Mary was but a four-year-old baby when she received her first definite conviction that God hears and answers prayer. She was a timid little maiden, and the greatest comfort she had in the world was the fact that she possessed a real Father in Heaven, strong, mighty, and willing to protect and help her. Sunday evenings in Forest House--as the Bosanquet mansion was called--were devoted to the children. On those occasions Mary's father taught her sister and herself the Church catechism. At five years old his youngest daughter asked questions concerning true Christians according to the Word of God, which might well have encouraged evasion on the part of her parent. She reasoned out everything told her; but her eager and earnest questions being so constantly put carelessly by, gave her childish mind the impression that the Bible did not mean all it said, therefore a sensible person would make due allowance for its threatenings. As this thought began to take well hold of Mary, a Methodist girl entered the household as nurse, whose conversations with the children were a great enlightenment to them both. In a year or two the nurse left them, but not before she had implanted in little Mary's mind the truth that it was not being united to any church or people which would save her, but that she must be converted through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and that the fruits of believing in Him as a personal Saviour would be power to love and serve God with a holy heart. That was excellent, but it had not been so explained to the child that she could understand the process either of "faith" or of "conversion." The result was perplexity. Not a few children in bygone days have had to suffer long Sunday afternoon agonies over the harrowing pictures of Foxe's "Book of Martyrs," this being then considered a profitable and bracing Sabbatic "exercise" for hundreds of sensitive little ones whose dreams were haunted, and whose waking hours in the dark were rendered terrific by vivid imaginings of racked, tortured, and burning saints. Mary was one of these. Yet so troubled was her little heart over the ungrasped subject of faith that one day, while gazing upon these fearful pictures, she exclaimed to herself, "Oh! oh! I do think it would be easier to _burn_ than to _believe!_" Mary seems to have been busy with these thoughts for nearly two years. She had not passed her eighth birthday when we find her sitting by herself for "a good think," and wondering "_What_ can it mean to have faith in Jesus?" Vexed with the mystery of the subject, her childish soul rose in rebellion against God for having chosen so hard a way into salvation, and she exclaimed aloud-- "Oh, if I had to die a martyr, I could do it; or give away all I have, I could do that; or when I grow up to have to be a servant, that would be easy; but I shall never, never, _never_ know how to believe!" Two lines of an old hymn drifted instantly through her mind--