“I have read the criticism, and I could answer it word for word, or any criticism that might follow it from any source, but that is not allowed, and not to be. When I first wrote _The Fulfilment_ I longed to see it published, that I might fight the battle for it with my pen. It would have been like coming down into the arena to fight and breathe and conquer. But as the time went by, after it was returned to me, I began to realise slowly what a terrible book I had written, as well as beautiful and true, and it seemed as if it called for all I had to give as an expiation before it could go free. I put it away—the book and the thought. But I began to write ever on the same theme—the revelation Heaven had given me. You know how it has prospered. And then on Whitsunday the voice awoke me that I must bring my greatest treasure forward once again, for though I have let it lie patiently these four years, hoping to make an opening for it, it has ever been in my heart and brain. And again I felt the pleasing prospects of the battle. I knew what strength I had, and always have had, did I care to use it, to answer those who disagreed with what I wrote. And in the cause of such a book I felt that everything would be allowable. But there has come the Season out of Silence to be silent. We cannot bandy words about religious things. I cannot anyway. I feel it all so much I cannot talk about it. For all I write about I love and fear. God knows I have not been familiar, I have only loved simply both God and man. “But there is only one way of showing it, and that by dying simply. When I am once out of the way the big stumbling-block has been removed. People can no longer think I have written with a fanciful irreverence when I have had before me, all the time, nothing but Death; for I believe, looking back, it was there with the very first page. “And so (for when this reaches you I shall be dead—only to this world) I leave it as my dying request that you publish, exactly as I have sent it to you, _The Fulfilment_. You must ask the gentleman to return it, and tell him my decision. And at the same time I do not wish you or him or anyone to think that his criticism has had anything to do with my death. For I do not wish you or anyone to view me as a common suicide—overcome by this or that, or bowed down by the thought of failure or disappointment. I have simply died to make room for a great truth. And I have died trusting humbly in God. “And so you cannot deny me that which I decide. To you it must become an impersonal affair. You must publish it because it is a dying command, and publish it word for word as I have left it. And now no one can take offence—neither the company whose impress the book bears, nor anyone connected with it.