"The Gates Ajar" was attacked by the press. In fact it was virulently bitten. The reviews of the book, some of them, reached the point of hydrophobia. Others were found to be in a milder pathological condition. Still others were gentle or even friendly enough. Religious papers waged war across that girl's notions of the life to come as if she had been an evil spirit let loose upon accepted theology for the destruction of the world. The secular press was scarcely less disturbed about the matter, which it treated, however, with the more amused good-humor of a man of the world puzzled by a religious disagreement. In the days of the Most Holy Inquisition there was an old phrase whose poignancy has always seemed to me to be but half appreciated. One did not say: He was racked. She was burned. They were flayed alive, or pulled apart with little pincers, or clasped in the arms of the red-hot Virgin. One was too well-bred for so bald a use of language. One politely and simply said: He was put to the question. The young author of "The Gates Ajar" was only put to the question. Heresy was her crime, and atrocity her name. She had outraged the church; she had blasphemed its sanctities; she had taken live coals from the altar in her impious hand. The sacrilege was too serious to be dismissed with cold contempt. Opinion battled about that poor little tale as if it had held the power to overthrow church and state and family. It was an irreverent book--it was a devout book. It was a strong book--it was a weak book. It was a religious book--it was an immoral book (I have forgotten just why; in fact, I think I never knew). It was a good book--it was a bad book. It was calculated to comfort the comfortless--it was calculated to lead the impressionable astray. It was an accession to Christian literature--it was a disgrace to the religious antecedents of the author; and so on, and so forth. At first, when some of these reviews fell in my way, I read them, knowing no better. But I very soon learned to let them alone. The kind notices, while they gave me a sort of courage which by temperament possibly I needed more than all young writers may, overwhelmed me, too, by a sense of my own inadequacy to be a teacher of the most solemn of truths, on any such scale as that towards which events seemed to be pointing. The unfair notices put me in a tremor of distress. The brutal ones affected me like a blow in the face from the fist of a ruffian. None of them, that I can remember, ever helped me in any sense whatsoever to do better work.