‘For months I read and thought of nothing else; whenever the pressing claims of work left me for a moment, I felt the light was gone from my life. Sometimes a deeper sympathy filled me,—as I seemed like a gladiator standing with my fellows. _Morituri te salutant._ But generally I felt myself growing hardened by the want of power to find sympathy in my sorrow, nor could I pray. I did not often, and when I did, it was one cry—“Why, why hast Thou left us, O God—without answer to our cries? Why hast Thou uttered no word of consolation to all the groans of earth? If Thou hast not heard Jesus, none of us need pray.” He trusted in God that He would deliver Him, and was forsaken, and men have waited through the ages, as a little child would wait, shut up in prison by some cruel father, and would not at first believe that he was to be starved to death. And at last they realised that God for them was not,—only the prison-house He had built, in which they passed away their lives, in which, like a starving man, they dreamed of palaces and feasts, the delusions of their fevered brain. ‘How that old passage came home to one’s fevered soul,—“the desert shall blossom as the rose”—as the thought of one’s old Christian faith came back. What would one not give, I thought, to believe it true once more! For that lighted up the whole world, then there were living waters, consolation in every sorrow, a well-spring of divine sympathy, inexhaustible,—wells from which one could drink for ever, and pour out of one’s abundance. ‘Sometimes one did look up to the parched heavens, and though no rain fell, each time there was a little refreshing dew, as if God were answering when one let Him speak, instead of running into desert places, crying with Io, forsaken and maddened by a cruel God. Sometimes the words came then, “I will see you again.”