‘I feel sorry you have read Strauss, but, of course, if you felt it your duty to do so, you _were_ right. Still, I do not think one is bound to read everything, any more than one is to listen to all that can be said against all one’s friends. I mean a person might be ever so good, yet if we were constantly to listen to insinuations against them, if we were frequently _with_ those who disbelieved in their goodness, and looked contemptuous when we trusted, a most well-founded confidence might result in doubt and distrust. I think we should act in religious matters as we ought in a case of friendship—refuse to hear insinuations, but ask for the grounds, arguments—not let our mind be biassed against our will and better judgment. I believe with many that these doubts are “spectres of the cave,” that if we have courage to face them, we shall see them fade away. But then we must be very much in earnest, spend time and labour and much thought upon this, as upon other subjects, and pray for the spirit of truth. I have not read Strauss, I know the general line of his arguments, but as you say he gives none here, I need not get the book to meet them.’ Now, in this period of doubt and anxiety, books by any whom Miss Beale thought to be earnest seekers for truth, whether they were orthodox or not, were freely read. The sense of loss and discomfort seems to have grown gradually all the year. ‘Poor lesson because depressed,’ she notes on a day in February. A fortnight later in church she was ‘wrestling like Jacob; Tell me Thy Name.’ Palm Sunday, however, brought some peace. ‘I think I touched His garment’s hem.’ Each day in that Holy Week she was at an early service before school hours began, and on Easter Day wrote: ‘This Lent has been blessed.’ In Easter week she notes that she finished reading Jukes’s _New Man_, ‘a beautiful book.’ But before the holidays were over there was ‘a dread of coming sorrow,’ a renewed feeling of deadness and want of devotion, only ‘passive following the inward guide.’ ‘Much troubled this morning,’ she wrote on Whit-Sunday, and the need for a ‘new life-pulse’ grew larger as the summer term wore on. Yet she persisted in striving to keep her devotional rules, and for her apparent want of zeal blamed only herself. At the end of that busy term, so full of work and interests and anxieties, she wrote: ‘Be with me in the holidays. I fear them.’ Of the suffering of that time she afterwards wrote fully, tracing the steps by which she was gradually led to think that the historical evidence on which she thought her faith rested was of no value. An extract from one account is given:— ‘Even if historical evidence were there, it could not be for all. And was it there?