‘Perhaps we have to go through these depths of blankness that we may not bottle up the spiritual to one time or church or country, but believe God is really eternal, omnipresent; that He does dwell with him who is of a contrite and humble spirit, and who trembles at His Presence felt in the darkness. We have to learn to see the Spirit of Christ dwelling in each man, regenerating him to the true and higher life.
‘We have to see it is God’s method to work through the man,—therefore the treasure is in earthen vessels,—the light is dimmed by the medium. But if it were given whole and complete by angels, the moral nature could no more be drawn out than the intellect could have been, had God revealed the kalendars and Kepler’s Laws.
‘So through the Man Christ Jesus, Who emptied Himself ere He could speak to man, Who, as His wondrous teaching, life and resurrection testify, stood in some different relation to God than other men, God has spoken to the whole world.’
Another paper of this period, entitled ‘Of my Religious Opinions,’ concludes thus:—
‘Yes, it was this. The consciousness of a universal life of God in man which lifted me up once more to see God in Christ, to see the New Man coming to the birth in all for whom Christ lived, and the whole world existed that this might be, that the whole being of the creature might be lifted into responsive sympathy with a sympathetic Father, and those followers of Christ Who was ever preaching the religion of Humanity were to lift the imperfect yet real Church of Christ to a higher life. Upon a world which seemed dead, which no prophet staff could restore, they were to stretch themselves, heart to heart, their own warm palpitating life was to rouse, and the power of love could raise the dead. We must learn that old lesson that no creature is common or unclean. We must enter as never before into the full meaning of the Name by which God was known to Abraham—I AM,—the Eternal. Ours has been a God of time, He is the Living God, lighting every man that cometh into the world. But here, light is struggling with darkness. There shall be no night there in that day dawn beyond the tomb.
‘Have you not been taught that the written word is imperfect without the heavenly interpretation, and does not your own experience confirm this, and the history of the records of the Christ bear it out? Enough we have as a foundation, but we must build thereon, or there will be no home for our soul. This is the method of God, revealing to us that we can only help one another. God must teach us all. They shall be all taught of God, here and hereafter.
‘Here the phenomenal and the imperfect is the only possible revelation to man, but through these he is being educated for the real, the actual. He will one day know God.’
The writer of these words might indeed have sung, ‘Thou hast set my feet in a large room.’ But the daily journal shows no trace of exultation, far less of relaxing watchfulness. It is surely impossible to exaggerate the importance of the jealous care with which devotional rules were guarded. More than all the high thoughts and noble imaginings with which she was so wonderfully gifted, this lifelong obedience came to her aid in the great crisis. Habits of prayer, daily acts of self-sacrifice and self-consecration, had been maintained even when their meaning seemed to be clouded. When sight was restored, when a greater sense of spaciousness came into her life, they were there to protect her in the newly found liberty. The tale of them remains to show that the doubts of this dark year were akin to that thirst for God which in all ages has been the portion of the saints.
May it not be said that they were the outcome of a passionate desire to help; that this descent into darkness as of the grave was necessary to one who yearned to give herself utterly to aid others to find the way to the light? ‘Can ye drink indeed?’ was asked of those who willed to share the divine work and joy, and in all times it has been given to a few to be brought through suffering into that region of consciousness in which they are made ‘able.’