life, and I deliberately trained myself to abandon a hope which was
always very dear to me. As regards Christ, there was inevitably, at
first, some reaction in my mind from the worship of my Christian days. I
almost felt I had been led into idolatry, and I bitterly resented then
(and ever since) the paramount prominence, the genuflexions at the
creed, and the especially reverential voice and language applied
constantly by Christians to the Son, rather than to the Father. But
after I had read F. W. Newman’s book of the _Soul_, I recognised, with
relief, how many of the phenomena of the spiritual life which Christians
are wont to treat as exclusively bound up with their creed are, in
truth, phases of the natural history of all devout spirits; and my
longing has ever since been rather to find grounds of sympathy with
believers in Christ and for union with them on the broadest bases of
common gratitude, penitence, restoration and adoration, rather than to
accentuate our differences. The view which I eventually reached of
Christ as an historical human character, is set forth at large in my
_Broken Lights_. He was, I think, the man whose life was to the life of
Humanity what Regeneration is to the individual soul.
I may here conclude the story of my religious life extending through the
years after the above described momentous change. After a time, occupied
in part with study and with efforts to be useful to our poor neighbours
and to my parents, my Deism was lifted to a higher plane by one of those
inflowings of truth which seem the simplest things in the world, but are
as rain on the dry ground in summer to the mind which receives them. One
day while praying quietly, the thought came to me with extraordinary
lucidity: “God’s Goodness is what _I mean_ by Goodness! It is not a mere
title, like the ‘Majesty’ of a King. He has really that character which
we call ‘Good.’ He is Just, as I understand Justice, only more perfectly
just. He is Good as I understand Goodness, only more perfectly good. He
is not good in time and tremendous in eternity; not good to some of His
creatures and cruel to others, but wholly, eternally, universally good.
If I could know and understand all His acts from eternity, there would
not be one which would not deepen my reverence and call forth my adoring
praise.”
To some readers this discovery may seem a mere platitude and truism: the
assertion of a thing which they have never failed to understand. To me
it was a real revelation which transformed my religion from one of
reverence only into one of vivid love for that Infinite Goodness which I
then beheld unclouded. The deep shadow left for years on my soul by the
doctrine of eternal Hell had rolled away at last. Another truth came
home to me many years later, and not till after I had written my first
book. It was one night, after sitting up late in my room reading (for
once) no grave work, but a pretty little story by Mrs. Gaskell. Up to
that time I had found the pleasures of knowledge the keenest of all, and
gloried in the old philosopher’s _dictum_, “Man was created to know and
to contemplate.” I looked on the pleasures of the affections as
secondary and inferior to those of the intellect, and I strove to
perform my duties to those around me, rather in a spirit of moral
rectitude and obedience to law than in one of lovingkindness. Suddenly
again it came to me to see that Love is greater than Knowledge; that it
is more beautiful to serve our brothers freely and tenderly, than to
“hive up learning with each studious year,” to compassionate the
failures of others and ignore them when possible, rather than undertake
the hard process (I always found it so!) of forgiveness of injuries; to
say, “What may I be allowed to do to help and bless this one—or that?”
rather than “What am I bound by duty to do for him, or her; and how
little will suffice?” As these thoughts swelled in my heart, I threw
myself down in a passion of happy tears, and passed most of the night
thinking how I should work out what I had learned. I had scarcely fallen
asleep towards morning when I was wakened by the intelligence that one
of the servants, a young laundress, was dying. I hurried to the poor
woman’s room which was at a great distance from mine, and found all the
men and women servants collected round her. She wished for some one to
pray for her, and there was no one to do it but myself, and so, while
the innocent girl’s soul passed away, I led, for the first and only
time, the prayers of my father’s household.
I had read a good number of books by Deists during the preceding years.
Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works (which I greatly admired), Hume, Tindal,
Collins, Voltaire, beside as many of the old heathen moralists and
philosophers as I could reach; Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus,
Plutarch’s _Moralia_, Xenophon’s _Memorabilia_, and a little of Plato.
But of any modern book touching on the particular questions which had
tortured me I knew nothing till, by the merest good fortune, I fell in
with _Blanco White’s Life_. How much comfort and help I found in his
_Meditations_ the reader may guess. Curiously enough, long years
afterwards, Bishop Colenso told me that the same book, falling into his
hands in Natal by the singular chance of a colonist possessing the
volumes, had determined him to come over to England and bring out his
_Pentateuch_. Thus poor Blanco White, after all prophesied rightly when
he said that he was “one of those who, falling in the ditch, help other
men to pass over”!
Another book some years later was very helpful to me—F. W. Newman’s
_Soul_. Dean Stanley told me that he thought in the far future that
single book would be held to outweigh in value all that the author’s
brother, Cardinal Newman, had ever written. I entered not long after
into correspondence with Professor Newman, and have had the pleasure of
calling him my friend ever since. We have interchanged letters, or at
least friendly greetings, at short intervals now for nearly fifty years.
But the epoch-making book for me was Theodore Parker’s _Discourse of
Religion_. Reading a notice of it in the _Athenæum_, soon after its
publication (somewhere about the year 1845), I sent for it, and words
fail to tell the satisfaction and encouragement it gave me. One must
have been isolated and care-laden as I to estimate the value of such a
book. I had come, as I have narrated above, to the main conclusions of
Parker,—namely, the absolute goodness of God and the non-veracity of
popular Christianity,—three years before; so that it has been a mistake
into which some of my friends have fallen when they have described me as
converted from orthodoxy by Parker. But his book threw a flood of light
on my difficult way. It was, in the first place, infinitely satisfactory
to find the ideas which I had hammered out painfully and often
imperfectly, at last welded together, set forth in lucid order,
supported by apparently adequate erudition and heartwarmed by fervent
piety. But, in the second place, the _Discourse_ helped me most
importantly by teaching me to regard Divine Inspiration no longer as a
miraculous and therefore incredible thing; but as normal, and in
accordance with the natural relations of the infinite and finite spirit;
a Divine inflowing of _mental_ Light precisely analogous to that _moral_
influence which divines call Grace. As every devout and obedient soul
may expect to share in Divine Grace, so the devout and obedient souls of
all the ages have shared (as Parker taught) in Divine Inspiration. And,
as the reception of Grace, even in large measure, does not render us
_impeccable_, so neither does the reception of Inspiration make us
_Infallible_. It is at this point that Deism stops and Theism begins;
namely, when our faith transcends all that can be gleaned from the
testimony of the bodily senses and accepts as supremely trustworthy the
direct Divine teaching, the “original revelation” of God’s holiness and
love in the depths of the soul. Theodore Parker adopted the alternative
synonym to mark the vital difference in the philosophy which underlies
the two creeds; a theoretic difference leading to most important
practical consequences in the whole temper and spirit of Theism as
distinct from Deism. I saw all this clearly ere long, and ranged myself
thenceforth as a THEIST: a name now familiar to everybody, but which,
when my family came to know I took it, led them to tell me with some
contempt that it was “a word in a Dictionary, not a Religion.”
A few months after I had absorbed Parker’s _Discourse_, the great sorrow
of my life befell me. My mother, whose health had been feeble ever since
I could remember her, and who was now seventy years of age, passed away
from a world which has surely held few spirits so pure and sweet. She
died with her weeping husband and sons beside her bed and with her head
resting on my breast. Almost her last words were to tell me I had been
“the pride and joy” of her life. The agony I suffered when I realised
that she was gone I shall not try to tell. She was the one being in the
world whom I truly loved through all the passionate years of youth and
early womanhood; the only one who really loved me. Never one word of
anger or bitterness had passed from her lips to me, nor (thank God!)
from mine to her in the twenty-four years in which she blessed my life;
and for the latter part of that time her physical weakness had drawn a
thousand tender cares of mine around her. No relationship in all the
world, I think, can ever be so perfect as that of mother and daughter
under such circumstances, when the strength of youth becomes the support
of age, and the sweet dependance of childhood is reversed.
But it was all over—I was alone; no more motherly love and tenderness
were ever again to reach my thirsting heart. But this was not as I
recall it, the worst pang in that dreadful agony. I had (as I said
above) ceased to believe in a future life, and therefore I had no choice
but to think that that most beautiful soul which was worth all the
kingdoms of earth had actually _ceased to be_. She was a “Memory;”
nothing more
I was not then or at any time one of those fortunate people who can
suddenly cast aside the conclusions which they have reached by careful
intellectual processes, and leap to opposite opinions at the call of
sentiment. I played no tricks with my convictions, but strove as best I
could to endure the awful strain, and to recognise the Divine Justice
and Goodness through the darkness of death. I need not and cannot say
more on the subject.
Happily for me, there were many duties waiting for me, and I could
recognise even then that, though _pleasure_ seemed gone for ever, yet it
was a relief to feel I had still _duties_. “Something to do for others”
was an assuagement of misery. My father claimed first and much
attention, and the position I now held of the female head of the family
and household gave me a good deal of employment. To this I added
teaching in my village school a mile from our house two or three times a
week, and looking after all the sick and hungry in the two villages of
Donabate and Balisk. Those were the years of Famine and Fever in
Ireland, and there was abundant call for all our energies to combat
them. I shall write of these matters in the next chapter.
I had, though with pain, kept my heresies secret during my mother’s
declining years and till my father had somewhat recovered from his
sorrow. I had continued to attend family prayers and church services,
with the exception of the Communion, and had only vaguely allowed it to
be understood that I was not in harmony with them all. When my poor
father learned the full extent of my “infidelity,” it was a terrible
blow to him, for which I have, in later years, sincerely pitied him. He
could not trust himself to speak to me, but though I was in his house,
he wrote to tell me I had better go away. My second brother, a
barrister, had a year before given up his house in Queen Anne Street
under a terrible affliction, and had gone, broken-hearted, to live on a
farm which he hired in the wilds of Donegal. There I went as my father
desired and remained for nearly a year; not knowing whether I should
ever be permitted to return home and rather expecting to be
disinherited. He wrote to me two or three times and said that if my
doubts only extended in certain directions he could bear with them, “but
if I rejected Christ and disbelieved the Bible, a man was called upon to
keep the plague of such opinions from his own house.” Then he required
me to answer him on those points categorically. Of course I did so
plainly, and told him I did _not_ believe that Christ was God; and I did
_not_ (in his sense) believe in the inspiration or authority of the
Bible. After this ensued a very long silence, in which I remained
entirely ignorant of my destiny and braced myself to think of earning my
future livelihood. I was absolutely lonely; my brother, though always
very kind to me, had not the least sympathy with my heresies, and
thought my father’s conduct (as I do) quite natural; and I had not a
friend or relative from whom I could look for any sort of comfort. A
young cousin to whom I had spoken of them freely, and who had, in a way,
adopted my ideas, wrote to me to say she had been shown the error of
them, and was shocked to think she had been so misguided. This was the
last straw. After I received this letter I wandered out in the dusk as
usual down to a favourite nook—a natural seat under the bank in a bend
of the river which ran through Bonny Glen,—and buried my face in the
grass. As I did so my lips touched a primrose which had blossomed in
that precise spot since I had last been there, and the soft, sweet
flower which I had in childhood chosen for my mother’s birthday garland
seemed actually to kiss my face. No one who has not experienced _utter_
loneliness can perhaps quite imagine how much comfort such an incident
can bring.
As I had no duties in Donegal, and seldom saw our few neighbours, I
occupied myself, often for seven or eight or even nine hours a day, in
writing an _Essay on True Religion_. I possess this MS. still, and have
been lately examining it. Of course, as a first literary effort, it has
many faults, and my limited opportunities for reference render parts of
it very incomplete; but it is not a bad piece of work. The first part is
employed in setting forth my reasons for belief in God. The second,
those for not believing in (the apocalyptic part of) Christianity. The
chapter on _Miracles_ and Prophecy (written from the literal and
matter-of-fact standpoint of that epoch) are not ill-done, while the
moral failure of the Bible and of the orthodox theology, the histories
of Jacob, Jael, David, &c., and the dogmas of Original Sin, the
Atonement, a Devil and eternal Hell, are criticised pretty successfully.
A considerable part of the book consists in a comparison in parallel
columns of moral precepts from the Old and New Testaments on one side,
and from non-Christian writers, Euripides, Socrates (Xenophon),
Plutarch, Sextius, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, the Zend Avesta
(Anquetil du Perron’s), The Institutes of Menu (Sir W. Jones’), the
Damma Padan, the Talmud, &c., on the other. For years I had seized every
opportunity of collecting the most striking ethical _dicta_, and I thus
marshalled them to what appeared to me good purpose, namely, the
disproof of the originality or exceptional loftiness of Christian
Morals. I did not apprehend till later years, how the supreme
achievement of Christianity was not the inculcation of a _new_, still
less of a _systematic_ Morality; but the introduction of a new spirit
into Morality; as Christ himself said, a leaven into the lump.
Reading Parker’s _Discourse_, as I did very naturally in my solitude
once again, it occurred to me to write to him and ask him to tell me on
what ground he based the faith which I perceived he held, in a life
after death? It had seemed to me that the guarantee of Revelation having
proved worthless, there remained no sufficient reason for hope to
counter-weigh the obvious difficulty of conceiving of a survival of the
soul. Parker answered me in a most kind letter, accompanied by his
_Sermon of the Immortal Life_. Of course I studied this with utmost care
and sympathy, and by slow, very slow degrees, as I came more to take in
the full scope of the Theistic, as distinguished from the Deistic view,
I saw my way to a renewal of _the Hope of the Human Race_ which, twenty
years later, I set forth as best as I could in the little book of that
name. I learned to trust the intuition of Immortality which is “written
in the heart of man by a Hand which writes no falsehoods.” I deemed also
that I could see (as Parker says) the evidence of “a summer yet to be in
the buds which lie folded through our northern winter;” the presence in
human nature of many efflorescences—and they the fairest of all—quite
unaccountable and unmeaning on the hypothesis that the end of the man is
in the grave. In later years I think, as the gloom of the evil and
cruelty of the world has shrouded more the almost cloudless skies of my
youth, I have almost fervently held by the doctrine of Immortality
because it is, to me _the indispensable corollary of that of the
Goodness of God_. I am not afraid to repeat the words, which so deeply
shocked, when they were first published, my old friend, F. W. Newman.
“_If Man be not immortal, God is not Just._”
Recovering this faith, as I may say, rationally and not by any gust of
emotion, I had the inexpressible happiness of thinking henceforth of my
mother as still existing in God’s universe, and (as well as I knew)
loving me wherever she might be, and under whatever loftier condition of
being. To meet her again “spirit to spirit, ghost to ghost,” has been to
me for forty years, the sweetest thought connected with death. Ere long,
now, it must be realised.
After nine or ten months of this, by no means harsh, exile, my father
summoned me to return home. I resumed my place as his daughter in doing
all I could for his comfort, and as the head of his house; merely
thenceforth abstaining from attendance either at Church or at family
prayer. I had several favourite nooks and huts near and far in the
woods, which I made into little Oratories for myself, and to one or
other of them I resorted almost every evening at dusk; making it a
habit—not broken for many years afterwards, to repeat a certain
versified Litany of Thanksgiving which I had written and read to my
mother. On Sundays, when the rest of the family went to the village
church, I had the old garden for a beautiful cathedral. Having let
myself in with my own key, and locked the doors, I knew I had the lovely
six acres within the high walls, free for hours from all observation or
intrusion. How much difference it makes in life to have at command such
peace and solitude it is hard to estimate. I look back to some of the
summer forenoons spent alone in that garden as to the flowering time of
my seventy years. God grant that the afterglow of such hours may remain
with me to the last, and that “at eventide it may be light!”
I knew that there were Unitarian chapels in Dublin at this time, and
much wished to attend them now and then; but I would not cause annoyance
to my father by the notice which my journey to the town on a Sunday
would have attracted. Only on New Year’s Day I thought I might go
unobserved and interpolate attendance at the service among my usual
engagements. I went accordingly to Dublin one 1st of January and drove
to the chapel of which I had heard in Eustace Street. It was a big,
dreary place with scarcely a quarter of the seats occupied, and a
middle-class congregation apparently very cool and indifferent. The
service was a miserable, hybrid affair, neither Christian as I
understood Christianity, nor yet Theistic; but it was a pleasure to me
merely to stand and kneel with other people at the hymns and prayers. At
last, the sermon, for which I might almost say, I was hungry, arrived.
The old Minister in his black-gown ascended the pulpit, having taken
with him—what?—could I believe my eyes? It was an _old printed book_,
bound in the blue and drab old fuzzy paper of the year 1810 or
thereabouts, and out of this he proceeded to read an erudite discourse
by some father of English Socinianism, on the precise value of the Greek
article when used before the word Θεός! My disappointment not to say
disgust were such that,—as it was easy from my seat to leave the place
without disturbing any one,—I escaped into the street, never (it may be
believed) to repeat my experiment.
It was an anomalous position that which I held at Newbridge from the
time of my return from Donegal, till my father’s death eight years
later. I took my place as head of the household at the family table and
in welcoming our guests, but I was all the time in a sort of moral
Coventry, under a vague atmosphere of disapprobation wherein all I said
was listened to cautiously as likely to conceal some poisonous heresy.
Everything of this kind, however, wears down and becomes easier and
softer as time goes on, and most so when people are, _au fond_,
just-minded and good-hearted; and the years during which I remained at
home till my father’s death, though mentally very lonely, were far from
unhappy. In particular, the perfect clearness and straightforwardness of
my position was, and has ever since been, a source of strength and
satisfaction to me, for which I have thanked God a thousand times. My
inner life was made happy by my simple faith in God’s infinite and
perfect love; and I never had any doubt whether I had erred in
abandoning the creed of my youth. On the contrary, as the whole tendency
of modern science and criticism showed itself stronger and stronger
against the old orthodoxy, my hopes were unduly raised of a not distant
New Reformation which I might even live to see. These sanguine hopes
have faded. As Dean Stanley seems to have felt, there was, somewhere
between the years ’74 and ’78, a turn in the tide of men’s thoughts
(due, I think, to the paramount influence and insolence which physical
science then assumed), which has postponed any decisive “broad” movement
for years beyond my possible span of life. But though nothing appears
quite so bright to my old eyes as all things did to me in youth, though
familiarity with human wickedness and misery, and still more with the
horrors of scientific cruelty to animals, have strained my faith in
God’s justice sometimes even to agony,—I know that no form of religious
creed could have helped me any more than my own or as much as it has
done to bear the brunt of such trial; and I remain to the present
unshaken both in respect to the denials and the affirmations of Theism.
There are great difficulties, soul-torturing difficulties besetting it;
but the same or worse, beset every other form of faith in God; and
infinitely more, and to my mind insurmountable ones, beset Atheism.
For fifty years Theism has been my staff of life. I must soon try how it
will support me down the last few steps of my earthly way. I believe it
will do so well.
CHAPTER
V.
_MY FIRST BOOK._