we give to life, perversely separating the strands of the woven thread, they hold no meaning for me now—­I do not expect to be free from suffering or from grief; but I will no more distinguish them from other experiences saying, this is joyful, and I will take all I can, or this is sad, and I will fly from it.  I will take life whole, not divide it into pieces and choose.  My grief shall be like a silent chapel, lit with holy light, into which I shall often enter, and bend, not to frame mechanical prayers, but to submit myself to the still influence of the shrine.  It is all my own now, a place into which no other curious eye can penetrate, a guarded sanctuary.  My sorrow seems to have plucked me with a strong hand out of the swirling drift of cares, anxieties, ambitions, hopes; and I see now that I could not have rescued myself; that I should have gone on battling with the current, catching at the river wrack, in the hopes of saving something from the stream.  Now I am face to face with God; He saves me from myself, He strips my ragged vesture from me and I stand naked as He made me, unashamed, nestling close to His heart.

April 3, 1891.

A truth which has come home to me of late with a growing intensity is that we are sent into the world for the sake of experience, not necessarily for the sake of immediate happiness.  I feel that the mistake we most of us make is in reaching out after a sense of satisfaction; and even if we learn to do without that, we find it very difficult to do without the sense of conscious growth.  I say again that what we need and profit by is experience, and sometimes that comes by suffering, helpless, dreary, apparently meaningless suffering.  Yet when pain subsides, do we ever, does any one ever wish the suffering had not befallen us?  I think not.  We feel better, stronger, more pure, more serene for it.  Sometimes we get experience by living what seems to be an uncongenial life.  One cannot solve the problem of happiness by simply trying to turn out of one’s life whatever is uncongenial.  Life cannot be made into an Earthly Paradise, and it injures one’s soul even to try.  What we can turn out of our lives are the unfruitful, wasteful, conventional things; and one can follow what seems the true life, though one may mistake even that sometimes.  One of the commonest mistakes nowadays is that so many people are haunted with a vague sense that they ought to do good, as they say.  The best that most people can do is to perform their work and their obvious duties well and conscientiously.

If we realise that experience is what we need, and not necessarily happiness or contentment, the whole value of life is altered.  We see then that we can get as much or even more out of the futile hour when we are held back from our chosen delightful work, even out of the dreary or terrified hour, when the sense of some irrevocable neglect, some base surrender that has marred our life, sinks burning into the soul, as a hot ember sinks smoking into a carpet.  Those are the hours of life when we move and climb; not the hours when we work, and eat, and laugh, and chat, and dine out with a sense of well-merited content.