beauty in religion; to break with the Deity of Jesus was to break with
music, with painting, with literature; the Divine Babe in His Mother's
arms; the Divine Man in His Passion and His Triumph; the Friend of Man
encircled with the majesty of the Godhead. Did inexorable Truth demand
that this ideal Figure, with all its pathos, its beauty, its human
love, should pass away into the Pantheon of the dead Gods of the Past?

Nor was this all. If I gave up belief in Christ as God, I must give up
Christianity as creed. Once challenge the unique position of the
Christ, and the name Christian seemed to me to be a hypocrisy, and its
renouncement a duty binding on the upright mind. I was a clergyman's
wife; what would be the effect of such a step? Hitherto mental pain
alone had been the price demanded inexorably from the searcher after
truth; but with the renouncing of Christ outer warfare would be added
to the inner, and who might guess the result upon my life? The
struggle was keen but short; I decided to carefully review the
evidence for and against the Deity of Christ, with the result that
that belief followed the others, and I stood, no longer Christian,
face to face with a dim future in which I sensed the coming conflict.

One effort I made to escape it; I appealed to Dr. Pusey, thinking that
if he could not answer my questionings, no answer to them could be
reasonably hoped for. I had a brief correspondence with him, but was
referred only to lines of argument familiar to me--as those of Liddon
in his "Bampton Lectures"--and finally, on his invitation, went down
to Oxford to see him. I found a short, stout gentleman, dressed in a
cassock, looking like a comfortable monk; but keen eyes, steadfastly
gazing straight into mine, told of the force and subtlety enshrined in
the fine, impressive head. But the learned doctor took the wrong line
of treatment; he probably saw I was anxious, shy, and nervous, and he