Everyone who has doubted after believing knows how, after the first admitted and recognised doubt, others rush in like a flood, and how doctrine after doctrine starts up in new and lurid light, looking so different in aspect from the fair faint outlines in which it had shone forth in the soft mists of faith.  The presence of evil and pain in the world made by a “good God”, and the pain falling on the innocent, as on my seven months’ old babe; the pain here reaching on into eternity unhealed; these, while I yet believed, drove me desperate, and I believed and hated, instead of like the devils, “believed and trembled”.  Next, I challenged the righteousness of the doctrine of the Atonement, and while I worshipped and clung to the suffering Christ, I hated the God who required the death sacrifice at his hands.  And so for months the turmoil went on, the struggle being all the more terrible for the very desperation with which I strove to cling to some planks of the wrecked ship of faith on the tossing sea of doubt.

After Mr. D——­ left Cheltenham, as he did in the early autumn of 1871, he still aided me in my mental struggles.  He had advised me to read McLeod Campbell’s work on the Atonement, as one that would meet many of the difficulties that lay on the surface of the orthodox view, and in answer to a letter dealing with this really remarkable work, he wrote (Nov. 22, 1871): 

“(1) The two passages on pp. 25 and 108 you doubtless interpret quite rightly.  In your third reference to pp. 117, 188, you forget one great principle—­that God is impassive; cannot suffer.  Christ, qua God, did not suffer, but as Son of Man and in his humanity.  Still, it may be correctly stated that He felt to sin and sinners ’as God eternally feels’—­i.e., abhorrence of sin and love of the sinner.  But to infer from that that the Father in his Godhead feels the sufferings which Christ experienced solely in humanity, and because incarnate, is, I think, wrong.

“(2) I felt strongly inclined to blow you up for the last part of your letter.  You assume, I think quite gratuitously, that God condemns the major part of his children to objectless future suffering.  You say that if he does not, he places a book in their hands which threatens what he does not mean to inflict.  But how utterly this seems to me opposed to the gospel of Christ.  All Christ’s reference to eternal punishment may be resolved into reference to the Valley of Hinnom, by way of imagery; with the exception of the Dives parable, where is distinctly inferred a moral amendment beyond the grave.  I speak of the unselfish desire of Dives to save his brothers.  The more I see of the controversy the more baseless does the eternal punishment theory appear.  It seems, then, to me, that instead of feeling aggrieved and shaken, you ought to feel encouraged and thankful that God is so much better than you were taught to believe him.  You will have discovered by this time, in Maurice’s