on Eternal Torture, on the Vicarious Atonement, however heterodox, might be held within the pale of the Church; many broad church clergymen rejected these as decidedly as I did myself, and yet remained members of the Establishment; the judgment on “Essays and Reviews” gave this wide liberty to heresy within the Church, and a laywoman might well claim the freedom of thought legally bestowed on divines.  The name “Christian” might well be worn while Christ was worshipped as God, and obeyed as the “Revealer of the Father’s will”, the “well-beloved Son”, the “Savior and Lord of men”.  But once challenge that unique position, once throw off that supreme sovereignty, and then it seemed to me that the name “Christian” became a hypocrisy, and its renouncement a duty incumbent on an upright mind.  But I was a clergyman’s wife; my position made my participation in the Holy Communion a necessity, and my withdrawal therefrom would be an act marked and commented upon by all.  Yet if I lost my faith in Christ, how could I honestly approach “the Lord’s Table”, where Christ was the central figure and the recipient of the homage paid there by every worshipper to “God made man”?  Hitherto mental pain alone had been the price demanded inexorably from the searcher after truth; now to the inner would be added the outer warfare, and how could I tell how far this might carry me?

One night only I spent in this struggle over the question:  “Shall I examine the claims to Deity of Jesus of Nazareth?”.  When morning broke the answer was clearly formulated:  “Truth is greater than peace or position.  If Jesus be God, challenge will not shake his Deity; if he be Man, it is blasphemy to worship him.”  I re-read Liddon’s “Bampton Lectures” on this controversy and Renan’s “Vie de Jesus”.  I studied the Gospels, and tried to represent to myself the life there outlined; I tested the conduct there given as I should have tested the conduct of any ordinary historical character; I noted that in the Synoptics no claim to Deity was made by Jesus himself, nor suggested by his disciples; I weighed his own answer to an enquirer, with its plain disavowal of Godhood:  “Why callest thou me good?  There is none good save one, that is God” (Matt, xix., 17); I conned over his prayers to “my Father”, his rest on divine protection, his trust in a power greater than his own; I noted his repudiation of divine knowledge:  “Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father” (Mark xiii., 32); I studied the meaning of his prayer of anguished submission:  “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me! nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matt, xxvi., 39); I dwelt on his bitter cry in his dying agony:  “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matt, xxvii., 46); I asked the meaning of the final words of rest:  “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke xxiii., 46).  And I saw that, if there were any truth in the Gospels at all, they told the story of a struggling, suffering, sinning, praying man, and not of a God at all and the dogma of the Deity of Christ followed the rest of the Christian doctrines into the limbo of past beliefs.