ve
in; how dreadful for an educated and delicate gentlewoman, accustomed to
the comforts of civilisation, it is not easy to imagine.

But to the coarser tortures of physical deprivation and suffering had
been added the more refined torments of heart and soul. During four of
those five weeks all God's waves and billows had gone over Alice Benden.
She felt herself forsaken of God and man alike--out of mind, like the
slain that lie in the grave--forgotten even by the Lord her Shepherd.

One visitor she had during that time, who had by no means forgotten her.
Satan has an excellent memory, and never lacks leisure to tempt God's
children. He paid poor Alice a great deal of attention. How, he asked
her, was it possible that a just God, not to say a merciful Saviour,
could have allowed her to come into such misery? Had the Lord's hand
waxed short? Here were the persecutors, many of them ungodly men, robed
in soft silken raiment, and faring sumptuously every day; their beds
were made of the finest down, they had all that heart could wish; while
she lay upon dirty straw in this damp hole, not a creature knowing what
had become of her. Was this all she had received as the reward of
serving God? Had she not tried to do His will, and to walk before Him
with a perfect heart? and this was what she got for it, from Him who
could have swept away her persecutors by a word, and lifted her by
another to the height of luxury and happiness.

Poor Alice was overwhelmed. Her bodily weakness--of which Satan may
always be trusted to take advantage--made her less fit to cope with him,
and for a time she did not guess who it was that suggested all these
wrong and miserable thoughts. She "grievously bewailed" herself, and,
as people often do, nursed her distress as if it were something very
dear and precious.

But God had not forgotten Alice Benden. She was not going to be lost--
she, for whom Christ died. She was only to be purified, and made white,
and tried. He led her to find comfort in His own Word, the richest of
earthly comforters. One night Alice began to repeat to herself the
forty-second Psalm. It seemed just made for her. It was the cry of a
sore heart, shut in by enemies, and shut out from hope and pleasure.
Was not that just her case?

"Why art thou so full of heaviness, O my soul? and why art thou so
disquieted within me? Put thy trust in God!"

A little relieved, she turned next to the seventy-seventh Psalm. S