I want to give you EMPHATIC warning that you were never in such danger in your life.  This is the language of bitter, bitter experience and is not mine alone.  Leighton says the great Pirate lets the empty ships go by and robs the full ones. [1] ...  I do hope you will go on your way rejoicing, unto the perfect day.  Hold on to Christ with your teeth [2] if your hands get crippled; He, alone, is stronger than Satan; He, alone, knows all “sore temptations” mean.

This, certainly, is strong language and will sound very strange and extravagant in many ears; and yet is it really stronger language than that often used by inspired prophets and apostles? or than that of Augustine, Bernard, Luther, Hooker, Fenelon, Bunyan, and of many saintly women, whose names adorn the annals of piety?  Strong as it is, it will find an echo in hearts that have been assailed by the “fiery darts of the adversary,” and have learned to cry unto God out of the depths of mental anguish and gloom; while others still in the midst of the conflict, will, perhaps, be helped and comforted to read of the manner in which Mrs. Prentiss passed through it.  Nothing in the story of her religious life is more striking and beautiful.  Her faith never failed; she glorified God in the midst of it all; she thanked her Lord and Master for “taking her in hand,” and begged Him not to spare her for her crying, if so be she might thus learn to love Him more and grow more like Him!  And, what is especially noteworthy, her own suffering, instead of paralysing, as severe suffering sometimes does, active sympathy with the sorrows and trials of others, had just the contrary effect.  “How soon,” she wrote to a friend, “our dear Lord presses our experiences into His own service!  How many lessons He teaches us in order to make us ‘sons’ (or daughters) ‘of consolation!’” To another friend she wrote: 

I did not perceive any selfishness in you during our interview, and you need not be afraid that I am so taken up with my own affairs as to feel no sympathy with you in yours.  What are we made for, if not to bear each other’s burdens?  And this ought to be the effect of trial upon us; to make us, in the very midst of it, unusually interested in the interests of others.  This is the softening, sanctifying tendency of tribulation, and he who lacks it needs harder blows.

At no period of her life was she more helpful to afflicted and tempted souls.  In visits to sick-rooms and dying beds, and in letters to friends in trouble, her heart “like the noble tree that is wounded itself when it gives the balm,” poured itself forth in the most tender, soothing ministrations.  It seemed at times fairly surcharged with love.  Meanwhile she kept her pain to herself; only a few intimate friends, whose prayers she solicited, knew what a struggle was going on in her soul; to all others she appeared very much as in her happiest days.  “It is a little curious,” she wrote to a young friend, “that suffering as I really am, nobody sees it.  ‘Always bright!’ people say to me to my amazement....  I can add nothing but love, of which I am so full that I keep giving off in thunder and lightning.”