Now, in this period of doubt and anxiety, books by any whom Miss Beale thought to be earnest seekers for truth, whether they were orthodox or not, were freely read.
The sense of loss and discomfort seems to have grown gradually all the year. ‘Poor lesson because depressed,’ she notes on a day in February. A fortnight later in church she was ‘wrestling like Jacob; Tell me Thy Name.’ Palm Sunday, however, brought some peace. ‘I think I touched His garment’s hem.’ Each day in that Holy Week she was at an early service before school hours began, and on Easter Day wrote: ‘This Lent has been blessed.’ In Easter week she notes that she finished reading Jukes’s New Man, ‘a beautiful book.’
But before the holidays were over there was ‘a dread of coming sorrow,’ a renewed feeling of deadness and want of devotion, only ‘passive following the inward guide.’ ‘Much troubled this morning,’ she wrote on Whit-Sunday, and the need for a ‘new life-pulse’ grew larger as the summer term wore on. Yet she persisted in striving to keep her devotional rules, and for her apparent want of zeal blamed only herself. At the end of that busy term, so full of work and interests and anxieties, she wrote: ‘Be with me in the holidays. I fear them.’
Of the suffering of that time she afterwards wrote fully, tracing the steps by which she was gradually led to think that the historical evidence on which she thought her faith rested was of no value. An extract from one account is given:—
‘Even if historical evidence were there, it could not be for all. And was it there?
‘No, [only] fragments by nobodies, inconsistent versions. If God gave a perfect Man, He could not be for an age, but for all time, and how if His life passed, and we have no writing, only untrustworthy accounts? Surely, then, the life was worthless which God did not care to save for us. He stored up coal and light, our physical life, but He cared not to preserve Jesus, the spiritual life, He who had been called the Light of the world. Then it must be a delusion that He was, and God has deceived us, and we were deceived. The Pharisees were right in testing His claims. They watched Him on the Cross and there bade Him cry to the God Whom He had claimed as Father,—and He cried as the fabled prophet of old, Eli! Eli! and God disowned Him, and the words followed which proved that He was forsaken, that the thirst of soul was unappeased and His life was indeed over. And so the darkness gathered round the Cross, ever darkening as I listened to the cry. Was God indeed mocking our hopes? The old pagan vision rose before me. The symbols of the Christ were confounded with grotesque forms. I could not utter the Creeds of the Church. Yet strange to say I yet clung to a consciousness of a Father of the visible. In my troubled dreams, which haunted me day and night, I still seemed to feel there was a God, though no voice was heard for me among the trees of the garden.[50]
‘I said I will not give up my trust in God, I must reconstruct. I will not, as some who have lost faith in Christ and the eternal, give away the trust in a Father. This I thought would survive without, but with that (my faith in Christ) went all belief in the existence of any other. As I listened to the voice of creation unharmonised by the interpretation of generous love proceeding from the soul, it seemed simply horrible: the martyr slowly consuming in the fire, God looking on, refusing to interfere with natural causes. I had seen this before, but, as in that beautiful parable of the Septuagint, I had seen God was with him, and the joy overpowered the pain, and the true life was purified, and they thanked God in the fires. Now I saw no immortal hope, no resurrection; all was dark horror and amazement. No; could I keep belief in a God who had deceived mankind? Should I trust Him, pray “to Him”?[51]
‘For months I read and thought of nothing else; whenever the pressing claims of work left me for a moment, I felt the light was gone from my life. Sometimes a deeper sympathy filled me,—as I seemed like a gladiator standing with my fellows. Morituri te salutant. But generally I felt myself growing hardened by the want of power to find sympathy in my sorrow, nor could I pray. I did not often, and when I did, it was one cry—“Why, why hast Thou left us, O God—without answer to our cries? Why hast Thou uttered no word of consolation to all the groans of earth? If Thou hast not heard Jesus, none of us need pray.” He trusted in God that He would deliver Him, and was forsaken, and men have waited through the ages, as a little child would wait, shut up in prison by some cruel father, and would not at first believe that he was to be starved to death. And at last they realised that God for them was not,—only the prison-house He had built, in which they passed away their lives, in which, like a starving man, they dreamed of palaces and feasts, the delusions of their fevered brain.
‘How that old passage came home to one’s fevered soul,—“the desert shall blossom as the rose”—as the thought of one’s old Christian faith came back. What would one not give, I thought, to believe it true once more! For that lighted up the whole world, then there were living waters, consolation in every sorrow, a well-spring of divine sympathy, inexhaustible,—wells from which one could drink for ever, and pour out of one’s abundance.
‘Sometimes one did look up to the parched heavens, and though no rain fell, each time there was a little refreshing dew, as if God were answering when one let Him speak, instead of running into desert places, crying with Io, forsaken and maddened by a cruel God. Sometimes the words came then, “I will see you again.”