at all risks its
"No" when bidden to live a lie.

When that physical crisis was over I decided on my line of action. I
resolved to take Christianity as it had been taught in the Churches,
and carefully and thoroughly examine its dogmas one by one, so that I
should never again say "I believe" where I had not proved, and that,
however diminished my area of belief, what was left of it might at
least be firm under my feet. I found that four chief problems were
pressing for solution, and to these I addressed myself. How many are
to-day the souls facing just these problems, and disputing every inch
of their old ground of faith with the steadily advancing waves of
historical and scientific criticism! Alas! for the many Canutes, as the
waves wash over their feet. These problems were:--

(1) The eternity of punishment after death.

(2) The meaning of "goodness" and "love," as applied to a God who had
made this world, with all its sin and misery.

(3) The nature of the atonement of Christ, and the "justice" of God in
accepting a vicarious suffering from Christ, and a vicarious
righteousness from the sinner.

(4) The meaning of "inspiration" as applied to the Bible, and the
reconciliation of the perfections of the author with the blunders and
immoralities of the work.

It will be seen that the deeper problems of religion--the deity of
Christ, the existence of God, the immortality of the soul--were not yet
brought into question, and, looking back, I cannot but see how orderly
was the progression of thought, how steady the growth, after that first
terrible earthquake, and the first wild swirl of agony. The points that
I set myself to study were those which would naturally be first faced
by any one whose first rebellion against the dogmas of the Churches was
a rebellion of the moral nature rather than of the intellectual, a
protest of the conscience rather than of the brain. It was not a desire
for moral licence which gave me the impulse that finally landed me in
Atheism; it was the sense of outraged justice and insulted right. I was
a wife and mother, blameless in moral life, with a deep sense of duty
and a proud self-respect; it was while I was this that doubt struck me,
and while I was in the guarded circle of the home, with no dream of
outside work or outside liberty, that I lost all faith in Christianity.
My education, my mother's example, my inner timidity and self-distrust,
all fenced me in from temptations from without