I would ask those who are not believers in Christianity not to use it in order to bolster themselves up in their atheistical views, or to see in it a proof of the fallacy of true religion. Although I have given up convent religion, yet I am a firm believer in God. I believe that the Lord Jesus Christ died and rose again to atone for and save His people from their sins, that the Holy Spirit can and does give to all who believe in Christ a new and a clean heart, and grace to walk in the footsteps of the Saviour.
However misguided I was when I entered in my convent life, yet I was induced to do so because I had a deep love to my Saviour, and thought I could not in a better way prove my love and increase it.
But who can be surprised at a young girl being deluded and led astray when “false prophets” arise, who profess so much holiness and so great and exact a knowledge of God’s will?
Many there are, like myself, who have been misdirected and deceived by ritual, candles, flowers, incense, gorgeous vestments, genuflexions, sentimental music and sermons, and I know not what other nonsense. I was seeking Jesus. I asked for bread, but I was given a stone. For a time the excitement arising from convent life made me think I had found what I sought, but it was a vain delusion, as I found to my cost.
There are in English convents to-day many unhappy souls, groping in the dark. Are we to let them share my fate, and that of others, which may be worse? Nay, rather let us use our pens and voices to awaken and enlighten the men and women of England as to the truth.
Others have exposed conventual life as it exists in the Roman Catholic Church; but still the people of England can scarcely be alive to the fearfully rapid increase in the number of such convents,[24] or of the degrading and un-English and un-Christian nature of the life of a nun therein. It is not my lot to expose Roman Catholic convents; the discoveries I have made have been made in connection with the Church of England, which, alas, through the fearful growth of Ritualism, is becoming a recruiting ground for Rome.
My opinion may not be worth much, but I hold the strong conviction that unless Protestants make a great stir, and unless the bishops of the Church set the example, England, at no very distant period, will be Romanized.
I can point to more than two or three convents in connection with the Established Church where not only Roman Catholic books are in constant use, but where the Roman Catholic Ordinary of the Mass is used, instead of our own Protestant Communion Service; and, worse than all perhaps, I know the Mass was on several occasions celebrated by a Roman Catholic priest in a Church of England convent!!
When I came out of convent life and mixed with Christian people, I discovered that the most earnest workers were those who were in the enjoyment of peace. They were living in the sunlight of God’s love; they were, so to speak, good without knowing it, they had no time to be always thinking of themselves, but they were ever looking to God. Now, in the convent it had been far otherwise; we had been taught by man to try with all our might to be good according to set rules, and ceremonies, and methods handed down to us by Roman Catholic saints, or so-called Fathers of the Church, and to be continually examining and fingering our spiritual muscles to see how we were getting on in the spiritual life. In consequence of such a method, there was constant failure, as there ever will be under such a system.