Reading assent in my face, he proceeded, “Some might reply that this question has been answered by the brother above-mentioned, who says, in effect, ‘The Son was forsaken by the Father, not that the Son might be made purer, or freed from sin, but that He might know the Father’s will and might prepare Himself for His imminent self-sacrifice.’ But is that—I will not say a complete answer, for who will venture to say that he knows completely all the purpose of the Father in causing the Son to feel forsaken?—is it even an answer that ought rightly to satisfy us? Will you be patient with me, my friend—for friends we are already (are we not?) in our joint search after truth⸺” “We are indeed,” said I, “and I would gladly hear your fullest thoughts on this matter.” “Permit me then,” said he, “to put another thought before your mind, namely, that the Son of God, being Son of man, may have been forsaken by the Father in order to learn, as a man, the heights and depths of human nature, and to what an abyss of darkness the purest and most faithful saint may sometimes sink; and how even in that abyss, the saint may feel, through faith, that there are still beneath him the arms of God, not indeed supporting him but ready to support him; and that he is—as the prophets say about Israel—‘forsaken’ yet ‘not forsaken.’ No height in saintliness is higher than such a faith as this. “The scriptures tell us,” he continued, “that man is to love God with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his power, and with all his understanding. You know this?” I nodded assent. “Consider then how you and I will feel in the moments or hours before our departure, if God has decreed that we shall pass away by a slow and tedious passage, with a gradual weakening of our mental and spiritual powers, a chill of the heart, a deadening of the understanding, and a fading away of the fire of the soul; so that it is no longer possible for us, no longer permitted to us by God Himself, to love Him with all our human powers, because our powers themselves are becoming powerless. May we not then perhaps feel our grasp on the hand of the heavenly Father loosening, and our souls slipping back from the supporting strength of His presence, downward, and still downward, into the darkness of the infinite abyss? Should that hour of trial come upon us, would it not be a very present help in our trouble to know that the Lord, the Saviour, the Eternal Son of God, in the form of man, was troubled likewise?”