temptation of the devil, and I shrank back horror-stricken and penitent for the momentary lapse of faith.  I saw that these apparent contradictions were really a test of faith, and that there would be no credit in believing a thing in which there were no difficulties. Credo quia impossibile; I repeated Tertullian’s words at first doggedly, at last triumphantly.  I fasted as penance for my involuntary sin of unbelief.  I remembered that the Bible must not be carelessly read, and that St. Peter had warned us that there were in it “some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest unto their own destruction”.  I shuddered at the “destruction” to the edge of which my unlucky “harmony” had drawn me, and resolved that I would never again venture on a task for which I was so evidently unfitted.  Thus the first doubt was caused, and though swiftly trampled down, it had none the less raised its head.  It was stifled, not answered, for all my religious training had led me to regard a doubt as a sin to be repented of, not examined.  And it left in my mind the dangerous feeling that there were some things into which it was safer not to enquire too closely; things which must be accepted on faith, and not too narrowly scrutinised.  The awful threat:  “He that believeth not shall be damned,” sounded in my ears, and, like the angel with the flaming sword, barred the path of all too curious enquiry.

V.

The spring ripened into summer in uneventful fashion, so far as I was concerned, the smooth current of my life flowing on untroubled, hard reading and merry play filling the happy days.  I learned later that two or three offers of marriage reached my mother for me; but she answered to each:  “She is too young.  I will not have her troubled.”  Of love-dreams I had absolutely none, partly, I expect, from the absence of fiery novels from my reading, partly because my whole dream-tendencies were absorbed by religion, and all my fancies ran towards a “religious life”.  I longed to spend my time in worshipping Jesus, and was, as far as my inner life was concerned, absorbed in that passionate love of “the Savior” which, among emotional Catholics, really is the human passion of love transferred to an ideal—­for women to Jesus, for men to the Virgin Mary.  In order to show that I am not here exaggerating, I subjoin a few of the prayers in which I found daily delight, and I do this in order to show how an emotional girl may be attracted by these so-called devotional exercises.

“O crucified Love, raise in me fresh ardors of love and consolation, that it may henceforth be the greatest torment I can endure ever to offend Thee; that it may be my greatest delight to please Thee.”

“Let the remembrance of Thy death, O Lord Jesu, make me to desire and pant after Thee, that I may delight in Thy gracious presence.”

“O most sweet Jesu Christ, I, unworthy sinner, yet redeemed by Thy precious blood....  Thine I am and will be, in life and in death.”