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?

I walked long and far among the fields, in the fresh, sun-warmed air.
Ah! the sweet world! Everything was at its barest and austerest--the
grass thin in the pas