Yes, on the surface you saw an accomplished lady, and on the surface you saw also beaming out the fact that under the surface she was a whole-hearted Christian.  This was the most marked feature in her character.  No one could be in her company five minutes without recognising Whose she was and Whom she served.  A clergyman, who knew perhaps more of her inner life than any one else, in a letter to the writer, says, “The two most prominent characteristics of the last five and a half years of her life seemed to me to be her unreserved consecration and her absolute confidence in the Lord and His Word.”  The preceding chapters will have shown the reader how true an estimate this is.  The business of her life was to glorify God and enjoy Him for ever.  Of delicate health, she might have spent a large portion of her time in fretful complainings; but she looked to her Heavenly Father to consecrate even her sicknesses to His service.

Her standard of Christian life was a very high one.  She thus writes of a friend:  “I write to you as one who is really wanting to follow Jesus altogether, really wanting to live and speak exactly according to His commands and His beautiful example; and where this is the standard, what seems a little thing or nothing at all to others, is sure to be sin, because it is disobeying His dear Word and not ‘following, fully.’” Her intimate knowledge of Scripture, her sound common-sense kept her from falling into many of the errors into which some who have aimed high in holy things have fallen.

In a letter to her sister on this subject, she thus expresses herself:  “As to ‘perfectionism’ or ‘sinlessness,’ I have all along, and over and over again, said I never did and do not hold either.  ‘Sinlessness’ belongs only to Christ now, and to our glorified state in heaven.  I believe it to be not merely an impossibility on earth but an actual contradiction of our very being, which cannot be ‘sinless’ till the resurrection change has passed upon us.  But being kept from falling, kept from sins, is quite another thing, and the Bible seems to teem with commands and promises about it.  First, however, I would distinctly state, that it is only as and while a soul is under the full power of the blood of Christ that it can be cleansed from all sin; that one moment’s withdrawal from that power, and it is again actively, because really, sinning;... one instant of standing alone is certain fall.”

While magnifying the Saviour’s power to save, she had a just estimate of her own condition; only about two years before her death she thus expresses herself:  “I can say for myself that I feel I have deserved the very suffering of hell for my transgression of the first great commandment of the law (’Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,’ etc.), and for my sin of unbelief.”  While she aimed high, she knew full well that she had not attained, neither was already perfect.