Filled with wonder, shame, remorse, I begin on a Thursday to write to you.  What possessed me to let Wednesday pass without doing so I can’t tell, but I think it happens about once a year, and I dare say it’s a statistical mystery—­the averages must be kept right, and my mind is not to blame—­no free will in the matter.  This brings me to an essay in one of the magazines for August—­I forget which—­on the statistics of prayer.  Not a nice name (perhaps it’s not correct, but nearly so), and not a nice article, it seemed to me—­but I only glanced at it; produced, like many other faulty things of the kind, by illogical superstition on the part of Christian clergy, most of whom preach a half-belief, some a whole belief, on the efficacy of prayer for temporal good.  Then comes the hard unbeliever, delighted to prove, as any child can do, that such prayer cannot be proved to avail anything.  He is incapable of understanding the deeper and truer kind of prayer, but he convinces many that all communion with God is fruitless, or perhaps that there is no God with whom to hold it.  This may not be the drift of the article, for, as I said, I have not read it, but it is the drift of much that is talked and written nowadays by men and women of the author’s school.  I wish there were no schools in that sense.  They always have done and always will do harm, and prevent the independence of thought which they are by way of encouraging.

    Lady Russell to Lady Dunfermline

    PEMBROKE LODGE, Christmas Day, 1872

I do indeed feel with you how wonderful the goodness and the contented spirit of many thousands of poor, pent-up, toiling human beings, who live in God’s glorious world and leave it without ever knowing its glories, whose lives are one struggle to maintain life; and I think with you how easy it ought to be for us who have leisure for the beauty of life, in nature and in books, in conversation and in art.  And yet, it was to the rich that Christ gave His most frequent warnings.  Is it then, after all, easiest for the poor to do His will and love Him and trust Him in all things?

The summer and autumn and winter had been spent almost entirely at Pembroke Lodge, but when Parliament met early in 1873 they moved to London, where they had taken a house till Easter.

    Lady Russell to Lady Dunfermline

    LONDON, February 19, 1873

Scene—­a drawing-room; hour 11.30 a.m.  A young lady playing the pianoforte by candle-light.  An old lady writing, also by candle-light.  An old gentleman five minutes ago sitting reading also by candle-light, but now doing the same in a room below.  Three large windows through which is seen a vast expanse of a semi-substantial material of the hue of a smoked primrose; against it is dimly visible an irregular and picturesque outline, probably of a range of mountains, some rocky and pyramidal, others horizontally