of criticism. Society at present is broken up into so many different sections as regards belief, that one must endeavour to speak his own mind, sure that though the majority sees nothing at all in what he says, the two or three who are at his stage will respond. People are more to me than the loveliest things, and living interpreters more than dead poets. . . . There are biographies I am always reading, Jowett, Thackeray, Hort, How, Napo- leon, etc. To his daughter, Mrs. Gray [Edinburgh, 6th March 1905.] I am possessed to-night with a very demon of desolation, and to relieve or expel him a little I write to you. But, oh ! my dear, I wish you were here to see and to talk to. To look into some loved and loving face seems sometimes the one thing needful and the one thing not easily to be had. But it 's too late to begin to grumble when one is nearly seventy- one. Only it makes me very thirsty for my visit to you. 172 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS To Miss Crum Edinburgh, 18th March 1905. Your flowers bring a tantalizing whiff of Largs, tantalizing but most acceptable ; and your kind and generous letter brings as welcome a whiff of your own spirit. I am grateful for your propagandism of my book. The first thousand was sold out a fortnight ago, and I can't get any to give to my students, but I hope in a week or two another supply will be ready. Your own appreciation of my book gives me great satisfaction. You have your prejudices, like all the rest of us, but your judgment has insight and thought behind it. You do not read as the ordinary reviewer reads. Already I have seen one or two reviews, quite favourable, but not seeing the points, because the reviewer has never himself been exercised about these things. I am up to the eyes in examination papers, and must deny myself the pleasure of talking at large, and content myself with remaining your grateful and affectionate . . . LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 173 To the Rev. Henry Sloane Coffin Edinbtirgh, 24^A March 1905. Our session closed yesterday, so I am com- paratively a free man ; at least I have time to nurse a headache or a cold. The Principal gave us his usual admonitions in bidding us good-bye, and I only wish he would appear more frequently and let us enjoy the atmosphere he carries with him. He did not indulge in any predictions regarding our quarters next year. I have finished Wood's book on the Spirit, and although perhaps there is little which is not in Glol, Gunkel and Weinel, yet I got a clearer hold of the whole matter and was impelled to re- write my lecture on Paul's doctrine of the Spirit. Thank you very much for putting me in touch with it. Another book from your side interests me much — Bacon's Paul. He is not so wild as sometimes ; I think his admiration for Paul keeps him right. He is very lucid, and puts a great amount of reading and thinking in small compass. Burton of Chicago sent me a publication of his on the Synoptists, but I have not found 174 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS time to read it, and I cannot say I am greatly interested in the question. I hope you got my book. The first thousand went off here immediately, and we have to wait for some more from New York. I am giving it to my classes, with the help of my sons and sisters. We have a very good set in College just now — not any geniuses, but an excellent average, and although we thought our circumstances would tell against our numbers next year, singularly enough we are to have considerably more than usual entering. To Miss {B) Edinbubgh, April 1905. When you first asked my opinion about When it was Dark I could not give it, because I am one of those scrupulous reviewers who read the books sent to them, and only after doing so express an opinion on them, and I had not read When it was Dark. Now I have remedied that slight defect, and can say that while I think the book clever, I think it a mere extravaganza. Why write a story which could not possiblj^ happen ? The supposed fraud LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 175 could never have gained currency for an hour among experts. Why should Joseph record his own fraud, and if he wished to do so why should he use Greek and not Aramaic ? The best bit of the book is the old Cornish woman's deliverance in the railway carriage. That is fine. But were I wise I would not say anything about the book, but leave you to suppose that the ideas and opinions you ascribe to me are correct. One thing the book shows — not that a discovery of the body of Jesus would destroy Christianity, though it would go far to alter it, but that an intense interest in the Resurrection at present prevails. But this also must be referred to that higher court which is to sit, or walk, in the Botanic Gardens. Later. — I see I have not expressed myself strongly enough regarding When it was Dark. I would now call it worse names. In some cases, as the well known Henry Venn's, the eagerness to enter the perfect life actually has kept people alive here and pre- vented them for a bit from ridding themselves of the rather insufficient bodily equipment we now have. It is the inconceivability of the whole future that hinders faith. If people 176 LATER LETTERS OF ?vIARCUS DODS believed in immortality, as they say they do, the whole world would be altered. To Miss {A) Manchester, lUli April 1905. I have allowed myself to run deeply into your debt, but while I was lecturing from day to day here I could not settle to have a chat with you or to thank you for your very welcome birthday greeting. Most people have now for- gotten, if they ever knew, that I had a birth- day, and this makes your loving words all the more valuable. I cannot tell you how glad I am to see from Miss 's letter that you have better prospect of quite regaining health; I pray that your hopes may be realised. How you can think yourself ' empty and unalive ' even in your present unfit physical condition, I don't know ; certainly you always have some help and cheer to send to me. I don't grudge you your Hegelianism while it affords you an optimistic view of life, for though I cannot myself directly find in Hegel the same comfort and encourage- ment, I find myself lifted by your optimism LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 177 based on Hegel, and content myself with this second-hand cheer. I have not had very large audiences here. The Committee who arranged the lectures un- fortunately chose the very week when it was impossible for students to attend. However, I have met a number of nice people. That is one of the rewards of wandering as I am at present doing — you always get alongside of good people and see their best side. You will be finding the same as you go from place to place at present. To the Rev. Dr. Charles Watson KiLBRANNAN, AUDLEY PaRK RoAD, Bath, 2\st April [1905]. I am moving from place to place, preaching and lecturing and meeting good people every- where, but I turn gratefully in thought to Largs, and must snatch time at least to tell you how very much gratified I am to receive your commendation of my book. Your letter^ be- ^ A copy of Dr. Watson's letter has been provided by Miss Crum. It was in the following terms : — NORTHFIELD, Laegs, April 1905. My dear Marcus Dods, — It has been with a sense of perfect contentment that I have heard your book read to me slowly and M 178 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS comes at once a precious archive. Of course I knew you would approve, because I have so largely learned from yourself ; still it is very pleasant to me to have your approval in uttered form. I do not know any greater blessing that could come to our Church than that it should accept your tone and stand in your point of view. This of course is meanwhile hopeless, but some day surely men will open their eyes and recognise facts. You will have read the Commissioners' Report. It is curious to see the English papers on it ; deliberately day after day. It is no common experience, at least it has not been mine, to be thoroughly content with a book. Very few books do content me. Many are hke yours interesting, fuU of scholarship, power, ingenuity, eloquence, goodness, and yet they say that which had better not have been said, or fail to say that which ought to have been said. But with your book I am quite content. I could add nothing to it, and as little cut out anything from it. It is in all respects admirable ; in nothing more than in its wide restraint. But I will not pursue the easy pleasant path of unimpeded praise. I would only say that you may well thank God for enabhng you to write a book which will go far, and ever further, to give spiritual liberty to the men who doubted and yet hated to doubt. To them you will be like Christian when in the dungeon of Giant Despair he pulled out the key which opened every gate that shut them in. It is well that you have given us some new keys, for since Bunyan's time the Giant has got some new locks, some of which dear old Christian's keys don't fit. — Yours ever, gratefully and afiEectionately, Chaeles Watson LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 179 some intelligent and interested, others quite at sea. The Daily News is interested, intelligent and bold ; going to the root of the matter and denouncing the judgment — even finding fault with the Commission because it does not directly ask for the overturning of the judgment. I am glad to see your improved handwriting, and I trust the summer, long delaying, may bring you health and comfort. To Miss {A) Bath, 22rid April 1905. I have been skipping from place to place lately, and am now for a couple of days in this ancient city. The country round is lovely, and the city itself most interesting. I suppose Walter Watson has been here, as he has been ever5rvvhere ; but if not it would be worth his while to c4me to see the house and street archi- tecture of the eighteenth century, but especially to see the Abbey Church. On either side of the door is a Jacob's ladder stretching right up each tower, the angels scrambling up, and some of them descending — head first ! There are also some interesting houses. Lord Nelson's, 180 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS Lord Olive's, Chatham's, Gainsborough's, etc. Speaking of those buried days, have you read Gertrude Atherton's The Conqueror ? It is really a life of Alexander Hamilton, the maker of the American Constitution, and in my opinion a very remarkable book — romance running through it, and a charming domestic life. There is something very fascinating in those heroic times when men scorned death and discomfort and danger, and lived for their country, and the future. To Miss {E) Edinburgh, Uh May 1905. I have been touring for a month, lecturing and preaching, but I managed to work in visits to my three English residents. I wonder very much what you will think of London. Its vastness is overwhelming, and the distances are most baffling. You spend all your time reach- ing your friends and have no time with them. But there is a grandeur about the whole thing, as well as a depth and dismalness of squalor, that will astonish you. For a holiday it is excellent, but I should not like to live there, LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 181 though it fascinates all who do dwell in it, and ties them to it forever. To Miss {B) Edinbitrgh, May 1905. Why does one vary so much in estimating one's fellows ? sometimes cordially endorsing Carlyle's verdict, at other times wondering where the Fall comes in at all. I fancy it is that like Tennyson's poor, in the lump they are bad, but taken individually and one by one they are good. Yet why should good people when conglomerated turn out bad ? Well, in any case I had a very pleasant time with my fellow country-men south of Tweed. To Miss (.4) Edinburgh, 2\st May 1905. Have you in the whirl of last week forgotten that we this week are in the whirl of the Assembly ? I have no heart for it ; which perhaps is wrong — we ought to hope ; but I am not a member, and things in Parliament are so threatening that I would like to go to the 182 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS North Pole for two years and cool my temper, and break all communications with Churches. Even The Scotsman is blaming the Government for slumping our practical matter with gener- alities regarding Church and State applicable to all Churches. And when The Scotsman can find fault with the Government, things are indeed serious. As I cannot conveniently find lodgings at the North Pole, I have been try- ing mental detachment by reading Euripides, whose ideas about women are interesting and in a way Shakespearian. His nurse in the Hippolytus is quite as unprincipled as the nurse in Bomeo and Juliet, while his Phaedra is in the highest degree tragic. There is a wonderfully healing air in Greek literature, partly owing to its carrying you so entirely beyond the ' flammantia moenia ' of our little world, and partly owing to the perfect art of their best writers. Beauty of form, what an enchantment it is ! I suppose it is a sensuous delight, and yet how it bars out our worst tempers, our discontent, our sullenness, and gives us back some of the joy which should ever be ours. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 183 To Miss {E) Edinburgh, 31si May 1905. I write to you not because I have anything to say, for I have not, and you must not expect either wit or news, but merely because I want to be talking to you. Only I wish it was real talk and not this odious post system. If only you were sitting here beside me, how nice it would be to hear you pouring out — observe, I don't say ' gushing ' — about all you are seeing and experiencing. Switzerland the first time of seeing is marvellously fascinating, and the second and the third time likewise. And to see it in good company, with a person that can enthuse and does enthuse over snow peaks and pine woods, and brisk air, and boisterous brooks, is truly heavenly. I wish a better thing than that you were here with me, namely, that I were with you ; to hear it all lauded in an American accent — which I love — would be quite too delicious. The one thing I have to ask in every letter is ' When are you coming ? ' I know you can't say, but that does not prevent my asking, for it seems to bring me a little nearer the time. 184 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS and I do want to see you gush a little over this old city of ours, which has lived through fightings, and mobs, and banquetings, and treacheries, and plots, and revelries, and page- ants, and processions, and dirt unspeakable, and still shines amidst her hills like a gem in a still richer setting. And here too ' American is understood,' and what is more, Americans are understood and loved. The Assembly of our Church has been holding its annual meeting, and my house is full of guests, ministerial and lay. I have not been at any of the meetings, as I am not a member, and am shy, and hate crowds and exhausted air and listening to other men's talk. Next week Parliament is to say its say about us, and probably the whole ecclesiastical situation in Scotland will be altered by the decision of men of whom a very small proportion are Scotch, and who really know nothing about us and, I fear, care less. Such is the beauty of British Law and the glorious British Con- stitution. We have really (that is, the English have really) made almost no advance since the Mayflower times. There is as deep an intoler- ance — as true an inability to see and admit LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 185 that the Church has a legislation of her own, and that in their religious convictions men should be free from State control. Now this is too much, to go and plunge you headlong into our disturbed waters. Forgive, love, and write to . . . To Miss {A) Edlnbukgh, 22nd June 1905. I am not cruel enough to yield to the tempta- tion of putting you immediately in my debt for a letter, but I really must express my sympathy with you, for you have most effectually roused it. It is truly painful to think of your being tortured with apparently so little benefit. It is easy to bear a little pain, which you know to be remedial ; but to have a great deal of pain, and that prolonged and with no apparent good result, is very hard. Surely all the long hammering to which you have been subjected means that you are intended for exceptional uses — ^which perhaps is greater comfort to your friends than to yourself. I would fain believe, however, that you are on your way even to sound bodily health, although your many dis- appointments must be ver}^ hard to bear. 186 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS How you can have diffused so much happi- ness and Hght while yourself so crippled and hampered, is a triumph of spirit. In my Shakespeare Calendar I have within the month three times over come upon the same lines — ' I have not that alacrity of spirit Or cheer of mind that I was wont to have,' which certainly is true of me. I like his trans- position of ' alacrity ' and ' cheer,' or rather I should say of ' spirit ' and ' mind.' Our Church case seems going from bad to worse, and you are well out of the most heart- breaking muddle and most sickening exhibition of Scottish Christianity that has ever come about in the history of our country. But I am not going to add to your own burden, and I know you are only too ready to take other people's upon you. Yesterday I was in Glasgow at the Summer School of Theology, lecturing on Christianity and Evolution. I dined with the Smiths (George and Lilian), and met there Jack Geddes and his wife, who were all anxious to know how you were. What nice people there are in the world — so hearty, kindly, true, and good. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 187 To Miss {D) Edinburgh, The Ever-glorious Ath July, 1905. Though still prone — or rather supine — I cannot forbear sending you one whoop of sympathetic triumph on Independence Day. You will be surprised that a date which in America is celebrated by such tornadoes of jubilation from sunrise to sunset should here pass unnoticed. But after all I do think we here have as cordial feelings towards you as to any of our Colonies that have not been so rudely compelled to sever connection. There seems more real affinity in culture, in aims in life and so forth, between America and this country than between any other countries in the world — and long may it be so. Blood is stronger than all political or oceanic water, and when people like you and yours arise beyond British frontiers it compels one to see that all good- ness is one. To Miss {A) Edinburgh, 9iA July [1905]. It is a real distress to me to think of you seek- ing health and not finding it. Really the only 188 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS account of such experience is that of Paul — a messenger of Satan sent to buffet, with every device of cruelty and devilry to make the thing as painful and bewildering and faith-under- mining as possible, a trouble against which no prayer for removal has any result, but which leads to strength made perfect in weakness. Far-reaching, far beyond our vision, must the results of endurance be. Sometimes the world seems so full of suffering that it seems the dominant note and significance of the whole; and only to those who endure is ' the crown of life ' promised. To the Same Edinburgh, V,th July 1905. Coffin preached in the U.F. High yesterday on Abraham and Isaac — ' they went both of them together ' up the hill of sacrifice. He used it to illustrate how God the Father suffers more in all our sufferings, and how He went with Christ foreseeing all that was to come upon Him and suffering all the way. It was a very beautiful and impressive sermon. I wish you could have heard it, but your own thoughts anticipate all the good things one can say. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 189 I do hope you are getting a little better. My prayer for you — and I know it will be answered — is ' Make her glad according to the days wherein Thou hast afflicted her, and the years wherein she has seen evil.' What is our love and good wishing for you compared to the brooding, all- wise and all -penetrating love of the Eternal Father ? To the Same Balig, Ballantrae, \Wi August 1905. Yes, as you say, ' Geduld ' is a difficult virtue ; to yield wholly to another, even though that other be so intimate as God, must always be difficult. The triumph of Christ was that He ' learned obedience ' — and learned it in the only way possible, by suffering. To leave our- selves wholly in another's hand is the victory of faith. It is so obvious, and yet so hard to practise. But as you have suffered so much you cannot fail to be more conformed to Christ than the rest of us ; and after all, what else in life is worth acquiring ? For enjoyment of results we have Eternity; the urgent thing is 190 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS now to sow the right seed, to lay the lasting foundation. How idle words seem — how little we can enter into one another's suffering ; but if I could do more than speak, how gladly would I, and many others, do it for you. It is a great joy to me to find in your letter a tone of content and hope, for assuredly we do well always to hope. I find I must stop, but I do not stop loving you and wishing you well and believing that though weeping may endure for a night, joy Cometh in the morning. Life, joy, strength, these are the ultimate things; and of this no one more than yourself has taught . . . To Miss {E) Ballyoukan Lodge, Pitlochry, 5^7; September 1905. I reproached myself all the way north and all the way south for not compelling you to go to Inverness. The country never seemed to me more enchantingly lovely — mile after mile, hundreds of miles, of heather in rich bloom, pinky, purply red, and the mountains with the LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 191 most marvellous lights upon them, and you going away and fancying you have seen Scotland. I hope you have had no return of megrim or measles or whatever laid you low in my diocese on Friday, and that you enjoyed St. Boswells and all Sir Walter's places — which are all very well in their way. Give my ' Bon voyage ' to Dr. and Mrs. T , also to the captain and officers, engineers, stokers, A.B.'s, stewards, boys, stewardesses and all the rest who are to have a hand in carrying you across what I trust you may find but a pond. To Miss [A) Edinburgh, ^th October 1905. I admire with my whole heart and soul the manner in which you find good in your present disorder, and I suppose no price is too great to pay for a complete and perfect reconcilement of our spirit with the order of things in which we are — that is, with God. This must often seem a hard saying to one who, like you, has to pay so heavy a price, but sufferers are the saviours of the world, and you instruct, edify 192 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS and help us all by the way you face and fight distress. To Mrs. {G) Edinburgh, \2th October 1905. Your letter, though most welcome, is rather waesome, and I do sympathise with you. For years I knew what it was to get acids put into one's eye with the assurance that it did not hurt. But I wish the great man could give you some assurance that his painful treatment will have compensating results. How long are you to remain at Wiesbaden, and where do you go to forget about it ? I don't believe there are any much better places than Scotland. At present we are having St. Luke's summer, lovely, warm, sunny days. Why St. Luke's ? I was seized with compunction on receiving so long a letter from you written in pain, but a short note would give only pleasure ; and give me more details about yourself, please. I had some nice books to tell you about, but I won't tantalize you. Time enough when your eyes are better. Doodle is very thankful for your kind remem- 1 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 193 brance of him. He is decidedly showing marks of age, and although he has hours when he remembers his youth and thinks of cats with a ferocious joy, he is in the main placid and sleepy. I am glad you get some entertainment out of your companions in affliction and in the Hotel. They will get more than entertainment out of you. So long as you have your tongue left in health, you don't need your eyes so much, for already you have wisdom and goodness enough both for yourseK and others. I don't mean flattery, but rather to remind you how much you have to be thankful for, and how much means of being that most useful member of society, a good and upright woman. This is a poor return for your letter, but I am rather fussed at present ; but I wished to express my sympathy and to beg you to let me know how you get on. With kindest regards to all your family who may be with you . . . To the Rev. Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll Edinbuegh, 23rd October 1905. Your interesting letter from Paris illustrates your energy, as usual. It is absurd of you to 194 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS ask advice or suggestions from any one. If you do not see the appropriate improvements on The Expositor, or any other of your under- takings, no one else is at all likely to see them. And in point of fact I do not think of anything beyond what you suggest which could tend to prolong the life of The Expositor. It seems to me to fill a niche as it is, and of course I find more in my own line in it than in The Hibbert or Journal of Theological Studies or Zeitschrift fur neutestamentliche Wissenschaft. As to contributions from myself, the only things I can think of are a paper on the Papyri — a general survey of the topics illustrated by them — or the paper I gave to the Summer School in Glasgow on Evolution and Christian Theology. We have got our session begun. I am in the Heriot Watt College, which is a modern structure with excellent class-rooms, though the noise on the street is sometimes annoying. I hear the Established Hall has a very small first year — eight men ; we have nineteen in the first year. The quality of the men is excel- lent, and their conduct in class perfect — silent, attentive, diligent. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 195 All kinds of rumours fly round regarding the Commission, but the most striking thing is the small interest people are taking in it. To Miss {A) Edinbukgh, 6th November 1905, Last week was for me a red-letter week, or as Baedeker would put it, a double-asterisk week, as I had a letter from you and also one from . But oh ! how I long to hear that you are Avell, or at any rate rid of some of your ailments. I think I would give my classes a holiday, or at any rate have a display of fireworks, if only you would mend a bit. But I suppose you are one of the ' blessed ' few who must endure and let patience have her perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. Do you remember in Lucas Malet's Wages of Sin when Polly asks ' What does one end by doing when all the best is taken away from one, when life has grown trivial, stunted and narrow ? ' her uncle says : ' After a time, my dear, one lights a candle called Patience, and guides one's footsteps by that.' God grant, my dear Miss , that your patience 196 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS may carry you through. You remember St. John's quaint wish, ' I pray that in all things thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.' Don't allow yourself to think that your soul is not prospering. Christ's darkest times were His most prosperous and fruitful. Forgive my preaching to one who might so infinitely rather counsel me ; but take all I say as the expression, awkward as it may be, of my longing to see you healthy and hearty again. Liberalism is booming. Haldane was yester- day elected to the Lord Rectorship of Edin- burgh University, and Glasgow has elected Asquith. But the next Government, to what- ever party it belongs, will have great difficulty in governing. Why do you worry about the future of other people ? Have we not sufficient security in ' Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right ? ' If we cannot leave things in His hand and feel assured that much better things will happen to all than anything we can plan or hope, then indeed LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 197 ' The pillar'd firmament is rottenness, And earth's base built on stubble.' But you raise questions that can only be answered in a long talk such as I have had the happiness to enjoy with you in this room, or on the lawn at , with your sister painting poppies at the border. I like very much your description of the Crum Browns ; they are ' lovely ' people. Write soon, and do say you are better. To Miss [B) Edinburgh, November 1905. I am rapidly advancing to the Socratic condition of being convinced I know nothing. Really knowledge is a bog — the more you strive, the deeper and more inextricably you sink ; a tussock of faith is all one can reach. In winter my students help me to keep up the delusion that we are learning something, and one can always fall back upon Grammar and Geography ; and as long as we are in the Heriot Watt and hear the rumble of dynamos, we feel that there is reality somewhere about, or a very good imitation of it. 198 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS I wish you had some teaching to do ; it 's great, if you have even an infinitesimal amount to teach. To the same Edinburgh, December 1905. The problem of man's folly in leaving such charming women unmarried has often been in my thoughts. It is partly looks, and partly on account of some ' affaire,' and partly that men do not want very superior women, but loving and happy women. You will say, But these are left. Yes, that is so, but very often they have had their chance and declined it. Still, after all that can be said, a friend of mine is justified in what he said years and years ago of the girls of our acquaintance, ' They always disappoint you.' He meant by declining on men not fit to button their boots. But my best friend in Glasgow, and a truly perfect woman, with just the weaknesses that made her perfect, and a heart overflowing with love, told me she used to pray when a girl that she might never be married. So there are wheels within wheels, and woman remains a mystery. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 199 To his son Harry {December 1905.] My dear Shaw Household, ^ — You are too many for me to address individually, though I must thank Clarence by name for the most useful tablets of memory she has sent me, and assure her of my gratitude for her kindly thought. Also I must specify the beloved little Beth, and hope she is now quite well. Doodle has got a present of an India rubber doll with a squeak from Mrs. , and he won't let me rest, but is at me from morning to night to get it, and I know if I gave it him its head would be off in a twinkling. Now there are things I want to say to each of you, but cannot possibly say to all, so there is nothing for it but to stop and sign myself one who is happy to be related to you all, indeed one whose happiness very much consists in being related to you all. . . . To Mrs. Watson Edinbuegh, Christmas, 1905. Your note with its refreshing friendliness * His son Harry's address at the time was Shaw House, Tarporley. 200 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS marks this Christmas morning with a bright- ness that quite scatters the gloom of the skies. Thank you very much ; but it is too tantaHzing to think I might be with you and your guests and cannot. I have articles to write for Bible Dictionaries and Magazines on 1. The Fatherhood of God. 2. Why did Jesus enjoin secrecy on the healed ? 3. The Johannine writings, as well as on Peter's Epistles and Jude. 4. Reviews of two German books — each containing 500 pages and not yet read. 5. Address for New Year's Day. Now, had I courage and could I depend on myself, I would gaily postpone part of this, but I get so anxious about work promised and not finished that I camiot take a holiday with comfort. If I find I can, I will avail myself of your most kind invitation, which itself, whether accepted or not, I appreciate and enjoy. I was amazed at Dr. Watson's appearance. He looks five years younger than he did a year ago. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 201 To Miss Crum Edinburgh, 1st January 1906. How did you divine my intention to purchase Conversations with Christ to-morrow ? I had put it down with another which must be had at once. Very many thanks ; it is so much pleasanter to read it with a suggestion of you holding it up to me than to buy it over a counter. As to disagreement, I don't much mind that, if the writer gives me something to think about. I am sorry my few notes of this morning's address are too fragmentary to send you. I told them that for progress two things were needed — a goal and driving power. The first they must choose — illustrated by Portia's three caskets in The Merchant of Venice. The second, the driving power, the only sufficient driving power, is love to Christ — not approval of Him or faith in Him, but love — illustrated by Saint-Simon's deathbed saying, ' Souvenez-vous que pour faire quelque chose du grand il faut etre passionne,' and Ecce Homo^s ' No heart is pure that is not passionate.' I only lately 202 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS realised that love alone can overcome all baser passions — personal attachment and devoted- ness. ' Hitch your wagon to a star,' says Emerson ; yes, but how to do so ? Only by strong attachment to Christ. You will find much good matter in Robinson's Studies, and in Anderson Scott's Revelation. I sent eight copies of Jones' lecture to American friends. As you say, it does carry Jones ' very high,' and yet Hegelians have such a way of slipping back from the plain meaning of their words that his very last sentences give me a little shiver. Still, that the universe is reason- able is a good deal to go upon. But immortality is a complicated and elusive theme. To Miss {A) Edinbuegit, bth January 1906. You know, don't you, that I have been writing letters to you every day during the last fortnight. You also know perhaps with even greater cer- titude that they have never been transferred from my mind to paper. Really I should long since have thanked you for your always welcome and always inspiring letters, and also for your LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 203 diary, which I regularly use. It is a great pleasure to know that every day I am thinking the same thought as you — only it makes me wish I could continue all day to think your thoughts. I had a kind of uplifting call from Prof, and Mrs. Crum Brown the other day, on New Year's Day. I have done nothing distinguished during my holiday. I had a good deal of work waiting to get done, and I have pushed through some part of it. Most of it is for America. They tempt one to write by offering a circulation of several millions through their magazines. I wrote one paper for their Sunday School Times on Why did Jesus enjoin secrecy ? and I have also got a paper on Jude and another on 2nd Peter finished for an American Bible Dictionary. But there is no call for you to be interested in such matters. I opened the year by breakfasting with the Y.M.C.A. and afterwards addressing them. There were about 150, and I took for my text ' No heart is pure that is not passionate ' — a saying which I awoke to only recently, though I have always believed it. Isn't it sad, the way 204 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS great truths should he in the mind hke lumber, no one thinking of casting them out, but just as little feeling any living influence from them ? Of course Ecce Homo^s saying is just the re- petition of our Lord's ' Except your love be greater than of father and mother,' etc. — and I have preached with elaboration on the fact that it is our likings that determine our char- acter ; not our opinions, nor in a sense our faith, but our love, what we cleave to more than aught besides ; but it came upon me lately with new force. The difficulty is to get such a dominant love for Christ ; but it is comforting to know that we are here to grow, to see what is right and to strive after it, and set our faces at any rate in the right direction. Can you not get Mr. Bradley to give us four comedies — TJie Merchant of Venice, As you like it. Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure, or The Tempest ? He could preach some fine sermons to us out of these. To the Rev. Henry Shane Coffin Edinburgh, Wth January 1906. As to summer, I wish I could say Yes to your LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 205 kind invitation. But if we are to meet this year, it must be by your coming over again. For I have four days ago received an invitation to lecture at Oberhn on a new foundation (Haskell). The remuneration is not great, but the subject is a good one — the Influence of Jewish Theology on Paul, and they ask for only five lectures in spring 1907. It looks like folly for a man who if alive in 1907 will then be seventy-three to undertake the engagement, but every one says I ought to, and though I have not yet closed with the offer, I have a kind of feeling that it will end so. Thank you very much for the novel, ^ and for Bowne's Theisin. The novel I read at once, with admiration but much sadness. If that is the kind of thing you have to cope with in New York, I am sorry for you. How little Christianity seems to be within these people's horizon, and yet I suppose they have their moments too. Wellesley, Harvard, Princeton and Yale will give you grand opportunities. I envy you both the opportunities and the power to use them. I had a chance at young men (Y.M.C.A.) ^ Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. 206 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS on New Year's Day, and spoke of Ecce Homo^a ' No heart is pure that is not passionate,' which has taken hold of me lately, as the whole secret of regeneration. It is contentment with duty which makes Christianity a failure. We i \ ? have never got past the law, and no one under- stands Paul or believes him — or for that matter understands Christ, for He said that if a man did not love Him more than any one else, he \ was no disciple of His. Very commonplace on paper, and verbally proclaimed from thousands of pulpits every Sunday, but oh ! dear me, how few accepted truths are really believed. It is fine of you to write your sermons twice over. It is hard, but it will certainly pay. Also, or perhaps even more, your prayers. So Harper has passed away at last. It will be a very serious loss to Chicago, as his work was not half done there. I wonder whom they will get to take it up. I do trust the right man will be appointed. We are in the thick of elections here. I must send you The Expositor for January, as it has an article of mine on Evolution in it, which I hope you Avill agree with, or at least care to see. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 207 To Miss {A) Edinburgh, 2Us/ January 1906. I fear this will be too late for your birthday, and quite inadequate to let you understand how glad I am you had a birthday, and how sub- stantial a part of my life and of others you have been. Many happier returns of it, and may each return find you more able to thank God for life and for all it has brought you. I would not have tried to write even to-day, for I am very much hurried, but I wished to return the enclosed letters. I fancy that what Miss means is that the solution of what is in- explicable otherwise is given us once for all in Christ; while you add, 'Yes, but it will take the whole life of all the generations to understand fully the solution itself.' As to what she says about time and eternity I quite agree with her. To me it is utterly puzzling — that is to say, we rightly conceive of eternity as an absence of time, but time being a necessary form of thought, and apparently of existence, with us, we cannot form any idea of eternal existence. And in her statement that each person must find the solution for himself, I see the expression 208 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS of her true and healthy nature. Certainly one thing is true, that anxiety does no good, and there is no call for it. The Stoic attitude was in this respect right : ' Here I am, do with me what is good and just.' The peace that comes upon one who commits himself to a long sea voyage results from the feeling that the whole responsibility for getting to the desired haven rests with another person and is wholly out of the passenger's hand. So with life. I think we worry too much, as if we were each to be a Providence to himself. God will do more for us than our most loving friends, and if you knew even my wishes for your coming year, I think you would expect great things from God ; but this is irrelevant, for nothing stril^es me more about your letters than their happiness — of which most precious quality please communicate soon a portion to your ever affectionate . . . To Miss (C) Edinburgh, 6th February 1906. I wish at once to send you my heartiest congratulations and best wishes. I cannot imagine anything more likely to secure the LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 209 happiness of a lifetime than the closest pos- sible connection with yourself, and I de- voutly hope you may both have a long, long time together. There is nothing greater or better than to love and be loved. Were you another sort of girl I would remind you that you will have daily, almost hourly, opportunity of filling to the brim another's cup of happiness, but of this you do not need to be reminded, as you belong to that beautiful type of woman- hood whose nature it is to give themselves away wholly and live in another's happiness. It is to me delightful to imagine your future, and if you have all the blessings I wish you and think you deserve, you will be the happiest of women. I take it very kind of you to write me so soon. To Miss {E) Edinbtirgh, 24ih February 1906. I have filled your blank sheet with extracts from The Lamentations of Jeremiah, and have severely underlined his poor attempts at pathos, and by this exercise have brought myself into some kind of sympathy with you. . . . 210 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS Well, as we say here, a man must ' dree his weird ' — in other words ' accomplish his destiny,' but that is often sad enough, and he draws so many with him who are dependent and sym- pathetic. To Miss {A) Edinburgh, Uh March 1906. I am very busy preparing for the end of the session, trying to fit in lectures into rapidly contracting days, and preparing examination papers. The end is always a little sad — men whose faces have been your most familiar objects of sight for four years passing away from your ken, and new men to make acquaint- ance with. To Miss (B) Edinburgh, March 1906. Galatians in six lines is impossible. But I should say that the key to Paul is his con- ception of sonship to which the spirit of Christ raises. The son is free, does not require to make good his claim to favour or provision, needs no external compulsion, but lives from LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 211 within, from the spirit ; it is this spirit of son- ship which is man's true ' inheritance,' the ' promise ' for which he waited, and for which he learned to long during all the preceding years. But what amazed and overjoyed him day by day was this sense of sonship — of the overflowing and fatherly love of God. To the Rev. Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll Edinburgh, 30th March 1906. I was sorry to decline your request to furnish you with a leader for The British Weekly f but I really am unfit. The day after the session closed I collapsed, and I am pretty miserable still — ^bronchitis, weak heart, etc. I have had to cancel engagements for April, and can only do ' light jobs ' in the meantime. I am glad to hear there is a prospect of seeing you. I should have been in London to-day, to preach on Sunday in Westbourne Grove, but I have had to cancel that. I expected to see you and some other old friends when up there, but I think I shall not go at all now. Our ecclesiastical affairs here are in a dis- gusting mess — no one satisfied with any- 212 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS BODS thing. What is to come of it all I know not. Happily I enjoy my own work, and have good times with the students. I fear some of my moroseness and pessimism is due to age. I hope so, and that this generation is better and not worse than the last ; but I do not envy those who have to fight the battle of Christianity in the twentieth century. Yes, perhaps I do, but it will be a stiff fight, and will require great concessions to be made. To his niece, Mrs. Young {Postcard) [Edinburgh, 20th April 1906.] 9000000 ad infinitum thanks for Chesterton's Watts. It is amazing — especially the bit on allegory. It is really that greatest desider- atum — a book. Glad to hear your Mother is holding her own. Aunt Marcia is with me for a few days. I am still spending hours every day in that delightful chair with foot rest, looking, regardless of the tenth commandment, on the most literary of manse libraries. I hope you feel me there some- times. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 213 To Miss {E) Edinburgh, 2Uh April 1906. Will you excuse pencil, as I am in a run down condition and my doctor bids me ' recumb ' as much as I can — my heart needing all the rest it can get, poor thing. In fact, since the session closed five weeks ago I have had a cough that shakes me to pieces. I get a cer- tain amount of work done each day, but what vexes me most is that I have had to cancel my engagement to lecture in Oberlin and in Rochester. I am now 72 — yes, seventy-two — three score ten and two — and that means that I must not trust that next year will be better than this in bringing me health. To the Rev. Prof. H. R. Mackintosh i Tarporley, %th May 1906. I have been reading in scraps of time Bousset's Jesus over again. There are some noble passages — though he falls into the usual vice of writing a gospel for himself, and of oscillating between a pedantically and pro- saically literal interpretation and an interpre- ^ Of New College, Edinburgh. 214 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS tation which does not even find a foot-hold to spring from in the text. You have in your Christology a tremendous piece of work if you are to convince these men that your faith is the truth. To the Same Edinburgh, llth May 1906. It was very good of you to write amid all the distractions of your German tour, and though I have little news, or none, I must at any rate acknowledge your card. I envy you seeing and interviewing these men, Loofs and Herrmann and the rest, and I am sure it must both quicken your interest in theology and bring you into the main stream of thought, and I hope you find that we here have still some defensible positions, however battered. Have you noticed or heard that has at last shuffled off this mortal coil ? I am rather in the mood to see nothing in life but baffled expectations and impenetrable gloom — the result, I suppose, of my not being well. The best book I have lately read is one I have read more than once before — Mrs. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 215 Gertrude Atherton's The Conqueror, which is merely a garnished life of Alexander Hamilton, the creator of the American Constitution, an amazing and most interesting life, terminated by Burr's bullet at the age of forty-seven. If I write more I fear my gloom may soil your sunshine — to which I trust Strachan is adding day by day — to whom commend . . . ' Me thinks we do as fretful children do, Leaning their faces on the window pane, To sigh the glass dim with their own breath's stain, And shut the sky and landscape from their view.' To Mrs. Lowe Shaw House, Tarporley, 25th May 1906. Please excuse pencil, as the two nurses are taking a very leisurely breakfast, and I can't get the table to honour you with ink, and to thank you in permanent characters for your kind letter. I never felt more dependent on letters, not even when I was first abroad at the age of twenty, and I am quite prepared to face the day with yours just received. Harry has had a fairly good night. . . . I have not seen Harry yet. The doctor 216 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS wishes him to be kept absolutely quiet, so I take the dogs out a walk (for which they are very grateful), and read and dream. The weather is bad — extraordinarily bad. Yesterday I met an old man with a shovel over his shoulder who stopped me with ' How is Maister Dod this marning ? ' and after I had explained to him his condition, he said ' Well, 1 hope the Lord will enlarge him. That I do.' I was stopped twice besides on my walk with enquiries. I hope the Wilsons got home all right, and with refreshed minds and bodies (one each). We expect Frank to-morrow. I hope Billy has not eaten Doodle, or Doodle Billy. To Miss {B) Edinburgh {1June\ 1906. Gibbon ! have you Gibbon ? Do you know the joy of plunging into that vitalising ocean just at any point ? Oh ! every man, woman and child ought to have Gibbon, and take any volume, open at any page, in any mood, at any hour, in any place — and then you are happy, away from all care in a wide, new world. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 217 Gibbon, Shakespeare, and the Bible, if you have these and use them you '11 forget there was ever such a person as Dante ^ — but I had better stop. Is anything more futile than to recom- mend books ? It 's only one stage better than recommending friends. To the Rev. Henry Shane Coffin Edinburgh, \5th June 1906. I don't think there 's much to read at present. Du Bose's The Gospel in the Gospels and Clark's Philosophy of Christian Experience are fresh and stimulating. But my most serious reading lately has been Herrmann's Communion with God. I read it years ago and was not greatly impressed. Now it seems to me to say exactly what needs at present to be said. There are extravagancies, no doubt, but taking his intention and essential meaning, I think it one of the profoundest books we have. His attitude towards doctrine and towards Scrip- ture, though sometimes too rashly put, strikes me as being nearer the right and just position than anything I have seen elsewhere. * The letter waa addressed to a devoted student of Dante. 218 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS Weinel's Paul is fresh, but not so final as one could wish. Mackintosh has spent May in Germany, and is more and more impressed by Loofs and Kahler. I must say that so far as I know them, I agree with him. I never consult Loofs without getting what I want, and Kahler seems to me the most rational German I ever read. My friends in 'Frisco (Balfour, Williamson & Co.) have lost all their books and papers. But of course their business goes on, and goes on with even increased volume, as so much will be needed to build up the city and its homes once more. When you go, you will not leave the Decalogue and the Christian Law at Chicago, but even in the far west will remember that to do good as you have opportunity is still binding, and that no one is in greater need of your affection and quickening than . . . To the Rev. Prof. H. R. Mackintosh Edinburgh, llth J^ily 1906. A man who can write such interesting letters as yours should have every opportunity given him of exercising his gift ; so I at once put you LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 219 in my debt. A letter like yours is to me a great treat, for I am somewhat solitary, although I have two American ladies with me for this week who keep me sufficiently lively and more than sufficiently idle. But as I am not yet fit for much work, perhaps it is as well to be idle under the guise of hospitality. I got Schweitzer's Von Eeimarus zu Wrede, and find much supplementary matter for my lectures, although of course his criticism seems to me somewhat wide of the mark. Still it is a very useful book, and he lifts one or two men into a position which I had not recognised as theirs. Last Sunday morning, Macgregor being away from home, I went to St. Bernard's and heard a most enriching exposition from Steven ; moreover, the right kind of people were there, not one person there drawn by fashion, but lots of decent working men who attended keenly throughout — one of the most reviving spectacles I have seen lately ; to hold the decent working lad is at present the chief task, or one of the chief tasks, of our Church. I felt hope for Scotland springing again, at least in a small jet, and felt disposed to say ' May my due feet never stray ' from Henderson Row. 220 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS To the Rev. Henry Shane Coffin Edinburgh, 2^th July 1906. As soon as I received your great news I wrote to Miss Eells, but I feel that so important an occasion demands some further whooping, and so I again send you my most cordial con- gratulations. . . . You will take my good wishes for granted, but it is pleasant to look forward and picture all the good days you will have with her. You have some idea of the happiness I had in my married life, but I see now how much higher and purer and happier I might have made it, and I would give you the benefit of my experience did I not know that the very faults which betrayed me do not exist in you. But I think all married men must learn that to happiness reverence or respect is as necessary as love. A kind of sacredness should attach to the object of one's adoration. You may laugh, but it is true. Mrs. Lowe and all your friends here are immensely interested, and were the ceremony to be performed at some smaller distance than 6000 miles you would see a lot of Edinburgh faces. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 221 I have had some very pleasant Americans staying with me, and several calling in their kind way. Now I know that all time spent on letters is to you at present time lost, but when you return to ordinary levels, if not before that, I hope you will remember that you have a warmly attached friend and well-wisher in . . . To Miss ■ {D) Edinburgh, 2nd Aug^ist 1906. Your letters are always a refreshment, though as your last is actually written from beyond the narrow limits of our little island it brings a pang. The Stars and Stripes are floating gaily above the N.B.R. Hotel, inviting many delightful Americans, but only reminding me of your visit, and that it is not to be repeated. I am very sorry. I think it most unlikely that I shall ever cross the Atlantic again, but no greater inducement could be offered me than your in- vitation. I shall expect to hear from you, from all kinds of queer places ; and please be as exclamatory as you feel. I know you will be hustled and hurried with so much to see. 222 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS and may forget that you have friends here who would like to share your pleasure, or to know of your enjoyment. I possess The House of Mirth ; it was given me by Coffin — who by the way has just become engaged to a charming Californian whom he has known since she was a child. I greatly admire The House of Mirth as a book, but the condition of things it reveals is very sad. I wonder if books of that kind do any good. I suppose the society people know they are fools, just as the drunkard does, but they are in the net and cannot free themselves. I think the love of pleasure in our own country has become far more general in my own time. Of course the means of enjoyment now lie to every one's hand, there is so much more money circulating. Sometimes it seems as if the whole motive of life was altering, and yet I am sure that there are more in our own time than in any other who are seeking to advance the common good, and who see that that is the only life worth living — the only life that really leaves results. You in America are a young people, and have the making of your future, but we are step by step following in the road LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 223 to decline and fall that was taken by the Roman Empire. Never in the world's history has there been a nation made as yours has been. None has lived under the same conditions, and it seems as if new methods were to be intro- duced, new tasks attempted, and a truly ' new world ' created. Thank you very much for offering me your ' homeless ' copy of The House of Mirth, which must go to some more needy person. Even in Holland you can't have time to read more, though it is very pleasant for me to talk to you. I won't say how greatly I have enjoyed your friendship and how grateful I am for it. May all good go with you, and may you find happiness and profit all round the world and still remember your affectionate . . . To Miss (A) EDmBUKGH, Qth August 1906. I need not tell you how delightful it was to see your hand again and to hear rather better accounts of your health. Surely you will now go steadily forward and renew joy in the hearts of all your friends. You certainly are being 224 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS schooled in patience. And really one is tempted to think St. James was right in giving patience so high a place. The despair so many of us feel because we cannot already understand things and solve this ' unintelligible world ' would disappear could we only muster patience to wait, submission to leave things in those hands which have made the world and presum- ably can rule it. I hope to go to Boat of Garten on Monday, and sit at the feet of Dr. Watson's mature wisdom and enjoy the affection of Mrs. Watson and Miss Crum. A world that holds such people is no despicable place, and how much they have helped to make it better. My son Harry seems now to be fairly on the road to health. He has had a terrible illness. May all good presences be with you, my dear Miss , now and ever. To Mrs. Lowe Edinburgh, Z\st August 1906. Here I am once more after a delightful time, but home-coming even with a welcome from Doodle is a bit dreary, and I hope you have been in sympathy and been decently dull. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 225 The weather here is blazing and blue, and I sigh for the river or the hill, and find it difficult to settle to any work. I think to sit down and write on abstract subjects is about the most difficult thing man can do. If you have those surprising trees to hew down or to turn into logs, or if you have deeds of conveyance to draw up, you have concrete things to go upon, but when you don't know where to begin and have only a vague universe before your mind, it 's just ' fair awfie.' I don't know how to thank you for your kindness to me. It has really done me good, and I am very glad to have these days to help me through days which may not be so bright. For it must always be remembered that ' The boast of heraldry,' etc. PS. ' Take yonder oak-tree. What an au- gust being it is. How it beggars the imagina- tion to conceive the silent tenacity of purpose which, working through century after century, has drawn together " the stuff of life to knit it," to robe it in its yearly marvel of leafage, and sweU its girth by ring on ring. Had I, as a boy, been taken to that tree, and judiciously 226 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS helped to study it and realise it in its majestic individuality — I should to-day have been a wiser and, I doubt not, a happier man.' To Miss {E) Edinburgh, 1th October 1906. We have not got our college back yet, and my voice is away somewhere — I don't know where, but how I am to lecture two hours a day I cannot yet see. However if I can't, I can't, and there is no use grumbling. Don't become a Buddhist, though the kind of Buddhism which faddists are making for them- selves out of scraps of the genuine Buddhism and scraps of Christianity is not the worst kind of ethics — but of religion ! ! Buddha was pure Atheist, but quite morally decent. To his daughter, Mrs. Gray [Edinburgh, ? 1906.] Was it this month last year, or December, that I last heard from you ? It is so long ago that I forget, and if you asked me any questions I cannot answer them. But happily I met and his wife the other day here, who told me LATER LETTERS OF I^URCUS DODS 227 you were still flowing and fresh. They had a glorious little boy with them, presumably of their own manufacture. He does them credit. I wonder on what principle it is that some children are worse than either of their parents, and others better than both combined. I believe all the bad in you is due to X. Y. Turnbull, who lived in the year 1245. He was a real bad lot. Have you no visions of him in your dreams ? To-day being students' day, four came by invitation and five uninvited. The uninvited were the best, but we had a very good talk about open-air preaching. Christian Science, turkeys and cranberry sauce, John Kelman, Doodle, victory of U.F. College Rugby football team v. Established Church football team, slums, drunks. North Dakota. Princeton, etc. (see last edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, vols. 3-15). The usual grumble about College dinner has set in with its usual severity, but the forecast is favourable for the disturbance passing away soon. ' Stodge ' is the one word that char- acterises the dinner. That boa-constrictor that swallowed its blanket, or the shark in whose 228 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS ' Little Mary ' there was found a bag of nails, a set of false teeth, a New Testament (Revised Version), a wooden leg, two babies' bottles (babies not still attached), a gold watch, and a shaving brush — these creatures might digest the clods of dumpling and slabs of beef we get, but the delicate and feeble gastric juices of the pallid divinity man can make nothing useful out of them. Now it 's nearly 11 on Friday night, and why I 'm sitting here blethering to you when I ought to be in bed I don't know, unless it be that you are such a dear ; but at 7 to-morrow morning I '11 repent of not going to bed in time to get my eight full hours. So good-night, and all blessings attend you, with the love of . . . To the Rev. Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll Edinbuegh, lO^A November 1906. Thank you very much for your kindness in sending me The Lamp of Sacrifice,^ which I highly prize and am sure to enjoy. Speaking of sacrifice, Macaulay's memory ^ Dr. Nicoll'a own book. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 229 played him false regarding human sacrifice among the Romans. No doubt the Senate tried to put an end to it about a century B.C., but both Julius and Augustus continued it in certain cases recorded by Dio Cassius and Suetonius and Seneca and Pliny — a quite sufficient amount of testimony. I hope you have got through the stormy weather with some comfort. To Miss {D) Edinburgh, \lth November 1906. Your letter dated Smj'^rna, 2nd Nov., has given me very great pleasure. I really thought you would for a time at least ' cut the cable ' between the enthralling scenes of the East and bleak, bare Scotland, but I see that to your other virtues which I have recognised I must add an abounding generosity. I assure you I greatly value your remembrance of me and your wish that I should so far share your enjoyment. It has been a dream of mine since boyhood — say for 250 years — to visit Greece and Egypt, and still I must see these richly educative lands by proxy. Well, sometimes I think there is 230 LATER LETTERS OF ]\L\RCUS DODS some consolation in being able to sit by the fire and read of torrid heat, or feel the shiver of ' frosty Caucasus ' through the printed page of one who has suffered from it. Thank you again and again for your vivid descriptions, which have let me see the Sultan's pallid face and smell his filthy capital and enjoy the colours of Smyrna. Be sure you keep a journal — for in after years when you are a great-grand- mother, or even sooner, you will be able to see again in memory and enjoy to a great extent all that you are now enjoying. Beware of the Eastern climates and foods and drinks. It would be disastrous if any of your party took any, even slight, ailment. I wish I could say anything that would help you about marriage, but it almost stands by itself as inaccessible to advice from a second or third party. I quite understand that women of your type must shrink from what is involved in marriage, and it would be a pity if such feelings died out of the world ; but Nature has planned her arrangements not only for the commonplace, but for the finest spirits, and what seems from the outside impossible sac- rifice is transmuted by love into desirable. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 231 inevitable, delightful surrender. It is the most commonplace thing to say that love alone justifies marriage, and that love alone makes all the difference ; yet though commonplace it is the solvent of all matrimonial problems. That the crown of human happiness lies in the marriage of two mutually devoted and pure hearts, is beyond contradiction. Whether there is not also a duty lying on some people to marry, is perhaps more questionable. Roose- velt would say it is not questionable. And I have often felt about men of my acquaintance that they ought to continue their type. On the other hand, some of the finest women I have known have never married. But marriage is not an abstract affair which in itself is good or bad. It is the people who enter it that make it so, and you will forgive me if I say that you might bring to a man, if you loved him, an ecstasy of happiness, and lift his whole life to a level from which everything would seem different. But I am speaking much in the dark, and may be entirely missing the point you wish explained, so I stop. Please write again. I send this to Bombay as it seems too late to 232 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS catch you elsewhere. Remember me to your father and mother, and with affectionate regards and best wishes for your enjoyment during your trip and your happiness in Europe, Asia, Africa and America, and for ever and ever beyond, I remain . . . To his son Harry [Edinburgh], llth November 1906. Sixty of our men are to leave their manses in a week, although the ' Legals ' have no men to put into them ; and they are all coming down here to confer and see what arrangements can be made. It 's a sad business, and would never have happened had Scotland had a supreme court of its own. To-day Scotland beat So. Africa, 6 to 0, Academy „ Fettes 21 to 5, which fills me with content. To Miss {F) Edinburgh, l^th November 1906. You would be greatly mistaken were you to suppose that it was indifference which kept me from answering your former letter from Devon- shire. It has lain before me ever since it came. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 233 casting reproachful eyes at me and assuring me that I should not have the pleasure of receiving another until I answered it ; and lo ! your abounding generosity has proved it false. Thank you very kindly for your for- giveness and for your most welcome letter. I have been very busy, as I always am at the beginning of a new session, and I have besides had people staying with me — two of them from America, a doctor and his son. I am extremely glad to hear that you are enjoying London. There are some fine musical services, and some very good men in quiet corners whom you won't have time to find out. Have you seen the Tate Gallery and the Wallace Collection, and how often have you gone to the British Museum ? If you have only been once, please don't tell me, as I don't want to lower in any degree my opinion of you. To tell you the truth, the things I like in London are the streets, and Rotten Row, and the Museum, and occasionally the Abbey and the House of Com- mons — and the ZOO ! ! Don't you think Edinburgh would really be as enjoyable as Algiers — and much cheaper ? I really thought you had some fine scheme for 234 LATER LETTERS OF MARC5US DODS returning here. I need not tell you it would be a great joy to me. I always feel that you stimulate me and do me good, because you are far more responsive than most people. I will still hope to see you again sometime, somehow, somewhere ; if not, it will be a great and melancholy blank in the few remaining days of your affectionate . . . To Miss [B) Edinburgh, November 1906. My class takes all my time except the tired scraps I give to reviewing, but I am pleased with my class. They are not geniuses, but they are fine fellows, quite the kind to make good ministers of, and several of them ministers' sons . . . and very good looking, the best look- ing year I have ever had ; and that is pleasing : if we admire flowers ought we not also to admire God's finest physical work, the human form ? To the Same {Postcard) Edinburgh, November 1906. Chrysostom dreamt your dream before you ^ LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 235 when he said ' Think of it, that Abraham and Paul are waiting till you are perfected that they may receive their reward ! ' Primasius also, when he said that the * stola alba ' of the saints was the endowment of love waiting for the rest and gladly accepting the postponement of their own consummation ; and best of all Herveus, who says ' It is one body which waits to be justified ; one body which is said to rise to judgment.' Who put it precisely in your form I don't know, but it is a common thought of the mediaeval and patristic men. To the Rev. Henry Sloane Coffin Edinburgh, 3rd December 1906. I have suffered a good many pangs for not writing you sooner, although I know that your home resources make you now independent of all extraneous greetings. First let me thank you for your account of your household, and of the prosperity of your congregation — in both of which I rejoice with you. Then let me also thank you — for it was you, was it not ? — for sending me Adams Brown's lecture, which is excellent. I lent it at once to our 236 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS Dogmatiker Mackintosh, and I am sure if it had been in German he would have chuckled and crowed over it. I think sometimes that if we wanted to make a stir we should write in German under some jaw-breaking name, for in theology it is true that ' Far birds have fine feathers.' This proverb does not account for the manner in which our whole College, and especially myself and Mrs. Lowe, have fallen in love with your protege M'Clure. He is an excellent sample of Yale's product, not that he is a scholar or gifted with a superabundance of theological faculty, but he would win the heart of the most indifferent, and has worked his way, or gently slid, into the affections of all of us. His face is an introduction that opens all hearts to him. He has gone to live in our Settlement, and will see much there to interest him. He is in earnest, and has a thousand insoluble problems to pour out upon any willing hearer. We hope to get back to our own quarters on 1st January, and it will be a blessing to have an end of this fiasco. I hope you have got through the first term of your session happily, and are finding that if LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 237 matrimony takes away some of your time, it so enriches your remaining hours that you are even professionally incalculably the gainer. I am so glad that I have seen Mrs. Coffin, and can picture your home. I suppose she is not allowed to attend your lectures. By the way, how is Black getting on ? Well, I hope. Give him my kind remembrances, and tell him I hear every Saturday the moans and groans of his late colleague striving to find a successor. There is nothing very interesting here. The Highlands are in a deplorable state, and not likely to be better soon. Bad blood which will be there for two generations at least. We are by no means through the wood yet, even with the loss of about half a million sterling, which will clean us out and leave all our funds bankrupt. The usual autumn floods of books have prevailed, but so far as I am concerned have produced nothing of great moment — though Burkitt's Gospel History is well written and at points suggestive. There are also some good articles in Hastings' new Dictionary, alongside of some fairly poor ones. But as all my opinions of books go into The British Weekly, which I 238 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS suppose you still see, I need not bore you with them. This year I am taking the first and second years together, as the first year is the smallest in the history of the College ; and I have no senior class at all. They will come to me next session, if all's well. So I am working away at the Gospels and Teaching of Jesus. I have a fine class — more up to the ideal standard of character than almost any I have had — and certainly the best looking set of men we have had for long. I hope you and Mrs. Coffin are seriously meditating a visit to this side next summer. You know what a joy it would be to me. I fear my crossings are over — for though I get along without colds or sickness, I do not feel that I can stand so much as I could even a few years ago. Macgregor has been giving us four very fine lectures on Daniel. To Miss {F) Edinburgh, 21th January 1907. I am taking advantage, you see, of your kindness in giving me an address which will LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 239 reach you; and I am grateful that you have not just flown off into space and left us doubtful whether you are on this planet at all. I should like to see you flitting about Paris and enjoying the beauty and the stir. It 's one of the best places for a holiday, and one of the worst for a permanent residence, I should think, although I greatly enjoyed three months of it in the year 1854 ! ! Have you read The Scarlet Pimpernel ? or 7 Will Repay ? They are both by Baroness Orczy, and both about Paris, and both delightful. But oh ! to be hanging round those fascinating book trays and stalls on the Quai Voltaire, where I used to prowl and pick up odd and unknown things that called themselves books. Paris is quite worth doing thoroughly, and I suppose you have friends who know it well. Much has been wiped out and is no more, but much remains ; and what ideal and never to be forgotten days one can spend at Versailles and Fontainebleau and St. Cloud. Oh ! would that one's youth could return ; but the next best thing is to know that young people are enjoying it all as much as we used to do. You can't imagine how pleased I am to hear 240 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS that you will really come back here. Be sure you let me know with some exactness what time you expect to visit us. I will very gladly keep any fortnight you name, or any month, free from engagements, and be free to enjoy your company fully. You will not take very well to a settled life after all this globe-trotting, but to settle will itself be a change, and after a while one gets tired of packing and re-packing, and changing hotels and countries and languages. I hope your brother is doing a ' roaring trade ' though he is not a dentist, and that his wife has accepted an American accent. Now I need not write more, for no amount of added words could carry more sincere affec- tion than these already written, and I hope you are already impressed with a sense of the imperative necessity of writing soon and often to your sincere friend . . . To his son Harry Edinburgh, 2nd February 1907. I wrote half a letter to you at College two days ago, and have left it there, which won't LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 241 do you much good. It is so pleasant to have a snug little retiring room once more that I have been using it a good deal, but I see it has its disadvantages, and I won't write you again there. I am longing for Monday to hear if you have any tidings, though I am naturally not a very hopeful person, I fear. Things have come to myself always in a remarkable way — not always the things I wanted, but still, I suppose, the right things, and in the main things that have suited me — so I am inclined to trust, perhaps a little too much, to Providence managing things for me. To the Rev. Henry Shane Coffin Edinbukgh, \%th Februury 1907. I hope that by this time your neuritis is deep buried in the past — but I am distressed to think of you doing three men's work with this ailment in the background. I can't ask you to slack ; both because I know you would not do it though you were asked, and also because I know your work would be so much missed. But were there any feasible way of Q 242 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS lightening it I hope Mrs. Coffin will compel you to adopt such a way. I doubt if I ever thanked you for Adams Brown's Theology, although I have been en- joying it much. It suits me. Perhaps that is not high praise, but I find it interesting and helpful. I like its up-to-dateness and its lucidity, and its bringing everything to book, by bringing it into touch with what is real and human. I have been finding much in Shailer Mathew's The Messianic Hope in the New Testa- ment, and gleaning once more Baur's great Neu- testamentliche Theologie. He is bigger than his children. I see Hilgenfeld is gone at last — main- taining his flag to the end ; an able warrior. If you indulge in the luxury of having Mrs. Coffin read to you in the evenings, ask her to read Gilbert Murray's translations of Euripides. Four of the plays are out, and are the finest translations of any kind I have ever read. They have driven me to the originals, and I have read several plays this winter — not of Euripides, but of Sophocles. Of course I have the excuse of being obliged to maintain a Greek atmosphere, though the pickings for the illustration of the New Testament are few and far between. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 243 I greatly fear I must give up all expectation of crossing the Atlantic again. I live a great deal in 13 W. 57th Street, and had you spiritual vision you would see me prowling about in the charming library, and I know a week or two with you and Mrs. Coffin would be worth a year's ordinary life, and I don't dread the voyage at all, but I have a feeling that at my age it would be rash, and if I did take ill on your hands I could only blame myself. So you will come over, won't you ? I '11 try and entertain you, though now-a-days of course you carry your entertainment with you. But it would be a great delight to me and to many others. I lectured the other day on the Limitations of Christ's Knowledge ; it took me two lectures ; the men were grave and earnest, and I think perhaps convinced. It 's a shame to ask you to write when you have so much to do, but I think if you knew how very greatly I enjoy your letters you would continue to be kind to your ever affectionate . . . PS. Have you read Kaftan's Jesws undPaulus ? — very good criticism of Bousset and Weinel. 244 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS To a Granddaughter, aged 6 Edinburgh [early in 1907]. My dear Beth, — I could not imagine what the fat little letter that came for me this morn- ing was, and you may guess I was pleased when I saw your kettle-holder. It is beautiful, and I am astonished that you could make it. Uncle Marcus and Uncle Frank are very much pleased to have your love, but the kisses they won't have from me, but wait till you can give them yourself, and these will of course be much sweeter. Do you know that Bobbin has been so unwell that Uncle Frank has had to leave her at the Veterinary College to see if the Professors there can cure her. Doodle, our little dog, ran all over the house this morning and could not make out what had become of her. Now I must run off to my classes, but again thank you for your kind gift. Much love and kisses to you and Marcus from Your Grandfather. To Miss {A) Edinburgh, Zrd March 1907. I fear you are yourself not quite in the LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 245 condition your friends would wish. There must be a meaning, and a good one, for your long suffering, and we know that the dearest of all God's children had but a sorry time of it, and yet- To be sympathised with is sometimes distaste- ful, and yet I cannot help saying how con- stantly I think of you and how keenly I long for your deliverance from all darkness and trouble. Light is sown for the upright, and though long in appearing must appear. And I often think that after all and with all, you are you, one in whom we all delight, rejoicing to know that such natures are possible. Nothing can alter that. And as we feel with and for you day by day, God must be doing so with His infinitely wiser and more penetrating love. To Miss (E) Edinburgh [Sth March 1907]. To-day we have buried the Principal of our College, Dr. Rainy, the greatest Scotsman we have had for a while. It is quite on the cards that I succeed him, as the big men are all gone. I am sorry it comes to me, for I don't wish any 246 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS more responsibility than I have. It will be settled by the Assembly in May. If I am appointed you will need to look up to me more than you have ever before dreamt of doing ! To a Granddaughter, aged 4 [Edinburgh, March 1907.] My very dear Grand-daughter Edith Marcia Gray, — I, Marcus Dods, of 23 Great King Street, Edinburgh, humbly apologise for not sending you any present on your birthday. It was indeed bad of me, for I am very very glad you were born (where would you be if you had not been born ? Ask Jessie to tell you, for I can't), and I am sure a great many people will be glad, for you are going to make a lot of people happy, are you not ? And do you know the best way to make people happy ? It is to be happy yourself. And do you know the best way to be happy yourself ? It is to try to make other people happy. Isn't that funny, and doesn't it make your head spin ? But what would you like for a birthday present ? Will you wait till you come to Edinburgh ? Then we can go out together and LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 247 buy something. But if you wish it now you must write a nice letter and let me know. Indeed, you must write me a nice letter at any rate, for I have never had a letter from you since you were four years old — think of Edie being four years old. Why, you will soon make up to Kitty if you go fast enough. I am longing very much to have you here, but perhaps I may come to Manchester before you come, and I '11 see both you and B'lig and the canary, and also Marcus, who. Mother tells me, is a dear little boy, but how could he help being good, having such a well-behaved sister to play with ? When did you see ' Quelland ' ? or does he never come to see you now that he has a little baby of his own ? Please thank your Mother for her letter and ask her if I could come to see her on my way to London, where I must be on the 13th April. Now good-bye, my dear little girl. Don't grow too fast, because I like you very much as you are. Do you think you can be better and nicer when you are five ? You can try. In any case I am no doubt ever your loving grandfather . . . 248 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS PS. 100,000,000,000, that is, a hundred thousand million kisses, which it will take all the rest of my life to give you. To Miss {A) Edinbtjrgh, 29f/i March 1907. Please remember me to your cousin. I admire the ' grammarians ' who are content to add one solid stone to the permanent temple of knowledge instead of twittering round it like so many swallows and only attracting attention to themselves. That you should honour me by sending one of your three copies ^ to me and one to him, is more than I deserve — but lean admire where I cannot rival. To Mrs, Watson Edinbukgh, 29^^ March 1907. Thank you very heartily for flowers and letters. I am not surprised Dr. Watson feels the burden of his eighty-five years. I hope he also has some consciousness of the aroma of goodness and wisdom he has diffused during these years, inspiring and gladdening so many. 1 Of a translation by the recipient of the letter. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 249 The impulse he has given to the most receptive and capable men, like Mackintosh and Athol Gordon, is quite unique, as you know. To Miss (D) Edinburgh, ZOth March 1907. In your flight across the Continents I tried to catch you with a letter at Calcutta, but from what I have since heard of your movements I fear it must have fallen far short of you. If it has overtaken you my admiration of Thomas Cook & Sons will be multiplied four- fold. This goes to Hong Kong (where it is said the English have caught their French accent), but as you may be at Tokio or Vancouver before it gets halfway I am not going to expatiate, but merely to ask you to be kind enough to write when you get home. This whirling round everywhere must make you dizzy, not to say giddy; that I suppose you never are. But what a gallery of pictures and memories you must have acquired. You could sit quietly all your life now and brood on what you have seen and experienced. Do you keep a diary ? If not, you must settle 250 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS somewhere and write down your reminiscences. You can't imagine what a pleasure it would be to read it afterwards. Good-bye. I am glad to think that Good- ness and Mercy follow you, and can travel as fast as you and catch you up in the queerest places. That I could do the same is the con- stant wish of yours ever . . . To Miss {F) Edinburgh, Zrd April 1907. It makes me very glad to think you are having so gorgeous a time, and the photos and word or two you found time to send help me to realise your enjoyment still more. How I wish I could have been with you to share it, and to enjoy your enjoyment. I have quite stopped going abroad, not solely because I am too old to knock about, but because a solitary with no one to gush to might as well stay at home. I should have written to you long ago, but winter is pretty busy with me, and after writing all day one is glad to lay down the pen. We have now finished our session, and I go to England for two or three weeks. Then my LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 251 daughter and her children come to me, then my son and his children and wife, and then a dear girl from at present rambling in Italy. Remember, you promised to come and see me before you return to shine on . Do you ever feel ashamed of having so much enjoyment while others are slaving in squalid, dark, lonely places scarcely able to get bread and tea by working eighteen hours a day ? Well, you need not be ashamed. On the contrary, by enjoying to the utmost and seeing and knowing all you can, you bring back an enriched self, (though you were always good enough for me), and resume your place in your society, and necessarily enrich it. You can't keep it all to yourself even though you would. You are growing a larger-minded, more thoughtful woman, and that is your best preparation for being helpful wherever your lot may be cast. Only I hope you won't take root in France or Italy — America needs you. I fancy you will now be trying to get the Pope's blessing, or at any rate a sight of him, in Rome. But there are so many things there more worth seeing that if you miss him you won't be much the poorer. Give my love to 252 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS the dear old statues, the Dying Gladiator, and the sitting Agrippina, and Sophocles and all the rest. But don't give it all to the marble, but keep a great deal to yourself, and try and write again to your very affectionate . . . To Miss {B) Manchester, April 1907. The disease, which is a masterpiece of the Pit, goes on tearing me to bits with cough, filling my limbs with lead and jumps, and running up a nice temperature with the accompaniment of headache, and yet you ' only half pity me.' Oh ! you hard hearts, ye cruel women of Foun- tainbridge. Last night I had 343 different sleeps, each of them with a dream for which see Job 'passim. My doctor spent his forenoon church with me, reading bits of Du Bose, JEs Triplex and Whittier. To a Granddaughter, aged 4 {Postcard) [Manchester, 2nd May 1907.] Ten Commandments for Edith M. Gray. 1. Obey Jessie. 2. Take your snuff. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 253 3. Be kind to Doodle. 4. Lend or give your toys to Arthur and Marcus. 5. Please your hostesses, Jessie, Margaret, and Jane. 6. Love and kiss your Uncle Frank. 7. Be grateful to Tattie, Aunt Marcia, and all who ask you to tea and make you happy. 8. Pray for all who love you. 9. Especially for Mother, Daddy, and Jessie. 10. Love and write to Your Grandfather. To the Rev. Prof. H. R. Mackintosh 26 Haeley House, Regent's Pabk, London [15/A May 1907]. It is most kind of you to send me so long and interesting a letter, and I am grateful. Such letters are at present the most acceptable form of literature ; though I am getting better able to read what may feed my work. I am go- ing over 2nd Corinthians with some care to pick out suggestions regarding Paul's character and methods, and I find it most interesting. Raleigh's Shakespeare is the book of the spring. 254 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS In this lovely and well-equipped flat I have found the Report for 1905-6 of the Egyptian Exploration Fund, and there are some valuable pickings in it. Your Oxford adventure is most entertaining, and really it was worth missing your train to elicit so substantial a kindness. I am glad you saw Rashdall and the others you name. Few things brace one mentally with so true a tonic. Fairbairn is most kind and suits his post to perfection, and Bartlet is a dear fellow. You will have opportunities for the next thirty years of cultivating Oxford, and you will find it as profitable as Germany. I have been warned by my doctor against going back to Edinburgh too soon, and I mean to take a week at Wark-on-Tyne with my niece, Mrs. Young. But Frank sails for Canada on the 31st, leaving Edinburgh on the 30th, so I must be home before he goes. He is going out with good letters of commendation, and he has made some excellent friends — quite notably good fellows, who will do what they can for him — so I hope he will find some- thing which may attract him and be worth while doing. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 255 Thomson is indeed a great loss. Even in his crippled state he was fuller of practical wisdom and affection than most other men, and we shall feel our little circle sadly broken. Then my oldest college friend, the one man who called me by my first name, is gone — John Cunningham, one of the best of men, humble, hard-work- ing, devoted, and a thoroughly good scholar. William Miller too is much disabled, and others illustrate the rapidity with which one generation gives place to another. But the new men are in many respects better than the old ; and in our own Church I think we may look forward with good heart and hope. To Miss {D) [Wark-on-Tyne], l^th May 1907. Your very kind, full and interesting letter from Hong Kong of the 14th April reached me the day before yesterday, which seems quick. I wrote to Hong Kong on the 29th March, so I am in hopes that the Bank to which it was addressed may still be able to find you. Since then I have been chiefly employed in fighting 256 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS influenza, from which I am only now slowly- emerging. It is a fiendish disease, and I was run down when it attacked me. Happily I was with my daughter in Manchester and so was well looked after, and now I am on my way back to 23 Great King Street. I am much interested in what you say about the different types of Buddhas you see ; gods made in man's image. But even in Christianity this continues, for though we have God in Christ, each of us tends to see in Him only what we wish to see. It is amazing on the one hand to see how little Christians understand Christ ; and on the other hand to see how instinctively men of all religions adore what is good, and how often they seek to possess it. It's a strange, unintelligible world, and the one fixed point on which hope can rest is that God is Father of all. If it is not so, then the solid firmament truly is rottenness, and ' earth's base built on stubble ' — but if it is so, then what may not human existence become ? And the grand element, or one grand element, in God's Father- hood is what Christ shows us, that we not only are like Him but may hour by hour draw our life from Him. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 257 Now I need not write more, as this may fall into the hands of the Mikado or one of his post-office clerks. I am very grateful to you for finding leisure to write so fully amidst your quickly changing scenes and much engagement. To Mrs. Watson Wark-on-Tyne, 2Uh May 1907. This is hateful paper and I cannot write much on it, but I must at any rate thank you for your long, kind, and interesting letter. It was very good of you to use a portion of your newly recovered strength to write to me. Since I came here the weather has been severe — cold east wind and a good deal of rain, but it is so beautiful a country, and so remote and quiet, that I have greatly enjoyed it, and hope to go home to-morrow feeling almost well, if not quite well. I have really resumed work in a kind of way, for I have just this morning finished a paper on Henry Drummond for The Boston Congregationalist, which is to publish a special number in his memory. It has been very pleasant to live with him again for a day or two. 258 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS This spring has deprived me of some of my oldest friends — last of all, Robert Cochran of Glasgow, who died suddenly on Monday, one of the very best of men, unostentatious, but full of kindness and Christian feeling, and ceaselessly doing good. I am sorry to hear of Dr. Watson being still tormented, and hope he may soon get rid of his trouble. Has Hutton's Pilgrims in the Region of Faith been read to him ? I think he would relish it. The second half of Mrs. Bosanquet's The Family is also interesting and profitable. Does he ever give time to a novel ? If so, Framley Parsonage will stand a second reading. To R. R. Simpson ^ Edinbtjrgh, 27th May 1907. I am in receipt of your note asking me when I can come and intimate my acceptance of the Principalship of New College. As I am still weak and shaken by recent illness, I trust it will not be considered discourteous if I signify my acceptance thus by letter rather than in ^ Depute-Clerk to the General Assembly of the United Free Church, LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 259 person. The Assembly will, I am sure, under- stand that I am grateful, and that I have a very keen sense of the trust reposed in me. I can only say that I hope, by God's help and through the support of my Colleagues and of the Students of New College, to be in some degree instrumental in maintaining it in its present high state of efficiency. As regards the association of my name with that of those great men who have made the office illustrious, prob- ably the less said the better. To Mrs. {G) Edinburgh, 2Qth May 1907. I am accustomed to think you the wisest of women, and therefore incomparably wiser than any man, but when I find you congratu- lating the Church on the appointment of a broken down man of seventy-three, I begin to * hae ma doots.' However, you are saved by abstaining from congratulating me. Why I should be congratulated I fail to see. Everything in life has come to me too late. ] 1 I hope you are all flourishing, and hope also that the fresh east wind we are pretending to 260 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS enjoy and really shivering over, may draw you in soon to have a good talk with your ever affectionate but at present burdened with sixty letters to answer ... To his daughter, Mrs. Gray Edinbitrgh, \st June [1907]. Your telegram was very welcome. I was glad to hear that Frank had not missed the boat, or anything. He would tell you what a great send-off he had from the Battery. I am rather low. He makes a great difference in the house, but I suppose he was right to follow his instincts. I am sure there 's gipsy blood in us somewhere, or Irish or French through Pallisers, and his worry and impatience with settled ways must be forgiven. It 's a bit of this big, unintelligible world. I am at my seventy-ninth letter of thanks for congratulations, and feel pretty sick of pen and very tired, so you will excuse this scrawl. Here comes in your delightful long letter. I can't tell you how glad I am that you saw Frank off. I am sure it would cheer him immensely. I am always going back to those truly de- LATER LETTERS OF IVMRCUS DODS 261 lightful days I had with you, for which influ- enza was a small price to pay. To the Rev. Dr. James Colder Macphail Edinbtteqh, 5th June 1907. No congratulations are more valuable to me than yours, not only because you are now almost, if not altogether, my oldest friend, but because your sincerity and courage and wisdom have shone before me all my life, and helped me to whatever fragments of right purpose can be found in me by diligent search. I am glad to hear you are improving in health, and that summer (if it ever comes) may be expected to let you out once more into the open air — which is the true atmosphere for old and young. With kindest remembrances to you all, I remain ever your affectionate . . . To his son Frank Edinbubgh, 5th July 1907. This is my fifth letter to you. I cannot think what has become of the other four, but I am 262 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS very glad that you are yourself writing so con- stantly, and that you have already secured a berth. I wrote a very nice grateful letter to you in one of my recent wakeful nights, but so long as I employ my present amanuensis I am quite unable to expose my feelings, which I know would meet with ridicule and contempt. My employment of any amanuensis, good, bad, or indifferent, sympathetic or contemptuous, literal-minded or imaginative, is due to the fact that for nine days now my own paws have been chained up by a pleurisy which makes the least motion rather a torture. I think, however, I have now got to the windward side of it, and hope shortly to see it go entirely under. All your letters have been immensely interesting, and I hope you have been as interested in seeing the things that you describe in so interesting a way, but your most interesting communication is of course your cable of yesterday that tells us that you have got work. I do hope that the post is one that has an outlook, and which already is remunerative enough to support you. My scribe is so ribald and weary that I hasten to close, but hope to write soon again with my own hand. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 263 To the Same » Edinburgh, 2Uh July 1907. The last news I have had of you is from your letter to Mamie giving the details of your expenditure on food. Please don't carry your economy too far. You have your first severe winter to face, and you should be in good condition. Some of our students permanently injure their health by underfeeding. So be cautious. In order to be successful it is not absolutely necessary that you begin in starva- tion and rags. Have you made any friends you can spend your evenings with ? Be sure you say. I sent you The Academy Chronicle for this month, in which the Battery wails over your departure. I am now allowed to sit up with my clothes on, but I am very weak still, and see no im- mediate prospect of getting away for a change. Mrs. Lowe has been extraordinarily kind while I have been ill, coming almost every day to write my letters and to talk. I hope you don't find the office work too irksome in the heat. Please give as much detail as you can about yourself, and whether 264 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS you have any games or relaxation in the evenings. I must not write more, but this carries much love and constant good wishes from . . . To the Rev. Dr. Alexander Whyte Edinburgh, 2nd August 1907. My Augustine apparatus is a little out of date, and mostly French and German — the French books are very good, especially Poujoulat. I send you Farrar, though I presume you have it. He is really very good. The other two, M'Cabe and Cunningham, will at any rate give you something to contradict. My copy of Mozley's Augustinianism has mysteriously dis- appeared — some unscrupulous student has no doubt taken a fancy to it ! There is nothing better or so good on the Confessions as John Gibb's preface to his edition. He will send you it in proof if you ask him. Macaulay too could write you a suggestive letter. Augustine with all his faults had three merits which almost compensate for his hard logical theology. 1. He loved God — for all that out-pouring LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 265 in the Confessions and elsewhere was not mere rhetoric nor undiluted sentiment. He really had God always before him, and loved Him. 2. He re-discovered Paul, who had been so mysteriously shelved for three centuries. 3. He had literary genius — no one could put into more final form whatever thoughts he had. I wonder if Mrs. Whyte has all Father Tyrrell's books ? I wonder also if you and she have read Inge's Truth and Falsehood in Religion. This illness has robbed me of what little germ of religion I had. But perhaps it is foolish to estimate the amount of religion by the value of the thoughts one has about it. I think Thackeray knew more of God's grace than Augustine, when he says, when he was thought to be dying, ' I was as easy in mind, and as trustful of God and as confident in His wisdom and mercy, as St. Augustine, or St. Teresa, or Lady Huntingdon, or the Rev. Caesar Malan. ... As you and I send for our children, mean- ing them only love and kindness, how much more Pater Noster.' That seems to me just the whole matter. But I am low and down, and can't see anything truly. 266 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS To the Same Edinburgh, 2Qth August [1907]. Thank you very much for the Matthew Arnold, which I found awaiting me last night on my return home. It is a good shilling's worth. My fortnight in Northumberland has been much broken by weather — wind and rain — but no day have I been kept in the house. There have always been bright bits, and often whole days fine. I mean to go away to some place near for another week or ten days, as I am by no means strong yet, and not up to work. I hope you are having as good a time as you usually have, and that all your household enjoys good health. You should be a very thankful man to have so many of your own about you. Last night when I came home I had no one but my faithful dog to greet me. His joy was boundless, but I miss more and more human companionship. I am far from complaining — on the contrary I am most thankful that Mamie and Harry are so satis- factorily settled, and that I get from Frank letters full of affection and hope. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 267 I have been living in one of the finest Manse libraries I ever saw — all the right editions of the best English literature, in excellent preservation, clean and shining in fine calf — a delightful place to browse, as I have been doing. Of profes- sional reading I have just finished an admirable survey of Hellenism in its relation to Judaism by Wendland. How those Germans work — it is amazing — the amount and the accuracy of what they do. To Thomas Ogilvie Edinburgh, 21st Augiist 1907. Your kindness is unfailing, and I am quite humbled by it. Very many thanks for all. I came home on Monday somewhat stronger, but I am not yet fit for work. I fear I must give up the idea of coming to Kepplestone. My Doctor says I must avoid the east coast. So I mean to go to Harry's to-day for a few days, and then if I am fit, which is doubtful, I will go to Pitlochry. I am more vexed than you believe to give up the idea of visiting you ; but the session is coming near, and I dare not run any risk. I hope you will enjoy your trip in the 268 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS Lusitania. I am very glad to hear that Mrs. Ogilvie is making progress, and I trust it may continue, and that you may never know the desolation of yours gratefully . . . To the Rev. Henry Shane Coffin Edinburgh, 30///, August 1907. I have been ill this whole spring and summer — last five months, six weeks in bed — first with influenza, then with pleurisy, but as your festal day, the 6th September, draws near, I must stir myself to wish you increasing happiness every year of your married life. I very often think of you and your wife, and always with pleasure and hopefulness. To celebrate the day in a very small way I send you (at least I asked Macniven & Wallace to send you) Inge's Truth and Falsehood in Religion, which I hope you have not already got. There are some striking things in it. Have you read any of Father Tyrrell's books ? He is writing too much, but he is representative and has some- thing to say. The little reading I have done this summer has been in the relation of Hellenism to Christianity, especially Wendland's introductory chapters in LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 269 J. Weiss' Neues Testament. For a survey of the whole field nothing could be better. But more inspiring is the volume published by Williams & Norgate and containing addresses or papers by Harnack and Herrmann. I am greatly helped by them. My introductory address will be a dull affair on the desirable changes in our College cur- riculum, and I know it will be breath wasted, as no change will be made. Frank is now in Winnipeg, and very anxious that I should come out and see him next spring. I think it unlikely that I shall be able to go so far, but if I do I will look in upon you on the way. I hope you are standing your work well. Don't try too much. Put yourself wholly into Mrs. Coffin's hands. Give her my love and tell her that if I could write her a letter half or a tenth as pleasant as the one she wrote me, I would write to her. To Miss Emily G. Kemp, F.R.G.S. [Ballyoukan Lodge, Pitlochry], 3]st August 1907. I hope by this time you have become hardened 270 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS to the sea and to the German ship, and are beginning to enjoy your experiences. I often wonder how you and Miss Macdougall are employed — mainly, I fancy, in examining maps and determining routes. You may be thankful even for such heat as that of the Red Sea ; for more persistent cold I never felt than what we have had here for months now. I am trying to write an inaugural address, but it gets very slowly on to paper, and looks very dry when it gets there. However, people are kind, and don't expect much. I suppose Shanghai is one of the busiest cities of China, and I try to think of you there surrounded by yellow faces and invaded by incredible and unconquerable odours ; but I hope you are not too uncomfortable, and that your companion's equable and cheery temper is not too severely tried. Be sure you write up your diary day by day, and don't disappoint your publisher and the public who wait to get some experience of unknown China at second- hand. Any tit-bits that you can spare for so hungry a mortal as I am will be highly prized, if you can find time to select what you think will specially suit a taste you know. I have an LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 271 impression your travels are going to be note- worthy and will afford an opportmiity for the utilisation of your gift of drawing and painting. And what fun you two will have. It is so useless going to even the funniest scenes if you have no one to wink to, or to the most beautiful if you can't see your admiration reflected in another face. Hoping to hear from you, and commending my spirit to you as a frequent third in your small party, I remain . . . To Mrs. Lowe [Edestburgh], Qth iSeptember [1907]. My old bones were safely transferred to the mouldy study yesterday. I comforted myself for the pangs of leaving BaUyoukan by going to tea at Lennox Street. Coming home through India Place I could not but reflect how much richer and more feeding are city smells than the thin air of the heather-clad hills ; the views too, how different — the bare, unpeopled, dead expanse of moor, and the closely walled streets with faces of your kind looking from every window. But I must own to missing the cheery 272 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS hostess, always down to greet me in the morning, and the beloved daughters. Doodle is faithful and happy, but — Seriously I must thank you from the bottom \ of my heart, also from the top, for your great kindness in having me, and in putting up with so inconvenient and uninteresting a guest. I should never go from home nowadays. To his son Frank Edinburgh, 25th October 1907. Until a few weeks back my first thought in the morning always was that God would keep in you a clean spirit and enable you to help your fellows. Now my first thought is one of thankfulness that God has prospered you so liberally ; for to have the love of such a girl is surely a greater possession than if you held all Manitoba. Cherish her as God's gift to you. Unfortunately I am again down with pleurisy ; high temperature and consequent sleeplessness and loss of appetite for more than a fortnight have pulled me down terribly. I hope to write more soon. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 273 To Miss Crum Edinburgh, 11th January 1908. It is only with great difficulty I can as yet write at all, but I must, however briefly, express my profound sympathy with you in your pre- sent distress and anxiety.^ I know that your sorrow will all be interlaced with joy that that singularly noble spirit has entered upon an existence in which he will find perfect satisfac- tion, freed from the limitations of which he was so conscious, and living a full and perfect life. And yet how much impoverished is this world of ours by his removal. I never met any one whose mind was so congenial, who so understood difficulties and had the wisest way of disposing of them. It was one of the great experiences of life to sit and hear him talk, however discursively, always with charity, width of soul, and width and prof imdity of perception. It has always been a great joy to me to see how the younger men fell under his spell, Hugh Mackintosh, Douglas Miller, James Paterson, Athol Gordon, Carnegie Simpson, very unlike one another, but equally owning his supremacy, 1 The Rev. Dr. Watson died at Northfield, Largs, on 14Lli January. Mrs. Watson was seriously ill at the time. S 274 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS and counting it the great honour and experience of their lives to have known him. No one so surely lifted one into the right atmosphere ; his finished courtesy, his knowledge, his wisdom, his sheer and constant goodness, were for many others a kind of new birth. But of course you know and rejoice in all this, and yet the blank now — well, well, you have had grace for many a trial, and doubtless the bitterness of this loss will be somehow sweetened to you. May the spirit of our Forerunner be with you and dear Mrs. Watson. I do trust she may not be thrown back by this terrible blow, but go on to perfect recovery. Please convey to her, with whom and with yourself my thoughts constantly are, my deepest sym- pathy. To the Rev. Prof. H. R. Mackintosh {Postcard) Manchester, 2^th February 1908. Very many thanks for your refreshing letter. I am not making much way. Multa senem circumveniunt incommoda. Multa ferunt anni venientes commoda secum, Multa recedentes adimunt. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 276 I am not recuperating as a man of thirty would. But the doctor here has a definite opinion as to what is keeping me weak, and is treating me accordingly. He gives me great hopes of good from Devonshire air. I hope you and yours keep clear of influenza and all other ills. I hope to be in Redcliffe Hotel, Paignton, Devon, by Friday afternoon, where a letter will be most acceptable to . . . To the Same Hotel Redcliffe, Paignton, 2nd March [1908]. Your proposed 'pact' illustrates your char- acteristic generosity, but I could not bear to think of you as in any way tied to write me. Meanwhile many thanks for the letter already received. Your fears about your sermon in St. Andrew's were quite unfounded. Mrs. spoke in such terms of the service that I fear to afflict you with swelled head by repeating it. We are most comfortably housed here — every one most attentive and the weather moderating. To-day I sat out in the sun for more than an hour, but the wind is still sharp 276 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS and nippy. We are close to the sea. I could even in my present enfeebled condition throw a stone into the water from where I now sit, supposing windows were removed. I can't say that as yet I feel much stronger. In fact I have to-day felt most disappointingly weak, but of course I need not expect to be well in a day, and I have not suffered from the long and wearisome journey. It 's an immense boon having Mamie with me — indeed to be here alone would look towards madness. The only theology I have with me is Paradise Lost and Scott's Apologetic of the New Testament, but as yet I can't read anything but the most frivolous. There are lots of novels lying about, but I 'm ashamed to say I have read them all years ago. Write soon and convey to our colleagues my very sincere regard. To the Rev. Henry Sloane Coffin Hotel Redcliffe, Paignton, Sth March 1908. The above address will possibly indicate to you the stage at which my recovery has arrived. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 277 I came south in three instalments, and took a fortnight to the process. Here we are on the sea just two miles south of Torquay in a most comfortable hotel, and as I have my nurse and my daughter with me I am weU looked after. I am still extremely weak — a kind of humbling weak- ness. I can't put on my own clothes yet, and I can't walk a hundred yards without panting. But why am I delaying to say what great pleasure your letter gave me, conveying as it did the glad news that you and Mrs. Coffin are likely to be my guests this summer ? That will indeed be a very great joy, and I trust that nothing will intervene to prevent you coming. All your other news is ecHpsed by this, but I am much interested in the prospect of seeing your assistant among us next winter. Whether I shall be able to teach any more is doubtful, but at all events I can see and talk with him. Martin has been reading my lectures this winter, and MacEwen takes my class two days a week, and has got so enamoured of the work that it would almost seem as if he would stand for my Chair when it 's vacant. Now I must not write more, as a very little fatigues me stiU, but with love for yourself and 278 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS Mrs. Coffin, and always kindest memories of the 57th Street household, I remain . . . To the Rev. Prof. H. R. Mackintosh Redcliffe Hotel, Paignton, llth March 1908. Your letters are as grateful as sunshine to this coughing invalid pinned to his chair. Very many thanks. May your reward come in forms you relish — as come it certainly will in one form or other. I have sat out baking in a very hot sun for three or four hours to-day, and I sleep with my window wide open, and I eat like anybody else, and yet I cough and remain weak. On the whole I am more hopeful. This is a lovely spot, and a most friendly and comfortable hotel, and Mamie and Nurse are with me always. Things, I suppose, must take their own way and their own time. You have heard of the minister who was praying for fine weather when he was interrupted by a furious blast of rain against the window. ' Weel, weel, hae your own way o't, rain awa' and spoil a' the puir folk's crops.' I feel rather like him. I have been refreshed to-day by a visit from LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 279 that good man, Peter Purves. His son resides in Exeter, and he comes frequently to this neighbourhood. What bothers me now is the thousand and one minor ailments which ' do either accompany or flow from ' the major disease and keep me back from soundness of health. The Findlaters in Torquay are very kind in lending books, James' Pragmatism^ The Awaken- ing of Helena Richie (very good), etc. I read before I get up a little of Plutarch's Pericles, and note things I missed before or have for- gotten. It is full of good things, as when Pericles is praised for his rw SwacrOac ^dpeiv hrfixoiv Kol avvap^ovTOiv ayvcojxocrvvas (stupidities ? cross-grained humours ?). I hope you mean to take a complete holiday, however short, after the session. It will pay you to do so, and it will give you leisure to write to me without feeling it a burden. To Miss (B) Paignton, 3Iarch 1908. I am at no time a religious person, and I seem during the last six months to have been even unusually irreligious. At first I prayed a 280 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS little for better health, but I soon stopped that and fell back on my text, which seems to me to contain the whole of religion, ' Who . . . though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered.' To obey, that is to accept the spirit of Christ in the only form I have any consciousness or knowledge of a spirit of Christ. But I see no use in always fussing about one's condition. God is kind, and will do the best for us, and I am prepared to respond as well as I know how by patience when patience is called for. As to joy, that depends largely on tempera- ment and circumstances, and even where spirit seems to triumph over physical illness and out- ward distresses, it is still largely temperament. At the same time our ideal, I know, should be a life of joy, because of our belief that through all muddle and wrong and sorrow God is working out an eternal joy for us. To the Convener of the College Committee of the United Free Church Hotel Redcliffe, Paignton, 2\st March 1908. Dear Sir, — In consequence of the state of LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 281 my health I find myself compelled, though with the utmost reluctance and extreme regret, to resign my Chair in New College. It seems advisable that I should retain the Principalship, and this, accordingly, I am willing to do. I should also like to put on record my most grateful sense of the generous and efficient aid afforded me by my Colleagues, and of the loyalty and affection of the Students. To the Rev. Prof. H. R. Mackintosh Hotel Redcliffe, Paignton, 21st March 1908. The die is cast, and I send in by this post my resignation of my Chair, but your words this morning clinching Martin's and MacEwen's have prevailed, and I have not resigned the Principalship. And so I am once again in the position into which life has so often brought me of being obliged to part with the thing I like and cleave to the thing I do not care for. I would rather not have the Principalship, much rather not, and I greatly like teaching, and to give up the one and keep the other is a real grief to me, and strong evidence of your great powers of persuasion. 282 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS Another galling thing in this business is that I now think it quite likely I may be fit for work in October, but I cannot in the interests of the College risk it. To fail again would be doubly disastrous. But I feel pretty sure that, in keeping with the usual contrariness of events, I shall now gain strength rapidly, and possibly see a man less (physicaUy) fit for the work occupying my chair. However, let me be thankful that I have held it so long, and have had so many opportunities of instilling truth into eager minds. Certainly I have had the satisfaction of seeing our College improve to an amazing extent. To the Rev. Dr. Alexander Wliyte Redcliffe Hotel, Paignton, 22nd March 1908. I hope you will be sorry to hear that I have felt compelled to resign my Chair. Owing to the urgent representations of my Colleagues, I retain the Principalship — at least meanwhile; that is, I retain what I dislike and abandon what I love. Such are the ways of Providence, which I do not pretend either to judge or to explain. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 283 I am better in every way except my breath- ing. I sit out many hours every day, and enjoy it, but when I walk a few yards I begin to cough and pant. When Beveridge's book ^ begins to come through the press you might tell them to send me the proof, or send it yourself after correct- ing it. I get long and interesting letters from Mackin- tosh and Martin. I trust the closing of the College will come off all right. To the Rev. Adam C. Welch Hotel Redcliffe, Paignton, Is^ April 1908. I have, as you suggested, written to Mr. Dalmahoy falling in with the very kind sug- gestion of the College Committee that I should not at present press my resignation. It is an act of extreme kindness on the part of the Committee, and I very highly appreciate it. I wish especially to thank you for the trouble 1 Makers of the Scottish Church, in the series of Handbooks for Bible Classes (T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh), of which Dr. Dods and Dr. Whyte were joint editors. 284 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS you have taken in the matter, and T most ardently hope that the event will prove we are not all mistaken. My medical advisers all urged me not to resign and assured me that the probabiUty was that I should be fit for work in October, but my progress has been so amazingly slow, and my present feeling is so entirely a feeling of unfitness and weakness, that I found it very difficult to accept their opinion. I hope that as the months go by, strength will come. Believe me yours gratefully . . . To his sister Andrea Redcliffe Hotel, Paignton, 5th April 1908. I am very sorry to hear you have not been so well since returning to your own house, but I hope you may mend as the year processes. Here I very often think of you, as my bed-room window looks out on a lovely border overflowing with primroses and another with six long rows of tulips, brilliant red, but with no stalks at all, just sitting on the ground. In the front of the house, where I mostly sit frying in the sun, LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 285 there are no flowers, as the sea frequently comes over the sea-wall and salts everything. The Findlaters have been very kind in calling. One or two other people have called, and I have access to lots of books, and Kathie has been here while Mamie has been away, so the days go past very quickly. I have still my delightful Nurse Innes. Frank is now counting the days till he gets married. He is so very happy that I sometimes fear lest something may happen, but that is a pagan feeling, as why should not he and every- body else be happy ? I am sure we are meant to be so. To the Rev. Dr. Alexander Whyte Redcliffe Hotel, Paignton, 14th April 1908. Aren't Macgregor's pubHshed sermons extra- ordinary ? I am glad you are getting away for a bit, and hope you may go back strong and eager for work. I was getting on so very slowly that my nurse persuaded me to consult a lung specialist in Torquay. He examined me, and 286 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS says that the breathlessness and weakness will go away, and that I shall be quite fit for work again. Tliis is cheering, but meanwhile I have to live in hope. There are some cultured and right-minded people here, and one can always have company ; and there is a fairly good circulating library, and I have a few books of my own, Harnack's Sayings of Jesus, and Scott's Apologetic of the New Testament. Then I have suddenly been summoned by NicoU to send him my con- tribution on Hebrews to his Greek Testament. This takes all the strength I am able to spend on serious subjects. I read Gosse's Father and Son last week, and greatly admire the simplicity of the style. It 's a remarkable account of a remarkable childhood. Write when you have time. To the Same Redcliffe Hotel, Paignton, I8th April [1908]. As to Origen, etc., of course you will read the ordinary things, Smith's Biographical Dic- tionary ; Cruttwell's Early Christianity ; Farrar's LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 287 Fathers, and especially the book of another English Dean whose name I can't recall, though I can direct you to the place in my shelves where his book lies. Of monographs, on Origen, Fairweather will give you all that you need. On Athanasius, Gibbon's celebrated chapter and Bright' s introduction to his edition of the Treatises against the Arians. On Chrysostom, Chase. Dill's books will give you a good deal which will serve by way of background to your lectures. But as you say. Rainy outweighs all for getting close to the men, their work and their worth. I am working away at Hebrews for Nicoll, though still very breathless and weak. Frank is to be married on Wednesday, and I hope to see him ten days after. Thank you for sending the Westminster on Arnold. I quite agree that his day is not spent — is not even at noon yet. I know I learned much from him, and find many of his poems utter for me what I would like to say. Write again soon. 288 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS To the Rev. Prof. H. R. Mackintosh Redcliffe Hotel, Paignton, 22nd April 1908. I write this on the principle of ' f anging the pump,' as I have no news or reflections, but can scarcely expect to hear copiously from you unless I at least show that I appreciate your letters. I hope you do not need to be told that I do. Indeed the day your hand-writing appears is marked with white. Nurse has attained the power of discerning your writing, and beams when she sees it, as she knows I '11 be good for the whole day after reading. I have been reading Henry James' Partial Portraits with much enjoyment, also Peake on Hebrews with the greatest admiration. But I don't get much read here. I can't read with much comfort sitting in the sun. I hear from Whjrte pretty often. He and his are near Guildford. His present loves are Lightfoot on Supernatural Religion and Stanley's Eastern Church. A letter from Harry Kennedy tells me what I knew already and greatly regret, that he has declined the re- quest from Chicago to take the New Testament LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 289 department for the summer term. Burton tells me that Moffatt also has declmed. Oh that I could go ! To the Rev. Dr. Alexander Whyte Redcliffe Hotel, Paignton, 2Zrd April 1908. A queer thing happened this morning. I had ordered Gilbert's History of Interpretation ^ from Thin, and opened a parcel from them in which I found not the book I ordered but another of Gilbert's books which I have had for years. But on opening the parcel addressed by you, in which I expected to find Stanley, I found the very book I wanted, so that your generosity has compensated for Thin's mistake. Stanley has not yet arrived, but the posts here are most irregular at present, and I am still hopeful. It is very gratifying to me to think that you believe in my sympathy with your reading and mental occupations, and I feel touched by it away in this corner of the comitry. As to taking Gilbert for an opening address, I can't weU do that, as I myself have a course on the History of Interpretation. ^ The First Interpreters of Jesus. T 290 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS I am often very doubtful still whether I shall be fit for an opening or any other lecture. I seem to have got a crushing blow, and cannot get back my strength. I am getting on slowly with Hebrews, and am reading Peake with the greatest admiration. He has an extraordinary faculty for exposition, and for a man so over-worked to produce work so finished reflects great credit on his working power. He seems to be obliged to do all kinds of work. I came across a clause in Henry James this morning which would please you : ' Effort, effort, always effort, is the only key to success.' He has some excellent papers (Partial Portraits) on George Eliot, Emerson, Daudet, Maupassant, etc. Kindest regards to all with you. To Miss Crum Hotel Redcliffe, Paignton, 2Qt1i April 1908. I would have written to you ere this had I not been passing through a time of great weak- ness, and had I thought I could say anything which would be of the slightest help to you. I LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 291 do not write now because I think I can say anything helpful, but because I cannot refrain from saying how very deeply grieved I am that you should have been called to suffer this very great sorrow. It must seem as if your life were emptied of all that is most vital in it. I am sure that when the first poignancy of your grief is past you will find endless satisfaction in thinking of Northfield, so long the home of all that is best in human nature and human life ; where so many of us learned the courtesies and kindnesses and hospitalities and intellec- tual intercourse and spiritual tone which make this world fit to live in. Your sister has had a long, happy and fruitful life, making many happy with the best kind of happiness, that purifies and softens ; and that she should not have been suffered to know any senile decay is certainly a thing to be devoutly thankful for. And must we not believe that husband and wife, after so short a separation, are now re-united in that unimaginable bliss for which they were here prepared ? God means that we should be glad, and the extreme difficulty of being so is the test of our loyalty to Him. 292 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS May all good influences now and ever attend you. To the Rev. Prof, H, R. Mackintosh Redcliffe Hotel, Paignton, lOth May 1908. I hope you are not setting me down as a monster of ingratitude ; I really have the usual wretched excuse that I have had still another bad turn, temperature up night after night, and a quite appalling weakness. Yester- day and to-day I am feeling better, and have been out in the sun most of the time. I have got the whole MS. of Hebrews sent to the printer now, and hope to get proofs imme- diately. I am a good deal ashamed of it. Nicoll has sent me for review my old and dear friend John Gibb's edition of the Con- fessions of Augustine in the original Latin. It seems to me very admirably done. Evidently Gibb has carefully studied Plotinus, and can trace Augustine's Neo-Platonic phases better than I have seen it done elsewhere. But our great sensation here is the arrival of Frank and his bride. They have been here for a week. . . . LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 293 A letter from MacEwen tells me he is home from a three weeks' cruise which he seems to have greatly enjoyed and benefited by. I wish I could have been with him. Here I am con- tinually reminded of the woman in the Gospel that spent all her living on many physicians and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse. Nurse says she wishes you were here as my best tonic, for she thinks nobody cheered me up or did me so much good as you. She is right. . . . but we are all limited. That book of Gibb's makes me feel entirely superficial, and Peake in a few pages has said, and said per- fectly, all that need be said about Hebrews, However one must just ' fush awa'.' To the portentous death-roll of this last year another of my college friends is added, Archibald Charteris — a good man. When you have occasion you might thank the ' Muftis ' ^ for their touching little greeting to me from Moffat. To the Rev. Dr. Alexander Whyte Paignton, I2th May 1908. I think it is quite heroic of Harry Miller to ^ A clerical club of old New College men. 294 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS think of the Wardenship,^ but several of our young men are enthused by the hope of a reconstructed society. It is not always easy for my antiquated brain to keep pace with Herbert Gray, but I am more and more per- suaded he is in the main right, and that socialism wisely directed has the future in its power, and if it does not accomplish all it expects, it will still cleanse society as it has never before been cleansed. It would repay you to read Wells' New Worlds for Old. No doubt Fred has a copy. Last week I was nearly despairing of getting well ; but I am much better again, and hope I may be able to come north in June. I am still unaccountably weak. Kindest regards to you all. To the Rev. Prof. H. R. Mackintosh Paignton, llth May 1908. It is really disgraceful that I have not yet sent congratulations to you and the Frau Professorinn, and a word of welcome to the new Professorinnchen. ^ Of the New College Settlement, Edinburgh. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 295 I am very glad you are going to Oxford. Sanday is a very lovable man, and you will meet RaslidaU, Percy Gardner, and all the rest of the royal family. If you don't already know Carlyle, get to know him well ; there is much good stuff in him. Have you seen the volume these men have issued just now, Anglican Liberalism ? If you read it you will be en rapport with the line they are taking. Carlyle' s pronounced socialism is interesting, and I think a hopeful sign. How I wish I were going with you. To the Same Edinburgh, 22nd July [1908]. Your letter was most welcome and refresh- ing, and it does me good to think of your rides with Gossip, and especially of your stimu- lating and strengthening 500 souls per diet. Really ours is a grand profession, and recently when I have been able to preach I have been much more disposed to thank the minister for giving me a chance of addressing people than to expect thanks from him. I am sitting up this afternoon, clothed and I hope in my right mind, though of that I am 296 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS not so sure, as my brain waggles a good deal, and my voice is a ' childish treble,' but I suppose time will bring that back. But now I have to face those dreary weeks of convalescence, as trying as those of sickness. I am quite as anxious to have a talk with you about the Christology of Hebrews. The remarkable thing is that with so extraordinarily free a handling of the humanity of Christ and so pronounced a statement of His divinity, the author should yet show no anxiety about recon- ciling the two, or have any theory of incarnation. His statement of Christ's divinity seems rather to lean upon the Old Testament quotations of the first chapter. Does that seem to you the origin of his belief, and if so, is it not some precarious ? I forget whether you take Kennedy's view of the Philippian passage ? I satisfy myself about it once in six months and fall into bewilderment the other half of the year. The passage from 2nd Corinthians which I wanted you to translate is Chapter iv., verses 8 and 9. Some fanciful persons, like Hausrath (who at any rate never fails to be interesting), think the words anopovixevoL, Stw/co/xei'ot, KaTa/BaWofievoif fit very well to the idea that Paul is recalling LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 297 how he was chased through the narrow streets of Ephesus by an infuriated mob, at a loss to find a way of escape, yet always finding one, knocked down, yet not made an end of. Of course the eV TravTl of V. 8 shows Paul did not mean this, and yet it adds life and reality to the passage. But what a time he must have had in that city — 'so great a death,' 'always bearing about the dying of the Lord Jesus,' etc. I expect to be here for ten days yet, as I can't move till I am a bit stronger, but I hope if this weather continues, I shall get on faster now. To compensate for the meagreness of this I enclose one received from Martin this morn- ing. He is having an excellent time, and no man better deserves it. Affectionate regards to yourself and Mrs. Mackintosh. To the Rev. Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll WiLLOWBANK, Newtonmore, Ith August [1908]. I have to thank you for your very kind letter and for the parcel of books etc. which has just come in. It is very gratifying to read what 298 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS you say about my work in New College, though I am aware much of what you say is due to friendship — which after all is more than personal success. I think you are wise to propose to yourself a period of comparative leisure. The strain of your past years must have been tremendous, and would tell heavily upon you if carried into old age. I don't know that I have much that would do to publish. At least it would need to be re-written. What has done for my classes was often very hastily put together, and lacks vitality and individuality. Tired again. To Miss Crum Newtonmore, 26th August 1908. Very many thanks for the lovely honey, which I have already been sampling with enjoy- ment. I am sure Mackintosh's visit would be a great delight ; he is so enthusiastic an admirer both of Dr. and Mrs. Watson. I myself feel often that such spirits cannot die. It may be an idle fancy, but it is comforting and helpful. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 299 I cannot say I am getting rid of my cough, but otherwise this place is doing me good. Excuse weariness. To Miss [D) Newtonmore, 4//i September 1908. Your good news has given me great pleasure, and I very truly rejoice in your happiness. I long for some one who knows you, to talk it over with. A letter from this morning is the nearest approach I can make to that, for I am here in exile trying, vainly as yet, to throw off an illness I have had for a year now. You know what I think of married life, and though it is difficult for me to look at it from the woman's point of view, I have seen nothing on I earth more beautiful, more worthy of admira- \ tion, or more fitted to give one hope for our race, than the manner in which good women 1 are able to give themselves away and find their i fullest life and happiness in the life and happiness \ of others. j I can't write much, for I am sick and ill, but I am sure you will believe me when I say that I do most earnestly pray that your married life may be a long ever-increasing joy. 300 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS To the Rev. Henry Shane Coffin Edinburgh, 1st October 1908. I feel constrained to celebrate the inaugura- tion of the penny post by writing to you. Of course I should have done so long ago, but after you left, a good deal of light and life went out of my existence, and I have been having an extra poor time lately. Whether to accentuate the joy of the two days you gave us — and there was little need to accentuate it, for its intrinsic value was quite apparent — at any rate the weather broke, and until this week we have had nothing but storm and rain and fog. But your two days shine through it all, vital and unforgettable. Many thanks for the book you sent me, but uncountable thanks for your visit. I don't get out so much now, as my cough is worse, and the doctors are going to try some new thing as a last resort. If it fails, I fear I must be content gradually to fade away. , Funnily enough I do not remember to have ever j been so irreligious, so little inclined to pray, so cold on the spiritual side, so content to let things slide. I wonder if that is a common experience in sickness. I can't quite under- stand it. LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 301 Nurse and I very often recall your visit, and if you heard her praises of Mrs. Coffin,. I am sure you would think Nurse a charming person. But all the friends here and in Newtonmore feel equally indebted to you for bringing among us not only yourself — a boon with which we used to be wholly satisfied — but also so gracious and lovable a personality as your wife. Please give her my very affectionate remembrances, and assure yourself once again of the sincere and grateful affection of . . . To the Rev. Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll Edinburgh, [October 1908]. Just a line from bed to say I have finished Ian Maclaren, not only with admiration but with a profound impression of his goodness. No book I ever read has made me so ashamed of my own ministry. The book cannot fail to do much good, especially among ministers. To his daughter-in-law^ Mrs. F. P. Dods Edinburgh, 1th February 1909. Your vivid and entertaining picture of your domestic life has made me feel as if I had lived 302 LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS in your house for a week, and I am sure the fit of indigestion I had last week was the result of your description of the ' sinkers.' One who has such a gift for letter-writing as you have should not let it lie idle, and I expect to have many more equally welcome accounts of what you two are up to. For myself, I am too weak to write. I have been in bed for five months now, but the doctors seem to be still hopeful of my recovery. I am not forgetting Frank's birthday, but I have nothing to send him but best wishes for his future years. It 's a great comfort to know that he has you to go home to after his work. To the Rev. Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll Edinburgh, 1th March 1909. I have to thank you very warmly for speaking to Hodder & Stoughton, who have sent me a very liberal cheque. On looking back over the last twenty-five years I see how very much I am indebted to you for giving me opportunities and encourage- ment without which I should have addressed a very much smaller audience. Believe me that LATER LETTERS OF MARCUS DODS 303 I am grateful, and that though I can write no more for you, my connection with you has been a very large part of my life. I thank you very much for the bundle of books you sent me. Printed by T. and A. Constablk, Printeri to His Majesty at the Edinburgh University Pres^ UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. Form L9-Series 444 AA 000 995 575 BX 9225 D66A3 1911