One must bear this in mind in reading the passage that follows: “To realize more and more that my life will be one—for years if not to the end—of struggle and perhaps obloquy, certainly outcasting from the synagogue,—struggle theological and social: and will it even succeed at last? Yes, surely,—inasmuch as Robertson says how to fall in the gap is success,—to be one of the conquering army, if not of the conquerors.” The next entry in the diary is the quotation of a flippant joke about the Californians who “when they go to a certain warm abode have yet to send back for their blankets.” “July 30th. A very interesting talk with the Fs. ... trying hard to show Mrs. F., who longs so to believe in a loving God, ‘Thou wouldst not seek me, hadst thou not found me,’—and that to long is almost to believe. Also to show her that Christ’s Christianity is a strong true manly thing,—that what she deprecates is the letter not the spirit, and that her willingness to live, and yet fear to die, without Christianity is of the essence of Calvinism. With him, still more interesting, (except that one pities and longs to help her) about origin of evil, free will, etc. I arguing that God _could_ not give men the possibility of virtue without the possibility of evil,—he arguing a higher state where evil not possible. I say—then you exclude the idea of goodness from God. With some effort cleared ideas so far as to detect the ‘undistributed middle term,’ to distinguish between the possibility of evil and the wish _toward_ evil. Saying that the very truth we prized in Unitarianism was that it said ‘Christ, if God, was no example’ and that Christ’s very goodness consisted in that he had the possibility of evil and no wish for evil. Illustrating with May forbidden sugar, in a room with and without it. In one case unable to disobey, in the other restrained from the wish to disobey. The two, confused in one, being absolute opposites. Is this all part of my training ‘for the ministry’? Please God. One does so gain a clearness never, one trusts, to be lost. He asked me tonight if I did not find I had a clearness of thought and language very rare; and she said I was the first person who had made her feel the intense reality of the invisible and long after it. Please God, a prophecy. I said I had won through infinite struggle—almost ‘to blood’—a certainty to which the visibility of the outer was nothing. And, please God, it is deeply true.” Ah me, Prometheus! The audacity of us small mortals all! But the words that follow are indeed ‘a prophecy.’ “I have such a conviction of infinite struggle and contest in the future,—yet please God, of earnest, on-pressing struggle, and in the end, victory and Rest....