“Had a long argument with Miss Wodehouse today. Two points chiefly. 1. Are evil deeds, though always pernicious to the doer, sometimes beneficial to mankind? I affirming: she denying. 2. Is it our first duty to seek our own salvation? She denying.
I cannot tell why I am so unable to argue with her. She seems to get me into a maze. Yet I think she argues honestly. I sometimes shrink from ‘sacred’ subjects with her, yet she considers all equally sacred.
‘What is truth’ indeed? Yet am I not somewhat like ‘jesting Pilate’ who ‘would not stay for an answer’?”
“What is truth?” one finds her asking again and again, and she at least had one grand qualification for the search,—the habit of treating truth with respect even in its humblest fragments.
Her Father, of course, was uneasy about her.
“I should like to see you much,” he writes, “but I feel that Sunday would be a heavy day for you here (as I don’t frequent popish mass houses or the like), so that if you could run down here on Monday evening....”
And again:
“When I think of the (at best) half teaching you have, but that I confide in our gracious covenant head, I should tremble for you when I am gone. I have no doubt at all that Maurice is a most amiable man, but I believe that to this hour he has never come clear out of Unitarianism, and therefore does not see distinctly, nor, of course, teach scripturally, any one of those fundamental Christian truths (all connected together) original sin, Christ’s vicarious work atoning for sin and fulfiling the law, justification by faith, and salvation by grace. Read, darling, ...”
The following “passage of arms” with a Norfolk cousin, a man some years older than herself, is interesting in this connection:
“Hastings, March 12/60.