throw off that supreme sovereignty, and then
it seemed to me that the name "Christian" became a hypocrisy, and its
renouncement a duty incumbent on an upright mind. But I was a clergyman's
wife; my position made my participation in the Holy Communion a
necessity, and my withdrawal therefrom would be an act marked and
commented upon by all. Yet if I lost my faith in Christ, how could I
honestly approach "the Lord's Table", where Christ was the central figure
and the recipient of the homage paid there by every worshipper to "God
made man"? Hitherto mental pain alone had been the price demanded
inexorably from the searcher after truth; now to the inner would be added
the outer warfare, and how could I tell how far this might carry me?

One night only I spent in this struggle over the question: "Shall I
examine the claims to Deity of Jesus of Nazareth?". When morning broke
the answer was clearly formulated: "Truth is greater than peace or
position. If Jesus be God, challenge will not shake his Deity; if he be
Man, it is blasphemy to worship him." I re-read Liddon's "Bampton
Lectures" on this controversy and Renan's "Vie de Jesus". I studied the
Gospels, and tried to represent to myself the life there outlined; I
tested the conduct there given as I should have tested the conduct of any
ordinary historical character; I noted that in the Synoptics no claim to
Deity was made by Jesus himself, nor suggested by his disciples; I
weighed his own answer to an enquirer, with its plain disavowal of
Godhood: "Why callest thou me good? There is none good save one, that is
God" (Matt, xix., 17); I conned over his prayers to "my Father", his rest
on divine protection, his trust in a power greater than his own; I noted
his repudiation of divine knowledge: "Of that day and that hour knoweth
no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, _neither the Son_, but
the Father" (Mark xiii., 32); I studied the meaning of his prayer of
anguished submission: "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass
from me! nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt" (Matt, xxvi.,
39); I dwelt on his bitter cry in his dying agony: "My God, my God, why
hast thou forsaken me?" (Matt, xxvii., 46); I asked the meaning of the
final words of rest: "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit" (Luke
xxiii., 46). And I saw that, if there were any truth in the Gospels at
all, they told the story of a struggling, suffering, sinning, praying
man, and not of a God a