Life and letters of Thomas Hodgkin / by Louise Creighton.

  • Thomas Hodgkin
Date:
1917
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Life and letters of Thomas Hodgkin / by Louise Creighton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tralia, and in many other places share with us who are here the sense of loss. I only long that we may share also the sense of thankfulness, the thankfulness and peace which are truly in harmony with the truest sense of personal bereave¬ ment, as all of us can give thanks, not only for what our loved one has been to us, but for what the Lord Jesus Christ was to him. Perhaps there is hardly any thought which comes more closely home to one to-day than that of thank¬ fulness for the wonderful simplicity of his own personal faith. Many an one, gifted in various ways, has sought after that simplicity and not known where to find it. With all the breadth of his outlook and the large-heartedness of his sympathy, all his readiness to welcome light, from what¬ ever quarter it came, there was always at the bottom the reality of a wonderfully childlike faith, that childlike faith which is far from being inconsistent with the truest and deepest reason. And so to him our Father in Heaven was a real Father—no shadowy figment of the imagination. All the more real because he knew, more than most men, what true fatherhood means, in his relation to his own father and in relation to his own children, and therefore the infinite blessing of the Fatherhood of our God in Heaven meant much to him and much to us through him. He accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as a personal Saviour, as a personal Friend, in a way which many with lesser gifts than he had, might well have desired, and that friendship with his Saviour was one cause of the brightness of his face and the youth of his heart to the very end. And the guidance of the Holy Spirit was no mere fancy of the imagination to him. In his daily life, his home life, his business life, his literary life, the guidance of the Holy Spirit meant much to him, and I am sure the longing of his heart to-day would be, if he could speak to us, that others might come into this same simplicity of faith, this true trust in God’s fatherly love, in the Lord Jesus Christ’s redeeming grace, and in the all-sufficient guidance of the Holy Spirit for everyone, whatever the difficulties and perplexities of this life. He who has led many others on by his wise counsel and loving sympathy and helpfulness in all sorts of ways, would seek to lead us on to a fuller reality of our faith, the reality of our relationship with the Unseen and Eternal Father, and that this might be more and more seen in the daily life of each one of us. May those of us who love and honour him, seek so to do, stimu¬ lated by his example, inspired by what he would have said