“I have such a conviction of infinite struggle and contest in the future,—yet please God, of earnest, on-pressing struggle, and in the end, victory and Rest....
Oh, dear, the ‘religious’ people and their effects!—very nearly making L. E. S. hate the name. So far from all good being ‘in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ’ or rather in God’s, there is actually room for the reverse to be said;—not wholly truly, I trust though. But she said, ‘If I want help for those poor things in or out of hospital, I never go near the pious people. I have and I know them. Go to atheists, and you are never refused.’
Oh, dear!”
Knowing the spiritual history of earnest souls in that generation, one is not surprised to come a couple of months later upon the entry:
“I am wonderfully unsettled and uneasy somehow.... I do believe this terrible sort of logical doubt of Theism that enters in—not un-faith, but a failure of the abiding surety—an entrance of the admission how possibly reasonable Atheism may be—hurts horribly.
And then isn’t the whole world void?
Oh for the ‘I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not‘!—and doubtless one has it,—both in ’Neither pray I for these alone,’ and also in those who live and love one, Mother and Octa....
L.’s absence of sympathy weighs heavily. Hitherto all my friends have met me here,—she does not. ‘All the help she ever got, she got from herself and her will.’ Not from the Bible or hymns, etc. She calls herself a theist, but it seems to me to run close to practical atheism....”[atheism....”]
“Oct. 29th. She is so good! Told her something of today’s pain, she so sympathizing and good! Believed that the struggle was part of the sequence of early training and later reaction into ‘wider faith’—what many had to go through one time or another. I spoke of herself,—asked her what practical difference she would find if an atheist. ‘Not much generally,’ she thought, but in trouble she did pray. She couldn’t help it, and believed it was good, and when her friends died she was happier. ‘When she thought of it, she felt very sure about God, but very seldom did stop to think. She was sure her first duty was her work, etc. and then she had small time and sense left.
I said lives not continually lived as seeing Him who is invisible would be worth but little; she said Then her’s was so, and many others. So I retracted hastily. ‘At least mine would be.’