“STRENGTH is born
  In the deep silence of long-suffering hearts,
  Not amid joy.”

Imagine soldiers getting ready for warfare, being told by their commander that they had no need to drill, and had nothing to do but drink nectar!  As to being brought low, I will own that I have not been entirely left of God to my own devices and desires; if I had been, I should have gone overboard.  He had such a grip of me that He couldn’t let go.  I saw a man apply a magnet to steel pens the other day, and that’s the way I clung to God; there was no power in me to hold on, the magnetism was in Him, and so I hung on.  Wasn’t it so with you?

And now to change the subject again; if you have any faded ferns, vines, leaves on hand, you can paint and make them beautiful again.  For a light wall, paint them with Caledonian brown, and they will have a very rich effect.  I expect a patent-right for this invention.

The vivid sense of human weakness and of the sharp discipline of life, which she expresses in this letter, was deepened by hearing what a sea of trouble some of her friends had been suddenly engulphed in.  Early in October she wrote to one of them: 

For some time before I left Dorset, your image met me everywhere I went, and I felt sure something was happening to you, though not knowing whether you were enjoying or suffering.  And since then there has been nothing I could do for you but to pray that your faith may bear this test and that you may deeply realise that—­

  God is the refuge of His saints,
  When storms of sharp distress invade.

The longer I live the more conscious I am of human frailty, and of the constant, overwhelming need we all have of God’s grace....  I can not but hope things will turn out better than they seem.  But if not, there is God; nothing of this sort can take Him from you.  You have longed and prayed for holiness; this fearful event may bring the blessing.  May God tenderly bless and keep you, dear child.

But vivid as was her sense of human weakness and of the imperfections cleaving to the best of men, while yet in the flesh, she still held fast to the conviction, uttered so often in “Urbane and His Friends” and in her other writings, that it is the privilege of every disciple of Jesus to attain, by faith, to high degrees of Christian holiness, and that, too, without consuming a whole lifetime in the process.  In a letter to a young friend she says: 

Your letter shows me that I have expressed my views very inadequately in Urbane, or that you have misunderstood what I have said there....  “There is a shorter way”; a better way; God never meant us to spend a lifetime amid lumbering machinery by means of which we haul ourselves laboriously upward; the work is His, not ours, and when I said I believed in “holiness through faith,” I was not thinking of the book by that title, but of utterances made by the Church ages before its author saw the