“Of the nature of the sin and error which is supposed to grieve God.  I take it that sin is an absolutely necessary factor in the production of the perfect man.  It was foreseen and allowed as means to an end—­as, in fact, an education.  The view of all the sin and misery in the world cannot grieve God any more than it can grieve you to see Digby fail in his first attempt to build a card-castle or a rabbit-hutch.  All is part of the training.  God looks at the ideal man to which all tends....  “No, Mrs. Besant; I never feel at all inclined to give up the search, or to suppose that the other side may be right.  I claim no merit for it, but I have an invincible faith in the morality of God and the moral order of the world.  I have no more doubt about the falsehood of the popular theology than I have about the unreality of six robbers who attacked me three nights ago in a horrid dream.  I exult and rejoice in the grandeur and freedom of the little bit of truth it has been given me to see.  I am told that ’Present-day Papers,’ by Bishop Ewing (edited), are a wonderful help, many of them, to puzzled people; I mean to get them.  But I am sure you will find that the truth will (even so little as we may be able to find out) grow on you, make you free, light your path, and dispel, at no distant time, your painful difficulties and doubts.  I should say on no account give up your reading.  I think with you that you could not do without it.  It will be a wonderful source of help and peace to you.  For there are struggles far more fearful than those of intellectual doubt.  I am keenly alive to the gathered-up sadness of which your last two pages are an expression.  I was sorrier than I can say to read them.  They reminded me of a long and very dark time in my own life, when I thought the light never would come.  Thank God it came, or I think I could not have held out much longer.  But you have evidently strength to bear it now.  The more dangerous time, I should fancy, has passed.  You will have to mind that the fermentation leaves clear spiritual wine, and not (as too often) vinegar.  I wish I could write something more helpful to you in this great matter.  But as I sit in front of my large bay window and see the shadows on the grass and the sunlight on the leaves, and the soft glimmer of the rosebuds left by the storms, I can but believe that all will be very well.  ’Trust in the Lord, wait patiently for Him’—­they are trite words.  But He made the grass, the leaves, the rosebuds, and the sunshine, and He is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  And now the trite words have swelled into a mighty argument.”

I found more help in Theistic writers like Grey, and Agnostic like Arnold, than I did in the Broad Church teachers, but these, of course, served to make return to the old faith more and more impossible.  The Church services were a weekly torture, but feeling as I did that I was only a doubter, I kept my doubts to myself.  It was possible, I felt, that all my difficulties might be cleared up, and I had no right to shake the faith of others while in uncertainty myself.  Others had doubted and had afterwards recovered their faith; for the doubter silence was a duty; the blinded had better keep their misery to themselves.