"I want you to know, my darling sister, that the despondency that made my affliction so hard to bear fled before those words of yours which, as I have already told you, God taught you to speak. I do not know whether I was really His child, at the time, or not. I had certainly had an experience very different from yours; prayer had never been much more to me than a duty; and I had never felt the sweetness of that harmony between God and I the human soul that I now know can take away all the bitterness from the cup of sorrow. I knew-who can help knowing it that reads God's word?-that he required submission from His children and that His children gave it, no matter what it cost. The Bible is full of beautiful expressions of it; so are our hymns; so are the written lives of all good men and good women; and I have seen it in you, my dear Katy, at the very moment you were accusing yourself of the want of it. Entire oneness of the will with the Divine Will seem to me to be the law and the gospel of the Christian life; and this evidence of a renewed nature, I found wanting in myself. At any moment during the three years following James' death I would have snatched away from God, if I could; I was miserably lonely and desolate without him, not merely because he had been so much, to me, but because his loss revealed to me the distance between Christ and my soul. All I could do was to go on praying, year after year, in a dreary, hopeless way, that I might learn to say, as David did, 'I opened not my mouth because Thou didst it.' When you suggested that instead of trying to figure out whether I had loved God, I should begin to love Him now, light broke in upon my soul; I gave myself to Him that instant and as soon as I could get away by myself I fell upon my knees and gave myself up to the sense of His sovereignty for the first time in my life. Then, too, I looked at my 'light affliction,' and at the 'weight of glory' side by side, and thanked Him that through the one He had revealed to me the other. Katy, I know the human heart is deceitful above all things, but I think it would be a dishonor to God to doubt that He then revealed Himself to me as He doth not to the world, and that the sweet peace I then found in yielding to Him will be more or less mine so long as I live. Oh, if all sufferers could learn what I have learned! that every broken heart could be healed as mine has been healed! My precious sister, cannot we make this one part of our mission on earth, to pray for every sorrow-stricken soul, and whenever we have influence over such, to lead it to honor God by instant obedience to His will, whatever that may be? I have dishonored Him by years of rebellious, carefully-nursed sorrow; I want to honor Him now by years of resignation and grateful joy."