Everyone who has doubted after believing knows how, after the first
admitted and recognised doubt, others rush in like a flood, and how
doctrine after doctrine starts up in new and lurid light, looking so
different in aspect from the fair faint outlines in which it had shone
forth in the soft mists of faith. The presence of evil and pain in the
world made by a "good God", and the pain falling on the innocent, as on
my seven months' old babe; the pain here reaching on into eternity
unhealed; these, while I yet believed, drove me desperate, and I believed
and hated, instead of like the devils, "believed and trembled". Next, I
challenged the righteousness of the doctrine of the Atonement, and while
I worshipped and clung to the suffering Christ, I hated the God who
required the death sacrifice at his hands. And so for months the turmoil
went on, the struggle being all the more terrible for the very
desperation with which I strove to cling to some planks of the wrecked
ship of faith on the tossing sea of doubt.

After Mr. D---- left Cheltenham, as he did in the early autumn of 1871,
he still aided me in my mental struggles. He had advised me to read
McLeod Campbell's work on the Atonement, as one that would meet many of
the difficulties that lay on the surface of the orthodox view, and in
answer to a letter dealing with this really remarkable work, he wrote
(Nov. 22, 1871):

"(1) The two passages on pp. 25 and 108 you doubtless interpret quite
rightly. In your third reference to pp. 117, 188, you forget one great
principle--that God is impassive; cannot suffer. Christ, quâ _God_, did
not suffer, but as Son of _Man_ and in his _humanity_. Still, it may be
correctly stated that He felt to sin and sinners 'as God eternally
feels'--_i.e., abhorrence of sin and love of the sinner_. But to infer
from that that the Father in his Godhead feels the sufferings which