e in the grandeur
and freedom of the little bit of truth it has been given me to see. I am
told that 'Present-day Papers', by Bishop Ewing (edited) are a wonderful
help, many of them, to puzzled people: I mean to get them. But I am sure
you will find that the truth will (even so little as we may be able to
find out) grow on you, make you free, light your path, and dispel, at no
distant time, your _painful_ difficulties and doubts. I should say on no
account give up your reading. I think with you that you could not do
without it. It will be a wonderful source of help and peace to you. For
there are struggles far more fearful than those of intellectual doubt. I
am keenly alive to the gathered-up sadness of which your last two pages
are an expression. I was sorrier than I can say to read them. They
reminded me of a long and very dark time in my own life, when I thought
the light never would come. Thank God it came, or I think I could not
have held out much longer. But you have evidently strength to bear it
now. The more dangerous time, I should fancy, has passed. You will have
to mind that the fermentation leaves clear spiritual wine, and not (as
too often) vinegar.

"I wish I could write something more helpful to you in this great matter.
But as I sit in front of my large bay window, and see the shadows on the
grass and the sunlight on the leaves, and the soft glimmer of the
rosebuds left by the storms, I cannot but believe that all will be very
well. 'Trust in the Lord; wait patiently for him'--they are trite words.
But he made the grass, the leaves, the rosebuds, and the sunshine, and he
is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And now the trite words have
swelled into a mighty argument."

Despite reading and argument, my scepticism grew only deeper and deeper.
The study of W.R. Greg's "Creed of Christendom", of Matthew Arnold's
"Literature and Dogma", helped to widen the mental horizon, while making
a return to the old faith more and more impossible. The church services
were a weekly torture, but feeling as I did that I was only a doubter, I
spoke to none of my doubts. It was possible, I felt, that all my
difficulties might be cleared up, and I had no right to shake the faith
of others while in uncertainty myself. Others had doubted and had
afterwards believed; for the doubter silence was a duty; the blinded had
better keep their misery to themselves. I found some practical relief in
parish work of a non-doctrinal kind