she began herself to question its reality.  “For some months I had no hope that I was a Christian, and pride made me go on just as if I felt myself perfectly safe.  Nothing could at that time have made me willing to have any eye a witness to my daily struggles.”  And yet she “often longed for the sympathy and assistance of Christian friends,” and to her unwillingness to confide in them she afterwards attributed much of the suffering that followed.  “I do not know exactly how I passed out of that season, but my school commenced in April, and I became so interested in it that I had less time to think of and to watch myself.  The next winter most of my scholars were deeply impressed by divine things, and, of course, I could not look on without having my own heart touched.  It was my privilege to spend many delightful weeks in watching the progress of minds earnestly seeking the way of life and early consecrating themselves to their Saviour.” [1] But after a while a severe reaction set in and in the course of the summer she became careless in her religious habits, shrank from the Lord’s table as a “place of absolute torture,” and while spending a fortnight in Boston in the fall, entirely omitted all exercises of private devotion.

She had now reached a crisis which was to decide her course for life.  During the winter of 1839-40, she passed through very deep and harrowing exercises of soul.  Her spiritual nature was shaken to its foundation, and she could say with the Psalmist, Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord. For several months she was in a state similar to that which the old divines depict so vividly as being “under conviction.”  Her sense of sin, and of her own unworthiness in the sight of God, grew more and more intense and oppressive.  At times she abandoned all hope, accused herself of having played the hypocrite, and fancied she was given over to hardness of heart.  At length she sought counsel of her pastor and confided to him her trouble, but he “did not know exactly what to do with me.”  In the midst of her distress, and as its effect, no doubt, she was taken ill and confined to her room, where in solitude she passed several weeks seeking rest and finding none.  “Sometimes I tried to pray, but this only increased my distress and made me cry out for annihilation to free me from the agony which seemed insupportable.”  With a single interval of comparative indifference, this state of mind continued for nearly four months.  She thus describes it: 

It was in vain that I sought the Lord in any of the lofty pathways through which my heart wished to go.  At last I found it impossible to carry on the struggle any longer alone.  I would gladly have put myself at the feet of a little child, if by so doing I could have found peace.  I felt so guilty and the character of God appeared so perfect in its purity and holiness, that I knew not which way to turn.  The sin which distressed me most of all was the rejection of the