‘I have to thank you much, dear Mrs. Gurney, for your sympathy. It was such a help to me to be able to speak to you. I meant to say nothing to _any one_, but I could not help it. The story of your own vision helped me, as it was something like my own: it is so much what Browning describes at the end of “Saul,” when David has realised the Divine love, and feels the living pulse beating in all nature. Everybody helped me in some way, but especially Mr. Corbet’s teaching, which seems wonderfully beautiful. ‘I dare say it was the same last year; but different to me, because I was comparatively satisfied then, not poor and needy (as I came this time), and therefore ready to understand. ‘“I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice”: my text for to-day.’ She felt like one set free from prison, but the newly recovered liberty was used with caution. ‘You will like to know,’ she wrote to a friend in the following year, ‘that the fitful gleams of sunlight, which used to come after the dark night, have become now something like a steady shining. I was able to get a few quiet days at Christmas, and then first I began to feel that I should be able to give thanks for this terrible experience, and the thankfulness has grown ever since.’ As she said, the thankfulness grew. But in the very heart of the fire she had felt no regret, known no complaining. She was willing to suffer, if by that means she might help the more. On August 15, just a week after the day she always remembered as ‘Tuesday the 8th,’ she wrote of one whose calling in life was to teach others: ‘You say he has been reading sceptical books; I want him to go on doing so. He must know how deep the questions go, or he will be fighting windmills, as I have done.’ It will be asked by what steps the ascent was made, and what the height from which the new spiritual horizons were discerned; what was the train of thought which brought back the possibility of saying the Church’s Creed? The mental process, if it can be disentangled from an exercise which engaged all the faculties of soul and spirit, was probably that suggested in the words of Amiel: ‘Chacun ne comprend que ce qu’il retrouve en soi.’ But the research and the retrieval were not simply individual and within, they involved the scrutiny of widespread religious instincts, cravings and needs. They were aided above all by the contemplation of martyr deaths and martyr lives, which in their continuous and abiding witness to the faith are seen to constitute a claim to authority. Miss Beale herself strove to show how the doubting spirit was silenced by an answer of faith, in a little paper called ‘Building,’ which is dated September 8. Here she wrote:— ‘Sweep away external proofs, we must believe in a God and in His love. ‘We see He speaks to His children through the wondrous language of Nature, drawing them to His Heart and teaching ever new trust through it.