callousness and even an enjoyment of my sufferings, I learnt self-sacrifice, the effacement of all personal gain, and total submission for love's sake to His Will, cruel though I might imagine it to be. With what tears does the heart afterwards address itself in awed repentance to its Beloved and Gentle God!

A painful illness came and lasted for months. Having no home, I was obliged to endure the misery of it as best I could among strangers. At this time I touched perhaps the very lowest depths. How often I longed that I might never wake in the morning! I loathed my life.

During this illness I came exceedingly near to Christ, so much so that I am not able to describe the vividness of it. What I learnt out of this time of suffering I do not know—save complete submission. I became like wax—wax which was asked to take only one impression, and that pain. I was too dumb; I should have remembered those words, that "men ought not to faint, but to pray."

Bewildered, and mystified by my own unhappiness and that of so many others all around me, I sank in my submission too much into a state of lethargic resignation, whereas an onward-driving resolution to win through, a powerful determination to seek and obtain the immediate protection and assistance of God, a standing before God, and a claiming of His help—these things are required of the soul: in fact that importunity is necessary of which Jesus spoke (Luke xi. 7-9): "And he from within shall answer and say, Trouble me not . . . I cannot rise and give thee. I say unto you he will not rise and give him because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him as many as he needeth. And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you."

Such times of distress are storms, fearful battles of the soul in which she must not faint but rise up and walk towards God and clamour for help; and she will receive it. In His own good time He will give her all that she asks and more even than she dreamed of. She must claim from God a continual restrengthening, and search with glowing aspiration for a more joyous love.

X

It was summer-time: a great battle was raging in France. A friend wrote me that my husband was up in the very foremost part of it. I heard no word from my husband; weeks passed, and still the same ominous silence. At last the day came when the shadow of these two fearful years rose up and overwhelmed me altogether. I went up on to the wild lonely hill where I so often walked, and there I contended with God for His help. For the first time in my life there was nothing between God and myself—this had continually happened with Jesus Christ, but not with God the Father, Who remained totally inaccessible to me. Now, like a man standing in a very dark place and seeing nothing but knowing himself immediately near to another—so I knew myself in very great nearness to God. I had no need for eyes to see outwardly, because of the immense magnetism of this inward Awareness. At one moment my heart and mind ran like water before Him—praying Him, beseeching Him for His help; at another my soul stood straight up before Him, contending and claiming because she could bear no more: and it felt as though the Spirit of God stood over against my spirit, and my spirit wrestled with God's Spirit for more than an hour. But He gave me no answer, no sign, no help. He gave me nothing but that awful silence which seems to hang for ever between God and Man. And I became exhausted, and turned away in despair from God, and from supplication, and from striving, and from contending, and, very quiet and profoundly sad, I stood looking out across the hills to the distant view—how gentle and lovely this peace of the evening sky, whilst on earth all the nations of the world were fighting together in blood and fury and pain!

I had stood there for perhaps ten minutes, mutely and sadly wondering at the meaning of it all, and was commencing to walk away when suddenly I was surrounded by a great whiteness which blotted out from me all my surroundings. It was like a great light or white cloud which hid all my surroundings from me, though I stood there with my eyes wide open: and the cloud pricked, so that I said to myself, "It is an electric cloud," and it pricked me from my head down to my elbows, but no further. I felt no fear whatever, but a very great wonder, and stood there all quite simple and placid, feeling very quiet. Then there began to be poured into me an indescribably great vitality, so that I said to myself, "I am being filled with some marvellous Elixir." And it filled me from the feet up, gently and slowly, so that I could notice every advance of it. As it rose higher in me, so I grew to feel freed: that is to say, I had within me the astounding sensation of having the capacity to pass where or how I would—which is to say I felt freed of the law of gravity. I was like a free spirit—I felt and knew within myself this glorious freedom! I tasted for some moments a new form of living! Words are unable to convey the splendour of it, the boundless joy, the liberty, the glory of it.

And the incomprehensible Power rose and rose in me until it reached the very crown of my head, and immediately it had quite filled me a marvellous thing happened—the Wall, the dreadful Barrier between God and me, came down entirely, and immediately I loved Him. I was so filled with love that I had to cry aloud my love, so great was the force and the wonder and the delight and the might of it.

And now, slowly, the vivid whiteness melted away so that I saw everything around me once more just as before; but for a little while I continued to stand there very still and thoughtful, because I was filled with wonder and great peace.

Then I turned to walk home, but I walked as a New Creature in a New World—my heart felt like the heart of an angel, glowing white-hot with the love for God, and all my sorrows fled away in a vast joy! This was His answer, this was His help. After years and years of wrestling and struggling, in one moment of time He had let me find Him, He had poured His Paradise into my soul! Never was such inconceivable joy—never was such gladness! My griefs and pains and woes were wiped away—totally effaced as though they had never existed!

Oh, the magnificence of such splendid joy! The whole of space could scarcely now be large enough to hold me! I needed all of it—I welcomed its immensity as once I was oppressed by it. God and my Soul, and Love, and Light, and Space!

PART II

At last my little suffering life is sheltered in the known, the felt, protection of the Ineffable and Invisible Being. The Being Who, without revealing Himself to me by sight or sound, yet communicates Himself to me in some divine manner at once all-sufficing and inexpressible. I ask no questions: I am in no haste of anxious learning. My heart and my mind and my soul stand still and drink in the glory of this happiness. All day, often half the night, I worship Him. I love Him with this new love, so different from anything known before. The greatest earthly love, by comparison to it, has become feeble, impure, almost grotesque in its inefficiency—a tinsel counterfeit of this glistening mystery which must still be spoken of as love because I know no other name.

I find it difficult, almost impossible, to speak to my fellow-creatures, because I have only two words, two thoughts in my entire being: my God, and my love for Him.

I am like a thing that is magnetised, held: I am not able, day or night, to detach my mind from God.

I wake with His name upon my lips, with His glory in my soul. In all this there is no virtue on my part; there is no effort; the capacity for this boundless devotion is a free gift. Coming immediately after my anguished prayer on the hill, it appears to me to have come solely on account of that one prayer—the previous prayers, struggles, endeavours of five-and-twenty years are