At Oxford the last vestiges of her religion, or rather her parents’ religion, faded from her mind, without pain of any order, hardly with any consciousness.  She devoted herself wholeheartedly to the schools.  No longer did she imagine that God had sent her lameness.  She ceased to think of Him.

But one day she heard a sermon which made her think of Jesus as a teacher, just as one thinks of Plato and Aristotle.  She reflected that she really knew more of the teaching of Plato and Aristotle than she knew of Christ’s teaching.  This seemed to her an unsatisfactory state of things, and she set herself, as a student of philosophy, to study the teaching of Jesus.  What had He said?  Never mind whether He had founded this Church or that, what had He said?  And what had been His science of life, His reading of the riddle?

This study, to which she brought a philosophic mind and a candid heart, convinced her that the teaching should be tried.  It was, indeed, a teaching that asked men to prove it by trial.  She decided to try it, and she tried it by reading, by meditation, and by prayer.  The trial was a failure.  But in this failure was a mystery.  For the more she failed the more profoundly conscious she became of Christ as a Power.  This feeling remained with her, and it grew stronger with time.  The Christ who would not help her nevertheless tarried as a shadow haunting the background of her thoughts.

There was a secret in life which she had missed, a power which she had never used.  Then came the second event to which I have referred.  Miss Royden met a lady who had left the Church of England and joined the Quakers, seeking by this change to intensify her spiritual experience, seeking to make faith a deep personal reality in her life.  This lady told Miss Royden the following experience: 

One day, at a Quakers’ meeting, she had earnestly “besieged the Throne of Grace” during the silence of prayer, imploring God to manifest Himself to her spirit.  So earnestly did she “besiege the Throne of Grace” in this silent intercession of soul that at last she was physically exhausted and could frame no further words of entreaty.  At that moment she heard a voice in her soul, and this voice said to her, “Yes, I have something to say to you, when you stop your shouting.”

From this experience Miss Royden learned to see the tremendous difference between physical and spiritual silence.  She cultivated, with the peace of soul which is the atmosphere of surrender and dependence, silence of spirit; and out of this silence came a faith against which the gates of hell could not prevail; and out of that faith, winged by her earliest; sympathy with all suffering and all sorrow, came a desire to give herself up to the service of God.  She had found the secret, she could use the power.