d see the shadows on the grass and the
sunlight on the leaves, and the soft glimmer of the rosebuds left by
the storms, I can but believe that all will be very well. 'Trust in
the Lord, wait patiently for Him'--they are trite words. But He made
the grass, the leaves, the rosebuds, and the sunshine, and He is the
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And now the trite words have swelled
into a mighty argument."

I found more help in Theistic writers like Grey, and Agnostic like
Arnold, than I did in the Broad Church teachers, but these, of course,
served to make return to the old faith more and more impossible. The
Church services were a weekly torture, but feeling as I did that I was
only a doubter, I kept my doubts to myself. It was possible, I felt,
that all my difficulties might be cleared up, and I had no right to
shake the faith of others while in uncertainty myself. Others had
doubted and had afterwards recovered their faith; for the doubter
silence was a duty; the blinded had better keep their misery to
themselves.

During these weary months of anxiety and torment I found some relief
from the mental strain in practical parish work, nursing the sick,
trying to brighten the lot of the poor. I learned then some of the
lessons as to the agricultural labourer and the land that I was able
in after-years to teach from the platform. The movement among the
agricultural labourers, due to the energy and devotion of Joseph Arch,
was beginning to be discussed in the fens, and my sympathies went
strongly with the claims of the labourers, for I knew their
life-conditions. In one cottage I had found four generations sleeping
in one room--the great-grandfather and his wife, the unmarried
grandmother, the unmarried mother, the little child; three men lodgers
completed the tale of eight human beings crowded into that narrow,
ill-ventilated garret. Other cottages were hovels, through the broken
roofs of which poured the rain, and wherein rheumatism and ague lived
with the human dwellers. How could I do aught but sympathise with any
combination that aimed at the raising of these poor? But the
Agricultural Labourers' Union was bitterly opposed by the farmers, and
they would give no work to a "Union man." One example may serve for
all. There was a young married man with two small children, who was
sinful enough to go to a Union meeting and sinful enough to talk of it
on his return home. No farmer would employ him in all the district
roun