February 14, 1891.

Then the Christian teacher says:  “God has given you a will, an independent will to act and choose; put it in unison with His will.”  Alas, I know not how much of my seeming liberty is His or mine.  He seems to make me able to exert my will in some directions, able to make it effective; and yet in other matters, even though I see that a course is holy and beautiful, I have no power to follow it at all.  I see men some more, some less hampered than myself.  Some seem to have no desire for good, no dim perception of it.  The outcast child, brought up cruelly and foully, with vile inheritances, he is not free, as I use the word; sometimes, by some inner purity and strength, he struggles upwards; most often he is engulfed; yet it is all a free gift, to me much, to another little, to some nothing at all.  With all my heart do I wish my will to be in harmony with His.  I yield it up utterly to Him.  I have no strength or force, and He withholds them from me.  I do not blame, I only ask to understand; He has given me understanding, and has put in my heart a high dream of justice and love; why will He not show me that He satisfies the dream?  I say with the old Psalmist, “Lo, I come,” but He comes not forth to meet me; He does not even seem to discern me when I am yet a long way off, as the father in the parable discerned his erring son.

Then the Christian teacher says to me that all is revealed in Christ; that He reconciles, not an angry God to a wilful world, but a grieved and outraged world to a God who cannot show them He is love.

Yet Christ said that God was all-merciful and all-loving, and that He ordered the very falling of a single hair of our heads.  But if God ordered that, then He did not leave unordered the qualities of our hearts and wills, and our very sins are of His devising.

No, it is all dark and desperate; I do not know, I cannot know; I shall stumble to my end in ignorance; sometimes glad when a gleam of sunshine falls on my wearied limbs, sometimes wrapping my garments around me in cold and drenching rain.  I am in the hand of God; I know that; and I hope that I may dare to trust Him; but my confidence is shaken as He passes over me, as the reed in the river shakes in the wind.

February 18, 1891.

A still February day, with a warm, steady sun, which stole in and caressed me, enveloping me in light and warmth, as I sate reading this morning.  If I could be ashamed of anything, I should be ashamed of the fact that my body has all day long surprised me by a sort of indolent contentment, repeating over and over that it is glad to be alive.  The mind and soul crave for death and silence.  Yet all the while my faithful and useful friend, the body, seems to croon a low song of delight.  That is the worst of it, that I seem built for many years of life.  Shall I learn to forget?