e I left Dorset, your image met me everywhere I went,
and I felt sure something was happening to you, though not knowing
whether you were enjoying or suffering. And since then there has been
nothing I could do for you but to pray that your faith may bear this
test and that you may deeply realise that--

God is the refuge of His saints,
When storms of sharp distress invade.

The longer I live the more conscious I am of human frailty, and of the
constant, overwhelming need we _all_ have of God's grace.... I can not
but hope things will turn out better than they seem. But if not, there
is God; nothing of this sort can take Him from you. You have longed and
prayed for holiness; this fearful event may bring the blessing. May God
tenderly bless and keep you, dear child.

But vivid as was her sense of human weakness and of the imperfections
cleaving to the best of men, while yet in the flesh, she still held fast
to the conviction, uttered so often in "Urbane and His Friends" and in
her other writings, that it is the privilege of every disciple of Jesus
to attain, by faith, to high degrees of Christian holiness, and that,
too, without consuming a whole lifetime in the process. In a letter to a
young friend she says:

Your letter shows me that I have expressed my views very inadequately in
Urbane, or that you have misunderstood what I have said there....
"There _is_ a shorter way"; a better way; God never meant us to spend a
lifetime amid lumbering machinery by means of which we haul ourselves
laboriously upward; the work is His, not ours, and when I said I
believed in "holiness through faith," I was not thinking of the book by
that title, but of utterances made by the Church ages before its author
saw the light of day. We _can not_ make ourselves holy. We are born
sinners. A certain school believe that they are "kept" by the grace of
God from all sin. I do not say that they are not. But I do say that I
think it requires superhuman wisdom to _know_ positively that one not
only keeps all God's law, but leaves no single duty undone. Think a
minute. Law proceeds from an infinite mind; can finite mind grasp it
so as to know, through its own consciousness, that it comes up to this
standard? On the other hand, I do believe that a way has been provided
for us to be set free from an "evil conscience"; that we may live in
such integrity and uprightness as to be at peace with God; not being
afraid to let His pure eye range through