“’Reach a hand through time to catch
  The far-off interest of tears.’

That you may have strength so to do is part of your share in the prayers of

“Yours very faithfully,

“W.  D——.”

A noble letter, but the storm was beating too fiercely to be stilled, and one night in that summer of 1871 stands out clearly before me.  Mr. Besant was away, and there had been a fierce quarrel before he left.  I was outraged, desperate, with no door of escape from a life that, losing its hope in God, had not yet learned to live for hope for man.  No door of escape?  The thought came like a flash:  “There is one!” And before me there swung open, with lure of peace and of safety, the gateway into silence and security, the gateway of the tomb.  I was standing by the drawing-room window, staring hopelessly at the evening sky; with the thought came the remembrance that the means was at hand—­the chloroform that had soothed my baby’s pain, and that I had locked away upstairs.  I ran up to my room, took out the bottle, and carried it downstairs, standing again at the window in the summer twilight, glad that the struggle was over and peace at hand.  I uncorked the bottle, and was raising it to my lips, when, as though the words were spoken softly and clearly, I heard:  “O coward, coward, who used to dream of martyrdom, and cannot bear a few short years of pain!” A rush of shame swept over me, and I flung the bottle far away among the shrubs in the garden at my feet, and for a moment I felt strong as for a struggle, and then fell fainting on the floor.  Only once again in all the strifes of my career did the thought of suicide recur, and then it was but for a moment, to be put aside as unworthy a strong soul.

My new friend, Mr. D——­, proved a very real help.  The endless torture of hell, the vicarious sacrifice of Christ, the trustworthiness of revelation, doubts on all these hitherto accepted doctrines grew and heaped themselves on my bewildered soul.  My questionings were neither shirked nor discouraged by Mr. D——­; he was not horrified nor was he sanctimoniously rebukeful, but met them all with a wide comprehension inexpressibly soothing to one writhing in the first agonies of doubt.  He left Cheltenham in the early autumn of 1871, but the following extracts from a letter written in November will show the kind of net in which I was struggling (I had been reading M’Leod Campbell’s work “On the Atonement"):—­

“You forget one great principle—­that God is impassive, cannot suffer.  Christ, qua God, did not suffer, but as Son of Man and in His humanity.  Still, it may be correctly stated that He felt to sin and sinners ’as God eternally feels’—­i.e., abhorrence of sin, and love of the sinner.  But to infer from that that the Father in His Godhead feels the sufferings which Christ experienced solely in humanity, and because incarnate is, I think, wrong.