"Do 'ee love the Lord?" my Grandmother was for ever asking.
"Yes, Grandmother," I always replied.
Down in my heart I knew it was not true. There was belief in me, and
awe; but of that passion for God which I envied in her, no semblance.
If it were really love I felt for Him (I put it to myself) "my heart
would warm within me whenever I think of Him, as it does when I think
of Robbie: or of Mother." When I tried to conjure Him up, all I could
ever see was a blurred bearded man on a high grey throne; and if I
peered harder for face and features, a dark mist like a rain-cloud
always filled the space where they should be.
I knew I could never love Any One Whose face I could never see.
"You do not love Him as you do Robbie," kept saying the accusing voice
within. It is true, and the thought horrified me. Until I could feel
this greater love, I knew I had not "got religion."
For all my godly upbringing, for all my pious ways, I was no more
privileged than ninety-nine of a hundred mere averagely religious
grown-ups. Like theirs, my religion was but an affair of education,
habit, intellect, morality. The Rapture was withheld. I had not got
religion.
I knew my Bible as well as any child in England, and I loved it as
well. I believed in all the doctrines of the Saints, not vaguely
either, like a normal unreflecting child: but had pondered on them, and
within my capabilities thought them out and personally accepted them.
No atheist doubts oppressed me. The Tempter had not assailed me, as he
had assailed my friend John Bunyan, with "Is Christianity no better
than other religions, just one religion among many?" and other such
wicked doubts. But I had not got religion.
And fear beset me: fear of other people, of the Devil, of Eternity,
and, now as I grew older, of myself. The glimpses I had of the evil
natures in me affrighted me. Sometimes in brooding over some wrong
done me, my imagination ran riot in fantastic excesses of cruelty and
revenge till I drew back appalled at the horrors of which, in thought
at any rate, I was capable. I would brood over the unhappiness of my
life and the injustice meted out to me every day, till my soul was a
dark seething mass of revengefulness and hate. Not till I found myself
visualizing the very act of murder did I draw back affrighted.
With the change in my nature that came as I grew into girlhood, a new
series of evil visions possessed me. I found myself picturing fleshly
and disgraceful things, things I had never heard of nor known to be
possible, thrown up from the wells of original sin within. Pleasurable
sensations lured me on till I drew back appalled at the sickening
deeds that I, godly little Plymouth Sister, conceived myself as doing.
Of course they were things I never _should_ really do--oh dear no!
that was foul, unimaginable!--but Conscience quoted Matthew five,
twenty-eight, and though I stuffed my fingers in my ears she kept
dinning it. _You have committed it already in your heart._
I had no sense of proportion, and believed myself a very monster of
vileness: a vileness, I feared, which would cling and canker till it
deformed my soul and body and face; and I saw myself, a loathsome
shape, living on for ever with increasing self-loathing through all
the pitiless eternal years. My blood froze with fear as my mind's eye
stared fascinated at the shameful shape. I screamed as madmen scream.
Madness I often feared. In my imaginings of Eternity, let me one day go
but a single step too far, let me suffer the awful ecstasy of fear to
hold me but a second too long, and I knew my reason would be fled. So
about this time I added to my prayers: "God, save me from going mad."
But fear, though never far away, and the sense of wickedness,
though always near the surface, were not masters of every moment.
The one thing that never left me was a feeling of unsatisfiedness,
incompleteness. The world seemed an empty place, my soul an empty
vessel. I had a melancholy sureness that something, the chief thing,
the secret of happiness, was lacking me. I believed that this secret
could only be discovered in the love of God: that there only could I
find, as my Grandmother had found, the peace and delight which pass all
understanding. That alone was religion, and I had it not.
"Do 'ee love the Lord?" my Grandmother was for ever asking.
To possess the love of God became the aim of all my prayers and hopes.
It alone could save me from my evil self, quell my bad desires, dispel
my fears, and fill the aching void. How could I possess it? The
conviction seized me one day, how or why I do not know, that I should
obtain it in the moment at which I was baptized; not before, and in no
other way. Once the idea had come, it would not leave me; to hasten on
my public immersion became the chief endeavour of my life.
Grandmother was nothing loth, for it was her own dearest wish. My age,
she said, might be raised in objection: I was not yet thirteen. Had I
surely faith?--I gave her passionate proofs--then God's requirements
were fulfilled. She spoke to Aunt Jael, and both of them to Pentecost
Dodderidge, who agreed ardently.
The Brethren do not of course practise infant baptism. However,
children of about my age could be, and very occasionally were,
baptized, provided they gave surpassing proofs of holiness. Faith, not
age, as the Bible shows, is the only test of fitness. But certain of
the Saints in our Meeting, influenced whether by "common-sense," or by
the rankling notion that none of their children ever had been or ever
would be admitted to baptism at such a tender age, began to murmur, and
spoke privily to Pentecost against the project. Brother Browning took
the bolder course of taking my Grandmother herself to task. Dark doubts
beset him, he declared, scriptural doubts; though his real motive was
jealousy for Marcus.
"Unscriptural?" said my Grandmother in amaze. "Have you read your acts
of the Apostles, Brother Browning? Faith, not years or rank or race is
what the Scripture requires. Think of Crispus, Cornelius, the jailor of
Philippi, Lydia seller of purple! Turn to your eighth chapter: Philip
and the Ethiopian eunuch: 'See, here is water, what doth hinder us to
be baptized?' Does Philip answer 'But tell me first your age?' No, he
answers: 'If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest.'"
She turned to me. "Child, do you believe with all your heart?"
"Yes, Grandmother."
Turning in triumph to Brother Browning: "The Scripture is satisfied.
And," she added, "Mr. Pentecost approves."
Brother Browning was confounded. Nevertheless, but for the affection in
which Grandmother was held, and Aunt Jael's prestige, both backed by
the insurmountable authority of Pentecost, I am pretty sure that some
of the Saints would have resisted further. In face of that Trinity,
they were dumb.
So it was settled, and I began a term of "preparation." Grandmother
enjoined that I turn my mind wholly on heavenly things. She held
devotions with me at all hours, praying sometimes far into the night.
Pentecost himself came in to pray with me, while those who had raised
objections were invited specially to test my faith. Brother Browning
came,--like the Queen of Sheba, to prove me with hard questions. Like
Solomon, I emerged triumphant.
As the time drew near, sometimes my excitement could hardly contain
itself. My visions of the Moment became more detailed, more delirious,
more intense. At the very moment of immersion the old Wicked Me would
instantly die and a New Self come into being: in a second, Eve would
be driven out and Christ implanted for ever in my soul. At one magical
stroke I should possess happiness and be freed from all fear and
wickedness and emptiness of heart. The love of God would not enter me
slowly, gradually; but would storm me like a victorious army, swallow
me like the sea.
As part of my preparation, I was taken by Grandmother to one or two
baptisms. Ceremonies were held from time to time, according as there
were sufficient candidates. Our Meeting baptized not only for ourselves
but also for the Branch Meeting and all the villages around. The
number of persons immersed ranged from two or three to a dozen. The
ceremony took place in the Taw, following Scripture example; at a spot
just beyond the quay and the ships, a few yards from where the Town
railway-station for Ilfracombe now stands. Here the river was shallow;
you could wade nearly into mid-stream. Robing and re-robing took place
at White House, Brother Brawn's tumble-down residence near by. Now that
Pentecost was too old, Brother Brawn was our Baptist. The usual time
was Lord's Day morning; very early, to avoid a jeering crowd.
At the second of these ceremonies that I was taken to see, a strange
incident occurred. Despite the day and hour, we were never quite
without a few scoffers, who would stand on the shore a little way away
from our company, and shout and mock at the proceedings in the water.
On this particular occasion two men who looked like labourers appeared,
not on shore, but in a small boat in mid-stream; where they remained
cat-calling and jeering while we held our preliminary service on the
river bank. Brother Brawn waded out with the convert--a fair-haired
young man whose name I do not remember--till the water was about up
to their middles. The two men in the boat rowed nearer till they were
within a few yards only; but farther out, and therefore in a deeper
place. The river was at high tide.
"Look 'ee at the dippers, the sheep dippers!" they cried; then to
Brother Brawn, "'Tis too early yet for the dippin', master, 'tis a'most
winter still." They used foul words and sneered blasphemously, taking
God's name in vain.
We on the shore had noticed a dog with them in the boat, a little
terrier, shaggy and brown. When Brother Brawn began the actual act of
immersion and dipped the fair-haired young Brother's head under water,
one of the men in the boat began a blasphemous imitation. He took the
dog by the scruff of the neck, held it over the edge of the boat, and
kept dipping its head under the water. After each word of Brother
Brawn's he cried out: "I baptize thee, O Brother Dog, i' the name o'
the Vather, o' the Zun--"
We were too horrified to speak or move. I know my face was scarlet with
shame; and I prayed within: "O God, stop him, strike him low. Stop his
mouth. Punish him now." I saw Grandmother was saying a like prayer.
God replied before our eyes. The mocking man, in a misjudged movement,
bent over too far with the dog. In a second the boat was overturned,
and men and dog were in the water together, struggling and splashing.
(Brother Brawn's back was turned; I do not think he knew what was
happening.)
Where the boat had overturned it was clearly much deeper, as neither
of the men could stand. One managed to swim in safety to the opposite
bank. The other, the chief mocker, struggled, rose, disappeared, rose
again, and finally disappeared, gurgling and gesticulating horribly.
Those of us on shore were purged with awe and terror. "God is not
mocked!" cried Pentecost.
After the service, the dead body was washed ashore; I gazed in dumb
horror (thinking too of God's power) at the staring wide-open eyes, the
blue face contorted with fear, the soft white foam issuing from the
mouth.
The dog was saved. Brother Brawn took it away with him and had it
poisoned.
This incident served to tinge with apprehension the hopes with which
I looked forward to my own immersion, now very near. Suppose I were
drowned: in my own way I was wicked as the labourer, with better
chances and less excuse. God could drown me if He wished. The mere
physical horror of cold water was another fleck. Nor was Mrs. Cheese
behindhand with tales that troubled. She recalled the young woman
in a rapid decline who had been baptized one winter morning in the
Exe, had been dragged out unconscious, and had died within the hour.
She knew of Sisters who had fainted through nervousness or collapsed
with the cold. Then there was the Christian wife who was stripped
naked and horsewhipped by her infidel husband, a country squire over
Chittlehampton way, because she had received public baptism. He flogged
her till she was a mass of blood and wounds, till she fell to the
ground as one dead; then dragged her up again and dashed her head
against a stone wall. She died from ill-usage, a true "gauspel martyr."
My day was fixed: our next baptism, a Sunday in April, a few weeks
after my thirteenth birthday.
Clothes were a problem. Female candidates usually donned for the
occasion an old cast-off skirt which they could afford to let the water
ruin. Pieces of lead were sewn at intervals to the inside of the bottom
of the skirt, so that when in the water the air would not get into and
blow it upwards.
According to Aunt Jael, the pieces of lead should weigh about four
ounces each: just sufficient to keep the skirt pendant and modest. All
very well, said my Grandmother, but what good were weights--four ounces
or forty ounces--when the skirt, like the child's, reached down to the
knees only? There was only one way out of the difficulty: "The child
must wear a long skirt for the occasion." A faded black serge of my
Grandmother's was unearthed. It fitted me--more or less--though a good
couple of inches higher in front than behind; and, helped out by an old
black blouse and cape, produced the most grotesque and unlovely Mary
the mirror had ever shewn me.
"Changing" was at Brother Brawn's, the White House, near the quay. On
the Saturday night preceding the event Grandmother took me down there
with my ordinary Lord's Day clothes wrapped up in a paper parcel and
laid them out in the back kitchen (the immemorial after-the-event
robing room) ready for the morrow. Mistress Brawn, née Clinker,
received us with an infantile affectation of patronage: as though we
didn't know that Brother Brawn's had been the garmenting-house for
forty years and more.
The morrow dawned fine and cold. With Grandmother on my left hand
and Aunt Jael on my right, I sallied forth down Bear Street, in full
baptismal kit of faded black. What the few early risers we met on our
way thought of me I do not know. Nor, I expect, did they.
Though he had relinquished the office of Baptist for several years,
Pentecost Dodderidge decided to resume it for this one occasion.
It was a supreme honour for me, a high compliment to Aunt Jael and
Grandmother, and a real risk and sacrifice on his part: for he was in
frail health, and nearing his eighty-fourth year. At the riverside we
found him waiting, clad in the black surplice he had always used, his
white beard flowing free. Around him the Saints stood clustered; every
man and woman in the Meeting must have been there.
All there, whispered the Devil, to see _you_. You the child-Saint,
you the youthful trophy of God's grace. There were other candidates,
I knew, mere everyday grown-ups; but I was the "star turn," and I
first should enter the water. The moment was very near: "Be ready,"
whispered Grandmother. My heart beat wildly. The air was sharp and a
cold breeze was stirring. How much colder would the water not be! Cold
dark water, suppose it should engulph me for ever? How blue the mocking
labourer had been. But God would not treat me so: my heart was aching
to receive Him. He would come to me, not cast my body to death. How
all the Saints were staring. Vanity swelled again. I was the youngest
who had ever been baptized in Taw (I heard it whispered near me), the
youngest ever privileged to break bread! Were not all the people gazing
on me, admiring my piety, specialness, distinction? Ah, publicity,
glory! I would walk into the water in the view of all the multitude,
like an empress on her way. "Crush that vile vanity!" the Better Me
cried savagely: "Chase forth that paltry pride. Only to a clean and
humble heart can the Lord of Heaven come. Quick, away with it!" Ere the
voice had done speaking, all the pride had fled away. My heart stood
empty, sure of its emptiness, hungering for the Holy Spirit, waiting
with intense expectation and a hope almost too hard to bear.
"Come, Lord Jesus," I whispered.
Meanwhile around me they had sung a hymn and prayed a prayer; I hardly
knew it. Pentecost took my hand. The moment was here: should I die
of hope?--my heart was beating so. We waded out together in the cold
stream. I must have been looking eastwards for I remember the bright
morning sun was in my eyes. I can see again the green fields opposite.
I remember too how frail and tiny I felt as Mr. Pentecost's hand held
mine, and as he towered above me in the water.
A long way out we halted: I was up to my shoulder nearly, he to his
middle. He grasped me, placing his right hand under my left armpit,
and the palm of his left hand flat in the middle of my back. He looked
to heaven, holding me still upright, and called in a loud voice: "I do
baptize thee, my sister, in the name of the Father and of the Son and
the Holy Ghost." On the last word he flung me backwards until for a
moment I was wholly under the water.
Now the miracle took place. As I came up again the water streaming from
my face was no longer cold, but warm and luminous; not water at all,
but light itself. Light suffused me, covered me, poured into me, filled
me; a blinding, lilting joy and brightness throbbed and shone through
all my body and soul. I shut my eyes in sheer rapture; my ordinary
senses faded away; sight and hearing were of another world from this
beatific Presence. It seemed as though another person, luminous and
divine, had entered into my body. It was God. I knew everything; and
everything was well. I remembered all I had ever done, and far away
things I had done in distant centuries in other lives I had not known
until now. I seemed to remember the future too; for in that moment
Time had no meaning; that moment was all Eternity. I understood, with
a perfectness of comprehension beside which all my life before seemed
darkness that there was no beginning and no end, no time and no space,
nothing but God Who transcended them all, and who now possessed me
utterly. I thought my heart would burst. The holy exaltation was too
hard and beautiful to bear. All round and in me was light and love: the
sun and God and I, all the same soul and body, all merged together, all
within each other, all One. For that one glorious moment I _was_ God.
A transcendent experience transcends all verbal description: even
now I cannot think of it: only feel it, _live_ it again. Nor can
explanation impart its quality to others. It is my soul's own mystery,
indescribable, incommunicable, in the most literal sense ineffable. I
rail at words that they can do so little, then at my own folly that I
should seek to describe in finite language the Infinite Mystery of God.
The ecstasy lasted perhaps, in the world's time, a minute: though, in
reality, for ever. Then I remember, as I woke to finite experience,
a gradual ebbing sensation as the Holy Spirit departed from me. The
warmth and radiance faded; the streaming fluid of light was dripping
water only. I was conscious of Pentecost again, clasping my hand and
leading me ashore. I heard the voices of the Saints raised aloft in a
song of triumphal thanks. Then--Grandmother's welcoming arms, benignant
Saints, the White House, garment-changing, loud Salvation, dear warm
breakfast; all part of a waking dream.
* * * * * * *
The results of Jordan morning were chiefly four.
First, I was left with a certainty of belief in God, a sense of
authority in my knowledge of Him, and an ever-present memory of His
nearness and reality, that faith without experience could never have
furnished. I apprehended once and for all the folly and futility of
all intellectual reasoning about God, all attempts to bolster Him up by
argument; to prove Him. Vain beatings about the bush! You do not beat
about the Burning Bush: you enter within, and there is God.
Second, from that day onwards I could never again be sure that life
was real. After the blinding reality of my moment with God, all things
around me seemed faded and unsubstantial; they were the shadows of
a dream, of the dream that I was, alive. After a while, as my soul
travelled back to the habits of normal experience, the notion haunted
me less; but it has never completely left me.
Third, having received the knowledge of God, I knew that it was the one
thing worth living for. I knew I must show myself worthy of possessing
Him, and fit to receive Him again. The sense of perfect holiness I had
experienced filled me with a yearning for goodness and purity that
was almost morbidly intense. I tried every moment of the day to make
myself more like the Holy Spirit, more capable of feeling within me the
holiness I had for one moment felt. Conscience was ever at hand: for a
long space I obeyed her every bidding. The fact that I was happier put
spite and revenge and morbid broodings under better control. Heredity
and habit, the taint within and the harsh surroundings without, kept me
dismal-Jenny enough: but from the day of my baptism my bouts of misery
were less frequent, less prolonged, and less cruel. I had always the
memory of that tender triumphant ineffable moment with God.
Fourth, and most curious, I found myself farther away from my
Grandmother. We had the same religion, yet different religions; knew
the One God, yet different Gods. Or rather the difference was not in
Him, but in our two selves, in the two temperaments with which we
experienced Him. All my life I had envied my Grandmother's joy and
serenity in the Lord; I had obtained a joy as perfect, yet I knew
that it was another joy; not greater nor less, but different. Her
chief delight was in contemplating the salvation of all souls achieved
through the sacrifice on Calvary; mine was the Spirit of God filling
and irradiating the heart. Not that I ever doubted that it was through
and because of the Cross that the knowledge of the Lord had been
vouchsafed me so miraculously; but the emotional result interested
me, not the theological cause. In all my earnest strivings to be good
it was never the sacrifice of Jesus that spurred me on; but always the
memory of the Holy Spirit. I must be clean and good and holy like Him,
and worthy to welcome Him again. I have put the distinction between
Aunt Jael and Grandmother as this: Aunt Jael was an Old Testament
woman, Grandmother a New Testament one. But the real distinction
between the three of us was this. God is Triune and One: Aunt Jael
revered the First Person, Grandmother loved the Second, and I adored
the Third.
Trouble began in this way. Unlike Grandmother, now that I had got
religion I took a strong dislike to talking of it. To her "Do 'ee
love the Lord?" I could only reply with passionate truth, "Yes,
Grandmother"; but I found that (where before my baptism it was the
sense of insincerity in my reply that had troubled me) now it was a
certain indelicacy in the question itself that offended. "If in my
heart"--this is approximately what I felt--"I have the mystery of the
love of the Lord, that is a private and sacred bond between Him and
me. Whose business is it else? What right have they to pry?" I felt a
curious shame, resembling the shame of nakedness, but more intense and
spiritual; as the soul is more sensitive than the body.
"Do you contemplate _hourly_ the Cross of Christ?" "Is the Means of
Salvation your _only_ joy?" "Do you think _always_ of the blessed
Gospel plan?" "Is the Atonement _everything_ to 'ee, my dear?" No
worldlyhead, no scoffer could have hated these searching questions
as did I. My Grandmother perceived the distaste, and was profoundly
puzzled and pained. Her own answer to these questions would have been
"Yes," in the weeks after her baptism (she must have said to herself),
a fervent triumphant Yes.
One day an incident showed how wide the spiritual breach was becoming,
and widened it still further. It was a Saturday morning: I was sitting
on the bottom stair of the staircase, pulling on my boots to go for a
walk. My Grandmother, coming from the little pantry at the head of the
cellar steps, stooped down as she passed, and asked in a loud whisper
of intense earnestness: "The Cross, my dear: is it giving you joy
_now_?" She bent and peered, poking her face right into mine. It was
so sudden, the irritation and distaste so powerful, that I drew back
sharply with a quick gesture of annoyance. There had been no time for
dissimulation, and the look on my face was unmistakable. So was the
look on hers--pain, and a rare and terrible thing, anger.
"You _dare_ draw back like that? What is it? _Du my breath smell bad?_"
* * * * * * *
The real crisis, I saw, was yet to come. Now that I had got religion
(in my fashion, in God's fashion, for me) I knew that I was never
destined to fulfil my Grandmother's purpose: to devote my life to
preaching the Gospel in heathen lands. The first moment I thought of
this after my baptism I realized with a shivering aversion how much
more distasteful my long-decided future was than it had ever appeared
before; I realized too in the old authentic way, that it was not God's
will or purpose for me; and but for this, I was far too honest, in my
new frame of mind, to have let my own distaste count for anything.
I reflected how odd it was that through the great central act of my
dedication, I had become unable to fulfil its ultimate purpose. But so
it was. The same answer came to all my prayers, unspoken and afoot, or
cried out on bended knees: His purpose for me was no missionary one,
but my best endeavours in an ordinary life in the everyday workaday
world. The conflict to come was not with Him, but with Grandmother.
What would she say when the day of decision came, and plans and
details of my apostolic career could no longer be evaded or postponed?
What would she say? How would she feel? And I, how should I face her
scornful accusing eyes? The more I pictured the inevitable instant, the
more I feared it.
And the everyday workaday life, where and what would it be? I had still
the vaguest ideas on such matters, though I knew I should have to earn
money and provide myself with bread: I, the mere dependent, the Charity
Child as Aunt Jael so often described me. The question turned itself
over and over in my brain. It was from an unexpected quarter that the
answer came.