To thoughtful men and women, especially such as have learnt any of the
patience of hope in the experiences of sorrow and trial, we commend this
little volume most heartily and earnestly."


_The Patience of Hope_ fell into my hands soon after its publication in
Edinburgh, some two years ago. I was at once impressed by its
extraordinary richness of language and imagery,--its deep and solemn tone
of meditation in rare combination with an eminently practical tendency,--
philosophy warm and glowing with love. It will, perhaps, be less the
fault of the writer than of her readers, if they are not always able to
eliminate from her highly poetical and imaginative language the subtle
metaphysical verity or phase of religious experience which she seeks to
express, or that they are compelled to pass over, without appropriation,
many things which are nevertheless profoundly suggestive as vague
possibilities of the highest life. All may not be able to find in some
of her Scriptural citations the exact weight and significance so apparent
to her own mind. She startles us, at times, by her novel applications of
familiar texts, by meanings reflected upon them from her own spiritual
intuitions, making the barren Baca of the letter a well. If the
rendering be questionable, the beauty and quaint felicity of illustration
and comparison are unmistakable; and we call to mind Augustine's saying,
that two or more widely varying interpretations of Scripture may be alike
true in themselves considered. "When one saith, Moses meant as I do,'
and another saith, 'Nay, but as I do,' I ask, more reverently, 'Why not
rather as both, if both be true?"

Some minds, for instance, will hesitate to assent to the use of certain
Scriptural passages as evidence that He who is the Light of men, the Way
and the Truth, in the mystery of His economy, designedly "delays,