In December, 1867, I was married at St. Leonards, and after a brief trip
to Paris and Southsea, we went to Cheltenham where Mr. Besant had
obtained a mastership. We lived at first in lodgings, and as I was very
much alone, my love for reading had full swing. Quietly to myself I
fretted intensely for my mother, and for the daily sympathy and
comradeship that had made my life so fair. In a strange town, among
strangers, with a number of ladies visiting me who talked only of
servants and babies--troubles of which I knew nothing--who were
profoundly uninterested in everything that had formed my previous life,
in theology, in politics, in questions of social reform, and who looked
on me as "strange" because I cared more for the great struggles outside
than for the discussions of a housemaid's young man, or the amount of
"butter when dripping would have done perfectly well, my dear," used by
the cook--under such circumstances it will not seem marvellous that I
felt somewhat forlorn. I found refuge, however, in books, and
energetically carried on my favorite studies; next, I thought I would try
writing, and took up two very different lines of composition; I wrote
some short stories of a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more
ambitious character, "The Lives of the Black Letter Saints". For the sake
of the unecclesiastically trained it may be well to mention that in the
Calendar of the Church of England there are a number of Saints' Days;
some of these are printed in red, and are Red Letter Days, for which
services are appointed by the Church; others are printed in black, and
are Black Letter Days, and have no special services fixed for them. It
seemed to me that it would be interesting to take each of these days and
write a sketch of the life of the saint belonging to it, and accordingly
I set to work to do so, and gathered various books of history and legend
wherefrom to collect my "facts". I don't in the least know what became of
that valuable book; I tried Macmillans with it, and it was sent on by
them to someone who was preparing a series of church books for the young;
later I had a letter from a Church brotherhood offering to publish it, if
I would give it as an "act of piety" to their order; its ultimate fate is
to me unknown.
The short stories were more fortunate. I sent the first to the _Family
Herald_, and some weeks afterwards received a letter from which dropped a
cheque as I opened it. Dear me! I have earned a good deal of money since
by my pen, but never any that gave me the intense delight of that first
thirty shillings. It was the first money I had ever earned, and the pride
of the earning was added to the pride of authorship. In my childish
delight and practical religion, I went down on my knees and thanked God
for sending it to me, and I saw myself earning heaps of golden guineas,
and becoming quite a support of the household. Besides, it was "my very
own", I thought, and a delightful sense of independence came over me. I
had not then realised the beauty of the English law, and the dignified
position in which it placed the married woman; I did not understand that
all a married woman earned by law belonged to her owner, and that she
could have nothing that belonged to her of right.[1] I did not want the
money: I was only so glad to have something of my own to give, and it was
rather a shock to learn that it was not really mine at all.
[Footnote 1: This odious law has now been altered, and a married woman is
a person, not a chattel.]
From time to time after that, I earned a few pounds for stories in the
same journal; and the _Family Herald,_ let me say, has one peculiarity
which should render it beloved by poor authors; it pays its contributor
when it accepts the paper, whether it prints it immediately or not; thus
my first story was not printed for some weeks after I received the
cheque, and it was the same with all others accepted by the same journal.
Encouraged by these small successes, I began writing a novel! It took a
long time to do, but was at last finished, and sent off to the _Family
Herald._ The poor thing came back, but with a kind note, telling me that
it was too political for their pages, but that if I would write one of
"purely domestic interest", and up to the same level, it would probably
be accepted. But by that time I was in the full struggle of theological
doubt, and that novel of "purely domestic interest" never got itself
written.
I contributed further to the literature of my country a theological
pamphlet, of which I forget the exact title, but it dealt with the duty
of fasting incumbent on all faithful Christians, and was very patristic
in its tone.
In January, 1869, my little son was born, and as I was very ill for some
months before,--and was far too much interested in the tiny creature
afterwards, to devote myself to pen and paper, my literary career was
checked for a while. The baby gave a new interest and a new pleasure to
life, and as we could not afford a nurse I had plenty to do in looking
after his small majesty. My energy in reading became less feverish when
it was done by the side of the baby's cradle, and the little one's
presence almost healed the abiding pain of my mother's loss.
I may pass very quickly over the next two years. In August, 1870, a
little sister was born to my son, and the recovery was slow and tedious,
for my general health had been failing for some time. I was, among other
things, fretting much about my mother, who was in sore trouble. A lawyer
in whom she had had the most perfect confidence betrayed it; for years
she had paid all her large accounts through him, and she had placed her
money in his hands. Suddenly he was discovered by his partners to have
been behaving unfairly; the crash came, and my mother found that all the
money given by her for discharge of liabilities had vanished, while the
accounts were unpaid, and that she was involved in debt to a very serious
extent. The shock was a very terrible one to her, for she was too old to
begin the world afresh. She sold off all she had, and used the money, as
far as it would go, to pay the debts she believed to have been long ago
discharged, and she was thus left penniless after thinking she had made a
little competence for her old age. Lord Hatherley's influence obtained
for my brother the post of undersecretary to the Society of Arts, and
also some work from the Patent Office, and my mother went to live with
him. But the dependence was intolerable to her, though she never let
anyone but myself know she suffered, and even I, until her last illness,
never knew how great her suffering had been. The feeling of debt weighed
on her, and broke her heart; all day long while my brother was at his
office, through the bitter winter weather, she would sit without a fire,
lighting it only a little before his home-coming, so that she might save
all the expense she could; often and often she would go out about
half-past twelve, saying that she was going out to lunch, and would walk
about till late in the afternoon, so as to avoid the lunch-hour at home.
I have always felt that the winter of 1870-1 killed her, though she lived
on for three years longer; it made her an old broken woman, and crushed
her brave spirit. How often I have thought since: "If only I had not left
her! I should have seen she was suffering, and should have saved her."
One little chance help I gave her, on a brief visit to town. She was
looking very ill, and I coaxed out of her that her back was always
aching, and that she never had a moment free from pain. Luckily I had
that morning received a letter containing £2 2s. from my liberal _Family
Herald_ editor, and as, glancing round the room, I saw there were only
ordinary chairs, I disregarded all questions as to the legal ownership of
the money, and marched out without saying a word, and bought for £1 15s.
a nice cushiony chair, just like one she used to have at Harrow, and had
it sent home to her. For a moment she was distressed, but I told her I
had earned the money, and so she was satisfied. "Oh, the rest!" she said
softly once or twice during the evening. I have that chair still, and
mean to keep it as long as I live.
In the spring of 1871 both my children were taken ill with hooping-cough.
The boy, Digby, vigorous and merry, fought his way through it with no
danger, and with comparatively little suffering; Mabel, the baby, had
been delicate since her birth; there had been some little difficulty in
getting her to breathe after she was born, and a slight tendency
afterwards to lung-delicacy. She was very young for so trying a disease
as hooping-cough, and after a while bronchitis set in, and was followed
by congestion of the lungs. For weeks she lay in hourly peril of death;
we arranged a screen round the fire like a tent, and kept it full of
steam to ease the panting breath, and there I sat all through those weary
weeks with her on my lap, day and night. The doctor said that recovery
was impossible, and that in one of the fits of coughing she must die; the
most distressing thing was that at last the giving of a drop or two of
milk brought on the terrible convulsive choking, and it seemed cruel to
torture the apparently dying child. At length, one morning when the
doctor was there, he said that she could not last through the day; I had
sent for him hurriedly, for her body had swollen up rapidly, and I did
not know what had happened; the pleura of one lung had become perforated,
and the air escaping into the cavity of the chest had caused the
swelling; while he was there, one of the fits of coughing came on, and it
seemed as though it would be the last; the doctor took a small bottle of
chloroform out of his pocket, and putting a drop on a handkerchief, held
it near the child's face, till the drug soothed the convulsive struggle.
"It can't do any harm at this stage," he said, "and it checks the
suffering." He went away, saying that he would return in the afternoon,
but he feared he would never see the child alive again. One of the
kindest friends I had in my married life was that same doctor, Mr.
Lauriston Winterbotham; he was as good as he was clever, and, like so
many of his noble, profession, he had the merits of discretion and of
silence.
That chance thought of his about the chloroform, verily, I believe, saved
the child's life. Whenever one of the convulsive fits was coming on I
used it, and so not only prevented to a great extent the violence of the
attacks, but also the profound exhaustion that followed them, when of
breath at the top of the throat showing that she still lived. At last,
though more than once we had thought her dead, a change took place for
the better, and the child began slowly to mend. For years, however, that
struggle for life left its traces on her, not only in serious
lung-delicacy but also in a form of epileptic fits. In her play she would
suddenly stop, and become fixed for about a minute, and then go on again
as though nothing had occurred. On her mother a more permanent trace was
left.
Not unnaturally, when the child was out of danger, I collapsed from sheer
exhaustion, and I lay in bed for a week. But an important change of mind
dated from those silent weeks with a dying child on my knees. There had
grown up in my mind a feeling of angry resentment against the God who had
been for weeks, as I thought, torturing my helpless baby. For some months
a stubborn antagonism to the Providence who ordained the sufferings of
life had been steadily increasing in me, and this sullen challenge, "Is
God good?" found voice in my heart during those silent nights and days.
My mother's sufferings, and much personal unhappiness, had been,
intensifying the feeling, and as I watched my baby in its agony, and felt
so helpless to relieve, more than once the indignant cry broke from my
lips: "How canst thou torture a baby so? What has she done that she
should suffer so? Why dost thou not kill her at once, and let her be at
peace?" More than once I cried aloud: "O God, take the child, but do not
torment her." All my personal belief in God, all my intense faith in his
constant direction of affairs, all my habit of continual prayer and of
realisation of his presence, were against me now. To me he was not an
abstract idea, but a living reality, and all my mother-heart rose up in
rebellion against this person in whom I believed, and whose individual
finger I saw in my baby's agony.
At this time I met a clergyman--I do not give his name lest I should
injure him--whose wider and more liberal views of Christianity exercised
much influence over me during the months of struggle that followed. Mr.
Besant had brought him to me while the child was at her worst, and I
suppose something of the "Why is it?" had, unconsciously to me, shown
itself to his keen eyes. On the day after his visit, I received from him
the following letter, in which unbeliever as well as believer may
recognise the deep human sympathy and noble nature of the writer:--
"April 21st, 1871.
"MY DEAR MRS. BESANT,--I am painfully conscious that I gave you but
little help in your trouble yesterday. It is needless to say that it was
not from want of sympathy. Perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say
that it was from excess of sympathy. I shrink intensely from meddling
with the sorrow of anyone whom I feel to be of a sensitive nature.
'The heart hath its own bitterness, and the stranger meddleth not
therewith.'
It is to me a positively fearful thought that I might await a reflection
as
'And common was the common place,
And vacant chaff well meant for grain'.
Conventional consolations, conventional verses out of the Bible and
conventional prayers are, it seems to me, an intolerable aggravation of
suffering. And so I acted on a principle that I mentioned to your
husband, that 'there is no power so great as that of one human faith
looking upon another human faith'. The promises of God, the love of
Christ for little children, and all that has been given to us of hope and
comfort, are as deeply planted in your heart as in mine, and I did not
care to quote them. But when I talk face to face with one who is in sore
need of them, my faith in them suddenly becomes so vast and
heart-stirring that I think I must help most by talking naturally, and
letting the faith find its own way from soul to soul. Indeed I could not
find words for it if I tried. And yet I am compelled, as a messenger of
the glad tidings of God, to solemnly assure you that all is well. We have
no key to the 'Mystery of Pain', excepting the Cross of Christ. But there
is another and a deeper solution in the hands of our Father. And it will
be ours when we can understand it. There is--in the place to which we
travel--some blessed explanation of your baby's pain and your grief,
which will fill with light the darkest heart. Now you must believe
without having seen; that is true faith. You must
'Reach a hand through time to catch
The far-oft interest of tears'.
That you may have strength so to do is part of your share in the prayers
of yours very faithfully, W. D----."
During the summer months I saw much of this clergyman, Mr. D---- and his
wife. We grew into closer intimacy in consequence of the dangerous
illness of their only child, a beautiful boy a few months old. I had
gained quite a name in Cheltenham as a nurse--my praises having been sung
by the doctor--and Mrs. D---- felt she could trust me even with her
darling boy while she snatched a night's sorely needed rest. My
questionings were not shirked by Mr. D----, nor discouraged; he was
neither horrified nor sanctimoniously rebuking, but met them all with a
wide comprehension inexpressibly soothing to one writhing in the first
agony of real doubt. The thought of hell was torturing me; somehow out of
the baby's pain through those seemingly endless hours had grown a dim
realisation of what hell might be, full of the sufferings of the beloved,
and my whole brain and heart revolted from the unutterable cruelty of a
creating and destroying God. Mr. D---- lent me Maurice and Robertson, and
strove to lead me into their wider hope for man, their more trustful
faith in God.
Everyone who has doubted after believing knows how, after the first
admitted and recognised doubt, others rush in like a flood, and how
doctrine after doctrine starts up in new and lurid light, looking so
different in aspect from the fair faint outlines in which it had shone
forth in the soft mists of faith. The presence of evil and pain in the
world made by a "good God", and the pain falling on the innocent, as on
my seven months' old babe; the pain here reaching on into eternity
unhealed; these, while I yet believed, drove me desperate, and I believed
and hated, instead of like the devils, "believed and trembled". Next, I
challenged the righteousness of the doctrine of the Atonement, and while
I worshipped and clung to the suffering Christ, I hated the God who
required the death sacrifice at his hands. And so for months the turmoil
went on, the struggle being all the more terrible for the very
desperation with which I strove to cling to some planks of the wrecked
ship of faith on the tossing sea of doubt.
After Mr. D---- left Cheltenham, as he did in the early autumn of 1871,
he still aided me in my mental struggles. He had advised me to read
McLeod Campbell's work on the Atonement, as one that would meet many of
the difficulties that lay on the surface of the orthodox view, and in
answer to a letter dealing with this really remarkable work, he wrote
(Nov. 22, 1871):
"(1) The two passages on pp. 25 and 108 you doubtless interpret quite
rightly. In your third reference to pp. 117, 188, you forget one great
principle--that God is impassive; cannot suffer. Christ, quâ _God_, did
not suffer, but as Son of _Man_ and in his _humanity_. Still, it may be
correctly stated that He felt to sin and sinners 'as God eternally
feels'--_i.e., abhorrence of sin and love of the sinner_. But to infer
from that that the Father in his Godhead feels the sufferings which
Christ experienced solely in humanity, and because incarnate, is, I
think, wrong.
"(2) I felt strongly inclined to blow you up for the last part of your
letter. You assume, I think quite gratuitously, that God condemns the
major part of his children to objectless future suffering. You say that
if he does not, he places a book in their hands which threatens what he
does not mean to inflict. But how utterly this seems to me opposed to the
gospel of Christ. All Christ's reference to eternal punishment may be
resolved into reference to the Valley of Hinnom, by way of imagery; with
the exception of the Dives parable, where is distinctly inferred a moral
amendment beyond the grave. I speak of the unselfish desire of Dives to
save his brothers. The more I see of the controversy the more baseless
does the eternal punishment theory appear. It seems, then, to me, that
instead of feeling aggrieved and shaken, you ought to feel encouraged and
thankful that God is so much better than you were taught to believe him.
You will have discovered by this time, in Maurice's 'What is Revelation'
(I suppose you have the 'Sequel' too?) that God's truth _is_ our truth,
and his love is our love, only more perfect and full. There is no
position more utterly defeated in modern philosophy and theology, than
Dean Mansel's attempt to show that God's justice, love, etc., are
different in kind from ours. Mill and Maurice, from totally alien points
of view, have shown up the preposterous nature of the notion.
"(3) A good deal of what you have thought is, I fancy, based on a strange
forgetfulness of your former experience. If you have known Christ (whom
to know is eternal life)--and that you have known him I am certain--can
you really say that a few intellectual difficulties, nay, a few moral
difficulties if you will, are able at once to obliterate the testimony of
that higher state of being?
"Why, the keynote of all my theology is that Christ is loveable because,
and _just_ because, he is the perfection of all that I know to be noble
and generous, and loving, and tender, and true. If an angel from heaven
brought me a gospel which contained doctrines that would not stand the
test of such perfect loveableness--doctrines hard, or cruel, or unjust--I
should reject him and his trumpery gospel with scorn, knowing that
neither could be Christ's.
"Know Christ and judge religions by him; don't judge him by religions,
and then complain because you find yourself looking at him through a
blood-colored glass....
"I am saturating myself with Maurice, who is the antidote given by God to
this age against all dreary doubtings and temptings of the devil to
despair."
On these lines weary strife went on for months, until at last brain and
health gave way completely, and for weeks I lay prostrate and helpless,
in terrible ceaseless head-pain, unable to find relief in sleep. The
doctor tried every form of relief in vain; he covered my head with ice,
he gave me opium--which only drove me mad--he used every means his skill
could dictate to remove the pain, but all failed. At last he gave up the
attempt to cure physically, and tried mental diversion; he brought me up
books on anatomy and persuaded me to study them; I have still an analysis
made by me at that time of Luther Holden's "Human Osteology ". He was
wise enough to see that if I were to be brought back to reasonable life,
it could only be by diverting thought from the currents in which it had
been running to a dangerous extent.
No one who has not felt it knows the fearful agony caused by doubt to the
earnestly religious mind. There is in this life no other pain so
horrible. The doubt seems to shipwreck everything, to destroy the one
steady gleam of happiness "on the other side" that no earthly storm could
obscure; to make all life gloomy with a horror of despair, a darkness
that may verily be felt. Fools talk of Atheism as the outcome of foul
life and vicious thought. They, in their shallow heartlessness, their
brainless stupidity, cannot even dimly imagine the anguish of the mere
penumbra of the eclipse of faith, much less the horror of that great
darkness in which the orphaned soul cries out into the infinite
emptiness: "Is it a Devil who has made this world? Are we the sentient
toys of an Almighty Power, who sports with our agony, and whose peals of
awful mocking laughter echo the wailings of our despair?"