Her letters during the first half of this year were few, and relate chiefly to those aspects of the Christian life with which her own experience was still making her so familiar.  “God’s plan with most of us,” she wrote to Mrs. Humphrey, “appears to be a design to make us flexible, twisting us this way and that, now giving, now taking; but always at work for and in us.  Almost every friend we have is going through some peculiar discipline.  I fancy there is no period in our history when we do not need and get the sharp rod of correction.  The thing is to grow strong under it, and yet to walk softly.”  “I do not care how much I suffer,” she wrote to a friend, “if God will purge and purify me and fit me for greater usefulness.  What are trials but angels to beckon us nearer to Him!  And I do hope that mine are to be a blessing to some other soul, or souls, in the future.  I can’t think suffering is meant to be wasted, if fragments of bread created miraculously, were not.”  She studied about this time with great interest the teaching of Scripture concerning the baptism of the Holy Ghost.  The work of the Spirit had not before specially occupied her thoughts.  In her earlier writings she had laid but little stress upon it—­not because she doubted its reality or its necessity, but because her mind had not been led in that direction.  Stepping Heavenward is full of God and of Christ, but there is in it little express mention of the Spirit and His peculiar office in the life of faith.  When this fact was brought to her notice she herself appeared to be surprised at it, and would gladly have supplied the omission.  To be sure, there is no mention at all of the Holy Spirit in several of the Epistles of the New Testament; but a carefully-drawn picture of Christian life and progress, like Stepping Heavenward, would, certainly, have been rendered more complete and attractive by fuller reference to the Blessed Comforter and His inspiring influences.

To a young Friend, New York, Jan. 8, 1873.

I feel very sorry for you that you are under temptation.  I have been led, for some time, to pray specially for the tempted, for I have learned to pity them as greater sufferers than those afflicted in any other way.  For, in proportion to our love to Christ, will be the agony of terror lest we should sin and fall, and so grieve and weary Him.  “One sinful wish could make a hell of heaven”; strong language, but not too strong, to my mind.  I can only say, suffer, but do not yield.  Sometimes I think that silent, submissive patience is better than struggle.  It is sweet to be in the sunshine of the Master’s smile, but I believe our souls need winter as well as summer, night as well as day.  Perhaps not to the end; I have not come to that yet, and so do not know; I speak from my own experience, as far as it goes.  Temptation has this one good side to it:  it keeps us down; we are ashamed of ourselves, we see we have nothing to boast of.