“‘Meek?’” said Elizabeth, —­ “I suppose if there is anything in the world I am not, it is meek.  I am the very, very opposite.  What can I do with this?  It is like a fire in my veins.  Can I cool it?  And if I could control the outward seeming of it, that would not be the change of the thing itself.  Besides, I couldn’t, I must be meek, if I am ever to seem so.”

She went on sorrowfully to the next.

“‘Hunger and thirst after righteousness’ —­ I do desire it —­ I do not ‘hunger and thirst.’  I don’t think I do —­ and it is those and those only to whom the promise is given.  I am so miserable that I cannot even wish enough for what I need most.  O God, help me to know what I am seeking, and to seek it more earnestly! —­”

“‘Merciful?’” she went on with tears in her eyes —­ “I think I am merciful. —­ I haven’t been tried, but I am pretty sure I am merciful.  But there it is —­ one must have all the marks, I suppose, to be a Christian.  Some people may be merciful by nature —­ I suppose I am. —­”

“Blessed are the pure in heart.”

She stopped there, and even shut up her book, in utter sorrow and shame, that if ‘pure in heart’ meant pure to the All-seeing eye, hers was so very, very far from it.  There was not a little scrap of her heart fit for looking into.  And what could she do with it?  The words of Job recurred to her, —­ “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one.”

Elizabeth was growing ‘poor in spirit’ before she knew what the words meant.  She went on carefully, sorrowfully, earnestly —­ till she came to the twenty-fourth verse of the sixth chapter.  It startled her.

“No man can serve two masters:  for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will hold to the one and despise the other.  You cannot serve God and Mammon.”

“That is to say then,” said Elizabeth, “that I must devote myself entirely to God —­ or not at all.  All my life and possessions and aims.  It means all that! —­”

And for ‘all that’ she felt she was not ready.  One corner for self-will and doing her own pleasure she wanted somewhere; and wanted so obstinately, that she felt, as it were, a mountain of strong unwillingness rise up between God’s requirements and her; an iron lock upon the door of her heart, the key of which she could not turn, shutting and barring it fast against his entrance and rule.  And she sat down before the strong mountain and the locked door, as before something which must, and could not, give way; with a desperate feeling that it must —­ with another desperate feeling that it would not.