of mere raptures as to one of bare,
loveless duty. "Christian life," she wrote, "is not all contemplation
and prayer; it is not all muscle and sinew. It is a perfect, practicable
union of the two. I believe in your joyful emotions if they result in
self-denying, patient work for Christ--I believe in your work if it is
winged by faith and prayer." She had scored this passage in her copy of
Fenelon: "To be constantly in a state of enjoyment that takes away
the feeling of the cross, and to live in a fervor of devotion that
continually keeps Paradise open--this is not dying upon the cross and
becoming nothing."

Such experience and such views were behind the active side of her life,
as represented by her personal ministries and by the work of her pen.
The one book in which she endeavored to embody _formally_ her views of
Christian doctrine and experience did not, as might have been expected,
find the same reception or the same response which were accorded to
other productions. It was a book which appealed to a smaller and higher
class of readers. But, when she wrought these same truths into pictures
of living men and women--when she illustrated them at the points where
they touched the drudgery and commonplace of thousands of lives--when
she opened outlooks for hundreds of discouraged souls upon the roads
where hundreds more were bearing the very same burdens, and yet stepping
heavenward under their pressure--when she, who had walked in the fire
herself, went to her sisters in the same old furnace and told them of
her vision of the form of the Fourth--when she went down to the many who
were sadly working out the mistakes of ill-judged alliances, and lifted
the veil from sorrows which separate their subject from human sympathy
because they must be borne in silence--when she told such how heaven
might come even into their life--when she, with her hands yet bleeding
from the grasp of her own cross, came to other sufferers, not to mock
them by the show of an unattainable beauty and an impossible peace, but
to _offer_ them _divine_ peace and the beauty of the Lord in the name
of her Saviour--then she spoke with a power which multitudes felt and
confessed.

I am sure that hers is, in an eminent degree, the blessing of them
that were ready to perish. Weary, overtaxed mothers; misunderstood and
unappreciated wives, servants, pale seamstresses, delicate women forced
to live in an atmosphere of drunkenness and coarse brutality, wid