Letters to His Friends | Page 4

education") in the latter year.
{8}
'He went up to Christ's, Cambridge, in 1887, and at once addressed
himself to his favourite study. What strides he was making in it were

apparent at once from the extraordinary series of distinctions which he
won--a scholarship at the college, the Carus Greek Testament Prize for
undergraduates, the Jeremie Septuagint Prize, a first class in the
Theological Tripos, the Burney Theological Essay Prize, the Carus
Prize for Bachelors, the Crosse Divinity Scholarship, and the Hulsean
Prize all fell to him between 1888 and 1893, and finally in 1896 he was
elected to a Fellowship at Christ's, where he had already been
Theological Lecturer for a year.
'His essay which gained the Burney Prize in 1891 was on "The
Authority of our Lord in its bearing upon the Interpretation of the Old
Testament." He printed it in 1893 under the title of "The Self-limitation
of the Word of God as manifested in the Incarnation." With
characteristic modesty he says in his preface: "I can claim but little of
the work as strictly original." This is far too deprecatory; the essay is a
singularly lucid statement and attempted solution of a most difficult
theological problem, in which all who believe in the Deity of Christ
must be deeply interested, and I can bear personal testimony to its
helpfulness. It was only the other day that I was reading it afresh, for I
had just recovered it, when I feared that the copy he gave me was
hopelessly lost and irreplaceable, from South Africa, where a friend to
whom I had lent it had taken it among his books. Among Forbes
Robinson's later activities were a work on the Coptic Apocryphal
Gospels ("the subject," he wrote to me, "was so technical and
uninteresting that I did not send you a copy"), and the editing of a
Sahidic fragment of the Gospels.
'But his value to Cambridge and to his college lay mainly in the
influence for good which he was able to exert over undergraduates.
Again and again I have been told {9} there how great this was; and it
was no little achievement for one whose very modesty and
humble-mindedness must have made it difficult. But his heart was in
the work, and in the maintaining of Christian influences in university
life. It is hard to over-estimate the loss which his death at so early an
age implies alike to students of theology and to those among whom he
was more immediately working. But he has left us the example of a
simple and devoted life and the consecration of great and growing

powers to his Master's service. "God buries His workmen, but carries
on His work."'

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CHAPTER II
LIFE AS AN UNDERGRADUATE AT CAMBRIDGE
From this point forward the sketch of Forbes's life can be given almost
entirely in the words of those who knew him at Cambridge.
A writer in the Christ's College Magazine for the Lent term 1904 says:
'Many older friends will always think of him in his attic rooms, where
he began to make his mark in our College society upon his first coming
up. Only two other Freshmen had rooms in College, and Robinson's
rooms became at once a centre for his year, and later a meeting-place
where the gulfs between higher and lower years were bridged over. A
little older than most men of his year, he was considerably their senior
in character and in intellect. He showed at once the qualities which he
retained to such a unique degree in later years--an inexhaustible power
of making friends with all sorts and conditions of men, and an
insatiable interest in all sides of College life; the most serious things
were from the first not beyond his comprehension, and the most trivial
did not appear to bore him, even when their freshness had worn off. His
love of books was catholic; he possessed a great many and read them
{11} to his friends. At the College Debate, of which he became
secretary and president in his second year, he was a frequent and fluent
speaker, with a remarkable command of language, though sometimes
his eloquence was more than half burlesque. His powers of thought and
real strength in argument were more often displayed in private
discussions, where irony and humour hardly veiled the depth of
earnestness below.'
[Illustration: Forbes Robinson (1887)]

During his first three years at Cambridge he read for the Theological
Tripos. In the course of his first year he was elected a scholar of his
College. At the beginning of his second year he won his first University
distinction, the Carus prize for the Greek Testament. The other
University prizes which he gained were the Jeremie prize for the
Septuagint in 1889, the Burney prize essay in