There were many stories and jokes on biblical themes, and—though S. J.-B. even at this time was a touchstone in the matter of jokes, never allowing one to pass which was not funny enough or clever enough to justify its breadth or its seeming irreverence—her sense of humour was keen.
“Suggestion to read the prayer for fair weather,—‘Lor, sir,—not a bit of good with the wind in this quarter.’”
But she was constantly reverting to the old religious intensity:
“How reading of any spiritual conflict—even such an ‘ébauche’ as in Agnes of Sorrento—rouses one’s whole nature in a sort of enthusiasm of longing and half prophecy!...
Sometimes I feel such intense sympathy and pity for Christ because of his very deification. That after spending his whole life to learn and tell men about his Father, he should find them, after his death, trying to set him up himself to obscure that Father,—making God a foil to Christ!”
With that extraordinary frankness that does such credit to both, she writes to her Mother at this time,—“I was thinking the other day how curious it was that I really never read one Unitarian book till I was altogether Unitarian,[[38]]—never one but the Bible at least, if that counts.”
“It is strange,” says someone, “that, in all our talk of the evolution of the individual, we fail to recognize the evolution of the medium.” S. J.-B. seems to have thought—as so many earnest spirits thought in those days—that she stood practically alone. “It has so been,” she says in the same letter to her Mother, “(I can’t say chanced) that I have had next to no human sympathy or help on my way. I do not remember that anyone but Mrs. Ballantyne has given me much of either in this one strife, and before I knew her the worst was over.”
One must bear this in mind in reading the passage that follows:
“To realize more and more that my life will be one—for years if not to the end—of struggle and perhaps obloquy, certainly outcasting from the synagogue,—struggle theological and social: and will it even succeed at last? Yes, surely,—inasmuch as Robertson says how to fall in the gap is success,—to be one of the conquering army, if not of the conquerors.”[conquerors.”]
The next entry in the diary is the quotation of a flippant joke about the Californians who “when they go to a certain warm abode have yet to send back for their blankets.”