here are abundance of
people in like case; the very confession of the fact may help others to
endure, because one of the darkest miseries of suffering is the
horrible sense of isolation that it brings. And if this book casts the
least ray upon the sad problem--a ray of the light that I have learned
to recognise is truly there--I shall be more than content. There is no
morbidity in suffering, or in confessing that one suffers. Morbidity
only begins when one acquiesces in suffering as being incurable and
inevitable; and the motive of this book is to show that it is at once
curative and curable, a very tender part of a wholly loving and
Fatherly design.

A. C. B.

Magdalene College, Cambridge,

July 14, 1907.

INTRODUCTION

I had intended to allow the records that follow--the records of a
pilgrimage sorely beset and hampered by sorrow and distress--to speak
for themselves. Let me only say that one who makes public a record so
intimate and outspoken incurs, as a rule, a certain responsibility. He
has to consider in the first place, or at least he cannot help
instinctively considering, what the wishes of the writer would have
been on the subject. I do not mean that one who has to decide such a
point is bound to be entirely guided by that. He must weigh the
possible value of the record to other spirits against what he thinks
that the writer himself would have personally desired. A far more
important consideration is what living people who play a part in such
records feel about their publication. But I cannot help thinking that
our whole standard in such matters is a very false and conventional
one. Supposing, for instance, that a very sacred and intimate record,
say, two hundred years old, were to be found among some family papers,
it is inconceivable that any one would object to its publication on the
ground that the writer of it, or the people mentioned in it, would not
have wished it to see the light. We show how weak our faith really is
in the continuance of personal identity after death, by allowing the
lapse of time to affect the question at all; just as we should consider
it a horrible profanation to exhume and exhibit the body of a man who
had been buried a few years ago, while we approve of the action of
archaeologists who explore Egyptian sepulchres, subscribe to their
operations, and should consider a man a mere sentimentalist who
suggested that the mummies exhibited in museums ought to be sent back