so little as we may be able to find out) grow on you, make you free, light your path, and dispel, at no distant time, your painful difficulties and doubts.  I should say on no account give up your reading.  I think with you that you could not do without it.  It will be a wonderful source of help and peace to you.  For there are struggles far more fearful than those of intellectual doubt.  I am keenly alive to the gathered-up sadness of which your last two pages are an expression.  I was sorrier than I can say to read them.  They reminded me of a long and very dark time in my own life, when I thought the light never would come.  Thank God it came, or I think I could not have held out much longer.  But you have evidently strength to bear it now.  The more dangerous time, I should fancy, has passed.  You will have to mind that the fermentation leaves clear spiritual wine, and not (as too often) vinegar.

“I wish I could write something more helpful to you in this great matter.  But as I sit in front of my large bay window, and see the shadows on the grass and the sunlight on the leaves, and the soft glimmer of the rosebuds left by the storms, I cannot but believe that all will be very well.  ’Trust in the Lord; wait patiently for him’—­they are trite words.  But he made the grass, the leaves, the rosebuds, and the sunshine, and he is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  And now the trite words have swelled into a mighty argument.”

Despite reading and argument, my scepticism grew only deeper and deeper.  The study of W.R.  Greg’s “Creed of Christendom”, of Matthew Arnold’s “Literature and Dogma”, helped to widen the mental horizon, while making a return to the old faith more and more impossible.  The church services were a weekly torture, but feeling as I did that I was only a doubter, I spoke to none of my doubts.  It was possible, I felt, that all my difficulties might be cleared up, and I had no right to shake the faith of others while in uncertainty myself.  Others had doubted and had afterwards believed; for the doubter silence was a duty; the blinded had better keep their misery to themselves.  I found some practical relief in parish work of a non-doctrinal kind, in nursing the sick, in trying to brighten a little the lot of the poor of the village.  But here, again, I was out of sympathy with most of those around me.  The movement among the agricultural laborers, due to the energy and devotion of Joseph Arch, was beginning to be talked of in the fens, and bitter were the comments of the farmers on it, while I sympathised with the other side.  One typical case, which happened some months later, may stand as example of all.  There was a young man, married, with two young children, who was wicked enough to go into a neighboring county to a “Union Meeting”, and who was, further, wicked enough to talk about it when he returned.  He became a marked man; no farmer would employ him.  He tramped about vainly, looking for work, grew reckless, and took to drink.