“I need not tell you I have felt much for you. One could not have wished the suffering prolonged, and yet one does not feel the loss less. Happily, one seems generally to forget, when all is over, the last painful incidents of the sickness, and to remember the past years. Few have had a more devoted mother. How proud she was of your success!”
To another, on her father’s death:—
“I must write you one line of sympathy in this great sorrow. I know how much you loved your dear father and had longed for this visit, and now there will be a great blank. You will not think now, ‘how glad he will be if I do well’.”
To one going through great spiritual struggle:—
“Indeed, dear child, I do feel for you. When you are freer you must come and see me and we will talk over things. I shall not think you wicked but believe that you do want to know God, and that He is sorry for you because you do care, but cannot see.”
To her dear friend, Miss Belcher, when the latter was suffering from the illness which was to bring the end:—
“I am looking forward to Friday. I thought of you so much on this the Physician’s [St. Luke’s] day as we sang that beautiful Hymn and Psalm xxx: and our window told of the raising of the daughter by the Healer.”
Dorothea Beale presented the perhaps not unusual combination of the practical woman of affairs and the mystic. Her business capacity and power of organisation were remarkable, and yet she had essentially the mind of a poet. Hers was the type of mind that is continually seeing a revelation of the spiritual in all material things, in history, in literature, and in sympathy with kindred souls.
Her Scripture lessons she considered one of the chief parts of her work. She always took the greatest care with her preparation for these classes and made them the subject of prayer. Some used to complain that her lessons were vague, and not intelligible, but even those who did not understand felt a greatness and an uplifting power which were a help to them.
In 1880 she wrote to a young teacher. “I used to prepare my lessons on my knees (don’t say this to others). You would find it a help, I think, to do this sometimes.”