ask His help honestly in so many words, and see what would come of it.

"Well, as I went on reading through the Old Testament, I was more and
more convinced that all the men of those times had tried this
experiment, and found that it would bear them; and in fact, I did begin
to find, in my own experience, a great many things happening so
remarkably that I could not but think that _Somebody_ did attend even
to my prayers,--I began to feel a trembling faith that _Somebody_ was
guiding me, and that the events of my life were not happening by
accident, but working themselves out by His will.

"Well, as I went on in this way, there were other and higher thoughts
kept rising in my mind. I wanted to be better than I was. I had a sense
of a life much nobler and purer than anything I had ever lived, that I
wanted to come up to. But in the world of men, as I found it, such
feelings are always laughed down as romantic, and impracticable, and
impossible. But about this time I began to read the New Testament, and
then the idea came to me, that the same Power that helped me in the
lower sphere of life would help me carry out those higher aspirations.
Perhaps the Gospels would not have interested me so much, if I had
begun with them first; but my Old Testament life seemed to have
schooled me, and brought me to a place where I wanted something higher;
and I began to notice that my prayers now were more that I might be
noble, and patient, and self-denying, and constant in my duty, than
for any other kind of help. And then I understood what met me in the
very first of Matthew: 'Thou shall call his name Jesus, for he shall
save his people from their sins.'

"I began now to live a new life,--a life in which I felt myself coming
into sympathy with you; for, Mary, when I began to read the Gospels, I