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FRIENDS (CHAP. XVII
cases of men with sparkle ·In their talk, whose letters are
letters of business and nothing more.
There remains, however, a much deeper enquiry. Sidgwick
in religion was a Theist, but certainly not a Christian.
How, the!\ are we to account for the extraordinary spell
exercised by this Hellenic-minded man upon men like
Archbishop Benson and Dr. Gore, to whom the central
affirmations of the Christian Creed are literally
The fountain-light of all our day,
The ma&ter·light of all our seeing J
I suggest the following : the deepest criterion as to the'
standard of excellence reached by any character is the'
completeness of the victory over egoism. A Christian
believes that there can be no even inchoate victory un-·
Jess the allegiance bas been transferred from self to God,
or to Goodness, Beauty or Truth, with such an ardour of
loyalty that the new service can never again be thought
of as given merely to an abstract Principle. It must be the
response to thaovertures of the Creator Himself, however
various may be the conceptions formed of the way those
overtures have been made. What hindered Henry Sidgwick
from looking at the Gospel st{)ry with our eyes we
may not know and must not dream of judging. But of
one supreme excellence we are allowed to be judges. He
was one of those rare and holy souls who, disowning the
claims of an all-analysing, all-corroding intellect, entered
on the highest, purest quest that was known to him, the
wholly disinterested pursuit of Truth : Truth conceived
of intuitionally ; descended from Heaven but to. he
lived by us on earth, in obedience to claims :that were
never to be questioned or disallowed. He once contrasted
the long, slow, unrewarded toil of philosophic research
with the quick returns promised him as a talker of modern.
languages. After taking his degree (as Senior Classic), he·
calculated that he might travel and give six months
severally to twenty languages on end, and come back a
lion of society with 60 per cent. of the reputation of