And did Katie persevere? Yes, indeed, she did. Here is an entry made some time later in the diary that she kept, which shows you how very much her experience was like yours:–
’I have not been blessed so much for weeks as I was to-night. I prayed aloud. The cross was great, but so was the reward.
My heart beat violently, but I felt some liberty.’
Though Catherine’s spine difficulty was better, she was still very delicate, and at the age of eighteen every one felt sure she was going into a decline. But, sick or well, her soul grew stronger, and her desire to please and serve God better increased every day.
‘I do love Thee,’ she wrote in the same little diary, ’but I want to love Thee more.’
It was not till many years later that Catherine received the blessing of a clean heart; but even now she had begun to desire and long for it. She also writes at this time: ’I see that this Full Salvation is very necessary if I am to glorify God below, and find my way to Heaven. I want a clean heart. Lord, take me and seal me.’
Some people, even after they are converted, are too proud to own themselves wrong, or to confess when they have sinned. Catherine was not of that sort. In one of her letters to her mother she ends with these words:–
’Pray for me, dear mother, and believe me, with all my faults and besetments, your loving child.’
Her hunger after a holy life was real and practical. She knew she must learn to live by method–that is, doing right, whether she liked it or not–and not by feelings, if she was to be of use in the world.
So at the end of the year she wrote some new resolutions; and as they may be of help to you, I will copy them for you just as she put them down:–