Читать книгу Eminent Victorians - Lytton Strachey - Страница 9

' … I am sure you would pity me and like to help me, if you knew the unhappy, unsettled state my mind is in, and the misery of being ENTIRELY, WHEREVER I AM, with those who look upon joining the Church of Rome as the most awful "fall" conceivable to any one, and are devoid of the smallest comprehension of how any enlightened person can do it. … My old Evangelical friends, with all my deep, deep love for them, do not succeed in shaking me in the least. …

'My brother has just published a book called "Regeneration", which all my friends are reading and highly extolling; it has a very contrary effect to what he would desire on my mind. I can read and understand it all in an altogether different sense, and the facts which he quotes about the articles as drawn up in 1536, and again in 1552, and of the Irish articles of 1615 and 1634, STARTLE and SHAKE me about the Reformed Church in England far more than anything else, and have done so ever since I first saw them in Mr. Maskell's pamphlet (as quoted from Mr. Dodsworth's).

'I do hope you have some time and thought to pray for me still. Mr. Galton's letters long ago grew into short formal notes, which hurt me and annoyed me particularly, and I never answered his last, so, literally, I have no one to say things to and get help from, which in one sense is a comfort when my convictions seem to be leading me on and on, and gaining strength in spite of all the dreariness of my lot.

'Do you know I can't help being very anxious and unhappy about poor Sister Harriet. I am afraid of her GOING OUT OF HER MIND. She comforts herself by an occasional outpouring of everything to me, and I had a letter this morning. … She says Sister May has promised the Vicar never to talk to her or allow her to talk on the subject with her, and I doubt whether this can be good for her, because though she has lost her faith, she says, in the Church of England, yet she never thinks of what she could have faith in, and resolutely without inquiring into the question determines not to be a Roman Catholic, so that really, you see, she is allowing her mind to run adrift and yet perfectly powerless.

'Forgive my troubling you with this letter, and believe me to be always your faithful, grateful and affectionate daughter,