Letters to His Friends | Page 4

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 1891, the Carus prize for Bachelors, the Hulsean prize essay, and the Crosse University Scholarship in 1892. He took his degree in the first class of the Theological Tripos in 1890, and obtained a second class in the Moral Science Tripos of 1891. The year which he spent in reading moral science he afterwards looked back upon as one of the most useful in his life. After he had