“All the great religions of the world, historically considered, are
rightly the objects of deep reverence and sympathy—they are the
record of spiritual struggles, which are the types of our own. This
is to me pre-eminently true of Hebrewism and Christianity, on which
my own youth was nourished. And in this sense I have no antagonism
towards any religious belief, but a strong outflow of sympathy. Every
community met to worship the highest God (which is understood to be
expressed by God) carries me along in its main current; and if there
were not reasons against by following such an inclination, I should
go to church or chapel, constantly, for the sake of the delightful
emotions of fellowship which come over me in religious assemblies—the
very nature of such assemblies being the recognition of a binding
belief or spiritual law, which is to lift us into willing obedience,
and save us from the slavery of unregulated passion or impulse. And
with regard to other people, it seems to me that those who have no
definite conviction which constitutes a protesting faith, may often
more beneficially cherish the good within them and be better members
of society by a conformity based on the recognized good in the public
belief, than by a nonconformity which has nothing but negatives to
utter. _Not_, of course, if the conformity would be accompanied by
a consciousness of hypocrisy. That is a question for the individual
conscience to settle. But there is enough to be said on the different
points of view from which conformity may be regarded, to hinder a
ready judgment against those who continue to conform after ceasing
to believe in the ordinary sense. But with the utmost largeness of
allowance for the difficulty of deciding in special cases, it must
remain true that the highest lot is to have definite beliefs about
which you feel that ‘necessity is laid upon you’ to declare them, as
something better which you are bound to try and give to those who have
the worse” (iii. 215-217).
These volumes contain many passages in the same sense—as, of course,
her books contain them too. She was a constant reader of the Bible,
and the _Imitatio_ was never far from her hand. “She particularly
enjoyed reading aloud some of the finest chapters of Isaiah, Jeremiah,
and St. Paul’s Epistles. The Bible and our elder English poets best
suited the organ-like tones of her voice, which required for their full
effect a certain solemnity and majesty of rhythm.” She once expressed
to a younger friend, who shared her opinions, her sense of the loss
which they had in being unable to practise the old ordinances of family
prayer. “I hope,” she says, “we are well out of that phase in which the
most philosophic view of the past was held to be a smiling survey of
human folly, and when the wisest man was supposed to be one who could
sympathise with no age but the age to come” (ii. 308).
For this wise reaction she was no doubt partially indebted, as so
many others have been, to the teaching of Comte. Unquestionably the
fundamental ideas had come into her mind at a much earlier period,
when, for example, she was reading Mr. R. W. Mackay’s _Progress of
the Intellect_ (1850, i. 253). But it was Comte who enabled her to
systematise these ideas, and to give them that “definiteness,” which,
as these pages show in a hundred places, was the quality that she
sought before all others alike in men and their thoughts. She always
remained at a respectful distance from complete adherence to Comte’s
scheme, but she was never tired of protesting that he was a really
great thinker, that his famous survey of the Middle Ages in the fifth
volume of the _Positive Philosophy_ was full of luminous ideas, and
that she had thankfully learned much from it. Wordsworth, again, was
dear to her in no small degree on the strength of such passages as that
from the _Prelude_, which is the motto of one of the last chapters of
her last novel:—
“The human nature with which I felt
That I belonged and reverenced with love,
Was not a persistent presence, but a spirit
Diffused through time and space, with aid derived
Of evidence from monuments, erect,
Prostrate, or leaning towards their common rest
In earth, _the widely scattered wreck sublime
Of vanished nations_.”