CHAPTER I.

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THE STORY

OF

ANNA KINGSFORD AND

EDWARD MAITLAND

AND OF

THE NEW GOSPEL OF

INTERPRETATION

BY

EDWARD MAITLAND.

EDITED BY SAMUEL HOPGOOD HART.

"The days of the Covenant of Manifestation are passing away;

The Gospel of Interpretation cometh."

"There shall nothing new be told; but that which is ancient

shall be interpreted."

* * * * *

"Now is the Gospel of Interpretation come, and the kingdom

of the Mother of God."--_C.W.S._, Part I. No. ii. (part 2) 10. 11.

and Part II. No. xiii. 31.

THIRD AND ENLARGED EDITION.

PRICE THREE SHILLINGS AND SIXPENCE.

BIRMINGHAM:

THE RUSKIN PRESS, STAFFORD STREET.

1905.

_1st Edition ... Christmas, 1893._

_2nd Edition ... Christmas, 1894._

_3rd Edition ... Christmas, 1905._

PREFACE

TO THE FIRST AND SECOND EDITIONS.

This book is designed (1) in satisfaction of the widely-expressed desire

for a more particular account than has yet been rendered concerning the

genesis of the writings claiming to constitute a "New Gospel of

Interpretation"; and (2) in fulfilment of the duty incumbent on me as

the survivor of the two recipients of such Gospel to spare no means

which may minister to its recognition and acceptance by the world, for

whose benefit it has been vouchsafed.

Although largely biographical in character, this book is not a history

of individuals, but of a Work, and involves only such personal

references as are necessary to such history. It is not, however, a full

or a final account that is contained in it. Such an account can be given

only in the form of the regular biography which is in course of

preparation. This book is an instalment only of that biography, being

put forth in advance of it, partly, as said above, to meet a present

need, and partly, to prevent a total loss of the record in the event of

my failure to complete it--a contingency of which, in view of the

magnitude of the task and my advanced age, I am bound to take account.

E.M.

PREFACE

TO THE THIRD EDITION.

Since the publication in 1893 of this book which, as stated in Chapter

VII., was "intended but as an epitome and instalment" of a far larger

book then in course of preparation, the full and final account of the

"New Gospel of Interpretation" has been given to the world. In 1896

Edward Maitland published his _magnum opus_, "The Life of Anna

Kingsford," in two large volumes of 420 pages, "illustrated with

portraits, views, and facsimiles." This is, and will always be, the

biography _par excellence_ of Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland, and it

is absolutely indispensable for those who would know all that there is

to be known of them and their work and of the "New Gospel of

Interpretation." As that book, however, on account of its great length,

must always be a costly book, and therefore beyond the means of many who

would like to have some reliable information concerning Anna Kingsford

and Edward Maitland and their work, and as there are many who, on

account of their time for reading being limited or their inclination to

read being little, require information within the compass of a small

book or go without it altogether, there will, notwithstanding the

publication of the "Life of Anna Kingsford," be a demand for this

shorter "Story," which is so admirably suited to meet the needs or

requirements of these classes of persons; for, be it noted, the

publication of "The Life of Anna Kingsford" has not in any way

depreciated the value of this book in this sense that, having been

written by one of the two recipients of the "New Gospel of

Interpretation," it is a first authority second to none for the

statements therein contained.

The change in the title of the book from "The Story of the New Gospel of

Interpretation" to the present title calls for some explanation and

justification, because the former title was an excellent one in many

respects, and the book has become known to many by that title. The

"Gospel of Interpretation" is the name or description which was given by

its Divine Inspirers, the Hierarchy of the Spheres Celestial, to the

work of which this book tells the story, in token of its relation to the

previous "Gospel of Manifestation." The former title implied, as the

Author pointed out in his preface, that that which this book propounded

was "not really a new Gospel, but one of Interpretation only"; and this

is not really new, but, as the Author has also pointed out, "so old as

to have become forgotten and lost, being the purely spiritual sense, as

discerned from the purely spiritual standpoint originally intended and

insisted on by Scripture itself as its true sense and standpoint, and

those which alone render Scripture intelligible"[1]. But notwithstanding

this, and notwithstanding that on the front page it was expressly stated

that "There shall nothing new be told; but that which is ancient shall

be interpreted," the former title failed to convey to the minds of some

the meaning that it was intended to convey, and it gave no indication of

the biographical nature of the work. Many who otherwise would have read

the book refrained from doing so because they thought that a new Gospel,

inconsistent with and perhaps opposed to if not intended to supersede

the old Gospel, was propounded. It is necessary, therefore, for me to

state, if possible more explicitly than it was stated in the previous

editions of this book, that this is not an attempt to create a new

Gospel differing from that of Jesus Christ[2]. Anna Kingsford's and

Edward Maitland's mission and aim was to interpret the Christ, not to

rival or supersede Him. The "New Gospel" is, first and foremost,

_interpretative_, and is destructive only in the sense of

reconstructive. "It tells nothing new; it simply restores and reinforces

the old, even the Gnosis, which, as the doctrine of the Church unfallen,

is that also of the Church fallen, though the latter has lost the key to

its interpretation"[3]. Nor is the teaching represented by this book

opposed to the existence of an objective Church. Anna Kingsford and

Edward Maitland fully recognised the necessity of such an organisation

for the formulation, propagation, and exposition of religion. Their

opposition was "only to the recognition by the Church of the objective,

historical, and materialistic aspect of religion, _to the exclusion_ of

that which really constitutes religion, namely, its subjective,

spiritual, and substantial aspect, wherein alone it appeals to the mind

and soul, and is efficacious for redemption." The aim of the New Gospel

"is defined exactly," said Edward Maitland, "in the following citation

from St. Dionysius the Areopagite 'not to destroy, but to construct; or,

rather, to destroy by construction; to conquer error by the full

presentment of truth.' As will be obvious, such a design does not

necessarily involve the destruction of anything that exists whether of

symbol or ritual, or ecclesiastical organisation, but only their

regeneration by means of their translation into their spiritual and

divinely intended sense. And it is precisely because that sense has been

lost--as declared in Scripture it had long been, and would yet long be,

lost--that a new 'Gospel of Interpretation' has been vouchsafed in

fulfilment of the promises in Scripture to that effect; and this from

the source of the original Divine revelation, namely, the Church

Celestial, and by the method which always was that of such revelation,

namely, the intuition operating under special illumination.... Even the

priest, though hitherto deservedly regarded as the 'enemy of man,' will

not be destroyed under the new _regime_ whose inauguration we are

witnessing. For in becoming interpreter as well as administrator, he

will be prophet as well as priest, and speak out the things of God and

the soul instead of concealing them under a veil. So will the 'veil be

taken away,' and Cain, the priest, instead of killing Abel, the prophet,

as hitherto, will unite with him, becoming prophet and priest in one.

And instead of any longer corrupting the 'woman' Intuition, and

suppressing the 'man' Intellect, he will purify and exalt her, and

enable her to fulfil her proper function as 'the Mother of God' in man,

and will recognise the intellect, when duly conjoined with her, as the

heir of all things. Thus, becoming interpreter as well as administrator,

prophet as well as priest, and recognising interpretation as the

corollary of the understanding, the prophet-priest of the regeneration

will give to men freely of the waters of life, that only true bread of

Heaven, which is the food of the understanding, instead of the

indigestible 'stones' and poisonous 'serpents' of doctrines, the

profession of which, by divorcing assent from conviction, involves that

moral and intellectual suicide, to induce others to join him in

committing which Cardinal Newman wrote his 'Grammar of Assent,' True it

is 'faith that saves,' but the faith that is without understanding is

not faith, but credulity"[4]. It is for the above-mentioned reasons that

the title of this book has been changed. The title must be subservient

to the book, and it is hoped that, the change having been made, there

will not be any further misunderstanding--even on the part of those who

are most superficial--as to the nature and object of "The Story of the

New Gospel of Interpretation."

Edward Maitland did not long survive the completion of the great task

that he undertook when he set himself to write a full account of his

life and that of his colleague. He retained his full mental vigour until

the publication of "The Life of Anna Kingsford"; but after that he

rapidly declined, and on the 2nd October, 1897, at the close of his

seventy-third year, a little over nine years after the death of Anna

Kingsford[5], he passed away peacefully at "The Warders" at Tonbridge,

the home (at that time) of his friends Colonel and Mrs. Currie, with

whom, and under whose loving care, he spent the last few months of his

life--a life concerning which, as also that of Anna Kingsford, I will

not say anything here, for this book will testify. Blessed are the souls

whom the just commemorate before God.

* * * * *

Many who read these pages will not rest until they know more of those

great prophets the story of whose lives is here told, and of the Divine

Gnosis that it was their high mission to proclaim. I have indicated

whence they can obtain this information. This "Story," interesting as it

is and much as there is in it, is little more than an indication of some

of the facts that are fully stated and dealt with in "The Life of Anna

Kingsford," and there is much of importance that (as it could not

possibly receive proper treatment in a book of this size) was passed

over here to be related in the larger biography. I have not thought it

expedient to alter the character of or to add much to this book, but I

have enlarged it by incorporating therein, from "The Life of Anna

Kingsford," some additional matter which is of interest, and which

should add to the value of the book. The most important additions are

the account of Anna Kingsford's vision of "The Doomed Train," on p.p.

43-47; the account of Anna Kingsford's vision of Adonai, on pp. 64-68;

the "Exhortation of Hermes to his Neophytes," on pp. 110-112; the verses

"Concerning the Passage of the Soul," on pp. 169-170; and the

illumination of Anna Kingsford concerning the "Work of Power," on

pp. 180-181. I have also amplified the text in some places when, on

comparing it with corresponding passages in "The Life of Anna

Kingsford," I found that I could do so with advantage. These

amplifications are not otherwise noted. Finally, I have added some notes

where I thought that further explanation was desirable or would prove

acceptable.

SAML. HOPGOOD HART.

Croydon, December, 1905.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] E.M. Letter in "Light" of 29th August, 1891.

[2] See further as to this, an article by A.K. and E.M. in "Light" of

23rd September, 1882, reprinted in Life A.K. Vol. II. p. 77.

[3] E.M. Letter in "Light" of 22nd July, 1893.

[4] E.M. Letter in "Light" of 17th December, 1892.

[5] A.K. died on the 22nd February, 1888

INTRODUCTION.

There are certain introductory remarks which, in view of the prevailing

tendency to reject prior to examination whatever conflicts with strongly

cherished preconceptions--as anything purporting to be a "new Gospel" is

undoubtedly calculated to do--may be made with advantage. Those remarks

are as follows:--

(1) As its title implies[6], that which is propounded is not really a

new Gospel, but one of Interpretation only, which is precisely what is

admitted by all serious and thoughtful persons to be the supreme need of

the times. It was said, for instance, by the late Matthew Arnold, "At

the present moment there are two things about the Christian religion

which must be obvious to every percipient person: one, that men cannot

do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is."

(2) As also its title implies[6] nothing new is told in it, but that

only which is old is interpreted; and the appeal on its behalf is not to

authority, whether of Book, Tradition, or Institution, but to the

Understanding--a quality which accords not only with the spirit of the

times, but also--as shewn herein--with that of religion itself, properly

so called.

(3) Scripture manifestly comprises two conflicting systems of doctrine

and practice, having for their representatives respectively the priest

and the prophet, one only of which systems, and this the system

reprobated in Scripture itself, has hitherto obtained recognition from

Christendom. It is the purpose of the New Gospel of Interpretation to

expound the system represented by the prophet and approved in Scripture,

with a view to replacing the other.

(4) For those who attach value to the prophecies contained in the Bible,

so far from there being an _a priori_ improbability against the delivery

of a new revelation in interpretation, confirmation, or completion of

the former revelation, and in correction of the false presentment of it,

the probability ought to be all in favour of such an event. This is

because Scripture abounds in predictions of a restoration both of

faculty and of knowledge, as to take place at the present time and under

the existing conditions of Church and World; and this of such kind as

shall constitute a second and spiritual manifestation of the Christ in

rectification of the perversion of the import of His first and personal

manifestation, and in arrest of the great Apostacy, not only from the

true faith of Christ but from religion itself, of which that perversion

has been the cause.

(5) So far from the idea of a new revelation which shall have for its

end the disclosure, as the true sense of Scripture and Dogma, of a

sense differing so widely from that hitherto accepted as to be virtually

destructive of it,--so far from this idea being universally repugnant to

orthodox ecclesiastics, it has found warm recognition from one of the

foremost of modern churchmen. This is the late Cardinal Newman.

Said Dr Newman in his _Apologia pro vita sua_, speaking of his earlier

days, "The broad philosophy of Clement and Origen carried me away; the

philosophy, not the theological doctrine.... Some portions of their

teaching, magnificent in themselves, came like music to my inward ear,

as if the response to ideas, which, with little external to encourage

them, I had cherished so long. These were based on the mystical or

sacramental principle, and spoke of the various Economies or

Dispensations of the Eternal. I understood these passages to mean that

the exterior world, physical and historical, was but the manifestation

to our senses of realities greater than itself. Nature was a parable:

Scripture was an allegory:.... The process of change had been slow; it

had been done not rashly, but by rule and measure, 'at sundry times and

in divers manners,' first one disclosure and then another, till the

whole evangelical doctrine was brought into full manifestation. And thus

room was made for the anticipation of further and deeper disclosures of

truths still under the veil of the letter, and in their season to be

revealed. The visible world still remains without its divine

interpretation: Holy Church in her sacraments and her hierarchical

appointments, will remain, even to the end of the world, after all but a

symbol of those heavenly facts which fill eternity. Her mysteries are

but the expressions, in human language, of truths to which the human

mind is unequal"[7].

Dr Newman is credited also with the remark, made on visiting Rome for

his investiture, that he saw no hope for religion save in a new

revelation.

These are utterances the value of which is in no way diminished by the

fact that their utterer failed to bring his own life into accordance

with them. He could write, indeed, the hymn "Lead, kindly light"; but

when the "kindly light" was vouchsafed him of those suggestions of a

system of thought concealed within the Christian Symbology, "magnificent

in themselves" and making "music to his inward ear," which he found in

the patristic writings; instead of following that lead, and striving to

exhume the treasures of divine truth thus buried and hidden from sight,

for the salvation of a world perishing for want of them,--he turned his

back upon it, and--entering the Church of Rome--wrote his "Grammar of

Assent," calling upon others to follow him in committing the suicide,

intellectual and moral, of renouncing the understanding and divorcing

profession from conviction.

This was a catastrophe the explanation of which is not far to seek. Dr

Newman had in him the elements which go to make both priest and prophet.

But the former proved the stronger; and the Cain, the priest in him,

suppressed the Abel, the prophet in him. Thus was he a type of the

Church as hitherto she has been. But, happily, not as henceforth she

will be. For "now is the Gospel of Interpretation come, and the kingdom

of the Mother of God," even the "Woman," Intuition,--the mind's feminine

mode, wherein it represents the perceptions and recollections of the

Soul--who is ever "Mother of God" in man, and whose sons the prophets

ever are, the greatest of them being called emphatically, for the

fulness and purity of his intuition, the "Son of the Woman" and she a

"virgin."

E.M.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] The original title of this book was "The Story of the New Gospel of

Interpretation." See preface to the present edition. S.H.H.

[7] Apologia pro vita sua, by J. H. Newman. New edition of 1893, pp. 26,

27.

FRONTISPIECES.

I.--PORTRAIT OF DR. ANNA KINGSFORD.

_Born, Sep. 16th, 1846; Died, Feb. 22nd, 1888._

II.--PORTRAIT OF EDWARD MAITLAND (_B.A., Cantab_).

_Born, Oct. 27th, 1824; Died, Oct, 2nd, 1897._

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

PAGE

PREFACE TO THE FIRST AND SECOND EDITIONS v.

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION vii.-xiii.

INTRODUCTION xv.-xix.

TABLE OF CONTENTS xx.-xxii.

ABBREVIATIONS xxiii.

CHAPTER I.

THE VOCATION.

The Instruments--Their early lives--Their consciousness of a special

mission, and intimations of a call--Their training in respect of

circumstance, character, and faculty, until brought together

for their Joint work. 1-36

CHAPTER II.

THE INITIATION.

A baptism of the Spirit--"At last I have found a man through whom

I can speak!"--Intimation of the nature and aim of their work--The

Doomed train, "No one on the engine!"--Instantaneous

transfer of inspiration--"Woman, what have I to do with

thee?"--The recovery of a Gospel scene, and its import--"The

woman taken in adultery"--Vision of Adonai--Source of the

opening sentences in St. John's Gospel--Chapter from the recovered

Gnosis--The Generation of the Word. 37-70

CHAPTER III.

THE COMMUNICATION.

The perfect love that casts out fear." In the presence of celestial

visitants--A parable of the Intuition--"The Wonderful

Spectacles"--The Greek element in the work--Hermes and John the

Baptist--The "heresy of Prometheus"--The Fig-tree, a symbol of the

inward understanding; the time come for it to bear fruit--The

Seeress's faculty--Her relations with Hermes--"Thou art the

Rock" addressed to Hermes--The parable of the Fig-tree--The

Mystic Woman of Holy Writ--"Go thy way, Daniel....

Thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days"--The

prophecy of the book of Esther--The Angel Genius, his account

of himself and his office--Divine revelation the supreme common

sense--The source and method of the New Revelation--Its chief

recipient "not a medium or a seer, but a prophet"--An instruction

and a caution concerning the survival of tendencies encouraged

in past lives--Communion with souls of the departed--The

conditions of such intercourse--An instruction concerning

Inspiration and Prophesying--The prophecy of "the kingdom of

the Mother of God." 71-108

CHAPTER IV.

THE ANTAGONISATION.

"Ye are not yet perfected"--Our respective _Auras_--An

exhortation--The Seven Spirits of God, their co-operation

necessary for a perfect work--"You belong to us now, to do our

work and not your own"--Enforced silence--"The Powers of the Air;"

their mode of attack--A strange visitant and his communication--A

strained situation--Visions of guidance--The "refractory team,"

and the "Two Stars"--The promised land reached only through

the wilderness--"The Word a Word of mystery, and they who

guard it Seven"--"One Neophyte could not save himself"--A

Horoscope--A descent into hell--Counsels of Perfection--A

"Merry Christmas"--A timely arrival--Neoplatonic recognition

of Hermes--The one Truth, never without a witness in the

world--The key of knowledge restored--Problems solved--The mystic

"Woman" of Holy Writ. 109-141

CHAPTER V.

THE RECAPITULATION.

The key to the mystery of the Bible; the "Veil of Moses"

withdrawn--The secret laid bare of the world's sacrificial system,

and the feud between priest and prophet--The Memory of the

Soul--The Standpoint of the Bible--All that is true is

Spiritual--The revelation of "that wicked one"--The seals broken

and the books opened--The New Gospel of

Interpretation--Sacerdotalism the "Jerusalem which killed the

prophets"--The suppressed doctrines--Reincarnation the corollary

and condition of Regeneration and implicit in the

Bible--"Ye _must_ be born again of Virgin Mary and Holy

Ghost"--The doctrines of the Trinity and Divine Incarnation as now

interpreted, necessary and self-evident truths--Evolution the

manifestation of a divine inherency; accomplished only by the

realisation of Divinity--The process of regeneration, and therein

of salvation, interior to the individual--Adam and Christ the

initial and final stages in the spiritual evolution of every

man--The "Christ within" of St Paul--The _Credo_ an epitome of the

spiritual history of the Sons of God. 142-162

CHAPTER VI.

THE EXEMPLIFICATION.

Spontaneity of the Seeress's faculty--Specific illuminations, in

illustration, chiefly, of the process of Regeneration; concerning

(1) Holy Writ; (2) Redemption; (3) Sin and death; (4) The Twelve

Gates of Regeneration; (5) The Passage of the Soul; (6) The

Mystic Exodus; (7) The Spiritual Phoibos and the order of the

Christs; (8) The Previous Lives of Jesus, and Reincarnation;

(9) The Work of Power; the land and tongue of the New

Revelation, why ours. 163-183

CHAPTER VII.

THE PROMULGATION AND RECOGNITION.

Accordance of all the dates with those prophesied--Other

coincidences--Why our work has remained so long unknown to the

generality--Notable recognitions, by representative Kabalists,

Mystics, Occultists and Divines, Catholic, Anglican, and

others--Spiritualism, Theosophy, and the New Gospel of

Interpretation as fellow-agents in the unfoldment of the world's

spiritual consciousness, and the unsealing of the world's Bibles,

prophesied to take place at this epoch--"Abraham, Isaac, and

Jacob," the Hebrew equivalents for Brahma, Isis, and Iacchos, to

denote the mysteries of India, Egypt, and Greece, the Spirit, the

Soul, and the Body, and therein the Gnosis of which the Christ is

the fulfilment and personal demonstration, and the restoration of

which was prophesied by Jesus as to mean the Regeneration of the

Church and the establishment of the divine kingdom on

earth--Mysticism and Occultism, the distinction between them, and

the necessity of both physical and spiritual science to a perfect

system of thought and rule of life--Conclusion. 184-204

ABBREVIATIONS.

A.K., for Anna Kingsford.

B.O.A.I., for "The Bible's Own Account of Itself," by E.M.; second

edition, 1905.

C.W.S., for "Clothed With The Sun," being the book of the

Illuminations of A.K.; edited by E.M., 1889.

D. and D.-S., for "Dreams and Dream-Stones," by A.K., edited by

E.M.; second edition, 1888.

E.C.U., for "The Esoteric Christian Union," founded by E.M. in

1891.

E. and I., for "England and Islam; or, The Counsel of Caiaphas," by

E.M., 1877.

E.M., for Edward Maitland.

Life A.K., for "The Life of Anna Kingsford," by E.M., 1896.

P.W., for "The Perfect Way; or, The Finding of Christ," by A.K. and

E.M.; third edition, revised, 1890.

Statement, E.C.U., for "The New Gospel of Interpretation; being an

Abstract of the Doctrine and Statement of the Objects of the

Esoteric Christian Union," by E.M.; revised and enlarged edition,

1892.

BIRMINGHAM:

THE RUSKIN PRESS, RUSKIN HOUSE,

STAFFORD STREET.

1905.

[Illustration: Edward Maitland]

[Illustration: Anna Kingsford]

THE

STORY OF ANNA KINGSFORD AND

EDWARD MAITLAND

AND

OF THE NEW GOSPEL OF

INTERPRETATION.

CHAPTER I.

THE VOCATION.

My colleague in the work, the history of which I am about to render some

account, was the late Anna Kingsford, _nee_ Bonus, M.D. of the

University of Paris.

There was a link between her husband's family and mine, but we were not

personally acquainted until, in the summer of 1873, she was led by

reading one of my books[8] to open a correspondence with me, which

disclosed so striking a community between us of ideas, aims, and

methods, that I accepted an invitation to visit her at her husband's

rectory at Pontesbury, Salop, in Shropshire, for the sake of a fuller

discussion of them. This visit which lasted nearly a fortnight, took

place in February, 1874[9].

The account I received of her history was in this wise. Born at

Stratford, in Essex, on the 16th September, 1846, long after the last of

her many brothers and sisters, and endowed with the most fragile of

constitutions and liabilities the most distressing of bodily weakness

and suffering, and differing widely, moreover, in temperament from all

with whom she was associated, her young life had enjoyed but a scanty

share of human sympathy, and was largely one of solitude and meditation,

and such as to foster the highly artistic, idealistic, and mystic

tendencies with which she was born. Singularly energetic of will, and

conscious of powers both transcending in degree and differing in kind

from any that she recognised in others, she assiduously exercised her

faculties in many and various directions in the hope of discovering the

special direction in which her mission lay. For, from her earliest

childhood she had been conscious of a mission, for the accomplishment of

which she had expressly come into the earth-life. And she claimed even

to have distinct recollection of having been strongly dissuaded from

coming, on account of the terrible suffering which awaited her in the

event of her assuming a body of flesh. Indeed, so little conscious was

she of the reality of her human parentage that she was wont to look upon

herself as a suppositious child of fairy origin; and on her first visit

to the pantomime, when the fairies made their appearance on the stage,

she declared that they were her proper people, and cried and struggled

to get to them with such vehemence that it was necessary to remove her

from the theatre. Among her amusements, her chief delight was in the

ample gardens around her homes at Stratford and Blackheath, where she

would hold familiar converse with the flowers, putting into their petals

tiny notes for her lost relatives, the fairies, who in return would

visit her in her dreams and assure her of their continued affection, and

counsel her to have patience and courage.

The chief occupation of her girlhood was the writing of poems and

tales[10] which were tinged with an exquisite mysticism, and showed a

ripeness of soul and maturity of feeling and knowledge wholly

unaccountable for by her years, her experiences, or her physical

heredity. At school she always obtained the first prizes for

composition, and her faculty of improvisation was the delight of her

companions; the subjects of these her earlier romances being lovely

princesses, gallant knights, castles, dragons, and the like, when--as

may readily be supposed--her tall and slender frame, long golden hair,

delicacy of complexion, deep-set hazel eyes, beauty of feature, the brow

and the mouth being especially notable, the brightness of her looks,

vivacity of her manner, her musical voice, and the easy eloquence of her

diction,--all combined to make her an ideal heroine for her own

romances. She could hardly, however, be said to be a _persona grata_

with her pastors and masters. For while her independence of character

and strength of will were apt to bring her into conflict with rules and

regulations of which she failed to recognise the need, her thirst for

knowledge, especially on religious subjects, prompted her to the

proposition of questions which were highly embarrassing to her teachers;

and nothing that they could say succeeded in convincing her that her

duty lay in believing what she was told, and not in understanding it.

She very early learnt to resent the disabilities of her sex, and to

insist that they were not real but artificial, the result of masculine

selfishness and injustice. This hatred of injustice and its correlative

cruelty, especially towards animals, attained in her the force and

dignity of a passion, her sensitiveness on this score making the chief

mental misery of her life.

Of one gift possessed by her she early learnt to repress the

manifestation. This was the faculty for seeing apparitions and divining

the characters and fortunes of people. For she was a born seer. But the

inability of her elders to comprehend the faculty, and their consequent

ascription of it to pathological causes, were wont to lead to references

to the family doctor with results so eminently disagreeable and even

injurious to her, as soon to suggest the wisdom of keeping silence

respecting her experiences.

Her first published compositions were written at the age of

thirteen[11], the editors who accepted her contributions to their

magazines being under the impression that they came from a grown-up

person and not from the mere child that she was. They cost her, she

assured me, little labour, especially the poems, but seemed to come to

her ready-made, and to flow through her spontaneously. And whatever the

country in which their scene lay, the local colouring and descriptions

were always faithful and vivid, as if the places and their inhabitants

were familiar and even actually visible to her.

It was not, however, to any encouragement of her peculiar gifts that

such excellency as she exhibited was due. Rather were they severely

repressed, especially in respect of drawing, singing and music, lest she

should be tempted to follow them as a profession; a fear which had been

excited by the suggestions of her masters that she would be certain of

success in any of those lines.

Her innate consciousness of a mission seemed to her to indicate her as

destined for some redemptive work, not only for others, but also for

herself. For, while the instincts of the Champion and the Saviour were

potent in her, she was dimly conscious of its possessing also an

expiatory element, in virtue of which her own salvation would largely

depend upon her endeavours to save others. She had as yet no theory

whereby to explain this or any other of the problems she was to herself.

All that she knew was that she possessed, or rather was possessed of,

these feelings and impulses. It was easy to see by her account of

herself that she was as one driven of the Spirit long before the Spirit

definitely revealed itself to her. The two departments of humanity which

she felt especially impelled to succour and save were her own sex and

the animals. For she would recognise no hard and fast line between

masculine and feminine, human and animal, or even between animal and

plant. In her eyes everything that lived was humanity, only in different

stages of its unfoldment. Even the flowers were persons for her.

As she approached womanhood she found herself looking forward to

marriage far less for its own sake than as a means of emancipation from

restrictions on her choice of a career. Her father died while she was

yet wanting two or three years of her majority, leaving her mistress of

an income ample for a single woman. And when at length she became

engaged to Algernon Godfrey Kingsford, a cousin to whom she had some

time been attached, it was on the understanding that she should remain

unfettered in this respect. He held at the time a post in the Civil

Service; but soon after their marriage, which took place on the last day

of 1867, determined to read for holy orders. This gave her an

opportunity for making herself acquainted with Anglican theology, of

which--thirsting for knowledge of all kinds--she eagerly availed

herself, accompanying him in all his studies, and greatly facilitating

them by her admirable scholarly methods. This proved to be the first

great step in her religious and intellectual training for her destined

mission.

One of the occupations of her early married life was the editing of a

lady's magazine, which she purchased with a view of making it an

instrument for the dissemination of her ideas especially in regard to

her sex. And she accordingly took an active part in the movement then

recently originated for the enfranchisement of women, achieving an

extraordinary success as a public speaker. But, becoming convinced that

their cause would be best advanced by the practical demonstration of

their fitness for the promotion they sought, and also feeling her own

need for the discipline of a severe intellectual training to balance the

emotional side of her nature, she soon withdrew from active

participation in the movement. She moreover recognised as a grave

mistake the disposition evinced by her fellow-workers to suppress their

womanliness in favour of a factitious masculinity, under the impression

that they would thereby exalt their sex; her idea being, that their true

policy lay in magnifying rather than in depreciating their womanhood.

Meanwhile she had given birth to a daughter, her only child.

Her magazine was given up after a couple of years, the results failing

to justify the expenditure of time, labour and money, requisite for its

continuance. Not that it lacked adequate support; but the principles on

which she insisted on conducting it proved to be incompatible with

commercial success. She resolutely refused all advertisements of

articles, whether of food or of clothing, of which she disapproved; and

she had adopted the pythagorean regimen and discarded as unhygienic

sundry articles of attire ordinarily deemed indispensable by her sex. It

was in her magazine that she first struck the note which proved the

initiation of the holy warfare since waged against the horrors of the

physiological laboratory, a warfare in which she bore a foremost part

and developed the malady of which she died.

In 1870, a long and severe illness, which compelled her return to her

mother's house at Hastings to be nursed, led to her entry upon another

phase in her inner life, and a further stage in the process of her

education for her mission. She had early recoiled from the faith in

which she had been reared. This was Protestantism in its most unlovely

form, cold, harsh, narrow, dogmatic. Her closer acquaintance with it as

a clergyman's wife had done nothing to mitigate her judgment of it.

Explaining nothing and lacking fervour and poetry, it left head and

heart alike unsatisfied. Her residence as an invalid at Hastings brought

her into intimacy with some devout Catholics, the effect of which was to

intensify the repugnance already set up. She attended the Catholic

services, and visited the sisters in the convent, reading their books of

devotion and even making an extended study of Catholic doctrine, for she

would do nothing by halves. She found what satisfied her heart and

artistic tastes. But the chief determining cause of the change upon

which she at length resolved, was her reception by night of sundry

visitations, purporting to be of angelic nature, and enjoining on her,

for the sake of the mission to which she was called--the knowledge of

which, she was told, would in due time be revealed to her--that she join

the Roman communion. Well aware that the confession of such experiences,

whether to her relations or to a minister of her own Church, would

elicit only a smile of pity or contempt, with a recommendation to seek

medical advice, and involve other contingencies equally distasteful, she

resolved to see how the same confession would be treated by a Catholic

priest. The result of the essay was that she was listened to with

respect and sympathy, and informed that the Church fully recognised such

visitations as coming within the divine order, and as being a token of

high spiritual favour and grace; and while it refrained from pronouncing

positively on them, considered that they ought not to be lightly

disregarded. She was soon afterwards received into the Roman Church,

being baptised on September 14, 1870. On June 9, 1872, she was confirmed

by Archbishop Manning, who admonished her to utilise her attractions in

making converts. And on each occasion she received additional names, in

virtue of which she now bore the names of all the five women who were by

the Cross and at the Sepulchre.

None the less, however, did she retain her independence of mind and

conduct. She accepted no direction, and professed no tenet that she did

not understand. And it was soon made clear to her that the Spirit, of

whom she was being impelled, did not intend her to regard her adoption

of Catholicism as more than a step in her education for the work

required of her. For the following year saw her bent on seeking a

medical degree, under the impression that such a step was in some way

related to the mission of which she had received such and so many

mysterious intimations. And she had scarcely commenced her study of

medicine when this impression was reinforced by the following incident,

the scene of which was her home in Shropshire, in the parish of which

her husband had then recently become incumbent, and where I first

visited them.

This was the receipt of a letter from a lady who was a stranger to her,

written from a distant part of the country, and saying that she, the

writer, had read with profound interest and admiration a story[12] of

Mrs Kingsford which, after appearing in her magazine, had been published

as a book, and that after reading it she had received from the Holy

Spirit a message for her which was to be delivered in person. After some

hesitation as to what reply to make, Mrs Kingsford--whose account I am

following exactly--agreed to receive her; an appointment was made, and

the stranger duly presented herself. She was tall, erect, distinguished

looking, with hair of iron-grey and strangely brilliant eyes, and was

perfectly calm and collected of demeanour. The message was to the effect

that Mrs Kingsford was to remain in retirement for five years,

continuing the studies and mode of life on which she had entered,

whatever they might be--for that the messenger did not know--and to

suffer nothing and no one to draw her aside from them. That when these

probationary five years were past, the Holy Spirit would bring her

forth from her seclusion, and a great work would be given her to do. All

this was uttered with a rapt and inspired expression, as though she had

been a Sibyl pronouncing an oracle. After delivering her message, the

messenger kissed her on both cheeks and departed, first asking only

whether she thought her mad; a question to which for a moment Mrs

Kingsford found it somewhat difficult to make reply. But only for a

moment. For then there rushed on her the conviction that it was all

genuine and true, and was but a fresh unfoldment of the mystery of her

life and destiny, and in full accordance with her own foreshadowings

from the beginning.

Some four years later, at a time when Mrs Kingsford was in great straits

for want of a suitable home in London in which to carry on her studies,

the same lady was similarly commissioned on her behalf, while totally

ignorant both of her whereabouts and her need, and with results entirely

satisfactory. On which occasion I had the privilege of making her

acquaintance, and the satisfaction of finding her not merely perfectly

sane, but a person entitled to the highest consideration, noted for her

pious devotion to works of beneficence involving complete

self-abnegation; and in short a veritable "Mother in Israel."

The event above related occurred in the spring of 1873, the summer of

which year saw Mrs Kingsford impelled to do what led to the most crucial

of the events upon which her destined mission hinged, namely, to write

to me the letter which led to my visit to her home. In the autumn of the

same year she passed her matriculation examination at the Apothecaries'

Hall with success so great as to fill her with high hopes of a

triumphant passage through the course of her student-life. But

immediately afterwards her hopes were dashed, for the English medical

authorities saw fit to close their schools to women, and the way to her

anticipated career was shut against her.

Such was the position when, in February, 1874, I visited the Shropshire

rectory, and such in brief the history which was gradually unfolded to

me as my evident sympathy and appreciation gained the confidence of the

still young couple, whose senior I was by some twenty years. Both

husband and wife were at their wits' end, the situation being aggravated

by a circumstance which was first brought to my knowledge on my

suggestion of the postponement of her design until such time as the

medical authorities should come to their right minds and re-open their

schools to women. The circumstance in question was her terrible

liability on the ground of ill-health, and especially of asthma, to

which she was a martyr, life in the country being impossible to her for

the greater part of the year, when it was only in some large city that

she was able to breathe. With the schools closed against her in England,

her thoughts turned towards France, the University of Paris being open

to women. But for obvious reasons her husband, who could not absent

himself from his duties to accompany her, would not consent to her going

thither unless under suitable protection. For himself he had but one

wish, that she should follow her bent and fashion her life as seemed

best to her; for he recognised her as entitled by her endowments and

aspirations, as well as by the terms of their engagement, to full

liberty of action, while the conditions of her health claimed all

consideration from him. If, indeed, the Gods had destined her for a

mission requiring freedom of action combined with the shelter and

support of a husband's name, it seemed to me that in him they had

created a man expressly for the office. For some time, however, the

difficulty seemed insuperable, and one that would yield to no amount of

deliberation, even with the best will of all concerned.

Meanwhile her self-revelations continued, being evidently prompted, at

least as much by the desire to obtain some explanation of herself for

herself, to whom she was, she avowed, a complete puzzle, as by the

desire to elicit answering confidences from me. And they became with

each disclosure more and more striking, until I could hardly resist the

conviction that she was possessed of some faculty in virtue of which she

was able to have direct perception of conclusions to which I had won my

way by dint of long and arduous thinking, and in some instances in

advance of me. She had read my mental history between the lines of my

books, and was fully prepared to learn that I too had a consciousness,

analogous to her own, of a mission in life perhaps also analogous to her

own.

This, I was able to assure her, was indeed the case, and that all my

books had been written in the idea of finding my way to it by dint of

free, unfettered thinking. For, brought up in the strictest of

evangelical sects, I had even as a lad begun to be revolted by the creed

in which I was reared, and had very early come to regard its tenets,

especially of total depravity and vicarious atonement, as a libel

nothing short of blasphemous against both God and man, and to feel that

no greater boon could be bestowed on the world than its emancipation

from the bondage of a belief so degrading and so destructive of any

lofty ideal. I had felt strongly that only in such measure as I might be

the means of its abolition would my life be a success and a satisfaction

to myself. It even seemed to me that my own credit was involved in the

matter; and that in disproving such beliefs I should be vindicating my

own character. For if God were evil, as those doctrines made Him, I

could by no possibility be good, since I must have my derivation from

Him. And I knew that, however weak and unwise I might be, I was not

evil.

Then, too, my life, like hers, had been one of much isolation and

meditation. I had felt myself a stranger even with my closest intimates.

For I was always conscious of a difference which separated me from them,

and of a side to which they could not have access. I had graduated at

Cambridge with the design of taking orders; but only to find that I

could not do so conscientiously, and to feel that to commit myself to

any conditions incompatible with absolute freedom of thought and

expression would be a treachery against both myself and my kind;--for it

was for no merely personal end that I wanted to discover the truth. I

longed to get away from all my surroundings in order, first, to think

myself out of all that I had been taught, and so to make my mind as a

clean sheet whereon to receive true impressions and at first hand; and,

next, to think myself into a condition and to a level wherein I could

see all things--myself, nature, and God--face to face, with vision

undimmed and undistorted by beliefs which, being inherited only and

traditional, instead of the result of conviction honestly arrived at,

were factitious and unreal; no living outcome of my own growth and

observation, but a veritable straitwaistcoat, stifling life and

restraining development. And so it had come that--as related in my first

novel, "The Pilgrim and the Shrine"[13], which was essentially

autobiographical--I had eagerly fallen in with a proposal to join an

expedition to the then newly-discovered placers of California, an

enterprise which, besides promising to gratify the love for adventure,

physical as well as mental, which was strong in me, would postpone if

not solve the difficulty of my position. It possessed, moreover, the

high recommendation of taking me to the world of the fresh,

unsophisticated West, instead of to that East which had been made almost

hateful to me by its association with the tenets by which existence had

been poisoned for me.

So, setting my face towards the sunset, I became one of the band of

"Forty-niners" in California, and remained abroad in the continents and

isles of the Pacific, from America passing to Australia, until the

intended year of my absence had grown into nearly ten years, and I had

experienced well-nigh every vicissitude and extreme which might serve to

heighten the consciousness, toughen the fibre, and try the soul of man.

But throughout all, the idea of a mission remained with me, gathering

force and consistency, until it was made clear to me that not

destruction merely, but construction, not the exposure of error but the

demonstration of truth, was comprised in it. For I saw that it was

possible to reduce religion to a series of first principles, necessary

truths and self-evident propositions, and that only in such measure as

it was thus reduced and discerned, was it really true and really

believed;--in short, that faith and knowledge are identical. To accept a

religion on the ground that one had been born in it, and apart from its

appeal to the mind and moral conscience, and thus to make it dependent

upon the accident of birth and parentage, was to resemble the African

savage who for the same reason worships Mumbo Jumbo. How, moreover,--I

asked myself--could a religion which was not in accord with first

principles, represent a God, Who, to be God, must Himself be the first

of, and must comprise all principles; must account logically for all the

facts of consciousness, be it unfolded as far as it may? Granting that,

as the poet says, "an honest man's the noblest work of God," it was for

me no less true that "an honest God's the noblest work of man." And it

was precisely such a being that I longed to elaborate out of, or

discover in, my own consciousness, confident that the achievement meant

the solution of all problems, the rectification of all difficulties, the

satisfaction of all aspirations, intellectual, moral, and spiritual.

Following such trains of thought, I arrived at the assurance that I had

within my own consciousness both the truth itself and the verification

of the truth, and that it remained only to find these.

Returning to England in 1857, and, after an interval, devoting myself to

literature, all that I wrote, whether essay or fiction, represented the

endeavour by probing the consciousness to the utmost in every direction

to discover a central, radiant, and indefeasible point from which all

things could be deduced, and on which, as a pivot they must depend and

revolve. I read largely, and went much among people, always in search of

aid in my quest; but only with the result of finding that neither from

books nor from persons could I even begin to get what I sought, but only

from thought.

Meanwhile everything seemed ordered with a view to the end ultimately

attained. For, so far from having left behind me for ever the

vicissitudes, and struggles, and trials, and ordeals, in which the

wildernesses of the western and southern worlds had been so fruitful, I

was found of them in the old world to which I had returned; and this in

number, kind, and degree, such as to make it appear as if what I had

borne before had been inflicted expressly for the purpose of enabling me

to bear what was put upon me now. And it was only when I had learnt by

experience that the very capacity for thought is enhanced by feeling no

less than by thinking, that the "ministry of pain" found its

explanation. For the feeling required of me proved to be that of the

inner, not merely of the outer man, of the soul, not merely of the body;

and the faculty, to be the intuition, and not merely the intellect.

Hence I was made to learn by experience, long before the fact was

formulated for me in words, that only "by the bruising of the outer, the

inner is set free," and "man is alive only so far as he has felt."

Everything seemed contrived expressly in order to force me in this

inward direction. Even in my literary work, nothing of the "trade"

element was permitted to intrude. I could not write except when writing

to or from my own centre. Faculty itself was shut off, if turned to any

other purpose. Everything I wrote must minister to and represent a step

in my own unfoldment.

I can confidently affirm that the only books which really helped me

were, with scarcely an exception, those which I wrote myself. Of the

exceptions the chief was Emerson. His essays had been my _vade mecum_ in

all my world-wide wanderings. And there were three sentences of his

which, to use his own phrase, "found" me as no others had done. They

were these: "The talent is the call"; "I the imperfect adore my own

perfect"; and, "Beware when God lets loose a thinker on the earth." Like

Emerson himself, I had yet to learn that man's own perfect is God, and

self-culture is God-culture, provided the self be the inmost self. The

two other books which most helped me were Bailey's "Festus," and

Carlyle's "Hero-Worship." And I owed something to Tucker's "Light of

Nature." By which it will be seen that my affinity was always for the

prophets rather than the priests of literature; for the intuitionalists

rather than the externalists.

Gradually two leading ideas took definite form in my mind, which,

however, proved to be but two aspects or applications of one and the

same idea. And that idea proved to be the keynote of all that I was

seeking after. For it finally solved the problems of existence, of

religion, of the Bible, of Being itself. Hence the necessity of this

reference to it.

This idea was that of a duality subsisting in every unity, such as I had

nowhere read or heard of. I was, of course, aware that the theological

doctrine of the Trinity involved a Duality. But not of a kind to find a

response in my mind. And being unable to assimilate it as it stood, I

ignored it; putting it aside until it should present itself to me in an

aspect in which it was intelligible. I felt, however vaguely, that the

Duality I sought was in the Bible, though it had been missed by the

official expositors of that book. And the conviction that it was in some

way connected with my life-work was so strong that I constructed for the

covers of my two first books a monogram symbolical of Genesis i. 27. And

I looked to the unfoldment of what I felt to be the secret significance

of that utterance for the explication of all the mysteries the solution

of which engrossed me. The thought did not seem to originate in any of

my experiences, but rather to be part of my original stock of innate

ideas, supposing that there are such ideas, and to derive confirmation

and explanation from my experiences.

Those experiences were in this wise. It had been my privilege to have

the friendship of several women of a type so noble that to know them was

at once an education and a religion; women whose perfection of character

had served more than anything else to make me believe in God, when all

other grounds had failed. I could in no wise account for them on the

hypothesis of a fortuitous concourse of unintelligent atoms. And not

only did I find that the higher the type the more richly they were

endowed with precisely the faculty of which I myself was conscious as

distinguishing me from my fellows; I found also that I was unable to

recognise any woman as of a high type as woman save in so far as she was

possessed of it. I had failed to find any who possessed the knowledge I

craved, and who were thereby able to help me in my thought. They helped

me nevertheless, but it was by _being_ what they were, rather than by

_knowing_ and _doing_, be they admirable as they might in these

respects. I recognised in them that which supplemented and complemented

my mental self in such wise as to suggest unbounded possibilities of

results to accrue from the intimate association of two minds thus

attuned to each other, and duly unfolded by thought and study. It

needed, it seemed to me, but the reverberation and intensification of

thought, induced by the apposition of two minds thus related, for the

production of the divine child Truth in the very highest spheres of

thought. So that the results would by no means be restricted to the mere

sum of the associated capacities of the two minds themselves. And in

view of such high possibilities I found myself appropriating and

applying the ejaculation which Virgil puts into the mouth of Anna when

urging the union of her sister Dido with AEneas--

"Quae surgere regna

Conjugio tali!"

and I felt with Tennyson that

"They two together well might move the world."

So boundless seemed to me the kingdoms of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty

which would spring from such conjunction.

It goes without saying that such relationship was contemplated by me

only as the accompaniment of a happy re-marriage. [For I had married in

Australia only to be widowered after a year's wedlock.] But such a

prospect was so long withheld as to make me dubious of its

realisation[14]. Nevertheless, some inner voice was ever saying: "Wait;

wait. Everything comes to him who waits, provided only he do so in faith

and patience, looking to the highest." But that I did wait, and

accordingly kept myself free for what ultimately was assigned to me, was

due far less to the expectation of finding that for which I waited, than

to the vivid consciousness which I had of the bitterness that would come

of finding it, only to be withheld from it through a previous disposal

of myself in some other and incompatible quarter. This was an impression

which served largely to keep my life as free as I desired my thought to

be. But that the as yet undisclosed arbiters of my destiny deemed it

insufficient as a deterrent, appeared from their reinforcement of it in

a manner which effectually debarred me from marriage save on the

condition, impossible to me, of a mercenary alliance. This was a

reversal of fortune through a succession of losses so serious as to be

the cause of reducing my means to the minimum compatible with existence

at all in my own station, which soon afterwards happened. That there

were yet further reasons for this imposition on me of the rule of

poverty, arising out of the nature of the work required of me, was in

due time made manifest, and also what those reasons were. They need not

be specified here, excepting only this one. It made impossible the

ascription to my destined colleague of mercenary motives for her

association with me. In this I came to recognise a delicate providence

for which I felt I could not be too thankful. In the meantime, even

while smarting severely from this dispensation, and others yet more

bitter which were heaped on me for no apparent cause or fault of my own

that I could discern, the thought that most of all served to sustain me

under what I felt would have utterly broken down in heart or head, or in

both of these organs, any other person whatever of whom I had

knowledge,--that thought was the surmise or suspicion that all these

things, hard to bear as they were, and undeserved as they seemed, might

prove to be blessings in disguise, in ministering to the realisation of

the controlling ambition of my life by educating me for it; and that

according to the manner in which I bore them might be the result.

There is yet one more personal disclosure essential to this part of my

relation. It concerns my own mental standpoint at the time at which my

narrative has arrived. Bent as I was on penetrating the secret of things

at first hand, and by means of a thought absolutely free, I was never

for a moment disposed to turn, as my so-called free-thinking

contemporaries one and all had turned, a scornful back upon whatever

related to or savoured of the current religion. Scripture and dogma were

not for me necessarily either false or inscrutable because their

official exponents had presented them in an aspect which outraged my

reason and revolted my conscience. I felt bound--if only in justice to

them and myself--at least to find out what they did mean before finally

discarding them. And in this act of justice I was strangely sustained

by a sense of the possibility that the truth, if any, contained in them,

was no other than that of which I was in search. This is to say, that in

all my investigations I kept before me the idea that, if I could discern

the actual nature of existence and the intended sense of the Bible and

Christianity, independently of each other, they might prove on

comparison to be identical; in which case the latter would really

represent a true revelation. Meanwhile, I found myself constrained to

believe, as an axiomatic proposition, that the higher and nobler the

conception I framed in my imagination of the nature of existence, and

the more in accordance with my ideas of what, to be perfect, the

constitution of the universe ought to be, the nearer I should come to

the actual truth.

Similarly with religion. For a religion to be true, it must, I felt

absolutely assured, be ideally perfect after the most perfect ideal that

we can frame. This is to say, that not only must it be in itself such as

to satisfy both head and heart, mind and moral conscience, spirit and

soul; it must also be perfectly simple, obviously reasonable, coherent,

self-evident, founded in the nature of things, incapable--when once

comprehended--of being conceived of as otherwise, absolutely equitable,

eternally true, and recognisable as being all these, invariable in

operation, independent of all accidents of time, place, persons and

events, and comparable to the demonstration of a mathematical problem in

that it needs no testimony or authority beyond those of the mind; and

requiring for its efficacious observance, nothing that is extraneous or

inaccessible to the subject-individual, but within his ability to

recognise and fulfil, provided only that he so will. It must also be

such as to enable him by the observance of it to turn his existence to

the highest possible account imaginable by him, be his imagination as

developed as it may: and all this as independently of any being other

than himself, as if he were the sole personal entity in the universe,

and were himself the universe. That is to say, the means of a man's

perfectionment must inhere in his own system, and he must be competent

of himself effectually to apply them. It is further necessary, because

equitable, that he be allowed sufficient time and opportunity for the

discovery, understanding and application of such means.

Such are the terms and conditions of an ideally perfect religion, as I

conceived of them. It is a definition which excludes well-nigh, if not

quite, all the characteristics ordinarily regarded as appertaining to

religion, and notably to that of Christendom. For in excluding

everything extraneous to the actual subject-individual, and requiring

religion to be self-evident and necessarily true, it excludes as

superfluous and irrelevant, history, tradition, authority, revelation,

as ordinarily conceived of, ecclesiastical ordinance, priestly

ministration, mediatorial function, vicarious satisfaction, and even the

operation of Deity as subsisting without and apart from the man, all of

which are essential elements in the accepted conception of religion.

Nevertheless, profound as was my distrust of the faithfulness of the

orthodox presentation, I could not reconcile myself to a renunciation of

the originals on which that presentation was founded, until I had

satisfied myself that I had fathomed their intended and real meaning.

I had, moreover, very early conceived a personal affection for Jesus as

a man, so strong as to serve as a deterrent both from abandoning the

faith founded on Him, and from accepting it as it is as worthy of Him.

Such was my standpoint, intellectual and religious, at the period in

question. The time came when it found full justification; our results

being such as to verify it in everyone of its manifold aspects. And not

this only. The doctrine which had so mysteriously evolved itself out of

my consciousness to attain by slow degrees the position of a controlling

influence in my life, the doctrine, namely of a Duality subsisting in

the Original Unity of Underived Being, and as inhering therefore in

every unit of derived being, this doctrine proved to be the key to the

mysteries both of Creation and of Redemption, as propounded in the Bible

and manifested in the Christ; the key also to the nature of man,

disclosing the facts both of his possession of divine potentialities as

his birthright, and his endowment with the faculty whereby to discern

and to realise them. And while it proved constructive in respect of

Divine Truth, it proved destructive in respect of the falsification of

that truth which had passed for orthodoxy, by disclosing the source, the

motive, the method and the agents of that falsification.

But these things were still in the future. At the time with which we are

now concerned, I had commenced a book to represent the standpoint just

described, "The Keys of the Creeds." The first and initial draft of

that book was written under the sympathetic eye of one of the order of

noble women to which reference has been made, and owed much to the

enhancement of faculty derived by me from such conjunction of minds. The

second and final draft was written under like relationship with another

member of the self-same order, even she who proved to be my destined

collaborator in the work of which this book recounts the story. It was

published in 1875. It is necessary only to say further of the book thus

produced, that notwithstanding certain defects of expression, due

chiefly to an insufficient acquaintance with the terminology of

metaphysics, it proved an invaluable help to very many, as was amply

shown by the letters of grateful appreciation received from them by me.

The keynote was that which afterwards found expression in the

utterance,--

"There is no enlightenment from without: the secret of things is

revealed from within.

"From without cometh no Divine Revelation: but the Spirit within beareth

witness"[15].

For the lesson it contained was the lesson that the phenomenal world

cannot disclose its own secret. To find this, man must seek in that

substantial world which lies within himself, since all that is real is

within the man. From which it followed that if there is no within, or if

that within be inaccessible, either there is no reality, or man has no

organon of knowledge, and is by constitution agnostic. Meanwhile, the

very fact of my possession of an ideal exempt from the limitations of

the apparent, constituted for me a strong presumption in favour of the

reality of the ideal.

The moment of contact between my destined colleague and myself, was as

critical for one as for the other, only that in my case the crisis was

intellectual. I could see to the end of the argument I was then

elaborating; and that it landed me close to the dividing barrier between

the two worlds of sense and spirit, supposing the latter to have any

being[16]. But I neither saw beyond, nor knew how to ascertain whether

or not there is a beyond. We were discussing the question of there being

an inner sense in Scripture, such as my book suggested; and whether,

supposing it to have such a sense, it required for its discernment any

faculty more recondite than a subtle imagination; and if it did, is

there such a faculty? and what is its nature? By which it will be seen

that I was still in ignorance of the nature of the faculty I found in

myself and recognised as especially subsisting in women, and which, for

me, really made the woman.

The reply rendered by her to these questionings constituted the proof

positive that I had at length discovered the mind which my own had so

long craved as its sorely needed complement. In response to them she

gave me a manuscript in her own writing, asking me to read it and tell

her frankly what I thought of it. Having read and re-read it, I

enquired how and where she had got it. She replied by asking what I

thought of it. I answered, "If there is such a thing as divine

revelation, I know of nothing that comes nearer to my ideal of what it

ought to be. It is exactly what the world is perishing for want of--a

reasonable faith." She then told me that it had come to her in her

sleep, but whence or how she did not know; nor could she say whether she

had seen it or heard it, but only that it came suddenly into her mind,

without her having ever heard or thought of such teaching before. It was

an exposition of the Story of the Fall, exhibiting it as a parable

having a significance purely spiritual, wholly reasonable, and of

universal application, physical persons, things, and events described in

it disappearing in favour of principles, processes, and states

appertaining to the soul; no mere local history, therefore, but an

eternal verity. The experience, she went on to tell me, was far from

exceptional; she had received many things which had greatly struck and

pleased her in the same way, and sometimes while in the waking state in

a sort of day-dream. It was subsequently incorporated into our book,

"The Perfect Way."

Her account of her faculty, of which she related several instances,

produced a profound impression on me. It differed altogether from any

that I had heard of as claimed by the votaries of "Spiritualism," a

creed to which neither of us had assented; such little experience as we

had of it having failed to convince us of the genuineness of its

phenomena; though she, on her part, confessed to having been somewhat at

a loss to account for some things she had seen. But though not

spiritualists, we were not materialists. Rather were we idealists, who

had yet to learn and, as the event proved, were destined shortly to

learn, that the Ideal _is_ the Real, and is Spiritual.

The event also proved that in order to learn it and to know it

positively by experience, there were two conditions to be fulfilled, on

both of which she had already entered, but I had yet to enter. One of

these conditions was physical, the other was emotional. The former

consisted in the renunciation of flesh-food in favour of a diet derived

from the vegetable kingdom. The latter condition consisted in the

kindling of our enthusiasm for the ideal into a flame of such ardour and

intensity as to make it the dominant passion of our lives, and one in

which all others would be swallowed up. It was to be an enthusiasm at

once for Humanity, for Perfection, for God.

Had we been in any degree instructed in spiritual or occult science, we

should have known that the renunciation of flesh-food, though in itself

a physical act, has ever been recognised by initiates as the prime

essential in the unfoldment of the spiritual faculties; since only when

man is purely nourished can he attain clearness and fulness of spiritual

perception. As it was, neither of us had ever heard of occult science,

or of the necessity of such a regimen to the perfectionment of faculty.

She had adopted it on grounds physiological, chemical, hygienic,

aesthetic, and moral; not on grounds mental or spiritual. I now undertook

to adopt it partly on the same grounds which had influenced her, and

partly with a view to enhance and consolidate the sympathy subsisting

between us. The mental and spiritual advantages of the regimen made

themselves known to us by experience.

The other condition found its fulfilment through the knowledge I derived

from her of the methods of the physiologists. That savages, sorcerers,

brigands, religious fanatics, and corrupt priesthoods had always been

wont to make torture their gain or their pastime, I was well aware, and

believed that evolution would sweep them and their practices away in its

course. But the discovery now first made to me that identical

barbarities are systematically perpetrated by the leaders of modern

science on the pretext of benefiting humanity, in an age which claims to

represent the summit of such evolution as has yet been accomplished; and

that after all its boasts, the best that science can do for the world is

to convert it into a hell and its population into fiends, by the

deliberate renunciation of the distinctive sentiments of humanity,--this

was a discovery which filled me with unspeakable horror and amazement,

at once raising to a white heat the enthusiasm of love for the ideal

already kindled within me, and adding to it a like enthusiasm of

detestation for its opposite. From which it came that I found myself

under the impulsion simultaneously of two mighty influences, the one

attracting, the other repelling, but both operating in the same

direction. For while by the former I was drawn upwards by the beauty of

an ideal indefinitely enhanced by its contrast with the foul actual

below, by the latter I was impelled upwards by the hideousness of that

actual. The sight of the moral abyss disclosed to me in Vivisection, as

I perused volume after volume of the annals of the practice written by

the perpetrators themselves, and now first made accessible to me,

effectually purged out of my system any particle of dilettanteism that

might have still lurked in it, compelling me to regard as of the utmost

urgency all and more than all that I had hitherto contemplated doing

deliberately.

This was the construction of a system of thought which by force of its

appeal to both those two indispensable constituents of humanity, the

head and the heart, shall compel acceptance from all persons really

human, and in presence of which the whole system of which Vivisection

was the typical outcome and symbol should vanish from off the earth.

This system was Materialism of which only now did I discern the full

significance. The systematic organisation of wholesale, protracted,

uncompensatable torture, for ends purely selfish, was--I saw with

absolute distinctness--not an accidental and avoidable outcome of

Materialism, but its logical and inevitable outcome. And it was to the

eradication of Materialism that, from that moment, I dedicated myself.

It was a rescue work for both man and beast, seeing that humanity itself

was menaced with extinction. For the materialist, of course, that which

makes the man is the form. For me it was the character, and it was this,

the character of mankind present and to come, that was at stake. For man

demonised is no longer man. In the overthrow of Materialism, I saw

absolutely, was salvation alone to be found, whether for man or beast.

The consideration that only as an abstainer from flesh-food I could with

entire consistency contend against vivisection, was a potent factor in

determining my change of diet. True, the distinction between death and

torture was a broad one. But the statistics I now for the first time

perused, of the slaughter-house and the cattle-traffic, showed beyond

question, that torture, and this prolonged and severe, is involved in

the use of animals for food as well as for science. And over and above

this was the instinctive perception of the probability that neither

would they who had them killed, whether for food, for sport, or for

clothing, be allowed the privilege of rescuing them from the hands of

the physiologist; nor would the animals be allowed to accept their

deliverance at the hands of those who thus used them. They who would

save others, we felt, must first make sacrifice in themselves. And in

the presence of the joy of working to effect such salvation, sacrifice

would cease to be sacrifice.

This, too, we noted, and with no small satisfaction--that to make the

rescue of the animals an immediate and urgent motive, was in no way to

abandon the original motive of hatred to the tenet of vicarious

atonement. For we recognised vivisection itself as but the extension to

the domain of science, of the very principle by which we had been

inexpressibly revolted in the domain of religion;--the principle of

seeking one's own salvation by the sacrifice of another, and that the

innocent. And so we learnt that "New Scientist is but Old Priest writ

differently,"--to vary Milton's expression; and that in both domains the

tenet had its root in Materialism. When the time came for our mission to

be more particularly defined, our satisfaction was unbounded on

receiving the charge, "We mean you to lay bare the secrets of the

world's sacrificial system." It expressed with absolute conciseness and

exactitude all that we had in our minds, far better than we could have

expressed it.

The importance of this question of vivisection in vitalising us for the

work before us, will be seen by the following fact. The time came when

we knew that the work committed to us was that revelation anew of the

Christ which was to constitute His Second Advent, inasmuch as it was the

interpretation of the truth of which He was the manifestation. It was to

be a spiritual coming; in the "clouds of heaven," the heaven of the

"kingdom within" of man's restored understanding. And, as at His first

advent so at His second, He was to have His birth among the animals.

And so it verily was. For--as I have elsewhere stated[17]--"Their

terrible wrongs, culminating at the hands of their scientific

tormentors, were the last drops which filled to overflowing with

anguish, indignation and wrath, hearts already brimming with the sense

of the world's degradation and misery, wringing from them the cry which

rent the heavens for His descent, and in direct and immediate response

to which He came.

"For the New Gospel of Interpretation was vouchsafed in express

recognition of the determined endeavour, by means of a thought

absolutely fearless and free, to scale the topmost heights, fathom the

lowest depths, and penetrate to the inmost recesses of Consciousness, in

search of the solution of the problem of Existence, under the assured

conviction that, when found, it would prove to be one that would make

above all things Vivisection impossible, if only by demonstrating the

constitution of things to be such that, terrible as is the lot of the

victims of the practice here, they are not without compensation

hereafter, while the lot of their tormentors will be unspeakably worse

than even that of their victims here. And so it proved, with absolute

certainty to be the case, to the full vindication at the same time of

the Divine Justice and the Divine Love;" no experience being withheld

which would qualify us to bear positive testimony thereto. For, although

at the outset we were, as I have said, in no wise believers in the

possibility of such experiences, the time came, and came quickly, when

the veil was withdrawn, and the secrets of the Beyond were disclosed to

us in plenitude, in its every sphere, from the abyss of hell to the

heights of heaven. And we learnt that this had become possible through

the passionate energy with which, in our search for the highest truth,

for the highest ends, and in purest love to redeem, we had directed our

thought inwards and upwards, living at the same time the life requisite

to qualify us for such perceptions. Thus did we obtain practical

realisation of the promise that they who do the divine will, by living

the divine life, shall know of the divine doctrine. Our whole mental

attitude had been one of prayer in its essential sense; which is not

that of _saying_ prayers, but as it came to be defined for us--"the

intense direction of the will and desire towards the Highest; an

unchanging intent to know nothing but the Highest." Because "to think

inwardly, to pray intensely, and to imagine centrally, is to hold

converse with God." And we had done this without knowing it was prayer,

or calling it by that name. For, knowing only the conventional

conception of prayer, we had recoiled from it as from other conventional

conceptions of things religious.

Now, however, we found that we had done instinctively and spontaneously

precisely what was necessary to bring us into relations at once with our

spiritual selves and with the world of those who consist only of the

spiritual self. For, by thus becoming vitalised and sensitive in that

part of man's system which endures and passes on, we had come into open

conditions with the world of those who have thus endured and passed on,

and are no longer of the terrestrial, but of the celestial, having

surmounted all lower and intermediate planes. All this came to us

without anticipation on our part, or any conscious seeking for it; but

yet without causing dismay or surprise when it came. For it came so

gradually as to seem to be but the natural and orderly result of the

unfoldment of our own spiritual consciousness, and excited only feelings

of joy and thankfulness at finding our method and aspirations crowned

with so high a success. Thus was it made absolutely clear to us that, so

far from divine revelation involving miracle, or requiring for its

instruments persons other in kind than the ordinary, it is a prerogative

of man, belonging to him as man; and requiring for its reception only

that he be fully man, alive and sensitive in his own innermost and

highest, in his centre as in his circumference. Thus living on the quick

and finding no others who did so, it seemed to us as if we alone were

the quick, and all others were dead.

We noted yet another way in which we supplemented and complemented each

other. It was in this wise. As I was bent on the construction of a

system of thought which should be at once a science, a philosophy, a

morality, and a religion, and recognisable by the understanding as

indubitably true; she was bent on the construction of a rule of life

equally obvious and binding, and recognisable by the sentiments as alone

according with them, its basis being that sense of perfect justice which

springs from perfect sympathy.

By which it will be seen that while it was her aim to establish a

perfect practice, which might or might not consist with a perfect

doctrine, it was my aim to establish a perfect doctrine which would

inevitably issue in a perfect practice, by at once defining it and

supplying an all-compelling motive for its observance.

These, as we at once recognised, were the two indispensable halves of

one perfect whole. But we had yet to learn the nature and source of the

compelling motive for its enforcement.

The deficiency was made good by the discovery of the fact of man's

permanence as an individual. The revelation of this truth was the

demonstration to us of the inanity--not to use a stronger term--of the

system called "Positivism." In ignoring the soul, that system lacks the

motive and repudiates the source of the sentiments on which it insists,

and to the experiences of which those sentiments are due.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] The book was "By and By: An Historical Romance of the Future," its

object being to show a state of society in which the intuition is

supreme, and individuals follow their own ideals. It represents a step

in E.M.'s unfoldment, but not his final conclusions. In 1873 A.K.,

having read a review of this book in the _Examiner_ (which also

contained a notice of one of her tales), communicated with E.M. (Life

A.K. Vol. I. p. 27.)

[9] This was not the first time that E.M. met A.K. He had met her once

before, in January, 1874, in a picture gallery in London. "It was but

for a short time, and during a single afternoon"; but it was "sufficient

to convince" him of "the unusual character of the personality" with

which he had come into contact. (Life A.K. Vol. I. p. 32.)

[10] Her "very first published production" was a poem in a religious

magazine, when she was "but nine years old." (Life A.K. Vol. I. p. 29.)

[11] "Beatrice: A Tale of the Early Christians," was written by A.K. in

1859, for the _Churchman's Companion_, "but the publisher thought it

worthy to make a separate volume, and offered to bring it out in that

form, and to give her a present for it," which offer was accepted. (Life

A.K. Vol. I. p. 4.)

[12] The Story was "In my Lady's Chamber," and purported to be a

"speculative romance touching a few questions of the day." It was

afterwards published separately as by "Colossa." (Life A.K. Vol. I. pp.

21, 22.)

[13] The first edition of "The Pilgrim and the Shrine" was published in

1867.

[14] E.M. did not marry again. He had one child, Charles Bradley

Maitland, and he died on the 16th February, 1901.

[15] See p. 100

[16] E.M. says that "The Keys of the Creeds" brought his thought up to

the extreme limits of a thought merely intellectual, to transcend which

it would be necessary to penetrate the barrier between the worlds of

sense and of spirit. (Life A.K. Vol. I. p. 54.)

[17] Statement E.C.U. p. 80.