Yesterday I was wondering how it should be possible that I should ever live out the next three days till I got home to you. Now every sort of trouble seems to have fled utterly away. I never knew before the meaning of the words, ‘the peace that passeth understanding’....
I every now and then wake up with a kind of start of wonder to find such a sunny smile of heart gladness all over my face. And people see it too. It would be very odd if they didn’t when the whole world is changed to me. It is the most wonderful separation of the inner from the outer world that I ever knew. I suppose nothing is changed in the physical world, but everything seems for me bright and golden,—as in my Welsh tour with Octavia (I can speak of it and her now with perfect quiet peace), as in those days at Hurst.
Last night I thought it most glorious, but too delicious to last; but it seems now the atmosphere of life, as if nothing can touch or shake it....
Mother, a grand solemn wonder comes with it all, whether it is that when we have actually and literally given up every will and wish to God,—have rested utterly and entirely on Him with perfect trust—whether then pain loses its power, and only blessing, even now, can come.
... if so, what a glorious future one sees for all the sorrowful here,—for all the tried and suffering. ‘For all the wanderers the home is one’. The pain only till it has brought the bliss; the All-loving Father that cannot wound but to heal.
Now my spirit is so perfectly at rest, all my strength seems to have come back to me like Samson. I feel as if Edinbro’ or anything else was nothing to me. ‘He hath set my heart at liberty’,—that is the very truth. Mother, how naturally in every depth of sorrow or joy one turns to those words about which verbally we quarrel,—not really or deeply, Mother.
Goodnight, my own Darling,
Yours very lovingly,
Soph.”
From diary: