From collection Frances Willard Journal Transcripts
November 11, 18 93
Bike again and much gain. Isabel tried to help me & we both as good as fell over. It takes our stenographers to coach one properly. Isabel has a grand article in the Westminster Gazette on what she saw of the strike. It is so heart-warm that I do not think it can fail to call forth subscriptions. Annie Holdsworth, the little novelist, came& we had delightful talk with her-she seems a beautiful spirit. Isabel is tormented by her men of business, trustees, bankers, solicitors, factors and factotums: "Blessed be nothing" is a happy prayer. No end of letters; articles, sketches & the like. When my blood is oxygenate I feel full of faith hope & charity-it is like a musician whose instrument is newly tuned.
November 12, 1893
A golden autumn day; Isabel, Bess Annie Holdsworth & I walked all over the park outside the dear old Priory grounds where Evelyn & Archbishop Usher "might have been seen" in other centuries and the Barons who came to the monks to get their help in preparing Magna Carta and a lot o' things! We had a charming talk of God, Nature and Humanity, with quips and turns, pleasantries and pathos.
-Evolution came in of course & Isabel told of the Evangelical Alliance in England a generation ago who thought that if Archbishop Usher's chronology were overthrown the bible must go with it & I remembered how when I came home from Prof. Jones' class in geology one day, and told of Hugh Miller's theories my good father said "I didn't put you in school to learn a lot of infidel notions; the world was made in 6 days and man [entry continues into space for 11/13] has been in it 6000 years & whoever teaches to the contrary let him be anathema maranatha. Dear father! His Puritan back bone & loyalty were noble qualities but had he lived & studied on into the realm of "Higher Criticism" the geological revulsion would have seemed but a trifle. Yet his daughter has lived on & finds Truth in the Bible which is a higher thing than fact and reverences God in the Word as much as ever he did the Word of God. Somehow I feel that half a century of church going "fulfils my lot" and henceforth when the place is barren and mechanical as here, shall take occasion to go or stay as seemeth me good.
The bicycle is getting to be more & more a natural element & I shall really enjoy outdoor life that is so nearly winged. Someys & Capt [entry continues into space for 11/14] Pollen & Clement P. went into the preserves back of the the Priory; four men "beat up" the birds & 13 pheasants were shot in a wee bit of time-a brace of wh. were sent to our champion Hugh Price Hughes who is ill from overwork. S. seems wonderfully domesticated since his awful trip of rain & horse-meat starvation. He is a genial, nice boy, very much her son in many ways. Little Holdsworth read his hand marvellously well-as she did all. I wonder how much reality
