“Indeed, dear child, I do feel for you. When you are freer you must come and see me and we will talk over things. I shall not think you wicked but believe that you do want to know God, and that He is sorry for you because you do care, but cannot see.” To her dear friend, Miss Belcher, when the latter was suffering from the illness which was to bring the end:-- “I am looking forward to Friday. I thought of you so much on this the Physician’s [St. Luke’s] day as we sang that beautiful Hymn and Psalm xxx: and our window told of the raising of the daughter by the Healer.” Dorothea Beale presented the perhaps not unusual combination of the practical woman of affairs and the mystic. Her business capacity and power of organisation were remarkable, and yet she had essentially the mind of a poet. Hers was the type of mind that is continually seeing a revelation of the spiritual in all material things, in history, in literature, and in sympathy with kindred souls. Her Scripture lessons she considered one of the chief parts of her work. She always took the greatest care with her preparation for these classes and made them the subject of prayer. Some used to complain that her lessons were vague, and not intelligible, but even those who did not understand felt a greatness and an uplifting power which were a help to them. In 1880 she wrote to a young teacher. “I used to prepare my lessons on my knees (don’t say this to others). You would find it a help, I think, to do this sometimes.” Her literature lessons were rather unusual. She dealt with the great writers in a great way, and used these lessons for conveying moral teaching that could not very well be given in Scripture lessons. Browning she loved, and her senior girls never left school without having been introduced by Dorothea Beale to some of his great, shorter poems. Her book on Literary Studies gives one an idea of how she dealt with literature in her classes. There is in this book a very interesting dialogue, between a person of the seventeenth and one of the nineteenth century on the theology of “Paradise Lost”. After an interesting discussion on the different conceptions of God and His ways the seventeenth century representative says:-- “You do not do justice to us. You do not think Bunyan meant us to believe Christian took a real journey away from a particular town. Why do you suppose Milton meant that Satan was thrown out of a special place in this, which we call space? You do not think that the Red Cross Knight was believed by Spenser, or Christian by Bunyan, to have been immersed in a dark dungeon.”