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Annie Besant

1847 – 1933

President of the Theosophical Society  1907-1933

 

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Autobiographical Sketches

By

Annie Besant

 

First published 1885.

 

 

                        

 

 

I am so often asked for references to some pamphlet or journal in which

may be found some outline of my life, and the enquiries are so often

couched in terms of such real kindness, that I have resolved to pen a few

brief autobiographical sketches, which may avail to satisfy friendly

questioners, and to serve, in some measure, as defence against unfair

attack.

 

 

 

I.

 

 

On October 1st, 1847, I made my appearance in this "vale of tears",

"little Pheasantina", as I was irreverently called by a giddy aunt, a pet

sister of my mother's. Just at that time my father and mother were

staying within the boundaries of the City of London, so that I was born

well "within the sound of Bow bells".

 

Though born in London, however, full three quarters of my blood are

Irish. My dear mother was a Morris--the spelling of the name having been

changed from Maurice some five generations back--and I have often heard

her tell a quaint story, illustrative of that family pride which is so

common a feature of a decayed Irish family. She was one of a large

family, and her father and mother, gay, handsome, and extravagant, had

wasted merrily what remained to them of patrimony. I can remember her

father well, for I was fourteen years of age when he died. A bent old

man, with hair like driven snow, splendidly handsome in his old age,

hot-tempered to passion at the lightest provocation, loving and wrath in

quick succession. As the family grew larger and the moans grew smaller,

many a pinch came on the household, and the parents were glad to accept

the offer of a relative to take charge of Emily, the second daughter. A

very proud old lady was this maiden aunt, and over the mantel-piece of

her drawing-room ever hung a great diagram, a family tree, which mightily

impressed the warm imagination of the delicate child she had taken in

charge. It was a lengthy and well-grown family tree, tracing back the

Morris family to the days of Charlemagne, and branching out from a stock

of "the seven kings of France". Was there ever yet a decayed. Irish

family that did not trace itself back to some "kings"? and these

"Milesian kings"--who had been expelled from France, doubtless for good

reasons, and who had sailed across the sea and landed in fair Erin, and

there had settled and robbed and fought--did more good 800 years after

their death than they did, I expect, during their ill-spent lives, if

they proved a source of gentle harmless pride to the old maiden lady who

admired their names over her mantel-piece in the earlier half of the

present century. And, indeed, they acted as a kind of moral thermometer,

in a fashion that would much have astonished their ill-doing and

barbarous selves. For my mother has told me how when she would commit

some piece of childish naughtiness, her aunt would say, looking gravely

over her spectacles at the small culprit: "Emily, your conduct is

unworthy of the descendant of the seven kings of France." And Emily, with

her sweet grey Irish eyes, and her curling masses of raven-black hair,

would cry in penitent shame over her unworthiness, with some vague idea

that those royal, and to her very real ancestors, would despise her small

sweet rosebud self, as wholly unworthy of their disreputable majesties.

But that same maiden aunt trained the child right well, and I keep ever

grateful memory of her, though I never knew her, for her share in forming

the tenderest, sweetest, proudest, purest, noblest woman I have ever

known. I have never met a woman more selflessly devoted to those she

loved, more passionately contemptuous of all that was mean or base, more

keenly sensitive on every question of honor, more iron in will, more

sweet in tenderness, than the mother who made my girlhood sunny as

dreamland, who guarded me until my marriage from every touch of pain that

she could ward off, or could bear for me, who suffered more in every

trouble that touched me in later life than I did myself, and who died in

the little house I had taken for our new home in Norwood, worn out ere

old age touched her, by sorrow, poverty and pain, in May, 1874.

 

Of my father my memory is less vivid, for he died when I was but five

years old. He was of mixed race, English on his father's side, Irish on

his mother's, and was born in Galway, and educated in Ireland; he took

his degree at Dublin University, and walked the hospitals as a medical

student. But after he had qualified as a medical man a good appointment

was offered him by a relative in the City of London, and he never

practised regularly as a doctor.

 

In the City his prospects were naturally promising; the elder branch of

the Wood Family, to which he belonged, had for many generations been

settled in Devonshire, farming their own land. When the eldest son

William, my father, came of age, he joined with his father to cut off the

entail, and the old acres were sold. Meanwhile members of other branches

had entered commercial life, and had therein prospered exceedingly. One

of them had become Lord Mayor of London, had vigorously supported the

unhappy Queen Caroline, had paid the debts of the Duke of Kent, in order

that that reputable individual might return to England with his Duchess,

so that the future heir to the throne might be born on English soil; he

had been rewarded with a baronetcy as a cheap method of paying his

services. Another, my father's first cousin once removed, a young

barrister, had successfully pleaded a suit in which was concerned the

huge fortune of a miserly relative, and had thus laid the foundations of

a great success; he won for himself a vice-chancellorship and a

knighthood, and then the Lord Chancellorship of England, with the barony

of Hatherley. A third, a brother of the last, Western Wood, was doing

good service in the House of Commons. A fourth, a cousin of the last two,

had thrown himself with such spirit and energy into mining work, that he

had accumulated a fortune. In fact all the scattered branches had made

their several ways in the world, save that elder one to which my father

belonged. That had vegetated on down in the country, and had grown poorer

while the others grew richer. My father's brothers had somewhat of a

fight for life. One has prospered and is comfortable and well-to-do. The

other led for years a rough and wandering life, and "came to grief"

generally. Some years ago I heard of him as a store-keeper in Portsmouth

dock-yard, occasionally boasting in feeble fashion that his cousin was

Lord Chancellor of England, and not many months since I heard from him in

South Africa, where he has secured some appointment in the Commissariat

Department, not, I fear, of a very lucrative character.

 

Let us come back to Pheasantina, who, I am told, was a delicate and

somewhat fractious infant, giving to both father and mother considerable

cause for anxiety. Her first attempts at rising in the world were

attended with disaster, for as she was lying in a cradle, with carved

iron canopy, and was for a moment left by her nurse in full faith that

she could not rise from the recumbent position, Miss Pheasantina

determined to show that she was capable of unexpected independence, and

made a vigorous struggle to assume that upright position which is the

proud prerogative of man. In another moment the recumbent position was

re-assumed, and the nurse returning found the baby's face covered with

blood, streaming from a severe wound on the forehead, the iron fretwork

having proved harder than the baby's head. The scar remains down to the

present time, and gives me the valuable peculiarity of only wrinkling up

one side of my forehead when I raise my eyebrows, a feat that I defy any

of my readers to emulate. The heavy cut has, I suppose, so injured the

muscles in that spot that they have lost the normal power of contraction.

 

My earliest personal recollections are of a house and garden that we

lived in when I was three and four years of age, situated in Grove Road,

St. John's Wood. I can remember my mother hovering round the dinner-table

to see that all was bright for the home-coming husband; my brother--two

years older than myself--and I watching "for papa"; the loving welcome,

the game of romps that always preceded the dinner of the elder folks. I

can remember on the first of October, 1851, jumping up in my little cot,

and shouting out triumphantly: "Papa! mamma! I am four years old!" and

the grave demand of my brother, conscious of superior age, at

dinner-time: "May not Annie have a knife to-day, as she is four years

old?"

 

It was a sore grievance during that same year 1851, that I was not judged

old enough to go to the Great Exhibition, and I have a faint memory of my

brother consolingly bringing me home one of those folding pictured strips

that are sold in the streets, on which were imaged glories that I longed

only the more to see. Far-away, dusky, trivial memories, these. What a

pity it is that a baby cannot notice, cannot observe, cannot remember,

and so throw light on the fashion of the dawning of the external world on

the human consciousness. If only we could remember how things looked when

they were first imaged on the retinae; what we felt when first we became

conscious of the outer world; what the feeling was as faces of father and

mother grew out of the surrounding chaos and became familiar things,

greeted with a smile, lost with a cry; if only memory would not become a

mist when in later years we strive to throw our glances backward into the

darkness of our infancy, what lessons we might learn to help our

stumbling psychology, how many questions might be solved whose answers we

are groping for in vain.

 

 

 

II.

 

 

The next scene that stands out clearly against the background of the past

is that of my father's death-bed. The events which led to his death I

know from my dear mother. He had never lost his fondness for the

profession for which he had been trained, and having many medical

friends, he would now and then accompany them on their hospital rounds,

or share with them the labors of the dissecting room. It chanced that

during the dissection of the body of a person who had died of rapid

consumption, my father cut his finger against the edge of the

breast-bone. The cut did not heal easily, and the finger became swollen

and inflamed. "I would have that finger off, Wood, if I were you," said

one of the surgeons, a day or two afterwards, on seeing the state of the

wound. But the others laughed at the suggestion, and my father, at first

inclined to submit to the amputation, was persuaded to "leave Nature

alone".

 

About the middle of August, 1852, he got wet through, riding on the top

of an omnibus, and the wetting resulted in a severe cold, which "settled

on his chest". One of the most eminent doctors of the day, as able as he

was rough in manner, was called to see him. He examined him carefully,

sounded his lungs, and left the room followed by my mother. "Well?" she

asked, scarcely anxious as to the answer, save as it might worry her

husband to be kept idly at home. "You must keep up his spirits", was the

thoughtless answer. "He is in a galloping consumption; you will not have

him with you six weeks longer." The wife staggered back, and fell like a

stone on the floor. But love triumphed over agony, and half an hour later

she was again at her husband's side, never to leave it again for ten

minutes at a time, night or day, till he was lying with closed eyes

asleep in death.

 

I was lifted on to the bed to "say good-bye to dear Papa" on the day

before his death, and I remember being frightened at his eyes which

looked so large, and his voice which sounded so strange, as he made me

promise always to be "a very good girl to darling Mamma, as Papa was

going right away". I remember insisting that "Papa should kiss Cherry", a

doll given me on my birthday, three days before, by his direction, and

being removed, crying and struggling, from the room. He died on the

following day, October 5th, and I do not think that my elder brother and

I--who were staying at our maternal grandfather's--went to the house

again until the day of the funeral. With the death, my mother broke down,

and when all was over they carried her senseless from the room. I

remember hearing afterwards how, when she recovered her senses, she

passionately insisted on being left alone, and locked herself into her

room for the night; and how on the following morning her mother, at last

persuading her to open the door, started back at the face she saw with

the cry: "Good God! Emily! your hair is white!" It was even so; her hair,

black, glossy and abundant, which, contrasting with her large grey eyes,

had made her face so strangely attractive, had turned grey in that night

of agony, and to me my mother's face is ever framed in exquisite silver

bands of hair as white as the driven unsullied snow.

 

I have heard that the love between my father and mother was a very

beautiful thing, and it most certainly stamped her character for life. He

was keenly intellectual, and splendidly educated; a mathematician and a

good classical scholar, thoroughly master of French, German, Italian,

Spanish, and Portuguese, with a smattering of Hebrew and Gaelic, the

treasures of ancient and of modern literature were his daily household

delight. Nothing pleased him so well as to sit with his wife, reading

aloud to her while she worked; now translating from some foreign poet,

now rolling forth melodiously the exquisite cadences of Queen Mab.

Student of philosophy as he was, he was deeply and steadily sceptical;

and a very religious relative has told me that he often drove her from

the room by his light playful mockery of the tenets of the Christian

faith. His mother and sister were strict Roman Catholics, and near the

end forced a priest into his room, but the priest was promptly ejected by

the wrath of the dying man, and by the almost fierce resolve of the wife

that no messenger of the creed he detested should trouble her darling at

the last.

 

This scepticism of his was not wholly shared by his wife, who held to the

notion that women should be "religious," while men might philosophise as

they would; but it so deeply influenced her own intellectual life that

she utterly rejected the most irrational dogmas of Christianity, such as

eternal punishment, the vicarious atonement of Christ, the doctrine that

faith is necessary to salvation, the equality of Christ with God, the

infallibility of the Bible; she made morality of life, not orthodoxy of

belief, her measure of "religion"; she was "a Christian", in her own view

of the matter, but it was a Christian of the school of Jowett, of

Colenso, and of Stanley. The latter writer had for her, in after years,

the very strongest fascination, and I am not sure that his "variegated

use of words", so fiercely condemned by Dr. Pusey, did not exactly suit

her own turn of mind, which shrank back intellectually from the crude

dogmas of orthodox Christianity, but clung poetically to the artistic

side of religion, to its art and to its music, to the grandeur of its

glorious fanes, and the solemnity of its stately ritual. She detested the

meretricious show, the tinsel gaudiness, the bowing and genuflecting, the

candles and the draperies, of Romanism, and of its pinchbeck imitator

Ritualism; but I doubt whether she knew any keener pleasure than to sit

in one of the carved stalls of Westminster Abbey, listening to the

polished sweetness of Dean Stanley's exquisite eloquence; or to the

thunder of the organ mingled with the voices of the white-robed

choristers, as the music rose and fell, as it pealed up to the arched

roof and lost itself in the carven fretwork, or died away softly among

the echoes of the chapels in which kings and saints and sages lay

sleeping, enshrining in themselves the glories and the sorrows of the

past.

 

To return to October, 1852. On the day of the funeral my elder brother

and I were taken back to the house where my father lay dead, and while my

brother went as chief mourner, poor little boy swamped in crape and

miserable exceedingly, I sat in an upstairs room with my mother and her

sisters; and still comes back to me her figure, seated on a sofa, with

fixed white face and dull vacant eyes, counting the minutes till the

funeral procession would have reached Kensal Green, and then following in

mechanical fashion, prayer-book in hand, the service, stage by stage,

until to my unspeakable terror, with the words, dully spoken, "It is all

over", she fell back fainting. And here comes a curious psychological

problem which has often puzzled me. Some weeks later she resolved to go

and see her husband's grave. A relative who had been present at the

funeral volunteered to guide her to the spot, but lost his way in that

wilderness of graves. Another of the small party went off to find one of

the officials and to enquire, and my mother said: "If you will take me to

the chapel where the first part of the service was read, I will find the

grave". To humor her whim, he led her thither, and, looking round for a

moment or two, she started from the chapel, followed the path along which

the corpse had been borne, and was standing by the newly-made grave when

the official arrived to point it out. Her own explanation was that she

had seen all the service; what is certain is, that she had never been to

Kensal Green before, and that she walked steadily to the grave from the

chapel. Whether the spot had been carefully described to her, whether she

had heard others talking of its position or not, we could never

ascertain; she had no remembrance of any such description, and the matter

always remained to us a problem. But after the lapse of years a hundred

little things may have been forgotten which unconsciously served as

guides at the time. She must have been, of course, at that time, in a

state of abnormal nervous excitation, a state of which another proof was

shortly afterwards given. The youngest of our little family was a boy

about three years younger than myself, a very beautiful child, blue-eyed

and golden haired--I have still a lock of his hair, of exquisite pale

golden hue--and the little lad was passionately devoted to his father. He

was always a delicate boy, and had I suppose, therefore, been specially

petted, and he fretted continually for "papa". It is probable that the

consumptive taint had touched him, for he pined steadily away, with no

marked disease, during the winter months. One morning my mother calmly

stated: "Alf is going to die". It was in vain that it was urged on her

that with the spring strength would return to the child. "No", she

persisted. "He was lying asleep in my arms last night, and William came

to me and said that he wanted Alf with him, but that I might keep the

other two." She had in her a strong strain of Celtic superstition, and

thoroughly believed that this "vision"--a most natural dream under the

circumstances--was a direct "warning", and that her husband had come to

her to tell her of her approaching loss. This belief was, in her eyes,

thoroughly justified by the little fellow's death in the following March,

calling to the end for "Papa! papa!" My brother and I were allowed to see

him just before he was placed in his coffin; I can see him still, so

white and beautiful, with a black spot in the middle of the fair waxen

forehead, and I remember the deadly cold which startled me when I was

told to kiss my little brother. It was the first time that I had touched

Death. That black spot made a curious impression on me, and long

afterwards, asking what had caused it, I was told that at the moment

after his death my mother had passionately kissed the baby brow. Pathetic

thought, that the mother's kiss of farewell should have been marked by

the first sign of corruption on the child's face.

 

And now began my mother's time of struggle and of anxiety. Hitherto,

since her marriage, she had known no money troubles, for her husband was

earning a good income; he was apparently vigorous and well: no thought of

anxiety clouded their future. When he died, he believed that he left his

wife and children safe, at least, from pecuniary distress. It was not so.

I know nothing of the details, but the outcome of all was that nothing

was left for the widow and children, save a trifle of ready money. The

resolve to which, my mother came was characteristic. Two of her husband's

relatives, Western and Sir William Wood, offered to educate her son at a

good city school, and to start him in commercial life, using their great

city influence to push him forward. But the young lad's father and mother

had talked of a different future for their eldest boy; he was to go to a

public school, and then to the University, and was to enter one of the

"learned professions"--to take orders, the mother wished; to go to the

Bar, the father hoped. On his death-bed there was nothing more earnestly

urged by my father than that Harry should receive the best possible

education, and the widow was resolute to fulfil that last wish. In her

eyes, a city school was not "the best possible education", and the Irish

pride rebelled against the idea of her son not being "a University man".

Many were the lectures poured out on the young widow's head about her

"foolish pride", especially by the female members of the Wood family; and

her persistence in her own way caused a considerable alienation between

herself and them. But Western and William, though half-disapproving,

remained her friends, and lent many a helping hand to her in her first

difficult struggles. After much cogitation, she resolved that the boy

should be educated at Harrow, where the fees are comparatively low to

lads living in the town, and that he should go thence to Cambridge or to

Oxford, as his tastes should direct. A bold scheme for a penniless widow,

but carried out to the letter; for never dwelt in a delicate body a more

resolute mind and will than that of my dear mother.

 

In a few months' time--during which we lived, poorly enough, in Richmond

Terrace, Clapham, close to her father and mother--to Harrow, then, she

betook herself, into lodgings over a grocer's shop, and set herself to

look for a house. This grocer was a very pompous man, fond of long words,

and patronised the young widow exceedingly, and one day my mother related

with much amusement how he had told her that she was sure to get on if

she worked hard. "Look at me!" he said swelling visibly with importance;

"I was once a poor boy, without a penny of my own, and now I am a

comfortable man, and have my submarine villa to go to every evening".

That "submarine villa" was an object of amusement when we passed it in

our walks for many a long day. "There is Mr. ----'s submarine villa",

some one would say, laughing: and I, too, used to laugh merrily, because

my elders did, though my understanding of the difference between suburban

and submarine was on a par with that of the honest grocer.

 

My mother had fortunately found a boy, whose parents were glad to place

him in her charge, of about the age of her own son, to educate with him;

and by this means she was able to pay for a tutor, to prepare the two

boys for school. The tutor had a cork leg, which was a source of serious

trouble to me, for it stuck out straight behind when we knelt down to

family prayers--conduct which struck me as irreverent and unbecoming, but

which I always felt a desire to imitate. After about a year, my mother

found a house which she thought would suit her scheme, namely, to obtain

permission from Dr. Vaughan, the then Head Master of Harrow, to take some

boys into her house, and so gain means of education for her own son. Dr.

Vaughan, who must have been won by the gentle, strong, little woman, from

that time forth became her earnest friend and helper; and to the counsel

and active assistance both of himself and of his wife, was due much of

the success that crowned her toil. He made only one condition in granting

the permission she asked, and that was, that she should also have in her

house one of the masters of the school, so that the boys should not

suffer from the want of a house-tutor. This condition, of course, she

readily accepted, and the arrangement lasted for ten years, until after

her son had left school for Cambridge.

 

The house she took is now, I am sorry to say, pulled down, and replaced

by a hideous red-brick structure. It was very old and rambling,

rose-covered in front, ivy-covered behind; it stood on the top of Harrow

Hill, between the church and the school, and had once been the vicarage

of the parish, but the vicar had left it because it was so far removed

from the part of the village where all his work lay. The drawing-room

opened by an old-fashioned half-window, half-door--which proved a

constant source of grief to me, for whenever I had on a new frock I

always tore it on the bolt as I flew through it--into a large garden

which sloped down one side of the hill, and was filled with the most

delightful old trees, fir and laurel, may, mulberry, hazel, apple, pear,

and damson, not to mention currant and gooseberry bushes innumerable, and

large strawberry beds spreading down the sunny slopes. There was not a

tree there that I did not climb, and one, a widespreading Portugal

laurel, was my private country house. I had there my bedroom and my

sitting-rooms, my study, and my larder. The larder was supplied by the

fruit-trees, from which I was free to pick as I would, and in the study I

would sit for hours with some favorite book--Milton's "Paradise Lost" the

chief favorite of all. The birds must often have felt startled, when from

the small swinging form perching on a branch, came out in childish tones

the "Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers", of Milton's

stately and sonorous verse. I liked to personify Satan, and to declaim

the grand speeches of the hero-rebel, and many a happy hour did I pass in

Milton's heaven and hell, with for companions Satan and "the Son",

Gabriel and Abdiel. Then there was a terrace running by the side of the

churchyard, always dry in the wettest weather, and bordered by an old

wooden fence, over which clambered roses of every shade; never was such a

garden for roses as that of the Old Vicarage. At the end of the terrace

was a little summer-house, and in this a trap-door in the fence, which

swung open and displayed one of the fairest views in England. Sheer from

your feet downwards went the hill, and then far below stretched the

wooded country till your eye reached the towers of Windsor Castle, far

away on the horizon. It was the view at which Byron was never tired of

gazing, as he lay on the flat tombstone close by--Byron's tomb, as it is

still called--of which he wrote:

 

"Again I behold where for hours I have pondered,

   As reclining, at eve, on yon tombstone I lay,

Or round the steep brow of the churchyard I wandered,

   To catch the last gleam of the sun's setting ray."

 

Reader mine, if ever you go to Harrow, ask permission to enter the old

garden, and try the effect of that sudden burst of beauty, as you swing

back the small trap-door at the terrace end.

 

Into this house we moved on my eighth birthday, and for eleven years it

was "home" to me, left always with regret, returned to always with joy.

 

Almost immediately afterwards I left my mother for the first time; for

one day, visiting a family who lived close by, I found a stranger sitting

in the drawing-room, a lame lady with, a strong face, which softened

marvellously as she smiled at the child who came dancing in; she called

me to her presently, and took me on her lap and talked to me, and on the

following day our friend came to see my mother, to ask if she would let

me go away and be educated with this lady's niece, coming home for the

holidays regularly, but leaving my education in her hands. At first my

mother would not hear of it, for she and I scarcely ever left each other;

my love for her was an idolatry, hers for me a devotion. [A foolish

little story, about which I was unmercifully teased for years, marked

that absolute idolatry of her, which has not yet faded from my heart. In

tenderest rallying one day of the child who trotted after her everywhere,

content to sit, or stand, or wait, if only she might touch hand or dress

of "mamma," she said: "Little one (the name by which she always called

me), if you cling to mamma in this way, I must really get a string and

tie you to my apron, and how will you like that?" "O mamma darling," came

the fervent answer, "do let it be in a knot." And, indeed, the tie of

love between us was so tightly knotted that nothing ever loosened it till

the sword of Death cut that which pain and trouble never availed to

slacken in the slightest degree.] But it was urged upon her that the

advantages of education offered were such as no money could purchase for

me; that it would be a disadvantage for me to grow up in a houseful of

boys--and, in truth, I was as good a cricketer and climber as the best of

them--that my mother would soon be obliged to send me to school, unless

she accepted an offer which gave me every advantage of school without its

disadvantages. At last she yielded, and it was decided that Miss Marryat,

on returning home, should take me with her.

 

Miss Marryat--the favorite sister of Captain Marryat, the famous

novelist--was a maiden lady of large means. She had nursed her brother

through the illness that ended in his death, and had been living with her

mother at Wimbledon Park. On her mother's death she looked round for work

which would make her useful in the world, and finding that one of her

brothers had a large family of girls, she offered to take charge of one

of them, and to educate her thoroughly. Chancing to come to Harrow, my

good fortune threw me in her way, and she took a fancy to me and thought

she would like to teach two little girls rather than one. Hence her offer

to my mother.

 

Miss Marryat had a perfect genius for teaching, and took in it the

greatest delight. From time to time she added another child to our party,

sometimes a boy, sometimes a girl. At first, with Amy Marryat and myself,

there was a little boy, Walter Powys, son of a clergyman with a large

family, and him she trained for some years, and then sent him on to

school admirably prepared. She chose "her children"--as she loved to call

us--in very definite fashion. Each must be gently born and gently

trained, but in such position that the education freely given should be a

relief and aid to a slender parental purse. It was her delight to seek

out and aid those on whom poverty presses most heavily, when the need for

education for the children weighs on the proud and the poor. "Auntie" we

all called her, for she thought "Miss Marryat" seemed too cold and stiff.

She taught us everything herself except music, and for this she had a

master, practising us in composition, in recitation, in reading aloud

English and French, and later, German, devoting herself to training us in

the soundest, most thorough fashion. No words of mine can tell how much I

owe her, not only of knowledge, bit of that love of knowledge which has

remained with me ever since as a constant spur to study.

 

Her method of teaching may be of interest to some, who desire to train

children with the least pain, and the most enjoyment to the little ones

themselves. First, we never used a spelling-book--that torment of the

small child--nor an English grammar. But we wrote letters, telling of the

things we had seen in our walks, or told again some story we had read;

these childish compositions she would read over with us, correcting all

faults of spelling, of grammar, of style, of cadence; a clumsy sentence

would be read aloud, that we might hear how unmusical it sounded; an

error in observation or expression pointed out. Then, as the letters

recorded what we had seen the day before, the faculty of observation was

drawn out and trained. "Oh, dear! I have nothing to say!" would come from

a small child, hanging over a slate. "Did you not go out for a walk

yesterday?" Auntie would question. "Yes", would be sighed out; "but

there's nothing to say about it". "Nothing to say! And you walked in the

lanes for an hour and saw nothing, little No-eyes? You must use your eyes

better to-day." Then there was a very favorite "lesson", which proved an

excellent way of teaching spelling. We used to write out lists of all the

words we could think of, which sounded the same but were differently

spelt. Thus: "key, quay," "knight, night," and so on; and great was the

glory of the child who found the largest number. Our French lessons--as

the German later--included reading from the very first. On the day on

which we began German we began reading Schiller's "Wilhelm Tell," and the

verbs given to us to copy out were those that had occurred in the

reading. We learned much by heart, but always things that in themselves

were worthy to be learned. We were never given the dry questions and

answers which lazy teachers so much affect. We were taught history by one

reading aloud while the others worked--the boys as well as the girls

learning the use of the needle. "It's like a girl to sew," said a little

fellow, indignantly, one day. "It is like a baby to have to run after a

girl if you want a button sewn on," quoth Auntie. Geography was learned

by painting skeleton maps--an exercise much delighted in by small

fingers--and by putting together puzzle maps, in which countries in the

map of a continent, or counties in the map of a country, were always cut

out in their proper shapes. I liked big empires in those days; there was

a solid satisfaction in putting down Russia, and seeing what a large part

of the map was filled up thereby.

 

The only grammar that we ever learned as grammar was the Latin, and that

not until composition had made us familiar with the use of the rules

therein given. Auntie had a great horror of children learning by rote

things they did not understand, and then fancying they knew them. "What

do you mean by that expression, Annie?" she would ask me. After feeble

attempts to explain, I would answer: "Indeed, Auntie, I know in my own

head, but I can't explain". "Then, indeed, Annie, you do not know in your

own head, or you could explain, so that I might know in my own head." And

so a healthy habit was fostered of clearness of thought and of

expression. The Latin grammar was used because it was more perfect than

the modern grammars, and served as a solid foundation for modern

languages.

 

Miss Marryat took a beautiful place, Fern Hill, near Charmouth, in

Dorsetshire, on the borders of Devon, and there she lived for some five

years, a centre of beneficence in the district. She started a

Sunday-school, and a Bible-class after a while for the lads too old for

the school, who clamored for admission to her class in it. She visited

the poor, taking help wherever she went, and sending food from her own

table to the sick. It was characteristic of her that she would never give

"scraps" to the poor, but would have a basin brought in at dinner, and

would cut the best slice to tempt the invalid appetite. Money she rarely,

if ever, gave, but she would find a day's work, or busy herself to seek

permanent employment for anyone asking aid. Stern in rectitude herself,

and iron to the fawning or the dishonest, her influence, whether she was

feared or loved, was always for good. Of the strictest sect of the

Evangelicals, she was an Evangelical. On the Sunday no books were allowed

save the Bible or the "Sunday at Home"; but she would try to make the day

bright by various little devices; by a walk with her in the garden; by

the singing of hymns, always attractive to children; by telling us

wonderful missionary stories of Moffat and Livingstone, whose adventures

with savages and wild beasts were as exciting as any tale of Mayne

Reid's. We used to learn passages from the Bible and hymns for

repetition; a favorite amusement was a "Bible puzzle", such as a

description of some Bible scene, which was to be recognised by the

description. Then we taught in the Sunday-school, for Auntie would tell

us that it was useless for us to learn if we did not try to help those

who had no one to teach them. The Sunday-school lessons had to be

carefully prepared on the Saturday, for we were always taught that work

given to the poor should be work that cost something to the giver. This

principle, regarded by her as an illustration of the text, "Shall I give

unto the Lord my God that which has cost me nothing?" ran through all her

precept and her practice. When in some public distress we children went

to her crying, and asking whether we could not help the little children

who were starving, her prompt reply was: "What will you give up for

them?" And then she said that if we liked to give up the use of sugar, we

might thus each save 6d. a week to give away. I doubt if a healthier

lesson can be given to children than that of personal self-denial for the

good of others.

 

Daily, when our lessons were over, we had plenty of fun; long walks and

rides, rides on a lively pony, who found small children most amusing, and

on which the coachman taught us to stick firmly, whatever his

eccentricities of the moment; delightful all-day picnics in the lovely

country round Charmouth, Auntie our merriest playfellow. Never was a

healthier home, physically and mentally, made for young things than in

that quiet village. And then the delight of the holidays! The pride of my

mother at the good report of her darling's progress, and the renewal of

acquaintance with every nook and corner in the dear old house and garden.

 

 

 

III.

 

 

The strong and intense Evangelicalism of Miss Marryat colored the whole

of my early religious thought. I was naturally enthusiastic and fanciful,

and was apt to throw myself strongly into the current of the emotional

life around me, and hence I easily reflected the stern and narrow creed

which ruled over my daily life. It was to me a matter of the most intense

regret that Christians did not go about as in the "Pilgrim's Progress",

armed to do battle with Apollyon and Giant Despair, or fight through a

whole long day against thronging foes, until night brought victory and

release. It would have been so easy, I used to think, to do tangible

battle of that sort, so much easier than to learn lessons, and keep one's

temper, and mend one's stockings. Quick to learn, my lessons of Bible and

Prayer Book gave me no trouble, and I repeated page after page with

little labor and much credit. I remember being praised for my love of the

Bible, because I had learned by heart all the epistle of St. James's,

while, as a matter of fact, the desire to distinguish myself was a far

more impelling motive than any love of "the holy book;" the dignified

cadences pleased my ear, and were swiftly caught and reproduced, and I

was proud of the easy fashion in which I mastered and recited page after

page. Another source of "carnal pride"--little suspected, I fear, by my

dear instructress--was found in the often-recurring prayer meetings. In

these the children were called on to take a part, and we were bidden pray

aloud; this proceeding was naturally a sore trial, and being endued with

an inordinate amount of "false pride"--the fear of appearing ridiculous,

_i.e._, with self conceit--it was a great trouble when the summons came:

"Annie dear, will you speak to our Lord". But the plunge once made, and

the trembling voice steadied, enthusiasm and facility for cadenced speech

always swallowed up the nervous "fear of breaking down", and I fear me

that the prevailing thought was more often that God must think I prayed

very nicely, than that I was a "miserable sinner", asking "pardon for the

sake of Jesus Christ". The sense of sin, the contrition for man's fallen

state, which are required by Evangelicalism, can never be truly felt by

any child; but whenever a sensitive, dreamy, and enthusiastic child comes

under strong Evangelistic influence, it is sure to manifest "signs of

saving grace". As far as I can judge now, the total effect of the

Calvinistic training was to make me somewhat morbid, but this tendency

was counteracted by the healthier tone of my mother's thought, and the

natural gay buoyancy of my nature rose swiftly whenever the pressure of

the teaching that I was "a child of sin", and could "not naturally please

God", was removed.

 

In the spring of 1861, Miss Marryat announced her intention of going

abroad, and asked my dear mother to let me accompany her. A little nephew

whom she had adopted was suffering from cataract, and she desired to

place him under the care of the famous Düsseldorf oculist. Amy Marryat

had been recalled home soon after the death of her mother, who had died

in giving birth to the child adopted by Miss Marryat, and named at her

desire after her favorite brother Frederick (Captain Marryat). Her place

had been taken by a girl a few months older than myself, Emma Mann, one

of the daughters of a clergyman who had married a Miss Stanley, closely

related, indeed if I remember rightly, a sister of the Miss Mary Stanley

who did such noble work in nursing in the Crimea.

 

For some months we had been diligently studying German, for Miss Marryat

thought it wise that we should know a language fairly well before we

visited the country of which it was the native tongue. We had been

trained also to talk French daily during dinner, so we were not quite

"helpless foreigners" when we steamed away from St. Catherine's Docks,

and found ourselves on the following day in Antwerp, amid what seemed to

us a very Babel of conflicting tongues. Alas for our carefully spoken

French, articulated laboriously. We were lost in that swirl of disputing

luggage-porters, and could not understand a word! But Miss Marryat was

quite equal to the occasion, being by no means new to travelling, and her

French stood the test triumphantly, and steered us safely to a hotel. On

the morrow we started again through Aix-la-Chapelle to Bonn, the town

which lies on the borders of the exquisite scenery of which the

Siebengebirge and Rolandseck serve as the magic portal. Our experiences

in Bonn were not wholly satisfactory. Dear Auntie was a maiden lady,

looking on all young men as wolves to be kept far from her growing lambs.

Bonn was a university town, and there was a mania just then prevailing

there for all things English. Emma was a plump, rosy, fair-haired typical

English maiden, full of frolic and harmless fun; I a very slight, pale,

black-haired girl, alternating between wild fun and extreme pensiveness.

In the boarding-house to which we went at first--the "Château du Rhin", a

beautiful place overhanging the broad blue Rhine--there chanced to be

staying the two sons of the late Duke of Hamilton, the Marquis of Douglas

and Lord Charles, with their tutor. They had the whole drawing-room

floor: we a sitting-room on the ground floor and bedrooms above. The lads

discovered that Miss Marryat did not like her "children" to be on

speaking terms with any of the "male sect". Here was a fine source of

amusement. They would make their horses caracole on the gravel in front

of our window; they would be just starting for their ride as we went for

walk or drive, and would salute us with doffed hat and low bow; they

would waylay us on our way downstairs with demure "Good morning"; they

would go to church and post themselves so that they could survey our pew,

and Lord Charles--who possessed the power of moving at will the whole

skin of the scalp--would wriggle his hair up and down till we were

choking with laughter, to our own imminent risk. After a month of this,

Auntie was literally driven out of the pretty _Château_, and took refuge

in a girls' school, much to our disgust, but still she was not allowed to

be at rest. Mischievous students would pursue us wherever we went;

sentimental Germans, with gashed cheeks, would whisper complimentary

phrases as we passed; mere boyish nonsense of most harmless kind, but the

rather stern English lady thought it "not proper", and after three months

of Bonn we were sent home for the holidays, somewhat in disgrace. But we

had some lovely excursions during those months; such clambering up

mountains, such rows on the swift-flowing Rhine, such wanderings in

exquisite valleys. I have a long picture-gallery to retire into when I

want to think of something fair, in recalling the moon as it silvered the

Rhine at the foot of Drachenfels, or the soft mist-veiled island where

dwelt the lady who is consecrated for ever by Roland's love.

 

A couple of months later we rejoined Miss Marryat in Paris, where we

spent seven happy workful months. On Wednesdays and Saturdays we were

free from lessons, and many a long afternoon was passed in the galleries

of the Louvre, till we became familiar with the masterpieces of art

gathered there from all lands. I doubt if there was a beautiful church in

Paris that we did not visit during those weekly wanderings; that of St.

Germain de l'Auxerrois was my favorite--the church whose bell gave the

signal for the massacre of St. Bartholomew--for it contained such

marvellous stained glass, deepest purest glory of color that I had ever

seen. The solemn beauty of Notre Dame, the somewhat gaudy magnificence of

La Sainte Chapelle, the stateliness of La Madeleine, the impressive gloom

of St. Roch, were all familiar to us. Other delights were found in

mingling with the bright crowds which passed along the Champs Elysées and

sauntered in the Bois de Boulogne, in strolling in the garden of the

Tuileries, in climbing to the top of every monument whence view of Paris

could be gained. The Empire was then in its heyday of glitter, and we

much enjoyed seeing the brilliant escort of the imperial carriage, with

plumes and gold and silver dancing and glistening in the sunlight, while

in the carriage sat the exquisitely lovely empress with the little boy

beside her, touching his cap shyly, but with something of her own grace,

in answer to a greeting--the boy who was thought to be born to an

imperial crown, but whose brief career was to find an ending from the

spears of savages in a quarrel in which he had no concern.

 

In the spring of 1862 it chanced that the Bishop of Ohio visited Paris,

and Mr. Forbes, then English chaplain at the Church of the Rue

d'Aguesseau, arranged to have a confirmation. As said above, I was under

deep "religious impressions", and, in fact, with the exception of that

little aberration in Germany, I was decidedly a pious girl. I looked on

theatres (never having been to one) as traps set by Satan for the

destruction of foolish souls; I was quite determined never to go to a

ball, and was prepared to "suffer for conscience sake"--little prig that

I was--if I was desired to go to one. I was consequently quite prepared

to take upon myself the vows made in my name at my baptism, and to

renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil, with a heartiness and

sincerity only equalled by my profound ignorance of the things I so

readily resigned. That confirmation was to me a very solemn matter; the

careful preparation, the prolonged prayers, the wondering awe as to the

"sevenfold gifts of the Spirit", which were to be given by "the laying on

of hands", all tended to excitement. I could scarcely control myself as I

knelt at the altar rails, and felt as though the gentle touch of the aged

Bishop, which fluttered for an instant on my bowed head, were the very

touch of the wing of that "Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove", whose presence

had been so earnestly invoked. Is there anything easier, I wonder, than

to make a young and sensitive girl "intensely religious".

 

My mother came over for the confirmation and for the "first communion" on

Easter Sunday, and we had a delightful fortnight together, returning home

after we had wandered hand-in-hand over all my favorite haunts. The

summer of 1862 was spent with Miss Marryat at Sidmouth, and, wise woman

that she was, she now carefully directed our studies with a view to our

coming enfranchisement from the "school-room." More and more were we

trained to work alone; our leading-strings were slackened, so that we

never felt them save when we blundered; and I remember that when I once

complained, in loving fashion, that she was "teaching me so little", she

told me that I was getting old enough to be trusted to work by myself,

and that I must not expect to "have Auntie for a crutch all through

life". And I venture to say that this gentle withdrawal of constant

supervision and teaching was one of the wisest and kindest things that

this noble-hearted woman ever did for us. It is the usual custom to keep

girls in the school-room until they "come out"; then, suddenly, they are

left to their own devices, and, bewildered by their unaccustomed freedom,

they waste time that might be priceless for their intellectual growth.

Lately, the opening of universities to women has removed this danger for

the more ambitious; but at the time of which I am writing no one dreamed

of the changes soon to be made in the direction of the "higher education

of women".

 

During the winter of 1862-1863 Miss Marryat was in London, and for a few

months I remained there with her, attending the admirable French classes

of M. Roche. In the spring I returned home to Harrow, going up each week

to the classes; and when these were over, Auntie told me that she thought

all she could usefully do was done, and that it was time that I should

try my wings alone. So well, however, had she succeeded in her aims, that

my emancipation from the school-room was but the starting-point of more

eager study, though now the study turned into the lines of thought

towards which my personal tendencies most attracted me. German I

continued to read with a master, and music, under the marvellously able

teaching of Mr. John Farmer, musical director of Harrow School, took up

much of my time. My dear mother had a passion for music, and Beethoven

and Bach were her favorite composers. There was scarcely a sonata of

Beethoven's that I did not learn, scarcely a fugue of Bach's that I did

not master. Mendelssohn's "Lieder" gave a lighter recreation, and many a

happy evening did we spend, my mother and I, over the stately strains of

the blind Titan, and the sweet melodies of the German wordless orator.

Musical "At Homes", too, were favorite amusements at Harrow, and at these

my facile fingers made me a welcome guest.

 

A very pleasant place was Harrow to a light-hearted serious-brained girl.

The picked men of the Schools of Oxford and Cambridge came there as

junior masters, so that one's partners at ball and croquet and archery

could talk as well as flirt. Never girl had, I venture to say, a brighter

girlhood than mine. Every morning and much of the afternoon spent in

eager earnest study: evenings in merry party or quiet home-life, one as

delightful as the other. Archery and croquet had in me a most devoted

disciple, and the "pomps and vanities" of the ballroom found the happiest

of votaries. My darling mother certainly "spoiled" me, so far as were

concerned all the small roughnesses of life. She never allowed a trouble

of any kind to touch me, and cared only that all worries should fall on

her, all joys on me. I know now what I never dreamed then, that her life

was one of serious anxiety. The heavy burden of my brother's school and

college-life pressed on her constantly, and her need of money was often

serious. A lawyer whom she trusted absolutely cheated her systematically,

using for his own purposes the remittances she made for payment of

liabilities, thus keeping upon her a constant drain. Yet for me all that

was wanted was ever there. Was it a ball to which we were going? I need

never think of what I would wear till the time for dressing arrived, and

there laid out ready for me was all I wanted, every detail complete from

top to toe. No hand but hers must dress my hair, which, loosed, fell in

dense curly masses nearly to my knees; no hand but hers must fasten dress

and deck with flowers, and if I sometimes would coaxingly ask if I might

not help by sewing in laces, or by doing some trifle in aid, she would

kiss me and bid me run to my books or my play, telling me that her only

pleasure in life was caring for her "treasure". Alas! how lightly we take

the self-denying labor that makes life so easy, ere yet we have known

what life means when the protecting mother-wing is withdrawn. So guarded

and shielded had been my childhood and youth from every touch of pain and

anxiety that love could bear for me, that I never dreamed that life might

be a heavy burden, save as I saw it in the poor I was sent to help; all

the joy of those happy years I took, not ungratefully I hope, but

certainly with as glad unconsciousness of anything rare in it as I took

the sunlight. Passionate love, indeed, I gave to my darling, but I never

knew all I owed her till I passed out of her tender guardianship, till I

left my mother's home. Is such training wise? I am not sure. It makes the

ordinary roughnesses of life come with so stunning a shock, when one goes

out into the world, that one is apt to question whether some earlier

initiation into life's sterner mysteries would not be wiser for the

young. Yet it is a fair thing to have that joyous youth to look back

upon, and at least it is a treasury of memory that no thief can steal in

the struggles of later life.

 

During those happy years my brain was given plenty of exercise. I used to

keep a list of the books I read, so that I might not neglect my work; and

finding a "Library of the Fathers" on the shelves, I selected that for

one _piéce de résistance_. Soon those strange mystic writers won over me

a great fascination, and I threw myself ardently into a study of the

question: "Where is now the Catholic Church?". I read Pusey, and Liddon,

and Keble, with many another of that school, and many of the seventeenth

century English divines. I began to fast--to the intense disapproval of

my mother, who cared for my health far more than for all the Fathers the

Church could boast of--to use the sign of the cross, to go to weekly

communion. Indeed, the contrast I found between my early Evangelical

training and the doctrines of the Primitive Christian Church would have

driven me over to Rome, had it not been for the proofs afforded by Pusey

and his co-workers, that the English Church might be Catholic although

non-Roman. But for them I should most certainly have joined the Papal

Communion; for if the Church of the early centuries be compared with Rome

and with Geneva, there is no doubt that Rome shows marks of primitive

Christianity of which Geneva is entirely devoid. I became content when I

found that the practices and doctrines of the Anglican Church could be

knitted on to those of the martyrs and confessors of the early Church,

for it had not yet struck me that the early Church might itself be

challenged. To me, at that time, the authority of Jesus was supreme and

unassailable; his apostles were his infallible messengers; Clement of

Rome, Polycarp, and Barnabas, these were the very pupils of the apostles

themselves. I never dreamed of forgeries, of pious frauds, of writings

falsely ascribed to venerated names. Nor do I now regret that so it was;

for, without belief, the study of the early Fathers would be an

intolerable weariness; and that old reading of mine has served me well in

many of my later controversies with Christians, who knew the literature

of their Church less well than I.

 

To this ecclesiastical reading was added some study of stray scientific

works, but the number of these that came in my way was very limited. The

atmosphere surrounding me was literary rather than scientific. I remember

reading a translation of Plato that gave me great delight, and being

rather annoyed by the insatiable questionings of Socrates. Lord Derby's

translation of the Iliad also charmed me with its stateliness and melody,

and Dante was another favorite study. Wordsworth and Cowper I much

disliked, and into the same category went all the 17th and 18th century

"poets," though I read them conscientiously through. Southey fascinated

me with his wealth of Oriental fancies, while Spencer was a favorite

book, put beside Milton and Dante. My novel reading was extremely

limited; indeed the "three volume novel" was a forbidden fruit. My mother

regarded these ordinary love-stories as unhealthy reading for a young

girl, and gave me Scott and Kingsley, but not Miss Braddon or Mrs. Henry

Wood. Nor would she take me to the theatre, though we went to really good

concerts. She had a horror of sentimentality in girls, and loved to see

them bright and gay, and above all things absolutely ignorant of all evil

things and of premature love-dreams. Happy, healthy and workful were

those too brief years.

 

 

 

IV.

 

 

My grandfather's house, No. 8, Albert Square, Clapham Road, was a second

home from my earliest childhood.

 

That house, with its little strip of garden at the back, will always

remain dear and sacred to me. I can see now the two almond trees, so rich

in blossom every spring, so barren in fruit every autumn; the large

spreading tufts of true Irish shamrock, brought from Ireland, and

lovingly planted in the new grey London house, amid the smoke; the little

nooks at the far end, wherein I would sit cosily out of sight reading a

favorite book. Inside it was but a commonplace London house, only one

room, perhaps, differing from any one that might have been found in any

other house in the square. That was my grandfather's "work-room", where

he had a lathe fitted up, for he had a passion and a genius for inventive

work in machinery. He took out patents for all sorts of ingenious

contrivances, but always lost money. His favorite invention was of a

"railway chair", for joining the ends of rails together, and in the

ultimate success of this he believed to his death. It was (and is) used

on several lines, and was found to answer splendidly, but the old man

never derived any profit from his invention. The fact was he had no

money, and those who had took it up and utilised it, and kept all the

profit for themselves. There were several cases in which his patents

dropped, and then others took up his inventions, and made a commercial

success thereof.

 

A strange man altogether was that grandfather of mine, whom I can only

remember as a grand-looking old man, with snow-white hair and piercing

hawk's eyes. The merriest of wild Irishmen was he in his youth, and I

have often wished that his biography had been written, if only as a

picture of Dublin society at the time. He had an exquisite voice, and one

night he and some of his wild comrades went out singing through the

streets as beggars. Pennies, sixpences, shillings, and even half-crowns

came showering down in recompense of street music of such unusual

excellence; then the young scamps, ashamed of their gains, poured them

all into the hat of a cripple they met, who must have thought that all

the blessed saints were out that night in the Irish capital. On another

occasion he went to the wake of an old woman who had been bent nearly

double by rheumatism, and had been duly "laid out", and tied down firmly,

so as to keep the body straight in the recumbent position. He hid under

the bed, and when the whisky was flowing freely, and the orgie was at its

height, he cut the ropes with a sharp knife, and the old woman suddenly

sat up in bed, frightening the revellers out of their wits, and, luckily

for my grandfather, out of the room. Many such tales would he tell, with

quaint Irish humor, in his later days. He died, from a third stroke of

paralysis, in 1862.

 

The Morrises were a very "clannish" family, and my grandfather's house

was the London centre. All the family gathered there on each

Christmastide, and on Christmas day was always held high festival. For

long my brother and I were the only grandchildren within reach, and were

naturally made much of. The two sons were out in India, married, with

young families. The youngest daughter was much away from home, and a

second was living in Constantinople, but three others lived with their

father and mother. Bessie, the eldest of the whole family, was a woman of

rigid honor and conscientiousness, but poverty and the struggle to keep

out of debt had soured her, and "Aunt Bessie" was an object of dread, not

of love. One story of her early life will best tell her character. She

was engaged to a young clergyman, and one day when Bessie was at church

he preached a sermon taken without acknowledgment from some old divine.

The girl's keen sense of honor was shocked at the deception, and she

broke off her engagement, but remained unmarried for the rest of her

life. "Careful and troubled about many things" was poor Aunt Bessie, and

I remember being rather shocked one day at hearing her express her

sympathy with Martha, when her sister left her to serve alone, and at her

saying: "I doubt very much whether Jesus would have liked it if Martha

had been lying about on the floor as well as Mary, and there had been no

supper. But there! it's always those who do the work who are scolded,

because they have not time to be as sweet and nice as those who do

nothing." Nor could she ever approve of the treatment of the laborers in

the parable, when those who "had borne the burden and heat of the day"

received but the same wage as those that had worked but one hour. "It was

not just", she would say doggedly. A sad life was hers, for she repelled

all sympathy, and yet later I had reason to believe that she half broke

her heart because none loved her well. She was ever gloomy,

unsympathising, carping, but she worked herself to death for those whose

love she chillily repulsed. She worked till, denying herself every

comfort, she literally dropped. One morning, when she got out of bed, she

fell, and crawling into bed again, quietly said she could do no more; lay

there for some months, suffering horribly with unvarying patience; and

died, rejoicing that at last she would have "rest".

 

Two other "Aunties" were my playfellows, and I their pet. Minnie, a

brilliant pianiste, earned a precarious livelihood by teaching music. The

long fasts, the facing of all weathers, the weary rides in omnibuses with

soaked feet, broke down at last a splendid constitution, and after some

three years of torture, commencing with a sharp attack of English

cholera, she died the year before my marriage. But during my girlhood she

was the gayest and merriest of my friends, her natural buoyancy

re-asserting itself whenever she could escape from her musical

tread-mill. Great was my delight when she joined my mother and myself for

our spring or summer trips, and when at my favorite St. Leonards--at the

far unfashionable end, right away from the gay watering-place folk--we

settled down for four or five happy weeks of sea and country, and when

Minnie and I scampered over the country on horseback, merry as children

set free from school. My other favorite auntie was of a quieter type, a

soft pretty loving little woman. "Co" we called her, for she was "such a

cosy little thing", her father used to say. She was my mother's favorite

sister, her "child", she would name her, because "Co" was so much her

junior, and when she was a young girl the little child had been her

charge. "Always take care of little Co", was one of my mother's dying

charges to me, and fortunately "little Co" has--though the only one of my

relatives who has done so--clung to me through change of faith, and

through social ostracism. Her love for me, and her full belief that,

however she differed from me, I meant right, have never varied, have

never been shaken. She is intensely religious--as will be seen in the

later story, wherein her life was much woven with mine--but however much

"darling Annie's" views or actions might shock her, it is "darling Annie"

through it all; "You are so good" she said to me the last time I saw her,

looking up at me with all her heart in her eyes; "anyone so good as you

must come to our dear Lord at last!" As though any, save a brute, could

be aught but good to "little Co".

 

On the Christmas following my eighteenth birthday, a little Mission

Church in which Minnie was much interested, was opened near Albert

Square. My High Church enthusiasm was in full bloom, and the services in

this little Mission Church were "high", whereas those in all the

neighboring churches were "low". A Mr. Hoare, an intensely earnest man,

was working there in most devoted fashion, and was glad to welcome any

aid; we decorated his church, worked ornaments for it, and thought we

were serving God when we were really amusing ourselves in a small place

where our help was over-estimated, and where the clergy, very likely

unconsciously, flattered us for our devotion. Among those who helped to

carry on the services there, was a young undermaster of Stockwell Grammar

School, the rev. Frank Besant, a Cambridge man, who had passed as 28th

wrangler in his year, and who had just taken orders. At Easter we were

again at Albert Square, and devoted much time to the little church,

decking it on Easter Eve with soft yellow tufts of primrose blossom, and

taking much delight in the unbounded admiration bestowed on the dainty

spring blossoms by the poor who crowded in. I made a lovely white cross

for the super-altar with camelias and azaleas and white geraniums, but

after all it was not really as spring-like, as suitable for a

"Resurrection", as the simple sweet wild flowers, still dewy from their

nests in field and glade and lane.

 

That Easter was memorable to me for another cause. It saw waked and

smothered my first doubt. That some people did doubt the historical

accuracy of the Bible I knew, for one or two of the Harrow masters were

friends of Colenso, the heretic Bishop of Natal, but fresh from my

Patristic studies, I looked on heretics with blind horror, possibly the

stronger from its very vagueness, and its ignorance of what it feared. My

mother objected to my reading controversial books which dealt with the

points at issue between Christianity and Freethought, and I did not care

for her favorite Stanley, who might have widened my views, regarding him

(on the word of Pusey) as "unsound in the faith once delivered to the

saints". I had read Pusey's book on "Daniel the prophet", and, knowing

nothing of the criticisms he attacked, I felt triumphant at his

convincing demonstrations of their error, and felt sure that none but the

wilfully blind could fail to see how weak were the arguments of the

heretic writers. That stately preface of his was one of my favorite

pieces of reading, and his dignified defence against all novelties of

"that which must be old because it is eternal, and must be unchangeable

because it is true", at once charmed and satisfied me. The delightful

vagueness of Stanley, which just suited my mother's broad views, because

it _was_ vague and beautiful, was denounced by Pusey--not unwarrantably--

as that "variegated use of words which destroys all definiteness of

meaning". When she would bid me not be uncharitable to those with whom I

differed in matters of religion, I would answer in his words, that

"charity to error is treason to truth", and that to speak out the truth

unwaveringly as it was revealed, was alone "loyalty to God and charity to

the souls of men".

 

Judge, then, of my terror at my own results when I found myself betrayed

into writing down some contradictions from the Bible. With that poetic

dreaming which is one of the charms of Catholicism, whether English or

Roman, I threw myself back into the time of the first century as the

"Holy Week" of 1866 approached. In order to facilitate the realisation of

those last sacred days of God incarnate on earth, working out man's

salvation, I resolved to write a brief history of that week, compiled

from the four gospels, meaning then to try and realise each day the

occurrences that had happened on the corresponding date in A.D. 33, and

so to follow those "blessed feet" step by step, till they were

 

  "... nailed for our advantage to the bitter cross."

 

With the fearlessness which springs from ignorance I sat down to my

task. My method was as follows:

 

     MATTHEW.     |      MARK.      |      LUKE.      |     JOHN.

                  |                 |                 |

   PALM SUNDAY.   |   PALM SUNDAY.  |   PALM SUNDAY.  |   PALM SUNDAY.

                  |                 |                 |

Rode into         | Rode into       | Rode into       | Rode into

Jerusalem.        | Jerusalem.      | Jerusalem.      | Jerusalem. Spoke

Purified the      | Returned to     | Purified the    | in the Temple.

Temple. Returned  | Bethany.        | Temple. Note:   |

to Bethany.       |                 | "Taught daily   |

                  |                 | in the Temple". |

                  |                 |                 |

     MONDAY.      |     MONDAY.     |     MONDAY.     |     MONDAY.

                  |                 |                 |

Cursed the fig    | Cursed the fig  | Like Matthew.   |

tree. Taught in   | tree. Purified  |                 |

the Temple, and   | the Temple.     |                 |

spake many        | Went out of     |                 |

parables. No      | city.           |                 |

breaks shown,     |                 |                 |

but the fig tree  |                 |                 |

(xxi., 19) did    |                 |                 |

not wither till   |                 |                 |

Tuesday (see      |                 |                 |

Mark).            |                 |                 |

                  |                 |                 |

     TUESDAY.     |     TUESDAY.    |     TUESDAY.    |    TUESDAY.

                  |                 |                 |

All chaps, xxi.,  | Saw fig tree    | Discourses. No  |

20, xxii.-xxv.,   | withered up.    | date shown.     |

spoken on Tues-   | Then discourses.|                 |

day, for xxvi., 2 |                 |                 |

gives Passover as |                 |                 |

"after two days". |                 |                 |

                  |                 |                 |

    WEDNESDAY.    |    WEDNESDAY.   |    WEDNESDAY.   |    WEDNESDAY.

                  |                 |                 |

Blank.            |                 |                 |

(Possibly remained in Bethany; the alabaster box of ointment.)

                  |                 |                 |

    THURSDAY.     |    THURSDAY.    |    THURSDAY.    |    THURSDAY.

                  |                 |                 |

Preparation of    | Same as Matt.   | Same as Matt.   | Discourses with

Passover. Eating  |                 |                 | disciples, but

of Passover,      |                 |                 | _before_ the

and institution   |                 |                 | Passover. Washes

of the Holy Eu-   |                 |                 | the disciples'

charist. Gesthse- |                 |                 | feet. Nothing said

mane. Betrayal    |                 |                 | of Holy Eucharist,

by Judas. Led     |                 |                 | nor of agony in

captive to Caia-  |                 |                 | Gethsemane.

phas. Denied by   |                 |                 | Malchus' ear.

St. Peter.        |                 |                 | Led captive to

                  |                 |                 | Annas first. Then

                  |                 |                 | to Caiaphas. Denied

                  |                 |                 | by St. Peter.

                  |                 |                 |

     FRIDAY.      |     FRIDAY.     |     FRIDAY.     |      FRIDAY.

                  |                 |                 |

Led to Pilate.    | As Matthew,     | Led to Pilate.  | Taken to Pilate.

Judas hangs       | but hour of     | Sent to Herod.  | Jews would not

himself. Tried.   | crucifixion     | Sent back to    | enter, that they

Condemned to      | given, 9 a.m.   | Pilate. Rest as | might eat the

death. Scourged   |                 | in Matthew; but | Passover.

and mocked.       |                 | _one_  male-    | Scourged by Pi-

Led to cruci-     |                 | factor repents. | late before con-

fixion. Darkness  |                 |                 | demnation, and

from 12 to 3.     |                 |                 | mocked. Shown by

Died at 3.        |                 |                 | Pilate to Jews

                  |                 |                 | at 12.

 

At this point I broke down. I had been getting more and more uneasy and

distressed as I went on, but when I found that the Jews would not go into

the judgment hall lest they should be defiled, because they desired to

eat the passover, having previously seen that Jesus had actually eaten

the passover with his disciples the evening before; when after writing

down that he was crucified at 9 a.m., and that there was darkness over

all the land from 12 to 3 p.m., I found that three hours after he was

crucified he was standing in the judgment hall, and that at the very hour

at which the miraculous darkness covered the earth; when I saw that I was

writing a discord instead of a harmony, I threw down my pen and shut up

my Bible. The shock of doubt was, however only momentary. I quickly

recognised it as a temptation of the devil, and I shrank back

horror-stricken and penitent for the momentary lapse of faith. I saw that

these apparent contradictions were really a test of faith, and that there

would be no credit in believing a thing in which there were no

difficulties. _Credo quia impossibile_; I repeated Tertullian's words at

first doggedly, at last triumphantly. I fasted as penance for my

involuntary sin of unbelief. I remembered that the Bible must not be

carelessly read, and that St. Peter had warned us that there were in it

"some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and

unstable wrest unto their own destruction". I shuddered at the

"destruction" to the edge of which my unlucky "harmony" had drawn me, and

resolved that I would never again venture on a task for which I was so

evidently unfitted. Thus the first doubt was caused, and though swiftly

trampled down, it had none the less raised its head. It was stifled, not

answered, for all my religious training had led me to regard a doubt as a

sin to be repented of, not examined. And it left in my mind the dangerous

feeling that there were some things into which it was safer not to

enquire too closely; things which must be accepted on faith, and not too

narrowly scrutinised. The awful threat: "He that believeth not shall be

damned," sounded in my ears, and, like the angel with the flaming sword,

barred the path of all too curious enquiry.

 

 

 

V.

 

 

The spring ripened into summer in uneventful fashion, so far as I was

concerned, the smooth current of my life flowing on untroubled, hard

reading and merry play filling the happy days. I learned later that two

or three offers of marriage reached my mother for me; but she answered to

each: "She is too young. I will not have her troubled." Of love-dreams I

had absolutely none, partly, I expect, from the absence of fiery novels

from my reading, partly because my whole dream-tendencies were absorbed

by religion, and all my fancies ran towards a "religious life". I longed

to spend my time in worshipping Jesus, and was, as far as my inner life

was concerned, absorbed in that passionate love of "the Savior" which,

among emotional Catholics, really is the human passion of love

transferred to an ideal--for women to Jesus, for men to the Virgin Mary.

In order to show that I am not here exaggerating, I subjoin a few of the

prayers in which I found daily delight, and I do this in order to show

how an emotional girl may be attracted by these so-called devotional

exercises.

 

"O crucified Love, raise in me fresh ardors of love and consolation, that

it may henceforth be the greatest torment I can endure ever to offend

Thee; that it may be my greatest delight to please Thee."

 

"Let the remembrance of Thy death, O Lord Jesu, make me to desire and

pant after Thee, that I may delight in Thy gracious presence."

 

"O most sweet Jesu Christ, I, unworthy sinner, yet redeemed by Thy

precious blood.... Thine I am and will be, in life and in death."

 

"O Jesu, beloved, fairer than the sons of men, draw me after Thee with

the cords of Thy love."

 

"Blessed are Thou, O most merciful God, who didst vouchsafe to espouse me

to the heavenly Bridegroom in the waters of baptism, and hast imparted

Thy body and blood as a new gift of espousal and the meet consummation of

Thy love."

 

"O most sweet Lord Jesu, transfix the affections of my inmost soul with

that most joyous and most healthful wound of Thy love, with true, serene,

most holy, apostolic charity; that my soul may ever languish and melt

with entire love and longing for Thee. Let it desire Thee and faint for

Thy courts; long to be dissolved and be with Thee."

 

"Oh, that I could embrace Thee with that most burning love of angels."

 

"Let Him kiss me with the kisses of His mouth; for Thy love is better

than wine. Draw me, we will run after Thee. The king hath brought me into

his chambers.... Let my soul, O Lord, feel the sweetness of Thy presence.

May it taste how sweet Thou art.... May the sweet and burning power of

Thy love, I beseech Thee, absorb my soul."

 

To my dear mother this type of religious thought was revolting. But then,

she was a woman who had been a wife and a devoted one, while I was a

child awaking into womanhood, with emotions and passions dawning and not

understood, emotions and passions which craved satisfaction, and found it

in this "Ideal Man". Thousands of girls in England are to-day in exactly

this mental phase, and it is a phase full of danger. In America it is

avoided by a frank, open, unsentimental companionship between boys and

girls, between young men and young women. In England, where this wisely

free comradeship is regarded as "improper", the perfectly harmless and

natural sexual feeling is either dwarfed or forced, and so we have

"prudishness" and "fastness". The sweeter and more loving natures become

prudes; the more shallow as well as the more high-spirited and merry

natures become flirts. Often, as in my own case, the merry side finds its

satisfaction in amusements that demand active physical exercise, while

the loving side finds its joy in religious expansion, in which the

idealised figure of Jesus becomes the object of passion, and the life of

the nun becomes the ideal life, as being dedicated to that one devotion.

To the girl, of course, this devotion is all that is most holy, most

noble, most pure. But analysing it now, after it has long been a thing of

the past, I cannot but regard it as a mere natural outlet for the dawning

feelings of womanhood, certain to be the more intense and earnest as the

nature is deep and loving.

 

One very practical and mischievous result of this religious feeling is

the idealisation of all clergymen, as being the special messengers of,

and the special means of communication with, the "Most High". The priest

is surrounded by the halo of Deity. The power that holds the keys of

heaven and of hell becomes the object of reverence and of awe. Far more

lofty than any title bestowed by earthly monarch is that patent of

nobility straight from the hand of the "King of kings", which seems to

give to the mortal something of the authority of the immortal, to crown

the head of the priest with the diadem which belongs to those who are

"kings and priests unto God". Swayed by these feelings, the position of a

clergyman's wife seems second only to that of the nun, and has therefore

a wonderful attractiveness, an attractiveness in which the particular

clergyman affected plays a very subordinate part; it is the "sacred

office", the nearness to "holy things", the consecration involved, which

seem to make the wife a nearer worshipper than those who do not partake

in the immediate "services of the altar"--it is all these that shed a

glamor over the clerical life which attracts most those who are most apt

to self-devotion, most swayed by imagination. I know how incomprehensible

this will seem to many of my readers, but it is a fact none the less, and

the saddest pity of it is that the glamor is most over those whose brains

are quick and responsive to all forms of noble emotions, all suggestions

of personal self-sacrifice; and if such later rise to the higher emotions

whose shadows have attracted them, and to that higher self-sacrifice

whose whispers reached them in their early youth, then the false

prophet's veil is raised, and the life is either wrecked, or through

storm-wind and surge of battling billows, with loss of mast and sail, is

steered by firm hand into the port of a higher creed.

 

My mother, Minnie, and I passed the summer holidays at St. Leonards, and

many a merry gallop had we over our favorite fields, I on a favorite

black mare, Gipsy Queen, as full of life and spirits as I was myself, who

danced gaily over ditch and hedge, thinking little of my weight, for I

rode barely eight stone. At the end of those, our last free summer

holidays, we returned as usual to Harrow, and shortly afterwards I went

to Switzerland with some dear friends of ours named Roberts.

 

Everyone about Manchester will remember Mr. Roberts, the solicitor, the

"poor man's lawyer". Close friend of Ernest Jones, and hand-in-hand with

him through all his struggles, Mr. Roberts was always ready to fight a

poor man's battle for him without fee, and to champion any worker

unfairly dealt with. He worked hard in the agitation which saved women

from working in the mines, and I have heard him tell how he had seen them

toiling, naked to the waist, with short petticoats barely reaching to

their knees, rough, foul-tongued, brutalised out of all womanly decency

and grace; and how he had seen little children working there too, babies

of three and four set to watch a door, and falling asleep at their work

to be roused by curse and kick to the unfair toil. The old man's eye

would begin to flash and his voice to rise as he told of these horrors,

and then his face would soften as he added that, after it was all over

and the slavery was put an end to, as he went through a coal-district the

women standing at their doors would lift up their children to see "Lawyer

Roberts" go by, and would bid "God bless him" for what he had done. This

dear old man was my first tutor in Radicalism, and I was an apt pupil. I

had taken no interest in politics, but had unconsciously reflected more

or less the decorous Whiggism which had always surrounded me. I regarded

"the poor" as folk to be educated, looked after, charitably dealt with,

and always treated with most perfect courtesy, the courtesy being due

from me, as a lady, to all equally, whether they were rich or poor. But

to Mr. Roberts "the poor" were the working-bees, the wealth producers,

with a right to self-rule, not to looking after, with a right to justice,

not to charity, and he preached his doctrines to me, in season and out of

season. "What do you think of John Bright?" he demanded of me one day. "I

have never thought of him at all," I answered lightly. "Isn't he a rather

rough sort of man, who goes about making rows?" "There, I thought so," he

broke out fiercely. "That's just what they say. I believe some of you

fine ladies would not go to heaven if you had to rub shoulders with John

Bright, the noblest man God ever gave to the cause of the poor." And then

he launched out into stories of John Bright's work and John Bright's

eloquence, and showed me the changes that work and eloquence had made in

the daily lives of the people.

 

With Mr. Roberts, his wife, and two daughters, I went to Switzerland as

the autumn drew near. It would be of little interest to tell how we went

to Chamounix and worshipped Mont Blanc, how we crossed the Mer de Glace

and the Mauvais Pas, how we visited the Monastery of St. Bernard (I

losing my heart to the beautiful dogs), how we went by steamer down the

lake of Thun, how we gazed at the Jungfrau and saw the exquisite

Staubbach, how we visited Lausanne, and Berne, and Geneva, how we stood

beside the wounded Lion, and shuddered in the dungeon of Chillon, how we

walked distances we never should have attempted in England, how we

younger ones lost ourselves on a Sunday afternoon, after ascending a

mountain, and returned footsore and weary, to meet a party going out to

seek us with lanterns and ropes. All these things have been so often

described that I will not add one more description to the list, nor dwell

on that strange feeling of awe, of wonder, of delight, that everyone must

have felt, when the glory of the peaks clad in "everlasting snow" is for

the first time seen against the azure sky on the horizon, and you whisper

to yourself, half breathless: "The Alps! The Alps!"

 

During that autumn I became engaged to the Rev. Frank Besant, giving up

with a sigh of regret my dreams of the "religious life", and substituting

for them the work which would have to be done as the wife of a priest,

laboring ever in the church and among the poor. A queer view, some people

may think, for a girl to take of married life, but it was the natural

result of my living the life of the Early Church, of my enthusiasm for

religious work. To me a priest was a half-angelic creature, whose whole

life was consecrated to heaven; all that was deepest and truest in my

nature chafed against my useless days, longed for work, yearned to devote

itself, as I had read women saints had done, to the service of the church

and the poor, to the battling against sin and misery. "You will have more

opportunity for doing good as a clergyman's wife than as anything else,"

was one of the pleas urged on my reluctance. My ignorance of all that

marriage meant was as profound as though I had been a child of four, and

my knowledge of the world was absolutely _nil_. My darling mother meant

all that was happiest for me when she shielded me from all knowledge of

sorrow and of sin, when she guarded me from the smallest idea of the

marriage relation, keeping me ignorant as a baby till I left her home a

wife. But looking back now on all, I deliberately say that no more fatal

blunder can be made than to train a girl to womanhood in ignorance of all

life's duties and burdens, and then to let her face them for the first

time away from all the old associations, the old helps, the old refuge on

the mother's breast. That "perfect innocence" maybe very beautiful, but

it is a perilous possession, and Eve should have the knowledge of good

and of evil ere she wanders forth from the paradise of a mother's love.

When a word is never spoken to a girl that is not a caress; when

necessary rebuke comes in tone of tenderest reproach; when "You have

grieved me" has been the heaviest penalty for a youthful fault; when no

anxiety has ever been allowed to trouble the young heart--then, when the

hothouse flower is transplanted, and rough winds blow on it, it droops

and fades.

 

The spring and summer of 1867 passed over with little of incident, save

one. We quitted Harrow, and the wrench was great. My brother had left

school, and had gone to Cambridge; the master, who had lived with us for

so long, had married and had gone to a house of his own; my mother

thought that as she was growing older, the burden of management was

becoming too heavy, and she desired to seek an easier life. She had saved

money enough to pay for my brother's college career, and she determined

to invest the rest of her savings in a house in St. Leonard's, where she

might live for part of the year, letting the house during the season. She

accordingly took and furnished a house in Warrior Square, and we moved

thither, saying farewell to the dear Old Vicarage, and the friends loved

for so many happy years.

 

At the end of the summer, my mother and I went down to Manchester, to pay

a long visit to the Roberts's; a very pleasant time we passed there, a

large part of mine being spent on horseback, either leaping over a bar in

the meadow, or scouring the country far and wide. A grave break, however,

came in our mirth. The Fenian troubles were then at their height. On

September 11th, Colonel Kelly and Captain Deasy, two Fenian leaders, were

arrested in Manchester, and the Irish population was at once thrown into

a terrible ferment. On the 18th, the police van containing them was

returning from the Court to the County Gaol at Salford, and as it reached

the railway arch which crosses the Hyde Road at Bellevue, a man sprang

out, shot one of the horses, and thus stopped the van. In a moment it was

surrounded by a small band, armed with revolvers and with crowbars, and

the crowbars were wrenching at the locked door. A reinforcement of police

was approaching, and there was no time to be lost. The rescuers called to

Brett, a sergeant of police who was in charge inside the van, to pass the

keys out, and, on his refusal, there was a cry: "Blow off the lock!". The

muzzle of a revolver was placed against the lock, and the revolver was

discharged. Unhappily, poor Brett had stooped down to try and see through

the keyhole what was going on outside, and the bullet, fired to blow open

the lock, entered his head, and he fell dying on the floor. The rescuers

rushed in, and one Allen, a lad of seventeen, opened the doors of the

compartments in which were Kelly and Deasy, and hurriedly pulled them

out. Two or three of the band, gathering round them, carried them off

across the fields to a place of safety, while the rest gallantly threw

themselves between their rescued friends and the strong body of police

which charged down after the fugitives. With their revolvers pointed,

they kept back the police, until they saw that the two Fenian leaders

were beyond all chance of capture, and then they scattered, flying in all

directions. Young William Allen, whose one thought had been for his

chiefs, was the earliest victim. As he fled, he raised his hand and fired

his revolver straight in the air; he had been ready to use it in defence

of others, he would not shed blood for himself. Disarmed by his own act,

he was set upon by the police, brutally struck down, kicked and stoned by

his pursuers, and then, bruised and bleeding, he was dragged off to gaol,

to meet there some of his comrades in much the same plight. The whole

city of Manchester went mad over the story, and the fiercest

race-passions at once blazed out into flame; it became dangerous for an

Irish workman to be alone in a group of Englishmen, for an Englishman to

venture into the Irish quarter of the city. The friends of the arrested

Irishmen went straight to "Lawyer Roberts", and begged his aid, and he

threw himself heart and soul into their defence. He soon found that the

man who had fired the fatal shot was safe out of the way, having left

Manchester at once, and he trusted that it would at least be possible to

save his clients from the death-penalty. A Special Commission was issued,

with Mr. Justice Blackburn at its head. "They are going to send that

hanging judge," groaned Mr. Roberts when he heard it, and we felt there

was small chance of escape for the prisoners. He struggled hard to have

the _venue_ of the trial changed, protesting that in the state of

excitement in which Manchester was, there was no chance of obtaining an

impartial jury. But the cry for blood and for revenge was ringing through

the air, and of fairness and impartiality there was no chance. On the

25th of October, the prisoners were actually brought up before the

magistrates _in irons_, and Mr. Ernest Jones, the counsel briefed to

defend them, after a vain protest against the monstrous outrage, threw

down his brief and quitted the Court. The trial was hurried on, and on

October 29th, Allen, Larkin, Gould (O'Brien), Maguire, and Condon, stood

before their judges.

 

We drove up to the court; the streets were barricaded; soldiers were

under arms; every approach was crowded by surging throngs. At last, our

carriage was stopped in the midst of excited Irishmen, and fists were

shaken in the window, curses levelled at the "d----d English who were

going to see the boys murdered". For a moment things were uncomfortable,

for we were five women of helpless type. Then I bethought myself that we

were unknown, and, like the saucy girl I was, I leant forward and touched

the nearest fist. "Friends, these are Mr. Roberts' wife and daughters."

"Roberts! Lawyer Roberts! God bless Roberts. Let his carriage through."

And all the scowling faces became smile-wreathen, and cheers sounded out

for curses, and a road was cleared for us to the steps.

 

Very sad was that trial. On the first day Mr. Roberts got himself into

trouble which threatened to be serious. He had briefed Mr. Digby Seymour,

Q.C. as leader, with Mr. Ernest Jones, for the defence, and he did not

think that the jurymen proposed were challenged as they should be. We

knew that many whose names were called were men who had proclaimed their

hostility to the Irish, and despite the wrath of Judge Blackburn, Mr.

Roberts would jump up and challenge them. In vain he threatened to commit

the sturdy solicitor. "These men's lives are at stake, my lord," he said

indignantly. At last the officers of the court were sharply told: "Remove

that man," but as they advanced reluctantly--for all poor men loved and

honored him--Judge Blackburn changed his mind and let him remain. At last

the jury was empanelled, containing one man who had loudly proclaimed

that he "didn't care what the evidence was, he would hang every d----d

Irishman of the lot". In fact, the verdict was a foregone conclusion. The

most disreputable evidence was admitted; the suppositions of women of

lowest character were accepted as conclusive; the _alibi_ for Maguire--

clearly proved, and afterwards accepted by the Crown, a free pardon being

issued on the strength of it--was rejected with dogged obstinacy; how

premeditated was the result may be guessed from the fact that I saw--with

what shuddering horror may be estimated--some official in the room behind

the judges' chairs, quietly preparing the black caps before the verdict

had been given. The verdict of "Guilty" was repeated in each of the five

cases, and the prisoners were asked by the presiding judge if they had

anything to say why sentence should not be passed on them. Allen spoke

briefly and bravely; he had not fired a shot, but he had helped to free

Kelly and Deasy; he was willing to die for Ireland. The others followed

in turn, Maguire protesting his innocence, and Condon declaring also that

he was not present (he also was reprieved). Then the sentence of death

was passed, and "God save Ireland"! rang out in five clear voices in

answer from the dock.

 

We had a sad scene that night; the young girl to whom poor Allen was

engaged was heartbroken at her lover's doom, and bitter were her cries to

"save my William!". No protests, no pleas, however, availed to mitigate

the doom, and on November 23rd, Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien were hanged

outside Salford gaol. Had they striven for freedom in Italy, England

would have honored them as heroes; here she buried them as common

murderers in quicklime in the prison yard.

 

I have found, with a keen sense of pleasure, that Mr. Bradlaugh and

myself were in 1867 to some extent co-workers, although we knew not of

each other's existence, and although he was doing much, and I only giving

such poor sympathy as a young girl might, who was only just awakening to

the duty of political work. I read in the _National Reformer_ for

November 24, 1867, that in the preceding week, he was pleading on

Clerkenwell Green for these men's lives:

 

"According to the evidence at the trial, Deasy and Kelly were illegally

arrested. They had been arrested for vagrancy of which no evidence was

given, and apparently remanded for felony without a shadow of

justification. He had yet to learn that in England the same state of

things existed as in Ireland; he had yet to learn that an illegal arrest

was sufficient ground to detain any of the citizens of any country in the

prisons of this one. If he were illegally held, he was justified in using

enough force to procure his release. Wearing a policeman's coat gave no

authority when the officer exceeded his jurisdiction. He had argued this

before Lord Chief Justice Erle in the Court of Common Pleas, and that

learned judge did not venture to contradict the argument which he

submitted. There was another reason why they should spare these men,

although he hardly expected the Government to listen, because the

Government sent down one of the judges who was predetermined to convict

the prisoners; it was that the offence was purely a political one. The

death of Brett was a sad mischance, but no one who read the evidence

could regard the killing of Brett as an intentional murder. Legally, it

was murder; morally, it was homicide in the rescue of a political

captive. If it were a question of the rescue of the political captives of

Varignano, or of political captives in Bourbon, in Naples, or in Poland,

or in Paris, even earls might be found so to argue. Wherein is our sister

Ireland less than these? In executing these men, they would throw down

the gauntlet for terrible reprisals. It was a grave and solemn question.

It had been said by a previous speaker that they were prepared to go to

any lengths to save these Irishmen. They were not. He wished they were.

If they were, if the men of England, from one end to the other, were

prepared to say, "These men shall not be executed," they would not be. He

was afraid they had not pluck enough for that. Their moral courage was

not equal to their physical strength. Therefore he would not say that

they were prepared to do so. They must plead _ad misericordiam_. He

appealed to the press, which represented the power of England; to that

press which in its panic-stricken moments had done much harm, and which

ought now to save these four doomed men. If the press demanded it, no

Government would be mad enough to resist. The memory of the blood which

was shed in 1798 rose up like a bloody ghost against them to-day. He only

feared that what they said upon the subject might do the poor men more

harm than good. If it were not so, he would coin words that should speak

in words of fire. As it was, he could only say to the Government: You are

strong to-day; you hold these men's lives in your hands; but if you want

to reconcile their country to you, if you want to win back Ireland, if

you want to make her children love you--then do not embitter their hearts

still more by taking the lives of these men. Temper your strength with

mercy; do not use the sword of justice like one of vengeance; for the day

may come when it shall be broken in your hands, and you yourselves

brained by the hilt of the weapon you have so wickedly wielded."

 

In October he had printed a plea for Ireland, strong and earnest,

asking:--

 

"Where is our boasted English freedom when you cross to Kingstown pier?

Where has it been for near two years? The Habeas Corpus Act suspended,

the gaols crowded, the steamers searched, spies listening at shebeen

shops for sedition, and the end of it a Fenian panic in England. Oh,

before it be too late, before more blood shall stain the pages of our

present history, before we exasperate and arouse bitter animosities, let

us try and do justice to our sister land. Abolish once and for all the

land laws, which in their iniquitous operation have ruined her peasantry.

Sweep away the leech-like Church which has sucked her vitality, and has

given her back no word even of comfort in her degradation. Turn her

barracks into flax mills, encourage a spirit of independence in her

citizens, restore to her people the protection of the law, so that they

may speak without fear of arrest, and beg them to plainly and boldly

state their grievances. Let a commission of the best and wisest amongst

Irishmen, with some of our highest English judges added, sit solemnly to

hear all complaints, and then let us honestly legislate, not for the

punishment of the discontented, but to remove the causes of the

discontent. It is not the Fenians who have depopulated Ireland's strength

and increased her misery. It is not the Fenians who have evicted tenants

by the score. It is not the Fenians who have checked cultivation. Those

who have caused the wrong at least should frame the remedy."

 

 

 

VI.

 

 

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?"

 

 

 

VII.

 

 

On recovering from that prostrating physical pain, I came to a very

definite decision. I resolved that, whatever might be the result, I would

take each dogma of the Christian religion, and carefully and thoroughly

examine it, so that I should never again say "I believe" where I had not

proved. So, patiently and steadily, I set to work. Four problems chiefly

at this time pressed for solution. I. The eternity of punishment after

death. II. The meaning of "goodness" and "love" as applied to a God who

had made this world with all its evil and its misery. III. The nature of

the atonement of Christ, and the "justice" of God in accepting a

vicarious suffering from Christ, and a vicarious righteousness from the

sinner. IV. The meaning of "inspiration" as applied to the Bible, and the

reconciliation of the perfection of the author with the blunders and the

immoralities of the work.

 

Maurice's writings now came in for very careful study, and I read also

those of Robertson, of Brighton, and of Stopford Brooke, striving to find

in these some solid ground whereon I might build up a new edifice of

faith. That ground, however, I failed to find; there were poetry, beauty,

enthusiasm, devotion; but there was no rock on which I might take my

stand. Mansel's Bampton lectures on "The Limits of Religious Thought"

deepened and intensified my doubts. His arguments seemed to make

certainty impossible, and I could not suddenly turn round and believe to

order, as he seemed to recommend, because proof was beyond reach. I could

not, and would not, adore in God as the highest Righteousness that which,

in man was condemned as harsh, as cruel, and as unjust.

 

In the midst of this long mental struggle, a change occurred in the

outward circumstances of my life. I wrote to Lord Hatherley and asked him

if he could give Mr. Besant a Crown living, and he offered us first one

in Northumberland, near Alnwick Castle, and then one in Lincolnshire, the

village of Sibsey, with a vicarage house, and an income of £410 per

annum. We decided to accept the latter.

 

The village was scattered over a considerable amount of ground, but the

work was not heavy. The church was one of the fine edifices for which the

fen country is so famous, and the vicarage was a comfortable house, with

large and very beautiful gardens and paddock, and with outlying fields.

The people were farmers and laborers, with a sprinkling of shopkeepers;

the only "society" was that of the neighboring clergy, Tory and prim to

an appalling extent. There was here plenty of time for study, and of that

time I vigorously availed myself. But no satisfactory light came to me,

and the suggestions and arguments of my friend Mr. D---- failed to bring

conviction to my mind. It appeared clear to me that the doctrine of

Eternal Punishment was taught in the Bible, and the explanations given of

the word "eternal" by men like Maurice and Stanley, did not recommend

themselves to me as anything more than skilful special pleading--

evasions, not clearings up, of a moral difficulty. For the problem was:

Given a good God, how can he have created mankind, knowing beforehand

that the vast majority of those whom he had created were to be tortured

for evermore? Given a just God, how can he punish people for being

sinful, when they have inherited a sinful nature without their own choice

and of necessity? Given a righteous God, how can he allow sin to exist

for ever, so that evil shall be as eternal as good, and Satan shall reign

in hell, as long as Christ in Heaven? The answer of the Broad church

school was, that the word "eternal" applied only to God and to life which

was one with his; that "everlasting" only meant "lasting for an age", and

that while the punishment of the wicked might endure for ages it was

purifying, not destroying, and at last all should be saved, and "God

should be all in all". These explanations had (for a time) satisfied Mr.

D----, and I find him writing to me in answer to a letter of mine dated

March 25th, 1872:

 

"On the subject of Eternal punishment I have now not the remotest doubt.

It is impossible to handle the subject exhaustively in a letter, with a

sermon to finish before night. But you _must_ get hold of a few valuable

books that would solve all kinds of difficulties for you. For most points

read Stopford Brooke's Sermons--they are simply magnificent, and are

called (1) Christian modern life, (2) Freedom in the Church of England,

(3) and (least helpful) 'Sermons'. Then again there is an appendix to

Llewellyn Davies' 'Manifestation of the Son of God', which treats of

forgiveness in a future state as related to Christ and Bible. As to that

special passage about the Blasphemy against the Holy Ghost (to which you

refer), I will write you my notions on it in a future letter."

 

A little later, according, he wrote:

 

"With regard to your passage of difficulty about the unpardonable sin, I

would say: (1) If that sin is not to be forgiven in the world to come, it

is implied that all other sins _are forgiven in the world to come_. (2)

You must remember that our Lord's parables and teachings mainly concerned

contemporary events and people. I mean, for instance, that in his great

prophecy of _judgment_ he simply was speaking of the destruction of the

Jewish polity and nation. The _principles_ involved apply through all

time, but He did not apply them except to the Jewish nation. He was

speaking then, not of 'the end of the _world_, (as is wrongly

translated), but of 'the end of the _age_'. (Every age is wound up with a

judgment. French Revolutions, Reformations, etc., are all ends of ages

and judgments.) [Greek aion] does not, cannot, will not, and never did

mean _world_, but _age_. Well, then, he has been speaking of the Jewish

people. And he says that all words spoken against the Son of Man will be

forgiven. But there is a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit of God--there

is a confusion of good with evil, of light with darkness--which goes

deeper down than this. When a nation has lost the faculty of

distinguishing love from hatred, the spirit of falsehood and hypocrisy

from the spirit of truth, God from the Devil--_then its doom is

pronounced_--the decree is gone forth against it. As the doom of Judaism,

guilty of this sin, _was then_ pronounced. As the _decree against it had

already gone forth. It is a national warning, not an individual one. It

applies to two ages of this world, and not to two worlds_. All its

teaching was primarily _national_, and is only thus to be rightly read--

if not all, rather _most of it_. If you would be sure of this and

understand it, see the parables, etc., explained in Maurice's 'Gospel of

the Kingdom of Heaven' (a commentary on S. Luke). I can only indicate

briefly in a letter the line to be taken on this question.

 

"With regard to the [Greek: elui, elui, lama sabbachthani]. I don't

believe that the Father even momentarily hid his face from Him. The life

of sonship was unbroken. Remark: (1) It is a quotation from a Psalm. (2)

It rises naturally to a suffering man's lips as expressive of agony,

though not exactly framed for _his_ individual _agony_. (3) The spirit of

the Psalm is one of trust, and hope, and full faith, notwithstanding the

1st verse. (4) Our Lord's agony was very extreme, not merely of body but

of _soul_. He spoke out of the desolation of one forsaken, not by his

divine Father but by his human brothers. I have heard sick and dying men

use the words of beloved Psalms in just such a manner.

 

"The impassibility of God (1) With regard to the Incarnation, this

presents no difficulty. Christ suffered simply and entirely as man, was

too truly a man not to do so. (2) With regard to the Father, the key of

it is here. 'God _is_ love.' He does not need suffering to train into

sympathy, because his nature is sympathy. He can afford to dispense with

hysterics, because he sees ahead that his plan is working to the perfect

result. I am not quite sure whether I have hit upon your difficulty here,

as I have destroyed your last letter but one. But the 'Gospel of the

Kingdom' is a wonderful 'eye-opener'."

 

Worst of all the puzzles, perhaps, was that of the existence of evil and

of misery, and the racking doubt whether God _could_ be good, and yet

look on the evil and the misery of the world unmoved and untouched. It

seemed so impossible to believe that a Creator could be either cruel

enough to be indifferent to the misery, or weak enough to be unable to

stop it: the old dilemma faced me unceasingly. "If he can prevent it, and

does not, he is not good; if he wishes to prevent it, and cannot, he is

not almighty;" and out of this I could find no way of escape. Not yet had

any doubt of the existence of God crossed my mind.

 

In August, 1872 Mr. D---- tried to meet this difficulty. He wrote:

 

"With regard to the impassibility of God, I think there is a stone wrong

among your foundations which causes your difficulty. Another wrong stone

is, I think, your view of the nature of the _sin_ and _error_ which is

supposed to grieve God. I take it that sin is an absolutely necessary

factor in the production of the perfect man. It was foreseen and allowed

as a means to an end--as in fact an _education_.

 

"The view of all the sin and misery in the world cannot grieve God, any

more than it can grieve you to see Digby fail in his first attempt to

build a card-castle or a rabbit-hutch. All is part of the training. God

looks at the ideal man to which all tends. The popular idea of the fall

is to me a very absurd one. There was never an ideal state in the past,

but there will be in the future. The Genesis allegory simply typifies the

first awakening of consciousness of good and evil--of two _wills_ in a

mind hitherto only animal-psychic.

 

"Well then--there being no occasion for grief in watching the progress of

his own perfect and unfailing plans--your difficulty in God's

impassibility vanishes. Christ, _quâ_ God, was, of course, impassible

too. It seems to me that your position implies that God's 'designs' have

partially (at least) failed, and hence the grief of perfect benevolence.

Now I stoutly deny that any jot or tittle of God's plans can fail. I

believe in the ordering of all for the best. I think that the pain

consequent on broken law is only an inevitable necessity, over which we

shall some day rejoice.

 

"The indifference shown to God's love cannot pain Him. Why? because it is

simply a sign of defectiveness in the creature which the ages will

rectify. The being who is indifferent is not yet educated up to the point

of love. But he _will be_. The pure and holy suffering of Christ was

(pardon me) _wholly_ the consequence of his human nature. True it was

because of the _perfection_ of his humanity. But his Divinity had nothing

to do with it. It was his _human heart_ that broke. It was because he

entered a world of broken laws and of incomplete education that he became

involved in suffering with the rest of his race.....

 

"No, Mrs. Besant; I never feel at all inclined to give up the search, or

to suppose that the other side may be right. I claim no merit for it, but

I have an invincible faith in the morality of God and the moral order of

the world. I have no more doubt about the falsehood of the popular

theology than I have about the unreality of six robbers who attacked me

three nights ago in a horrid dream. I exult and rejoice in the grandeur

and freedom of the little bit of truth it has been given me to see. I am

told that 'Present-day Papers', by Bishop Ewing (edited) are a wonderful

help, many of them, to puzzled people: I mean to get them. But I am sure

you will find that the truth will (even so little as we may be able to

find out) grow on you, make you free, light your path, and dispel, at no

distant time, your _painful_ difficulties and doubts. I should say on no

account give up your reading. I think with you that you could not do

without it. It will be a wonderful source of help and peace to you. For

there are struggles far more fearful than those of intellectual doubt. I

am keenly alive to the gathered-up sadness of which your last two pages

are an expression. I was sorrier than I can say to read them. They

reminded me of a long and very dark time in my own life, when I thought

the light never would come. Thank God it came, or I think I could not

have held out much longer. But you have evidently strength to bear it

now. The more dangerous time, I should fancy, has passed. You will have

to mind that the fermentation leaves clear spiritual wine, and not (as

too often) vinegar.

 

"I wish I could write something more helpful to you in this great matter.

But as I sit in front of my large bay window, and see the shadows on the

grass and the sunlight on the leaves, and the soft glimmer of the

rosebuds left by the storms, I cannot but believe that all will be very

well. 'Trust in the Lord; wait patiently for him'--they are trite words.

But he made the grass, the leaves, the rosebuds, and the sunshine, and he

is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And now the trite words have

swelled into a mighty argument."

 

Despite reading and argument, my scepticism grew only deeper and deeper.

The study of W.R. Greg's "Creed of Christendom", of Matthew Arnold's

"Literature and Dogma", helped to widen the mental horizon, while making

a return to the old faith more and more impossible. The church services

were a weekly torture, but feeling as I did that I was only a doubter, I

spoke to none of my doubts. It was possible, I felt, that all my

difficulties might be cleared up, and I had no right to shake the faith

of others while in uncertainty myself. Others had doubted and had

afterwards believed; for the doubter silence was a duty; the blinded had

better keep their misery to themselves. I found some practical relief in

parish work of a non-doctrinal kind, in nursing the sick, in trying to

brighten a little the lot of the poor of the village. But here, again, I

was out of sympathy with most of those around me. The movement among the

agricultural laborers, due to the energy and devotion of Joseph Arch, was

beginning to be talked of in the fens, and bitter were the comments of

the farmers on it, while I sympathised with the other side. One typical

case, which happened some months later, may stand as example of all.

There was a young man, married, with two young children, who was wicked

enough to go into a neighboring county to a "Union Meeting", and who was,

further, wicked enough to talk about it when he returned. He became a

marked man; no farmer would employ him. He tramped about vainly, looking

for work, grew reckless, and took to drink. Visiting his cottage one day

I found his wife ill, a dead child in the bed, a sick child in her arms;

yes, she "was pining; there was no work to be had". "Why did she leave

the dead child on the bed? because there was no other place to put it."

The cottage consisted of one room and a "lean-to", and husband and wife,

the child dead of fever and the younger child sickening with it, were all

obliged to lie on the one bed. In another cottage I found four

generations sleeping in one room, the great-grandfather and his wife, the

grandmother (unmarried), the mother (unmarried), and the little child,

while three men-lodgers completed the tale of eight human beings crowded

into that narrow, ill-ventilated garret. Other cottages were hovels,

through the broken roofs of which poured the rain, and wherein rheumatism

and ague lived with the dwellers. How could I do aught but sympathise

with any combination that aimed at the raising of these poor? But to

sympathise with Joseph Arch was a crime in the eyes of the farmers, who

knew that his agitation meant an increased drain on their pockets. For it

never struck them that, if they paid less in rent to the absent landlord,

they might pay more in wage to the laborers who helped to make their

wealth, and they had only civil words for the burden that crushed them,

and harsh ones for the builders-up of their ricks and the mowers of their

harvests. They made common cause with their enemy, instead of with their

friend, and instead of leaguing themselves with the laborers, as forming

together the true agricultural interest, they leagued themselves with the

landlords against the laborers, and so made fratricidal strife instead of

easy victory over the common foe.

 

In the summer and autumn of 1872, I was a good deal in London with my

mother.--My health had much broken down, and after a severe attack of

congestion of the lungs, my recovery was very slow. One Sunday in London,

I wandered into St. George's Hall, in which Mr. Charles Voysey was

preaching, and there I bought some of his sermons. To my delight I found

that someone else had passed through the same difficulties as I about

hell and the Bible and the atonement and the character of God, and had

given up all these old dogmas, while still clinging to belief in God. I

went to St. George's Hall again on the following Sunday, and in the

little ante-room, after the service, I found myself in a stream of

people, who were passing by Mr. and Mrs. Voysey, some evidently known to

him, some strangers, many of the latter thanking him for his morning's

work. As I passed in my turn I said: "I must thank you for very great

help in what you have said this morning", for indeed the possibility

opened of a God who was really "loving unto every man", and in whose care

each was safe for ever, had come like a gleam of light across the stormy

sea of doubt and distress on which I had been tossing for nearly twelve

months. On the following Sunday, I saw them again, and was cordially

invited down to their Dulwich home, where they gave welcome to all in

doubt. I soon found that the Theism they professed was free from the

defects which revolted me in Christianity. It left me God as a Supreme

Goodness, while rejecting all the barbarous dogmas of the Christian

faith. I now read Theodore Parker's "Discourse on Religion", Francis

Newman's "Hebrew Monarchy", and other works, many of the essays of Miss

Frances Power Cobbe and of other Theistic writers, and I no longer

believed in the old dogmas and hated while I believed; I no longer

doubted whether they were true or not; I shook them off, once for all,

with all their pain, and horror, and darkness, and felt, with relief and

joy inexpressible, that they were all but the dreams of ignorant and

semi-savage minds, not the revelation of a God. The last remnant of

Christianity followed swiftly these cast-off creeds, though, in parting

with this, one last pang was felt. It was the doctrine of the Deity of

Christ. The whole teaching of the Broad Church School tends, of course,

to emphasise the humanity at the expense of the Deity of Christ, and when

the eternal punishment and the substitutionary atonement had vanished,

there seemed to be no sufficient reason left for so stupendous a miracle

as the incarnation of the Deity. I saw that the idea of incarnation was

common to all Eastern creeds, not peculiar to Christianity; the doctrine

of the unity of God repelled the doctrine of the incarnation of a portion

of the Godhead. But the doctrine was dear from association; there was

something at once soothing and ennobling in the idea of a union between

Man and God, between a perfect man and divine supremacy, between a human

heart and an almighty strength. Jesus as God was interwoven with all art,

with all beauty in religion; to break with the Deity of Jesus was to

break with music, with painting, with literature; the Divine Child in his

mother's arms, the Divine Man in his Passion and in his triumph, the

human friend encircled with the majesty of the Godhead--did inexorable

Truth demand that this ideal figure, with all its pathos, its beauty, its

human love, should pass into the Pantheon of the dead Gods of the Past?

 

 

 

VIII.

 

 

The struggle was a sharp one ere I could decide that intellectual honesty

demanded that the question of the Deity of Christ should be analysed as

strictly as all else, and that the conclusions come to from an impartial

study of facts should be faced as steadily as though they dealt with some

unimportant question. I was bound to recognise, however, that more than

intellectual honesty would be here required, for if the result of the

study were--as I dimly felt it would be--to establish disbelief in the

supernatural claims of Christ, I could not but feel that such disbelief

would necessarily entail most unpleasant external results. I might give

up belief in all save this, and yet remain a member of the Church of

England: views on Inspiration, on Eternal Torture, on the Vicarious

Atonement, however heterodox, might be held within the pale of the

Church; many broad church clergymen rejected these as decidedly as I did

myself, and yet remained members of the Establishment; the judgment on

"Essays and Reviews" gave this wide liberty to heresy within the Church,

and a laywoman might well claim the freedom of thought legally bestowed

on divines. The name "Christian" might well be worn while Christ was

worshipped as God, and obeyed as the "Revealer of the Father's will",

the "well-beloved Son", the "Savior and Lord of men". But once challenge

that unique position, once throw off that supreme sovereignty, and then

it seemed to me that the name "Christian" became a hypocrisy, and its

renouncement a duty incumbent on an upright mind. But I was a clergyman's

wife; my position made my participation in the Holy Communion a

necessity, and my withdrawal therefrom would be an act marked and

commented upon by all. Yet if I lost my faith in Christ, how could I

honestly approach "the Lord's Table", where Christ was the central figure

and the recipient of the homage paid there by every worshipper to "God

made man"? Hitherto mental pain alone had been the price demanded

inexorably from the searcher after truth; now to the inner would be added

the outer warfare, and how could I tell how far this might carry me?

 

One night only I spent in this struggle over the question: "Shall I

examine the claims to Deity of Jesus of Nazareth?". When morning broke

the answer was clearly formulated: "Truth is greater than peace or

position. If Jesus be God, challenge will not shake his Deity; if he be

Man, it is blasphemy to worship him." I re-read Liddon's "Bampton

Lectures" on this controversy and Renan's "Vie de Jesus". I studied the

Gospels, and tried to represent to myself the life there outlined; I

tested the conduct there given as I should have tested the conduct of any

ordinary historical character; I noted that in the Synoptics no claim to

Deity was made by Jesus himself, nor suggested by his disciples; I

weighed his own answer to an enquirer, with its plain disavowal of

Godhood: "Why callest thou me good? There is none good save one, that is

God" (Matt, xix., 17); I conned over his prayers to "my Father", his rest

on divine protection, his trust in a power greater than his own; I noted

his repudiation of divine knowledge: "Of that day and that hour knoweth

no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, _neither the Son_, but

the Father" (Mark xiii., 32); I studied the meaning of his prayer of

anguished submission: "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass

from me! nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt" (Matt, xxvi.,

39); I dwelt on his bitter cry in his dying agony: "My God, my God, why

hast thou forsaken me?" (Matt, xxvii., 46); I asked the meaning of the

final words of rest: "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit" (Luke

xxiii., 46). And I saw that, if there were any truth in the Gospels at

all, they told the story of a struggling, suffering, sinning, praying

man, and not of a God at all and the dogma of the Deity of Christ

followed the rest of the Christian doctrines into the limbo of past

beliefs.

 

Yet one other effort I made to save myself from the difficulties I

foresaw in connexion with this final breach with Christianity. There was

one man who had in former days wielded over me a great influence, one

whose writings had guided and taught me for many years--Dr. Pusey, the

venerable leader of the Catholic party in the Church, the learned

Patristic scholar, full of the wisdom of antiquity. He believed in Christ

as God; what if I put my difficulties to him? If he resolved them for me

I should escape the struggle I foresaw; if he could not resolve them,

then no answer to them was to be hoped for. My decision was quickly made;

being with my mother, I could write to him unnoticed, and I sat down and

put my questions clearly and fully, stating my difficulties and asking

him whether, out of his wider knowledge and deeper reading, he could

resolve them for me. I wish I could here print his answer, together with

two or three other letters I received from him, but the packet was

unfortunately stolen from my desk and I have never recovered it. Dr.

Pusey advised me to read Liddon's "Bampton Lectures", referred me to

various passages, chiefly from the Fourth Gospel, if I remember rightly,

and invited me to go down to Oxford and talk over my difficulties.

Liddon's "Bampton Lectures" I had thoroughly studied, and the Fourth

Gospel had no weight with me, the arguments in favor of its Alexandrian

origin being familiar to me, but I determined to accept his invitation to

a personal interview, regarding it as the last chance of remaining in the

Church.

 

To Oxford, accordingly, I took the train, and made my way to the famous

Doctor's rooms. I was shown in, and saw a short, stout gentleman, dressed

in a cassock, and looking like a comfortable monk; but the keen eyes,

steadfastly gazing straight into mine, told me of the power and subtlety

hidden by the unprepossessing form. The head was fine and impressive, the

voice low, penetrating, drilled into a somewhat monotonous and

artificially subdued tone. I quickly found that no sort of enlightenment

could possibly result from our interview. He treated me as a penitent

going to confession, seeking the advice of a director, not as an enquirer

struggling after truth, and resolute to obtain some firm standing-ground

in the sea of doubt, whether on the shores of orthodoxy or of heresy. He

would not deal with the question of the Deity of Jesus as a question for

argument; he reminded me: "You are speaking of your judge," when I

pressed some question. The mere suggestion of an imperfection in Jesus'

character made him shudder in positive pain, and he checked me with

raised hand, and the rebuke: "You are blaspheming; the very thought is a

terrible sin". I asked him if he could recommend to me any books which

would throw light on the subject: "No, no, you have read too much

already. You must pray; you must pray." Then, as I said that I could not

believe without proof, I was told: "Blessed are they that have not seen,

and yet have believed," and my further questioning was checked by the

murmur: "O my child, how undisciplined! how impatient!". Truly, he must

have found in me--hot, eager, passionate in my determination to know,

resolute not to profess belief while belief was absent--but very little

of that meek, chastened, submissive spirit to which he was accustomed in

the penitents wont to seek his counsel as their spiritual guide. In vain

did he bid me pray as though I believed; in vain did he urge the duty of

blind submission to the authority of the Church, of yielding, unreasoning

faith, which received but questioned not. He had no conception of the

feelings of the sceptical spirit; his own faith was solid as a rock--

firm, satisfied, unshakeable; he would as soon have committed suicide as

have doubted of the infallibility of the "Universal Church".

 

"It is not your duty to ascertain the truth," he told me sternly. "It is

your duty to accept and to believe the truth as laid down by the Church;

at your peril you reject it; the responsibility is not yours so long as

you dutifully accept that which the Church has laid down for your

acceptance. Did not the Lord promise that the presence of the Spirit

should be ever with his Church, to guide her into all truth?"

 

"But the fact of the promise and its value are the very points on which I

am doubtful," I answered.

 

He shuddered. "Pray, pray," he said. "Father, forgive her, for she knows

not what she says."

 

It was in vain I urged that I had everything to gain and nothing to lose

by following his directions, but that it seemed to me that fidelity to

truth forbade a pretended acceptance of that which was not believed.

 

"Everything to lose? Yes, indeed. You will be lost for time and lost for

eternity."

 

"Lost or not," I rejoined, "I must and will try to find out what is true,

and I will not believe till I am sure."

 

"You have no right to make terms with God," he answered, "as to what you

will believe and what you will not believe. You are full of intellectual

pride."

 

I sighed hopelessly. Little feeling of pride was there in me just then,

and I felt that in this rigid unyielding dogmatism there was no

comprehension of my difficulties, no help for me in my strugglings. I

rose and, thanking him for his courtesy, said that I would not waste his

time further, that I must go home and just face the difficulties out,

openly leaving the Church and taking the consequences. Then for the first

time his serenity was ruffled.

 

"I forbid you to speak of your disbelief," he cried. "I forbid you to

lead into your own lost state the souls for whom Christ died."

 

Slowly and sadly I took my way back to the station, knowing that my last

chance of escape had failed me. I recognised in this famous divine the

spirit of the priest, which could be tender and pitiful to the sinner,

repentant, humble, submissive, craving only for pardon and for guidance,

but which was iron to the doubter, to the heretic, and would crush out

all questionings of "revealed truth", silencing by force, not by

argument, all challenge of the traditions of the Church. Out of such men

were made the Inquisitors of the Middle Ages, perfectly conscientious,

perfectly rigid, perfectly merciless to the heretic. To them heretics

were and are centres of infectious disease, and charity to them "the

worst cruelty to the souls of men". Certain that they hold "by no merit

of our own, but by the mercy of our God the one truth which he hath

revealed", they can permit no questionings, they can accept nought but

the most complete submission. But while man aspires after truth, while

his brain yearns after knowledge, while his intellect soars upward into

the heaven of speculation and "beats the air with tireless wing", so long

shall those who demand faith be met by challenge for proof, and those who

would blind him shall be defeated by his determination to gaze

unblenching on the face of Truth, even though her eyes should turn him

into stone.

 

During this same visit to London I saw Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Scott for the

first time. I had gone down to Dulwich to see Mr. and Mrs. Voysey, and

after dinner we went over to Upper Norwood, and I was introduced to one

of the most remarkable men I have ever met. At that time Mr. Scott was an

old man, with beautiful white hair, and eyes like those of a hawk

gleaming from under shaggy eyebrows; he had been a man of magnificent

physique, and though his frame was then enfeebled, the splendid lion-like

head kept its impressive strength and beauty, and told of a unique

personality. Of Scotch descent and wellborn, Thomas Scott had, as a boy,

been a page at the French Court; his manhood was spent in many lands, for

he "was a mighty hunter", though not "before the Lord". He had lived for

months among the North American Indians, sharing the hardships of their

wild life; he had hunted and fished all over the world. At last, he came

home, married, and ultimately settled down at Ramsgate, where he made his

home a centre of heretical thought. He issued an enormous number of

tracts and pamphlets, and each month he sent out a small packet to

hundreds of subscribers and friends. This monthly issue of heretical

literature soon made itself a power in the world of thought; the tracts

were of various shades of opinion, but were all heretical: some moderate,

some extreme; all were well-written, cultured and polished in tone--this

was a rule to which Mr. Scott made no exceptions; his writers might say

what they liked, but they must have something real to say, and they must

say that something in good English. The little white packets found their

way into many a quiet country parsonage, into many a fashionable home.

His correspondence was world-wide and came from all classes--now a letter

from a Prime Minister, now one from a blacksmith. All were equally

welcome, and all were answered with equal courtesy. At his house met

people of the most varying opinions. Colenso, Bishop of Natal, Edward

Maitland, E. Vansittart Neale, Charles Bray, Sara Hennell, W.J. Birch, R.

Suffield, and hundreds more, clerics and laymen, scholars and thinkers,

all gathered in this one home, to which the right of _entrée_ was gained

only by love of Truth and desire to spread Freedom among men.

 

Mr. Scott devoted his fortune to this great work. He would never let

publishers have his pamphlets in the ordinary way of trade, but issued

them all himself and distributed them gratuitously. If anyone desired to

subscribe, well and good, they might help in the work, but make it a

matter of business he would not. If anyone sent money for some tracts, he

would send out double the worth of the money enclosed, and thus for years

he carried on this splendid propagandist work. In all he was nobly

seconded by his wife, his "right hand" as he well named her, a sweet,

strong, gentle, noble woman, worthy of her husband, and than that no

higher praise can be spoken. Of both I shall have more to say hereafter,

but at present we are at the time of my first visit to them at Upper

Norwood, whither they had removed from Ramsgate.

 

Kindly greeting was given by both, and on Mr. Voysey suggesting that

judging by one essay of mine that he had seen--an essay which was later

expanded into the one on "Inspiration", in the Scott series--my pen would

be useful for propagandist work, Mr. Scott bade me try what I could do,

and send him for criticism anything I thought good enough for

publication; he did not, of course, promise to accept an essay, but he

promised to read it. A question arose as to the name to be attached to

the essay, in case of publication, and I told him that my name was not my

own to use, and that I did not suppose that Mr. Besant could possibly, in

his position, give me permission to attach it to a heretical essay; we

agreed that any essays I might write should for the present be published

anonymously, and that I should try my hand to begin with on the subject

of the "Deity of Jesus of Nazareth". And so I parted from those who were

to be such good friends to me in the coming time of struggle.

 

 

 

IX.

 

 

My resolve was now made, and henceforth there was at least no more doubt

so far as my position towards the Church was concerned. I made up my mind

to leave it, but was willing to make the leaving as little obtrusive as

possible. On my return to Sibsey I stated clearly the ground on which I

stood. I was ready to attend the Church services, joining in such parts

as were addressed to "the Supreme Being", for I was still heartily

Theistic; "the Father", shorn of all the horrible accessories hung round

him by Christianity, was still to me an object of adoration, and I could

still believe in and worship One who was "righteous in all His ways, and

holy in all His works", although the Moloch to whom was sacrificed the

well-beloved son had passed away for ever from my creed. Christian I was

not, though Theist I was, and I felt that the wider and more generous

faith would permit me to bow to the common God with my Christian

brethren, if only I was not compelled to pay homage to that "Son of Man"

whom Christians believed divine, homage which to me had become idolatry,

insulting to the "One God", to him of whom Jesus himself had spoken as of

"my God and your God".

 

Simply enough was the difficulty arranged for the moment. It was agreed

that I should withdraw myself from the "Holy Communion"--for in that

service, full of the recognition of Jesus as Deity, I could not join

without hypocrisy. The ordinary services I would attend, merely remaining

silent during those portions of them in which I could not honestly take

part, and while I knew that these changes in a clergyman's wife could not

pass unnoticed in a country village, I yet felt that nothing less than

this was consistent with barest duty. While I had merely doubted, I had

kept silence, and no act of mine had suggested doubt to others. Now that

I had no doubt that Christianity was a delusion, I would no longer act as

though I believed that to be of God which heart and intellect rejected as

untrue.

 

For awhile all went smoothly. I daresay the parishioners gossipped about

the absence of their vicar's wife from the Sacrament, and indeed I

remember the pain and trembling wherewith, on the first "Sacrament

Sunday" after my return, I rose from my seat and walked quietly from the

church, leaving the white-spread altar. That the vicar's wife should

"communicate" was as much a matter of course as that the vicar should

"administer"; I had never in my life taken public part in anything that

made me noticeable in any way among strangers, and still I can recall the

feeling of deadly sickness that well nigh overcame me, as rising to go

out I felt that every eye in the church was on me, and that my exit would

be the cause of unending comment. As a matter of fact, everyone thought

that I was taken suddenly ill, and many were the calls and enquiries on

the following day. To any direct question, I answered quietly that I was

unable to take part in the profession of faith required from an honest

communicant, but the statement was rarely necessary, for the idea of

heresy in a vicar's wife did not readily suggest itself to the ordinary

bucolic mind, and I did not proffer information when it was unasked for.

 

It happened that, shortly after that (to me) memorable Christmas of 1872,

a sharp epidemic of typhoid fever broke out in the village of Sibsey. The

drainage there was of the most primitive type, and the contagion spread

rapidly. Naturally fond of nursing, I found in this epidemic work just

fitted to my hand, and I was fortunate enough to be able to lend personal

help that made me welcome in the homes of the stricken poor. The mothers

who slept exhausted while I watched beside their darlings' bedsides will

never, I like to fancy, think over harshly of the heretic whose hand was

as tender and often more skilful than their own. I think Mother Nature

meant me for a nurse, for I take a sheer delight in nursing anyone,

provided only that there is peril in the sickness, so that there is the

strange and solemn feeling of the struggle between the human skill one

wields and the supreme enemy, Death. There is a strange fascination in

fighting Death, step by step, and this is of course felt to the full

where one fights for life as life, and not for a life one loves. When the

patient is beloved, the struggle is touched with agony, but where one

fights with Death over the body of a stranger, there is a weird

enchantment in the contest without personal pain, and as one forces back

the hated foe there is a curious triumph in the feeling which marks the

death-grip yielding up its prey, as one snatches back to earth the life

which had well-nigh perished.

 

Meanwhile, the promise to Mr. Scott was not forgotten, and I penned the

essay on "The Deity of Jesus of Nazareth" which stands first in the

collection of essays published later under the title, "My Path to

Atheism". The only condition annexed to my sending it to Mr. Scott was

the perfectly fair one that if published it should appear without my

name. Mr. Scott was well pleased with the essay, and before long it was

printed as one of the "Scott Series", to my great delight.

 

But unfortunately a copy sent to a relative of Mr. Besant's brought about

a storm. That gentlemen did not disagree with it--indeed he admitted that

all educated persons must hold the views put forward--but what would

Society say? What would "the county families" think if one of the

clerical party was known to be a heretic. This dreadful little paper bore

the inscription "By the wife of a beneficed clergyman"; what would happen

if the "wife of the beneficed clergyman" were identified with Mrs. Besant

of Sibsey?

 

After some thought I made a compromise. Alter or hide my faith I would

not, but yield personal feelings I would. I gave up my correspondence

with Mr. and Mrs. Voysey, which might, it was alleged, he noticed in the

village and so give rise to mischievous gossip. In this Mr. and Mrs.

Voysey most generously helped me, bidding me rest assured of their

cordial friendship while counselling me for awhile to cease the

correspondence which was one of the few pleasures of my life, but was not

part of my duty to the higher and freer faith which we had all embraced.

With keen regret I bade them for awhile farewell, and went back to my