to regard all theories, still more all professions, of entire sanctification as fallacious and full of peril—­not a help, but a serious hindrance to real Christian holiness.  For several years she not only read but carefully studied the most noted writers who advocated the “Higher Life” and “Holiness through Faith” doctrines, and her testimony was that they had done her harm.  “I find myself spiritually injured by them,” she wrote to a friend less than two years before her death.  “How do you explain the fact,” she added, “that truly good people are left to produce such an effect?  Is it not to shut us up to Christ?  What a relief it will be to get beyond our own weaknesses, and those of others!  I long for that day.”

I have just alluded to her deep, vivid consciousness of sin.  It would have been an intolerable burden, had not her feeling of God’s infinite grace and love in Christ been still more vivid and profound.  The little allegory in the ninth chapter of Urbane and His Friends expresses very happily this feeling.

There are several other points in her theory of the Christian life, to which she attached much importance.  One is the close connexion between suffering in some form and holiness, or growth in grace.  The cross the way to the crown—­this thought runs, like a golden thread, through all the records of her religious history.  She expressed it while a little girl, as she sat one day with a young friend on a tombstone in the old burying-ground at Portland.  It occurs again and again in her early letters; in one written in 1840 she says:  “I thought to myself that if God continued His faithfulness towards me, I shall have afflictions such as I now know nothing more of than the name”; in another written four years later, in the midst of the sweetest joy:  “I know there are some of the great lessons of life yet to be learned; I believe I must suffer as long as I have an earthly existence.”  And in after years, when it formed so large an element in her own experience, she came to regard suffering, when sanctified by the word of God and by prayer, as the King’s highway to Christian perfection.  This point is often referred to and illustrated in her various writings—­more especially in Stepping Heavenward and Golden Hours.  Possibly she carried her theory a little too far; perhaps it does not appear to be always verified in actual Christian experience; but, certainly, no one can deny that it is in harmony with the general teaching of inspired Scripture and with the spirit of catholic piety in all ages. [16]

Another point, which also found illustration in her books, is the vital connexion between the habit of devout communion with God in Christ and all the daily virtues and charities of religion; another still is the close affinity between depth in piety and the highest, sweetest enjoyment of earthly good.