would fall a
prey to them. No fact of religious experience is more striking than
this, that the higher men rise in real goodness--the nearer they come
to God, the more keen-eyed and distressed are they to detect evil in
themselves. Their sense of sin seems to be in a sort of inverse ratio
to their freedom from its power. And we meet with a similar fact in the
natural life. The finer and more exalted the sentiment of purity and
honor, the more sensitive will one be to the slightest approach to what
is impure or dishonorable in one's own character and conduct. Such is
substantially her ground of dissent from the "Higher Life" theory. Her
own sense of sin was so profound and vivid that she shuddered at the
thought of claiming perfection for herself; and it seemed to her a
very sad delusion for anybody else to claim it. True holiness is never
self-conscious; it does not look at itself in the glass; and if it did,
it would see only Christ, not itself, reflected there. This was her way
of looking at the subject; and she came to regard all theories, still
more all professions, of entire sanctification as fallacious and full of
peril--not a help, but a serious hindrance to real Christian holiness.
For several years she not only read but carefully studied the most noted
writers who advocated the "Higher Life" and "Holiness through Faith"
doctrines, and her testimony was that they had done her harm. "I find
myself spiritually injured by them," she wrote to a friend less than two
years before her death. "How do you explain the fact," she added, "that
truly good people are left to produce such an effect? Is it not to
shut us up to Christ? What a relief it will be to get beyond our own
weaknesses, and those of others! I long for that day."

I have just alluded to her deep, vivid consciousness of sin. It would
have been an intolerable burden, had not her feeling of God's infinite
grace and love in Christ been still more vivid and profound. The little
allegory in the ninth chapter of Urbane and His Friends expresses very
happily this feeling.

There are several other points in her theory of the Christian life, to
which she attached much importance. One is the close connexion between
suffering in some form and holiness, or growth in grace. The cross the
way to the crown--this thought runs, like a golden thread, through all
the records of her religious history. She expressed it while a little
girl, as she sat one day with a young frien