on their nature, for they make misery for their partner in marriage as well as for themselves.  And if that partner, strong in traditional authority and conventional habits, seeks to “break in” the turbulent and storm-tossed creature—­well, it comes to a mere trial of strength and endurance, whether that driven creature will fall panting and crushed, or whether it will turn in its despair, assert its Divine right to intellectual liberty, rend its fetters in pieces, and, discovering its own strength in its extremity, speak at all risks its “No” when bidden to live a lie.

When that physical crisis was over I decided on my line of action.  I resolved to take Christianity as it had been taught in the Churches, and carefully and thoroughly examine its dogmas one by one, so that I should never again say “I believe” where I had not proved, and that, however diminished my area of belief, what was left of it might at least be firm under my feet.  I found that four chief problems were pressing for solution, and to these I addressed myself.  How many are to-day the souls facing just these problems, and disputing every inch of their old ground of faith with the steadily advancing waves of historical and scientific criticism!  Alas! for the many Canutes, as the waves wash over their feet.  These problems were:—­

(1) The eternity of punishment after death.

(2) The meaning of “goodness” and “love,” as applied to a God who had made this world, with all its sin and misery.

(3) The nature of the atonement of Christ, and the “justice” of God in accepting a vicarious suffering from Christ, and a vicarious righteousness from the sinner.

(4) The meaning of “inspiration” as applied to the Bible, and the reconciliation of the perfections of the author with the blunders and immoralities of the work.

It will be seen that the deeper problems of religion—­the deity of Christ, the existence of God, the immortality of the soul—­were not yet brought into question, and, looking back, I cannot but see how orderly was the progression of thought, how steady the growth, after that first terrible earthquake, and the first wild swirl of agony.  The points that I set myself to study were those which would naturally be first faced by any one whose first rebellion against the dogmas of the Churches was a rebellion of the moral nature rather than of the intellectual, a protest of the conscience rather than of the brain.  It was not a desire for moral licence which gave me the impulse that finally landed me in Atheism; it was the sense of outraged justice and insulted right.  I was a wife and mother, blameless in moral life, with a deep sense of duty and a proud self-respect; it was while I was this that doubt struck me, and while I was in the guarded circle of the home, with no dream of outside work or outside liberty, that I lost all faith in Christianity.  My education, my mother’s example, my inner timidity and self-distrust,