For would He help her as long as she lived in sin?
And was she not living in sin, deadly sin, as long as she knew what she was sure she knew, and left the wrong unrighted?
It is sometimes true, the popular saying, that sunshine comes after storm.

Sometimes true, or who could live?
but not always: not even often.

Equally true is the popular antithet, that misfortunes never come single; that in most human lives there are periods of trouble, blow following blow, wave following wave, from opposite and unexpected quarters, with no natural or logical sequence, till all God's billows have gone over the soul.
How paltry and helpless, in such dark times, are all theories of mere self-education; all proud attempts, like that of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, to hang self-poised in the centre of the abyss, and there organise for oneself a character by means of circumstances! Easy enough, and graceful enough does that dream look, while all the circumstances themselves--all which stands around--are easy and graceful, obliging and commonplace, like the sphere of petty experiences with which Goethe surrounds his insipid hero.

Easy enough it seems for a man to educate himself without God, as long as he lies comfortably on a sofa, with a cup of coffee and a review: but what if that "daemonic element of the universe," which Goethe confessed, and yet in his luxuriousness tried to ignore, because he could not explain--what if that broke forth over the graceful and prosperous student, as it may any moment! What if some thing, or some person, or many things, or many persons, one after the other (questions which he must get answered then, or die), took him up and dashed him down, again, and again, and again, till he was ready to cry, "I reckoned till morning that like a lion he will break all my bones; from morning till evening he will make an end of me"?
What if he thus found himself hurled perforce amid the real universal experiences of humanity; and made free, in spite of himself, by doubt and fear and horror of great darkness, of the brotherhood of woe, common alike to the simplest peasant-woman, and to every great soul perhaps, who has left his impress and sign manual upon the hearts of after generations?
Jew, Heathen, or Christian; men of the most opposite creeds and aims; whether it be Moses or Socrates, Isaiah or Epictetus, Augustine or Mohammed, Dante or Bernard, Shakspeare or Bacon, or Goethe's self, no doubt, though in his tremendous pride he would not confess it even to himself,--each and all of them have this one fact in common--that once in their lives, at least, they have gone down into the bottomless pit, and "stato all' inferno"-- as the children used truly to say of Dante; and there, out of the utter darkness, have asked the question of all questions--"Is there a God?
And if there be, what is he doing with me ?" What refuge then in self-education; when a man feels himself powerless in the gripe of some unseen and inevitable power, and knows not whether it be chance, or necessity, or a devouring fiend?
To wrap himself sternly in himself, and cry, "I will endure, though all the universe be against me;"-- how fine it sounds!--But who has done it?
Could a man do it perfectly but for one moment,--could he absolutely and utterly for one moment isolate himself, and accept his own isolation as a fact, he were then and there a madman or a suicide.

As it is, his nature, happily too weak for that desperate self-assertion, falls back recklessly on some form, more or less graceful according to the temperament, of the ancient panacea, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." Why should a man educate self, when he knows not whither he goes, what will befall him to-night?
No.