was painless. Faith is born of
doubt. "It is not life, but death, where nothing stirs." Take all these
doubts and struggles of yours as simply so many signs that your Father in
heaven is treating you as a father, that He has not forsaken you, is not
offended with you, but is teaching you in the way best suited to your own
idiosyncracy, the great lesson of lessons, "Empty thyself and God will
fill thee." Take your sorrows to your Father in heaven. If that name
Father mean anything, it must mean that He will not turn away from His
wandering child in a way that you would he ashamed to turn away from
yours. If there be pity, lasting affection, patience in man, they must
have come from God. They above all things must be His likeness. Believe
that He possesses them a million times more fully than any human being.

St. Paul knew well at least the state of mind in which you are. He said
that he had found a panacea for it. And his words, to judge from the way
in which they have taken root and spread and conquered, must have some
depth and life in them. Why not try them? Just read the first nine
chapters of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, taking for granted that
they mean the simplest and most obvious sense which can be put upon them.

_Letters and Memories_.

When the hour of temptation comes, go back, go back if you would escape,
to what you were taught at your mother's knee concerning the grace of
God; for that alone will keep you safe, or angel, or archangel, or any
created being safe, in this life, and in all lives to come.

_Sermons on David_.

What does it all mean? I cry. Night and day the heavens have been black
to me. You may think it sinful to have such thoughts. My experience is
that when they come, one must do battle with them; one must face them; do
battle with them deliberately; be patient if they worst one for a while.
By all such things men live; in these is the life of the spirit. Only by
going down into hell can one rise the third day. I have been in hell
many times in my life, therefore, perhaps, I have had some small power of
influencing human hearts. But I never have looked hell so close in the
face as I have been doing of late. Wherefore, I hope thereby to get
fresh power to rise and to lift others heavenward.

I can only cry--"O Lord, in Thee have I trusted, let me never be
confounded. Wherefore should the wicked say--Where is now his God?" But
while I fret most there comes to