mother in religion. I can almost feel myself now kneeling at my dear
mother’s knees repeating the Lord’s Prayer after her clear sweet voice.
Then came learning the magnificent Collects, to be repeated to my father
on Sunday mornings in his study; and later the church catechism and a
great many hymns. Sunday was kept exceedingly strictly at Newbridge in
those days; and no books were allowed except religious ones, nor any
amusement, save a walk after church. Thus there was abundant time for
reading the Bible and looking over the pictures in various large
editions, and in Calmet’s great folio _Dictionary_, beside listening to
the sermon in church, and to another sermon which my father read in the
evening to the assembled household. Of course, every day of the week
there were Morning Prayers in the library,—and a “Short Discourse” from
good, prosy old Jay, of Bath’s “Exercises.” In this way, altogether I
received a good deal of direct religious instruction, beside very
frequent reference to God and Duty and Heaven, in the ordinary talk of
my parents with their children.
What was the result of this training? I can only suppose that my nature
was a favourable soil for such seed, for it took root early and grew
apace. I cannot recall any time when I could not have been described by
any one who knew my little heart (I was very shy about it, and few, if
any, did know it)—as a very religious child. Religious ideas were from
the first intensely interesting and exciting to me. In great measure I
fancy it was the element of the sublime in them which moved me first,
just as I was moved by the thunder, and the storm and was wont to go out
alone into the woods or into the long, solitary corridors to enjoy them
more fully. I recollect being stirred to rapture by a little poem which
I can repeat to this day, beginning:
Where is Thy dwelling place?
Is it in the realms of space,
By angels and just spirits only trod?
Or is it in the bright
And ever-burning light
Of the sun’s flaming disk that Thou art throned, O God?
One of the stanzas suggested that the Divine seat might be in some
region of the starry universe:
“Far in the unmeasured, unimagined Heaven,
So distant that its light
Could never reach our sight
Though with the speed of thought for endless ages driven.”
Ideas like these used to make my cheek turn pale and lift me as if on
wings; and naturally Religion was the great storehouse of them. But I
think, even in childhood, there was in me a good deal beside of the
_moral_, if not yet the _spiritual_ element of real Religion. Of course
the great beauty and glory of Evangelical Christianity, its thorough
amalgamation of the ideas of Duty and Devotion (elsewhere often so
lamentably distinct), was very prominent in my parents’ lessons. God was
always to me the All-seeing Judge. His eye looking into my heart and
beholding all its naughtiness and little duplicities (which of course I
was taught to consider serious sins) was so familiar a conception that I
might be said to live and move in the sense of it. Thus my life in
childhood morally, was much the same as it is physically to live in a
room full of sunlight. Later on, the evils which belong to this
Evangelical training, the excessive self-introspection and
self-consciousness, made themselves painfully felt, but in early years
there was nothing that was not perfectly wholesome in the religion which
I had so readily assimilated.
Further, I was, as I have said, a very happy child, even conscious of my
own happiness; and gratitude to God or man has always come to me as a
sentiment enhancing my enjoyment of the good for which I have been
thankful. Thus I was,—not conventionally merely,—but genuinely and
spontaneously grateful to the Giver of all the pleasures which were
poured on my head. I think I may say, that I _loved God_, when I was
quite a young child. I can even remember being dimly conscious that my
good father and mother performed their religious exercises more _as a
duty_,—whereas to me such things, so far as I could understand them,
were real _pleasures_; like being taken to see somebody I loved. I have
since recognised that both my parents were, in Evangelical parlance,
“under the law;” while in my childish heart the germ of the mysterious
New Life was already planted. I think my mother was aware of something
of the kind and looked with a little wonder, blended with her tenderness
at my violent outbursts of penitence, and at my strange fancy for
reading the most serious books in my playhours. My brothers had not
exhibited any such symptoms, but then they were healthy schoolboys,
always engaged eagerly in their natural sports and pursuits; while I was
a lonely, dreaming girl.
When I was seven years old, my father undertook to read the _Pilgrim’s
Progress_ to my brothers, then aged from 12 to 18, and I was allowed to
sit in the room and provided with a slate and sums. The sums, it
appeared, were never worked, while my eyes were fixed in absorbed
interest on the reader, evening after evening. Once or twice when the
delightful old copy of Bunyan was left about after the lesson, my slate
was covered with drawings of Apollyon and Great Heart which were
pronounced “wonderful for the child.” By the time Christian had come to
the Dark River, all pretence of arithmetic was abandoned and I was
permitted, proud and enchanted, to join the group of boys and listen
with my whole soul to the marvellous tale. When the reading was over my
father gave the volume (which had belonged to his grandmother) to me,
for my “very own”; and I read it over and over continually for years,
till the idea it is meant to convey,—Life a progress to Heaven—was
engraved indelibly on my mind. It seems to me that few of those who have
praised Bunyan most loudly have recognized that he was not only a great
religious genius, but a born poet, a _Puritan-Tinker-Shelley_; possessed
of what is almost the highest gift of poetry, the sense of the analogy
between outward nature and the human soul. He used allegory instead of
metaphor, a clumsier vehicle by far, but it carried the same exquisite
thoughts. I have the dear old book still, and it is one of my treasures
with its ineffably quaint old woodcuts and its delicious marginal notes;
as, for example, when “Giant Despair” is said to be unable one day to
maul the pilgrims in his dungeon, because he had fits. “For sometimes,”
says Bunyan, “in sunshiny weather Giant Despair has fits.” Could any one
believe that this gem of poetical thought and deep experience is noted
by the words in the margin, “_His Fits!_”? My father wrote on the
flyleaf of the blessed old book these still legible words:—
1830.
“This book, which belonged to my grandmother, was given as a present
to my dear daughter Fanny upon witnessing her delight in reading it.
May she keep the Celestial City steadfastly in view; may she surmount
the dangers and trials she must meet with on the road; and, finally,
be re-united with those she loved on earth in singing praises for ever
and ever to Him who loved them and gave himself for them, is the
fervent prayer of her affectionate father,
“CHARLES COBBE.”
The notion of “getting to Heaven” by means of a faithful pilgrimage
through this “Vale of Tears” was the prominent feature I think, always,
in my father’s religion, and naturally took great hold on me. When the
day came whereon I began to doubt whether there were any Heaven to be
reached, that moral earthquake, as was inevitable, shook not only my
religion but my morality to their foundations; and my experience of the
perils of those years, has made me ever since anxious to base religion
in every young mind, on ground liable to no such catastrophes. The
danger came to me on this wise.
Up to my eleventh year, my little life inward and outward had flown in a
bright and even current. Looking back at it and comparing my childhood
with that of others I seem to have been—probably from the effects of
solitude—_devout_ beyond what was normal at my age. I used to spend a
great deal of time secretly reading the Bible and that dullest of dull
books _The Whole Duty of Man_ (the latter a curious foretaste of my
subsequent life-long interest in the study of ethics)—not exactly
enjoying them but happy in the feeling that I was somehow approaching
God. I used to keep awake at night to repeat various prayers and
(wonderful to remember!) the Creed and Commandments! I made all sorts of
severe rules for myself, and if I broke them, manfully mulcted myself of
any little pleasures or endured some small self-imposed penance. Of none
of these things had any one, even my dear mother, the remotest idea,
except once when I felt driven like a veritable Cain, by my agonised
conscience to go and confess to her that I had said in a recent rage (to
myself) “_Curse them all!_” referring to my family in general and to my
governess in particular! The tempest of my tears and sobs on this
occasion evidently astonished her, and I remember lying exhausted on the
floor in a recess in her bedroom, for a long time before I was able to
move.
But the hour of doubt and difficulty was approaching. The first question
which ever arose in my mind was concerning the miracle of the Loaves and
Fishes. I can recall the scene vividly. It was a winter’s night, my
father was reading the Sunday evening Sermon in the dining-room. The
servants, whose attendance was _de rigueur_, were seated in a row down
the room. My father faced them, and my mother and I and my governess sat
round the fire near him. I was opposite the beautiful classic black
marble mantelpiece, surmounted with an antique head of Jupiter Serapis
(all photographed on my brain even now), and listening with all my
might, as in duty bound, to the sermon which described the miracle of
the Loaves and Fishes. “How did it happen exactly?” I began cheerfully
to think, quite imagining I was doing the right thing to try to
understand it all. “Well! first there were the fishes and the loaves.
But what was done to them? Did the fish grow and grow as they were eaten
and broken? And the bread the same? No! that is nonsense. And then the
twelve basketsful taken up at the end, when there was not nearly so much
at the beginning. It is not possible!” “O! Heavens! (was the next
thought) _I am doubting the Bible!_ God forgive me! I must never think
of it again.”
But the little rift had begun, and as time went on other difficulties
arose. Nothing very seriously, however, distracted my faith or altered
the intensity of my religious feelings for the next two years, till in
October, 1836, I was sent to school as I have narrated in the last
chapter, at Brighton and a new description of life opened. At school I
came under influence of two kinds. One was the preaching of the
Evangelical Mr. Vaughan, in whose church (Christ Church) were our seats;
and I recall vividly the emotion with which one winter’s night I
listened to his sermon on the great theme, “Though your sins be as
scarlet, they shall be white as wool.” The sense of “the exceeding
sinfulness of sin,” the rapturous joy of purification therefrom, came
home to me, and as I walked back to school with the waves thundering up
the Brighton beach beside us and the wind tossing the clouds in the
evening sky overhead, the whole tremendous realities of the moral life
seemed borne in on my heart. On the other hand, the perpetual overstrain
of schoolwork, and unjust blame and penalty for failure to do what it
was impossible to accomplish in the given time, drove me to all sorts of
faults for which I hated and despised myself. When I knelt by my bed at
night, after the schoolfellow who shared my room was, as I fancied,
asleep, she would get up and pound my head with a bolster, laughing and
crying out, “Get up, you horrid hypocrite; get up! I’ll go on beating
you till you do!” It was not strange if, under such circumstances, my
beautiful childish religion fell into abeyance and my conscience into
disquietude. But, as I have narrated, I came home at sixteen, and then,
once more able to enjoy the solitude of the woods and of my own bedroom
and its inner study where no one intruded, the old feelings, tinged with
deep remorse for the failures of my school life and for many present
faults (amongst others a very bitter and unforgiving temper) come back
with fresh vigour. I have always considered that in that summer in my
seventeenth year I went through what Evangelical Christians call
“conversion.” Religion became the supreme interest of life; and the
sense that I was pardoned its greatest joy. I was, of course, a
Christian of the usual Protestant type, finding infinite pleasure in the
simple old “Communion” of those pre-ritualistic days, and in endless
Bible readings to myself. Sometimes I rose in the early summer dawn and
read a whole Gospel before I dressed. I think I never ran up into my
room in the daytime for any change of attire without glancing into the
book and carrying away some echo of what I believed to be “God’s Word.”
Nobody knew anything about all this, of course; but as time went on
there were great and terrible perturbations in my inner life, and these
perhaps I did not always succeed in concealing from the watchful eyes of
my dear mother.
So far as I can recall, the ideas of Christ and of God the Father, were
for all practical religious purposes identified in my young mind. It was
as God upon earth,—the Redeemer God, that I worshipped Jesus. To be
pardoned through his “atonement” and at death to enter Heaven, were the
religious objects of life. But a new and most disturbing element here
entered my thoughts. How did anybody know all that story of Galilee to
be true? How could we believe the miracles? I had read very carefully
Gibbon’s XV. and XVI. chapters, and other books enough to teach me that
everything in historical Christianity had been questioned; and my own
awakening critical, and reasoning, and above all, ethical,—faculties
supplied fresh crops of doubts of the truth of the story and of the
morality of much of the Old Testament history, and of the scheme of
Atonement itself.
Then ensued four years on which I look back as pitiful in the extreme.
In complete mental solitude and great ignorance, I found myself facing
all the dread problems of human existence. For a long time my intense
desire to remain a Christian predominated, and brought me back from each
return to scepticism in a passion of repentance and prayer to Christ to
take my life or my reason sooner than allow me to stray from his fold.
In those days no such thing was heard of as “Broad” interpretations of
Scripture doctrines. We were fifty years before _Lux Mundi_ and thirty
before even _Essays and Reviews_. To be a “Christian,” then, was to
believe implicitly in the verbal inspiration of every word of the Bible,
and to adore Christ as “very God of very God.” With such implicit belief
it was permitted to hope we might, by a good life and through Christ’s
Atonement, attain after death to Heaven. Without the faith or the good
life, it was certain we should go to hell. It was taught us all that to
be good only from fear of Hell was not the highest motive; the _highest_
motive was the hope of Heaven! Had anything like modern rationalising
theories of the Atonement, or modern expositions of the Bible stories,
or finally modern loftier doctrines of disinterested morality and
religion, been known to me at this crisis of my life, it is possible
that the whole course of my spiritual history would have been different.
But of all such “raising up the astral spirits of dead creeds,” as
Carlyle called it, or as Broad churchmen say, “Liberating the kernel of
Christianity from the husk,” I knew, and could know nothing. Evangelical
Christianity in 1840 presented itself as a thing to be taken whole, or
rejected wholly; and for years the alternations went on in my poor young
heart and brain, one week or month of rational and moral disbelief, and
the next of vehement, remorseful return to the faith which I supposed
could alone give me the joy of religion. As time went on, and my reading
supplied me with a little more knowledge and my doubts deepened and
accumulated, the returns to Christian faith grew fewer and shorter, and,
as I had no idea of the possibility of reaching any other vital
religion, I saw all that had made to me the supreme joy and glory of
life fade out of it, while that motive which had been presented to me as
the mainspring of duty and curb of passion, namely, the Hope of Heaven,
vanished as a dream. I always had, as I have described, somewhat of that
_mal-du-ciel_ which Lamartine talks of, that longing, as from the very
depths of our being for an Eden of Divine eternal love. I could scarcely
in those days read even such poor stuff as the song of the Peri in
Moore’s _Lalla Rookh_ (not to speak of Bunyan’s vision of the Celestial
City) without tears rushing to my eyes. But this, I saw, must all go
with the rest. If, as Clough was saying, all unknown to me, about that
same time,—
“Christ is not risen, no!
He lies and moulders low.”
If all the Christian revelation were a mass of mistakes and errors, no
firmer ground on which to build than the promises of Mahomet, or of
Buddha, or of the Old Man of the Mountain,—of course there was (so far
as I saw) no reason left for believing in any Heaven at all, or any life
after death. Neither had the Moral Law, which had come to me through
that supposed revelation on Sinai and the Mount of Galilee, any claim to
my obedience other than might be made out by identifying it with
principles common to heathen and Christian alike; an identity of which,
at that epoch, I had as yet only the vaguest ideas. In short my poor
young soul was in a fearful dilemma. On the one hand I had the choice to
accept a whole mass of dogmas against which my reason and conscience
rebelled; on the other, to abandon those dogmas and strive no more to
believe the incredible, or to revere what I instinctively condemned; and
then, as a necessary sequel, to cast aside the laws of Duty which I had
hitherto cherished; to cease to pray or take the sacrament; and to
relinquish the hope of a life beyond the grave.
It was not very wonderful if, as I think I can recall, my disposition
underwent a considerable change for the worse while all these tremendous
questions were being debated in my solitary walks in the woods and by
the sea-shore, and in my room at night over my Gibbon or my Bible. I
know I was often bitter and morose and selfish; and then came the
alternate spell of paroxysms of self-reproach and fanciful
self-tormentings.
The life of a young woman in such a home as mine is so guarded round on
every side and the instincts of a girl are so healthy, that the dangers
incurred even in such a spiritual landslip as I have described are very
limited compared to what they must inevitably be in the case of young
men or of women less happily circumstanced. It has been my profound
sense of the awful perils of such a downfall of faith as I experienced,
the peril of moral shipwreck without compass or anchorage amid the
tempests of youth, which has spurred me ever since to strive to
forestall for others the hour of danger.
At last my efforts to believe in orthodox Christianity ceased
altogether. In the summer after my twentieth birthday I had reached the
end of the long struggle. The complete downfall of Evangelicalism,—which
seems to have been effected in George Eliot’s strong brain in a single
fortnight of intercourse with Mr. and Mrs. Bray,—had taken in my case
four long years of miserable mental conflict and unspeakable pain. It
left me with something as nearly like a _Tabula rasa_ of faith as can
well be imagined. I definitely disbelieved in human immortality and in a
supernatural revelation. The existence of God I neither denied nor
affirmed. I felt I had no means of coming to any knowledge of Him. I
was, in fact (long before the word was invented), precisely—an Agnostic.
One day, while thus literally creedless, I wandered out alone as was my
wont into a part of our park a little more wild than the rest, where
deer were formerly kept and sat down among the rocks and the gorse which
was then in its summer glory of odorous blossoms, ever since rich to me
with memories of that hour. It was a sunny day in May, and after reading
a little of my favourite Shelley, I fell, as often happened, into
mournful thought. I was profoundly miserable; profoundly conscious of
the deterioration and sliding down of all my feelings and conduct from
the high ambitions of righteousness and holiness which had been mine in
the days of my Christian faith and prayer; and at the same time I knew
that the whole scaffolding of that higher life had fallen to pieces and
could never be built up again. While I was thus musing despairingly,
something stirred within me, and I asked myself, “Can I not rise once
more, conquer my faults, and live up to my own idea of what is right and
good? Even though there be no life after death, I may yet deserve my own
respect here and now, and, if there be a God, He must approve me.”
The resolution was made very seriously. I came home to begin a new
course and to cultivate a different spirit. Was it strange that in a few
days I began instinctively, and almost without reflection, to pray
again? No longer did I make any kind of effort to believe this thing or
the other about God. I simply addressed Him as the Lord of conscience,
whom I implored to strengthen my good resolutions, to forgive my faults,
“to lift me out of the mire and clay and set my feet upon a rock and
order my goings.” Of course, there was Christian sentiment and the
results of Christian training in all I felt and did. I could no more
have cast them off than I could have leaped off my shadow. But of
dogmatical Christianity there was never any more. I have never from that
time, now more than fifty years ago, attached, or wished I could attach,
credence to any part of what Dr. Martineau has called the _Apocalyptic
side of Christianity_, nor (I may add with thankfulness) have I ever
lost faith in God.
The storms of my youth were over. Henceforth through many years there
was a progressive advance to Theism as I have attempted to describe it
in my books; and there were many, many hard moral fights with various
Apollyons all along the road; but no more spiritual revolutions.
About thirty years after that day, to me so memorable, I read in Mr.
Stopford Brooke’s _Life of Robertson_, these words which seem truly to
tell my own story and which I believe recorded Robertson’s own
experience, a little while later:
“It is an awful moment when the soul begins to find that the props on
which it blindly rested are many of them rotten.... I know but one way
in which a man can come forth from this agony scatheless: it is by
holding fast to those things which are certain still. In the darkest
hour through which a human soul can pass, whatever else is doubtful,
this at least is certain. If there be no God and no future state, even
then _it is better to be generous than selfish, better to be true than
false, better to be brave than a coward_. Blessed beyond all earthly
blessedness is the man who in the tempestuous darkness of the soul has
dared to hold fast to these landmarks. I appeal to the recollection of
any man who has passed through that agony and stood upon the rock at
last, with a faith and hope and trust no longer traditional but his
own.”
It may be asked, “What was my creed for those first years of what I may
call _indigenous_ religion?” Naturally, with no better guide than the
inductive philosophy of Locke and Bacon, I could have no outlook beyond
the Deism of the last century. Miracles and miraculous inspiration being
formally given up, there remained only (as I supposed) as testimony to
the existence and character of God such inductions as were drawn in
_Paley’s Theology_ and the _Bridgwater Treatises_; with all of which I
was very familiar. Voltaire’s “_Dieu Toutpuissant, Remunerateur
Vengeur_,” the God whose garb (as Goethe says,) is woven in “Nature’s
roaring loom”; the Beneficent Creator, from whom came all the blessings
which filled my cup; these were the outlines of Deity for me for the
time. The theoretical connection between such a God and my own duty I
had yet to work out through much hard study, but fortunately moral
instinct was practically sufficient to identify them; nay, it was, as I
have just narrated, _through_ such moral instincts that I was led back
straight to religion, and began to pray to my Maker as my Moral Lord, so
soon as ever I strove in earnest to obey my conscience.