GRACE.
rTO THE EDITOR Or TER "SPECTATOR.".1 SER,—In reference to your article on " Grace " in the Spec- tator for March 29th, will you allow me to make the following quotation from Archbishop Benson's diary (as given in his Life, VoL IL, p. 222) ?—" Talking of Cyprian and Augustine he [Brooke Foss Westeott, afterwards Bishop of Durham] said that the dispute about grace, works done before grace, &c., vanished in the fuller light of the thought that nothing could have substantive existence by itself—that whatever isolates itself from source of light and life must be dead—' dead works." This thought, that " that which hath been made in
Him was life," and "that no man is wholly destitute of the illumination of the Light," is fully developed by Bishop Westcott in his commentaries on the Gospel and Epistles of St. John. It was one on which he delighted to dwell, and in which might be found the secret of the wonderful reverence for individuals of all creeds and all races by which he was characterised: Those of us who attended his lectures on Pre- Christian Religions at Cambridge will never forget the joy which illuminated his face as he told us of some strikingly Christian thought he had discovered in their Scriptures. It was, he said, a witness to the truth that "there was the Light, the true Light, which lighteth every man, coming into the world."
—I am, Sir, &c., CANTAB.
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