Not unnaturally, when the child was out of danger, I collapsed from sheer exhaustion, and I lay in bed for a week.  But an important change of mind dated from those silent weeks with a dying child on my knees.  There had grown up in my mind a feeling of angry resentment against the God who had been for weeks, as I thought, torturing my helpless baby.  For some months a stubborn antagonism to the Providence who ordained the sufferings of life had been steadily increasing in me, and this sullen challenge, “Is God good?” found voice in my heart during those silent nights and days.  My mother’s sufferings, and much personal unhappiness, had been, intensifying the feeling, and as I watched my baby in its agony, and felt so helpless to relieve, more than once the indignant cry broke from my lips:  “How canst thou torture a baby so?  What has she done that she should suffer so?  Why dost thou not kill her at once, and let her be at peace?” More than once I cried aloud:  “O God, take the child, but do not torment her.”  All my personal belief in God, all my intense faith in his constant direction of affairs, all my habit of continual prayer and of realisation of his presence, were against me now.  To me he was not an abstract idea, but a living reality, and all my mother-heart rose up in rebellion against this person in whom I believed, and whose individual finger I saw in my baby’s agony.

At this time I met a clergyman—­I do not give his name lest I should injure him—­whose wider and more liberal views of Christianity exercised much influence over me during the months of struggle that followed.  Mr. Besant had brought him to me while the child was at her worst, and I suppose something of the “Why is it?” had, unconsciously to me, shown itself to his keen eyes.  On the day after his visit, I received from him the following letter, in which unbeliever as well as believer may recognise the deep human sympathy and noble nature of the writer:—­

“April 21st, 1871.

“MY DEAR MRS. BESANT,—­I am painfully conscious that I gave you but little help in your trouble yesterday.  It is needless to say that it was not from want of sympathy.  Perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say that it was from excess of sympathy.  I shrink intensely from meddling with the sorrow of anyone whom I feel to be of a sensitive nature.

’The heart hath its own bitterness, and the stranger meddleth not therewith.’

It is to me a positively fearful thought that I might await a reflection as

  ’And common was the common place,
  And vacant chaff well meant for grain’.