With her natural temperament and inherited tendencies she might, perhaps, under other influences have been drawn too far over to the emotional, or at least to the contemplative side of religious life.  But she saw and avoided the danger.  She discerned the harmony and just balance between the contemplative and the active Christian life, and felt that they ought to co-exist in every genuine experience.  She attached as little meaning to a life of mere raptures as to one of bare, loveless duty.  “Christian life,” she wrote, “is not all contemplation and prayer; it is not all muscle and sinew.  It is a perfect, practicable union of the two.  I believe in your joyful emotions if they result in self-denying, patient work for Christ—­I believe in your work if it is winged by faith and prayer.”  She had scored this passage in her copy of Fenelon:  “To be constantly in a state of enjoyment that takes away the feeling of the cross, and to live in a fervor of devotion that continually keeps Paradise open—­this is not dying upon the cross and becoming nothing.”

Such experience and such views were behind the active side of her life, as represented by her personal ministries and by the work of her pen.  The one book in which she endeavored to embody formally her views of Christian doctrine and experience did not, as might have been expected, find the same reception or the same response which were accorded to other productions.  It was a book which appealed to a smaller and higher class of readers.  But, when she wrought these same truths into pictures of living men and women—­when she illustrated them at the points where they touched the drudgery and commonplace of thousands of lives—­when she opened outlooks for hundreds of discouraged souls upon the roads where hundreds more were bearing the very same burdens, and yet stepping heavenward under their pressure—­when she, who had walked in the fire herself, went to her sisters in the same old furnace and told them of her vision of the form of the Fourth—­when she went down to the many who were sadly working out the mistakes of ill-judged alliances, and lifted the veil from sorrows which separate their subject from human sympathy because they must be borne in silence—­when she told such how heaven might come even into their life—­when she, with her hands yet bleeding from the grasp of her own cross, came to other sufferers, not to mock them by the show of an unattainable beauty and an impossible peace, but to offer them divine peace and the beauty of the Lord in the name of her Saviour—­then she spoke with a power which multitudes felt and confessed.

I am sure that hers is, in an eminent degree, the blessing of them that were ready to perish.  Weary, overtaxed mothers; misunderstood and unappreciated wives, servants, pale seamstresses, delicate women forced to live in an atmosphere of drunkenness and coarse brutality, widows and orphans in the bitterness of their bereavement, mothers with their tears dropping over empty cradles—­to thousands of such she was a messenger from heaven.