“Tears never moistened my eyes; to prayer I was a stranger.  With Job I dared to curse the day of my birth.  One day I was tempted to say something of the kind to my mother.  She was greatly shocked, and reproved me seriously.  I craved a hiding-place in the grave, as a rest from the distress of my feelings, thinking that no estate could be worse than the present.  Sometimes, being unable to pray, unable to command one feeling of good, either natural or spiritual, I was tempted to commit some great crime, thinking I could repent and thus restore my lost sensibility.  On this I often meditated, and assuredly should have fallen into this snare had not the mercy of God still followed me.”

I might go on for many pages painting this dreary picture of a misdirected life, but enough has been quoted at present to show Sarah Grimke’s strong, earnest, impressionable nature, and the effects upon it of the teachings of the old theology, mingled with the narrow Southern ideas of usefulness and woman’s sphere.  Endowed with a superior intellect, with a most benevolent and unselfish disposition, with a cheerful, loving nature, she desired above all things to be an active, useful member of society.  But every noble impulse was strangled at its birth by the iron bands of a religion that taught the crucifixion of every natural feeling as the most acceptable offering to a stern and relentless God.  She was now twenty-eight years of age, and with the exception of the period devoted to her father she had as yet thought and worked only for herself.  I do not mean that she neglected home duties, or her private charities and visits to the afflicted, but all these offices were performed from one especial motive and with the same end in view to avert from herself the wrath of her Maker.  This one thought filled all her mind.  All else was as nothing.  Family and friends, home and humanity, were of importance only as they furthered this object.  It is in this spirit that she mentioned her father’s illness and death, and the heroic, self-sacrificing death, by shipwreck, of her brother Benjamin, to which she could resign herself from a conviction that the stroke was sent as a chastisement to her, and was a merciful dispensation to draw his young wife nearer to God.  We read not one word of solicitude for mother, or brothers, or sisters, not a single prayer for their conversion.  She was too busy watching and weeping over her own short-comings to concern herself about their doom.  The long diary is filled with the reiteration of her fears, her sorrows, and her prayers.  Many years afterwards she thus referred to this condition of her mind:—­

“I cannot without shuddering look back to that period.  How dreadful did the state of my mind become!  Nothing interested me; I fulfilled my duties without any feeling of satisfaction, in gloomy silence.  My lips moved in prayer, my feet carried me to the holy sanctuary, but my heart was estranged from piety.  I felt as if my doom was irrevocably fixed, and I was destined to that fire which is never quenched.  I have never experienced any feeling so terrific as the despair of salvation.  My soul still remembers the wormwood and the gall, still remembers how awful the conviction that every door of hope was closed, and that I was given over unto death.”