Mr. F. allowing and accepting the consequence that men differed no more from brutes than by finer organization, no more than the elephant from the fish! It is really good to contrast opposite extremes of thought,—it gives one a certain sense of stability and reality to have to defend one’s castle on _both_ sides, and so to feel sure that it is one’s own at least.... Talking of struggle as the only root of good, I quoted ‘perfect _through_ suffering,’ and spoke of my belief in Christ’s struggle in those 30 years as the only possible root of his accordance of will with God’s. July 16th. Curious how the things most living to me are just simple absurdities to another. Talking of tombstones, Mrs. H. doesn’t like them, as preventing the dead rising—in idea. Mrs. F.—‘Well, you don’t expect them to, do you?’ (as a sort of _reductio ad absurdum_). ‘Certainly I do: the Bible says so.’ ‘Oh—aw—ah!’ with such a face,—‘if I thought so, I’d take to Banting at once.’” Curious how none of them seem to have seen that the frivolous remark involved a great principle! There were many stories and jokes on biblical themes, and—though S. J.- B. even at this time was a touchstone in the matter of jokes, never allowing one to pass which was not funny enough or clever enough to justify its breadth or its seeming irreverence—her sense of humour was keen. “Suggestion to read the prayer for fair weather,—‘Lor, sir,—not a bit of good with the wind in this quarter.’” But she was constantly reverting to the old religious intensity: “How reading of any spiritual conflict—even such an ‘ébauche’ as in Agnes of Sorrento—rouses one’s whole nature in a sort of enthusiasm of longing and half prophecy!... Sometimes I feel such intense sympathy and pity for Christ because of his very deification. That after spending his whole life to learn and tell men about his Father, he should find them, after his death, trying to set him up himself to obscure that Father,—making God a foil to Christ!” With that extraordinary frankness that does such credit to both, she writes to her Mother at this time,—“I was thinking the other day how curious it was that I really never read one Unitarian book till I was altogether Unitarian,[38]—never one but the Bible at least, if that counts.” Footnote 38: It was only for a very brief period of her life that S. J.-B. would have called herself by this name. “It is strange,” says someone, “that, in all our talk of the evolution of the individual, we fail to recognize the evolution of the medium.” S. J.-B. seems to have thought—as so many earnest spirits thought in those days—that she stood practically alone. “It has so been,” she says in the same letter to her Mother, “(I can’t say _chanced_) that I have had next to no human sympathy or help on my way. I do not remember that anyone but Mrs. Ballantyne has given me much of either in this one strife, and before I knew her the worst was over.”