‘Here, where we have partaken together of His Body and Blood, I kneel near that empty tabernacle—but a spiritual Presence is with us—purifying us both and drawing us nearer to Him in Whom living and dead are one.
‘Bless and purify our spirits, O Lord, with the dew of Thy grace, make us gentler and holier. Through the veil we seem to see Thee nearer. Longing, praying that we may not, as the rich man, have to feel the burning shame for our unloving spirit, now that we see His love, His tender, searching eye.
‘It becomes to me a sacred chapel, I can scarcely bear to part. The room is fragrant with the gifts of tender flowers from loving friends, and there is a peace here abiding in the sense of God’s continued, loving, healing discipline. “I change not!”’
During these years outside interests multiplied. New friendships were formed; some old ones were strengthened. The College Magazine, the first definite link forged with old pupils, was begun in 1880. Miss Beale made more acquaintances outside the College. In London she met many who shared her educational interests. In Cheltenham she attended, and often read and spoke at, a small literary gathering called the Society of Friends, which met from time to time at different houses. The diary becomes full of reference to Mrs. Middleton and Mrs. Owen. Through Mrs. Middleton she came to know Mr. Wilkinson’s[48] great evangelistic work in his fashionable London parish. She often went to hear him preach, read his books, and showed them to others. Mrs. Owen introduced her to the Life and philosophy of James Hinton, which made a very deep impression. At Mr. Owen’s house she met many earnest social workers and thinkers. Among these was Miss Ellice Hopkins, whose devoted work revived in tenfold force her early pity for those who need to be ‘found.’ The increasing vigour of the College life and work was ever bringing in new ideas. Men who were making their mark as thinkers and teachers of their own special subjects often came to lecture. Among the most enthralled listeners to the eloquence of Professor William Knight, to the marvellous fairy-tales of science told by Professor Barrett, was the Lady Principal herself. Teachers and educationists of widely different views came to see the work of the school, often to find that the successful head-mistress who was able to show them so much was willing and eager to learn from them, and to see matters from their standpoint. Meanwhile she was reading as widely and eagerly as ever.
It was a time when long-accepted opinions were unsettled for many, by new scientific theories, or by a greater sensitiveness to the mystery of pain and the apparent indifference of a part of the so-called religious world in presence of the deepest wrongs and suffering. Dorothea Beale had to take her part in the special difficulties of her own day. The battle has been shifted to another ground for this generation, which scarcely knows what resistance was made, what suffering was endured by some heroic souls in the last, and at what a price a larger spiritual consciousness was bought.
The contact with so many minds, the widening circle of acquaintance with workers of different views and methods, and especially the appeal for aid in religious perplexity constantly made by those who came under her influence, doubtless helped to precipitate that sorrow, which, though in its acutest phase of short duration, was the sharpest trial Miss Beale was ever called upon to experience; one on which she never ceased to look back with horror. She who had said that she ‘could truly take to herself the words of Faber,’[49] who had been from earliest childhood conscious of a protecting Presence, and had even then ‘found prayer a joy,’ now in late middle life felt herself, as it were, cast out. At an age when the inexperienced questionings of youth were over, when she hoped to find faith and hope strengthened by knowledge, it seemed for a moment as if they had died down altogether.
‘Nel mezzo cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
Che la diritta via era smarrita.’
To write of it is to turn a page of soul-history so intimate, and for a moment so painful, that it may well be thought it should be passed over in silence. But to omit it would not be wholly faithful to the memory of one who wished certainly that this story of her inner life should be known to all who could be helped by it. To tell it, moreover, is to use her own words, for she wrote of it herself, more than once or twice. She felt, when she looked back on it afterwards, that she was obliged to go through this time of suffering in order that she might be better fitted to do the work given her, in order that others who had lost faith and hope might be helped to regain them, by knowing how she herself had passed from destruction and despair to hope and rebuilding.