‘All the great mystics have been energetic and influential, and their business capacity is specially noted in a curiously large number of cases.’ INGE, _Bampton Lectures_, Preface vii. One outcome of Miss Beale’s time of personal spiritual distress, one which bore directly on what she considered as St. Hilda’s work, was an arrangement made for the first time in 1884 for devotional meetings for teachers at the end of the summer term. After 1885, when a second gathering took place, they were held alternately with the biennial Guild meetings. Like much of Miss Beale’s work, these Quiet Days, as they were called, resulted rather from a definite idea than from a formal plan. Their arrangement and character appear to have been due to the occurrence of certain conditions and circumstances while Miss Beale was forming a decision to help others who might be suffering as she herself had done. Plans for this help began to pass through her mind as early as the summer of 1882, while she was herself, as she would have expressed it, ‘in the fire.’ In July 1882 she wrote to a friend:— ‘_July 25, 1882._ ‘What occurred to me was this—that something of a more definite Retreat might be held for teachers during the vacation. Mr. Wilkinson had at Christmas some Quiet Days which were very valuable and helpful. Still these were not quite like a regular Retreat:—because very few who went were able to be really quiet in London lodgings, and so could not get the absolute silence and repose which make a Retreat valuable.... Most of the regular Retreats are too general to give teachers the _special_ help, and many are so distinctly High Church, that one could not venture to recommend young teachers to go.... I _can’t_ accept the decision “nothing can be done”; theories of distress which reach me as the old light seems to go out, and the dark waves close in, are too distressing. We cannot administer “a universal pill”; but we can to some extent support and comfort those who are passing through the darkness; one can out of one’s own experience tell them that the stars will shine out once more; one can teach some few simple lessons of faith and patience and hope; one can show that there are _a priori_ and _a posteriori_ grounds for the faith we hold,—though mysteries unfathomable remain in every department of thought; and in such a meeting, personal help and advice might be given to meet special individual difficulties. It is here that the Christian Evidence Society fails. Teachers have not time for _much_ reading and there are masses of books, many of them containing very little matter and plenty of words and arguments, which are useless for our special difficulties. Of course Retreats are not simply for such intellectual treatment of doubts, and one