Chapter IV: Introduction (4)

Each morning we were bound publicly to repeat a text out of certain little books, called _Daily Bread_, left in our bedrooms, and always scanned in frantic haste while “doing-up” our hair at the glass, or gabbled aloud by one damsel so occupied while her room-fellow (there were never more than two in each bed-chamber) was splashing about behind the screen in her bath. Down, when the prayer-bell rang, both were obliged to hurry and breathlessly to await the chance of being called on first to repeat the text of the day, the penalty for oblivion being the loss of a “card.” Then came a chapter of the Bible, read verse by verse amongst us, and then our books were shut and a solemn question was asked. On one occasion I remember it was: “What have you just been reading, Miss S——?” Miss S—— (now a lady of high rank and fashion, whose small wits had been woolgathering) peeped surreptitiously into her Bible again, and then responded with just confidence, “The First Epistle, Ma’am, of _General Peter_.”

It is almost needless to add, in concluding these reminiscences, that the heterogeneous studies pursued in this helter-skelter fashion were of the smallest possible utility in later life; each acquirement being of the shallowest and most imperfect kind, and all real education worthy of the name having to be begun on our return home, after we had been pronounced “finished.” Meanwhile the strain on our mental powers of getting through daily, for six months at a time, this mass of ill-arranged and miscellaneous lessons, was extremely great and trying.

One droll reminiscence must not be forgotten. The pupils at Miss Runciman’s and Miss Roberts’ were all supposed to have obtained the fullest instruction in Science by attending a course of Nine Lectures delivered by a gentleman named Walker in a public room in Brighton. The course comprised one Lecture on Electricity, another on Galvanism, another on Optics, others I think, on Hydrostatics, Mechanics, and Pneumatics, and finally three, which gave me infinite satisfaction, on Astronomy.

If true education be the instilling into the mind, not so much Knowledge, as the desire for Knowledge, mine at school certainly proved a notable failure. I was brought home (no girl could travel in those days alone) from Brighton by a coach called the _Red Rover_, which performed, as a species of miracle, in one day the journey to Bristol, from whence I embarked for Ireland. My convoy-brother naturally mounted the box, and left me to enjoy the interior all day by myself; and the reflections of those solitary hours of first emancipation remain with me as lively as if they had taken place yesterday. “What a delightful thing it is,” so ran my thoughts “to have done with study! Now I may really enjoy myself! I know as much as any girl in our school, and since it is the best school in England, I _must_ know all that it can ever be necessary for a lady to know. I will not trouble my head ever again with learning anything; but read novels and amuse myself for the rest of my life.”

This noble resolve lasted I fancy a few months, and then, depth below depth of my ignorance revealed itself very unpleasantly! I tried to supply first one deficiency and then another, till after a year or two, I began to educate myself in earnest. The reader need not be troubled with a long story. I spent four years in the study of History—constructing while I did so some Tables of Royal Successions on a plan of my own which enabled me to see at a glance the descent, succession and date of each reigning sovereign of every country, ancient and modern, possessing any History of which I could find a trace. These Tables I still have by me, and they certainly testify to considerable industry. Then the parson of our parish, who had been a tutor in Dublin College, came up three times a week for several years, and taught me a little Greek (enough to read the Gospels and to stumble through Plato’s _Krito_), and rather more geometry, to which science I took an immense fancy, and in which he carried me over Euclid and Conic Sections, and through two most delightful books of Archimedes’ spherics. I tried Algebra, but had as much disinclination for that form of mental labour as I had enjoyment in the reasoning required by Geometry. My tutor told me he was able to teach me in one lesson as many propositions as he habitually taught the undergraduates of Dublin College in two. I have ever since strongly recommended this study to women as specially fitted to counteract our habits of hasty judgment and slovenly statement, and to impress upon us the nature of real demonstration.

I also read at this time, by myself, as many of the great books of the world as I could reach; making it a rule always (whether bored or not) to go on to the end of each, and also following generally Gibbon’s advice, viz., to rehearse in one’s mind in a walk before beginning a great book all that one knows of the subject, and then, having finished it, to take another walk, and register how much has been added to our store of ideas. In these ways I read all the _Faery Queen_, all Milton’s poetry, and the _Divina Commedia_ and _Gerusalemme Liberata_ in the originals. Also (in translations) I read through the Iliad, Odyssey, Æneid, Pharsalia, and all or nearly all, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Ovid, Tacitus, Xenophon, Herodotus, Thucydides, &c. There was a fairly good library at Newbridge, and I could also go when I pleased, and read in Archbishop Marsh’s old library in Dublin, where there were splendid old books, though none I think more recent than a hundred and fifty years before my time. My mother possessed a small collection of classics—Dryden, Pope, Milton, Horace, &c., which she gave me, and I bought for myself such other books as I needed out of my liberal pin-money. Happily, I had at that time a really good memory for literature, being able to carry away almost the words of passages which much interested me in prose or verse, and to bring them into use when required, though I had, oddly enough, at the same period so imperfect a recollection of persons and daily events that, being very anxious to do justice to our servants, I was obliged to keep a book of memoranda of the characters and circumstances of all who left us, that I might give accurate and truthful recommendations.

By degrees these discursive studies—I took up various hobbies from time to time—Astronomy, Architecture, Heraldry, and many others—centred more and more on the answers which have been made through the ages by philosophers and prophets to the great questions of the human soul. I read such translations as were accessible in those pre-Müller days, of Eastern Sacred books; Anquetil du Perron’s _Zend Avesta_ (twice); and Sir William Jones’s _Institutes of Menu_; and all I could learn about the Greek and Alexandrian philosophers from Diogenes Laertius and the old translators (Taylor, of Norwich, and others) and a large Biographical Dictionary which we had in our library. Having always a passion for Synopses, I constructed, somewhere about 1840, a Table, big enough to cover a sheet of double-elephant paper, wherein the principal Greek philosophers were ranged,—their lives, ethics, cosmogonies and special doctrines,—in separate columns. After this I made a similar Table of the early Gnostics and other heresiarchs, with the aid of Mosheim, Sozomen, and Eusebius.

Does the reader smile to find these studies recorded as the principal concern of the life of a young lady from 16 to 20, and in fact to 35 years of age? It was even so! They _were_ (beside Religion, of which I shall speak elsewhere) my supreme interest. As I have said in the beginning, I had neither cares of love, or cares of money to occupy my mind or my heart. My parents wished me to go a little into society when I was about 18, and I was, for the moment, pleased and interested in the few balls and drawing-rooms (in Dublin) to which my father and afterwards my uncle, General George Cobbe, conducted me. But I was rather bored than amused by my dancing partners, and my dear mother, already in declining years and completely an invalid, could never accompany me, and I pined for her motherly presence and guidance, the loss of which was only half compensated for by her comments on the long reports of all I had seen and said and done, as I sat on her bed, on my return home. By degrees also, my thoughts came to be so gravely employed by efforts to find my way to religious truth, that the whole glamour of social pleasures disappeared and became a weariness; and by the time I was 19 I begged to be allowed to stay at home and only to receive our own guests, and attend the occasional dinners in our neighbourhood. With some regret my parents yielded the point, and except for a visit every two or three years to London for a few weeks of sightseeing, and one or two trips in Ireland to houses of our relations, my life, for a long time, was perfectly secluded. I have found some verses in which I described it.

“I live! I live! and never to man
More joy in life was given,
Or power to make, as I can make,
Of this bright world a heaven.

“My mind is free; my limbs are clad
With strength which few may know,
And every eye smiles lovingly;
On earth I have no foe.

“With pure and peaceful pleasures blessed
Speed my calm and studious days,
While the noblest works of mightiest minds
Lie open to my gaze.”

In one of our summer excursions I remember my father and one of my brothers and I lionized Winchester, and came upon an exquisite chapel, which was at that time, and perhaps still is, a sort of sanctuary of books, in the midst of a lovely, silent cloister. To describe the longing I felt then, and long after, to spend all my life studying there in peace and undisturbed, “hiving learning with each studious year,”—would be impossible!

I think there is a great, and it must be said lamentable, difference between the genuine passion for study such as many men and women in my time and before it experienced, and the hurried anxious _gobbling up_ of knowledge which has been introduced by competitive examinations, and the eternal necessity for _getting something else beside knowledge_; something to be represented by M.A. or B.Sch., or, perhaps, by £ s. d.! When I was young there were no honours, no rewards of any kind for a woman’s learning; and as there were no examinations, there was no hurry or anxiety. There was only healthy thirst for knowledge of one kind or another, and of one kind after another. When I came across a reference to a matter which I did not understand, it was not then necessary, as it seems to be to young students now, to hasten over it, leaving the unknown name, or event, or doctrine, like an enemy’s fortress on the road of an advancing army. I stopped and sat down before it, perhaps for days and weeks, but I conquered it at last, and then went on my way strengthened by the victory. Recently, I have actually heard of students at a college for ladies being advised by their “coach” to _skip a number of propositions in Euclid_, as it was certain they would not be examined in them! One might as well help a climber by taking rungs out of his ladder! I can make no sort of pretensions to have acquired, even in my best days, anything like the instruction which the young students of Girton and Newnham and Lady Margaret Hall are so fortunate as to possess; and much I envy their opportunities for obtaining accurate scholarship. But I know not whether the method they follow can, on the whole, convey as much of the pure delight in learning as did my solitary early studies. When the summer morning sun rose over the trees and shone as it often did into my bedroom finding me still over my books from the evening before, and when I then sauntered out to take a sleep on one of the garden seats in the shrubbery, the sense of having learned something, or cleared up some hitherto doubted point, or added a store of fresh ideas to my mental riches, was one of purest satisfaction.

As to writing as well as reading, I had very early a great love of the art and frequently wrote small essays and stories, working my way towards something of good style. Our English master at school on seeing my first exercise (on Roman History, I think it was), had asked Miss Runciman whether she were sure I had written it unaided, and observed that the turn of the sentences was not girl-like, and that he “thought I should grow up to be a fine writer.” My schoolmistress laughed, of course, at the suggestion, and I fancy she thought less of poor Mr. Turnbull for his absurd judgment. But as men and women who are to be good musicians love their pianos and violins as children, so I early began to love that noble instrument, the English Language, and in my small way to study how to play upon it. At one time when quite young I wrote several imitations of the style of Gibbon and other authors, just as an exercise. Eventually without of course copying anybody in particular, I fell into what I must suppose to be a style of my own, since those familiar with it easily detect passages of my writing wherever they come across them. I was at a later time much interested in seeing many of my articles translated into French (chiefly in the French Protestant periodicals) and to note how little it is possible to render the real feeling of such words as those with which _our_ tongue supplies us by those of that language. At a still later date, when I edited the _Zoophile_, I was perpetually disappointed by the failures of the best translators I could engage, to render my meaning. Among the things for which to be thankful in life, I think we, English, ought to assign no small place to our inheritance of that grand legacy of our forefathers, the English Language.

While these studies were going on, from the time I left school in 1838 till I left Newbridge in 1857, it may be noted that I had the not inconsiderable charge of keeping house for my father. My mother at once put the whole responsibility of the matter in my hands, refusing even to be told beforehand what I had ordered for the rather formal dinner parties of those days, and I accepted the task with pleasure, both because I could thus relieve her, and also because then and ever since I have really liked housekeeping. I love a well-ordered house and table, rooms pleasantly arranged and lighted, and decorated with flowers, hospitable attentions to guests, and all the other pleasant cares of the mistress of a family. In the midst of my studies I always went every morning regularly to my housekeeper’s room and wrote out a careful _menu_ for the upstairs and downstairs meals. I visited the larders and the fine old kitchen frequently, and paid the servants’ wages on every quarter day; and once a year went over my lists of everything in the charge of either the men or women servants. In particular I took very special care of the china, which happened to be magnificent; and hereby hangs the memory of a droll incident with which I may close this chapter.

A certain dignified old lady, the Hon. Mrs. X., had paid a visit to Newbridge with her daughters, and in return she invited one of my brothers and myself to spend some days at her “show” place in ——. While stopping there I talked with the enthusiasm of my age to her very charming young daughters of the pleasures of study, urging them strenuously to learn Greek and Mathematics. Mrs. X., overhearing me, intervened in the conversation, and said somewhat tartly, “I do not at all agree with you, Miss Cobbe! I think the duty of a lady is to attend to her house, and to her husband and children. I beg you will not incite my girls to take up your studies.”

Of course I bowed to the decree, and soon after began admiring some of the china about the room. “There is,” said Mrs. X., “some very fine old china belonging to this house. There is one dessert-service which is said to have cost £800 forty or fifty years ago. Would you like to see it?”

Having gratefully accepted the invitation, I followed my hostess to the basement of the house, and there, for the first time in my life, I recognised that condition of disorder and slatternliness which I had heard described as characteristic of Irish houses. At last we reached an underground china closet, and after some delay and reluctance on the part of the servant, a key was found and the door opened. There, on the shelves and the floor, lay piled, higgledy-piggledy, dishes and plates of exquisite china mixed up with the commonest earthenware jugs, basins, cups, and willow-pattern kitchen dishes; and the great dessert-service among the rest—_with the dessert of the previous summer rotting on the plates_! Yes! there was no mistake. Some of the superb plates handed to me by the servant for examination by the light of the window, had on them peach and plum-stones and grape-stalks, obviously left as they had been taken from the table in the dining-room many months before! Poor Mrs. X. muttered some expressions of dismay and reproach to her servants, which of course I did not seem to hear, but I had not the strength of mind to resist saying: “Indeed this is a splendid service; _Style de l’Empire_ I should call it. We have nothing like it, but when next you do us the pleasure to come to Newbridge I shall like to show you our Indian and Worcester services. Do you know I always take up all the plates and dishes myself when they have been washed the day after a party, and put them on their proper shelves with my own hands,—_though I do know a little Greek and geometry_, Mrs. X.!”

CHAPTER
IV.
_RELIGION._

I do not think that any one not being a fanatic, can regret having been brought up as an Evangelical Christian. I do not include Calvinistic Christianity in this remark; for it must surely cloud all the years of mortal life to have received the first impressions of Time and Eternity through that dreadful, discoloured glass whereby the “Sun is turned into darkness and the moon into blood.” I speak of the mild, devout, philanthropic Arminianism of the Clapham School, which prevailed amongst pious people in England and Ireland from the beginning of the century till the rise of the Oxford movement, and of which William Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury were successively representatives. To this school my parents belonged. The conversion of my father’s grandmother by Lady Huntingdon, of which I have spoken, had, no doubt, directed his attention in early life to religion, but he was himself no Methodist, or Quietist, but a typical Churchman as Churchmen were in the first half of the century. All our relatives far and near, so far as I have ever heard, were the same. We had five archbishops and a bishop among our near kindred,—Cobbe, Beresfords, and Trenchs, great-grandfather, uncle, and cousins,—and (as I have narrated) my father’s ablest brother, my god-father, was a clergyman. I was the first heretic ever known amongst us.

My earliest recollections include the lessons of both my father and mother in religion. I can almost feel myself now kneeling at my dear mother’s knees repeating the Lord’s Prayer after her clear sweet voice. Then came learning the magnificent Collects, to be repeated to my father on Sunday mornings in his study; and later the church catechism and a great many hymns. Sunday was kept exceedingly strictly at Newbridge in those days; and no books were allowed except religious ones, nor any amusement, save a walk after church. Thus there was abundant time for reading the Bible and looking over the pictures in various large editions, and in Calmet’s great folio _Dictionary_, beside listening to the sermon in church, and to another sermon which my father read in the evening to the assembled household. Of course, every day of the week there were Morning Prayers in the library,—and a “Short Discourse” from good, prosy old Jay, of Bath’s “Exercises.” In this way, altogether I received a good deal of direct religious instruction, beside very frequent reference to God and Duty and Heaven, in the ordinary talk of my parents with their children.

What was the result of this training? I can only suppose that my nature was a favourable soil for such seed, for it took root early and grew apace. I cannot recall any time when I could not have been described by any one who knew my little heart (I was very shy about it, and few, if any, did know it)—as a very religious child. Religious ideas were from the first intensely interesting and exciting to me. In great measure I fancy it was the element of the sublime in them which moved me first, just as I was moved by the thunder, and the storm and was wont to go out alone into the woods or into the long, solitary corridors to enjoy them more fully. I recollect being stirred to rapture by a little poem which I can repeat to this day, beginning:

Where is Thy dwelling place?
Is it in the realms of space,
By angels and just spirits only trod?
Or is it in the bright
And ever-burning light
Of the sun’s flaming disk that Thou art throned, O God?

One of the stanzas suggested that the Divine seat might be in some region of the starry universe:

“Far in the unmeasured, unimagined Heaven,
So distant that its light
Could never reach our sight
Though with the speed of thought for endless ages driven.”

Ideas like these used to make my cheek turn pale and lift me as if on wings; and naturally Religion was the great storehouse of them. But I think, even in childhood, there was in me a good deal beside of the _moral_, if not yet the _spiritual_ element of real Religion. Of course the great beauty and glory of Evangelical Christianity, its thorough amalgamation of the ideas of Duty and Devotion (elsewhere often so lamentably distinct), was very prominent in my parents’ lessons. God was always to me the All-seeing Judge. His eye looking into my heart and beholding all its naughtiness and little duplicities (which of course I was taught to consider serious sins) was so familiar a conception that I might be said to live and move in the sense of it. Thus my life in childhood morally, was much the same as it is physically to live in a room full of sunlight. Later on, the evils which belong to this Evangelical training, the excessive self-introspection and self-consciousness, made themselves painfully felt, but in early years there was nothing that was not perfectly wholesome in the religion which I had so readily assimilated.

Further, I was, as I have said, a very happy child, even conscious of my own happiness; and gratitude to God or man has always come to me as a sentiment enhancing my enjoyment of the good for which I have been thankful. Thus I was,—not conventionally merely,—but genuinely and spontaneously grateful to the Giver of all the pleasures which were poured on my head. I think I may say, that I _loved God_, when I was quite a young child. I can even remember being dimly conscious that my good father and mother performed their religious exercises more _as a duty_,—whereas to me such things, so far as I could understand them, were real _pleasures_; like being taken to see somebody I loved. I have since recognised that both my parents were, in Evangelical parlance, “under the law;” while in my childish heart the germ of the mysterious New Life was already planted. I think my mother was aware of something of the kind and looked with a little wonder, blended with her tenderness at my violent outbursts of penitence, and at my strange fancy for reading the most serious books in my playhours. My brothers had not exhibited any such symptoms, but then they were healthy schoolboys, always engaged eagerly in their natural sports and pursuits; while I was a lonely, dreaming girl.

When I was seven years old, my father undertook to read the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ to my brothers, then aged from 12 to 18, and I was allowed to sit in the room and provided with a slate and sums. The sums, it appeared, were never worked, while my eyes were fixed in absorbed interest on the reader, evening after evening. Once or twice when the delightful old copy of Bunyan was left about after the lesson, my slate was covered with drawings of Apollyon and Great Heart which were pronounced “wonderful for the child.” By the time Christian had come to the Dark River, all pretence of arithmetic was abandoned and I was permitted, proud and enchanted, to join the group of boys and listen with my whole soul to the marvellous tale. When the reading was over my father gave the volume (which had belonged to his grandmother) to me, for my “very own”; and I read it over and over continually for years, till the idea it is meant to convey,—Life a progress to Heaven—was engraved indelibly on my mind. It seems to me that few of those who have praised Bunyan most loudly have recognized that he was not only a great religious genius, but a born poet, a _Puritan-Tinker-Shelley_; possessed of what is almost the highest gift of poetry, the sense of the analogy between outward nature and the human soul. He used allegory instead of metaphor, a clumsier vehicle by far, but it carried the same exquisite thoughts. I have the dear old book still, and it is one of my treasures with its ineffably quaint old woodcuts and its delicious marginal notes; as, for example, when “Giant Despair” is said to be unable one day to maul the pilgrims in his dungeon, because he had fits. “For sometimes,” says Bunyan, “in sunshiny weather Giant Despair has fits.” Could any one believe that this gem of poetical thought and deep experience is noted by the words in the margin, “_His Fits!_”? My father wrote on the flyleaf of the blessed old book these still legible words:—

1830.

“This book, which belonged to my grandmother, was given as a present
to my dear daughter Fanny upon witnessing her delight in reading it.
May she keep the Celestial City steadfastly in view; may she surmount
the dangers and trials she must meet with on the road; and, finally,
be re-united with those she loved on earth in singing praises for ever
and ever to Him who loved them and gave himself for them, is the
fervent prayer of her affectionate father,

“CHARLES COBBE.”

The notion of “getting to Heaven” by means of a faithful pilgrimage through this “Vale of Tears” was the prominent feature I think, always, in my father’s religion, and naturally took great hold on me. When the day came whereon I began to doubt whether there were any Heaven to be reached, that moral earthquake, as was inevitable, shook not only my religion but my morality to their foundations; and my experience of the perils of those years, has made me ever since anxious to base religion in every young mind, on ground liable to no such catastrophes. The danger came to me on this wise.

Up to my eleventh year, my little life inward and outward had flown in a bright and even current. Looking back at it and comparing my childhood with that of others I seem to have been—probably from the effects of solitude—_devout_ beyond what was normal at my age. I used to spend a great deal of time secretly reading the Bible and that dullest of dull books _The Whole Duty of Man_ (the latter a curious foretaste of my subsequent life-long interest in the study of ethics)—not exactly enjoying them but happy in the feeling that I was somehow approaching God. I used to keep awake at night to repeat various prayers and (wonderful to remember!) the Creed and Commandments! I made all sorts of severe rules for myself, and if I broke them, manfully mulcted myself of any little pleasures or endured some small self-imposed penance. Of none of these things had any one, even my dear mother, the remotest idea, except once when I felt driven like a veritable Cain, by my agonised conscience to go and confess to her that I had said in a recent rage (to myself) “_Curse them all!_” referring to my family in general and to my governess in particular! The tempest of my tears and sobs on this occasion evidently astonished her, and I remember lying exhausted on the floor in a recess in her bedroom, for a long time before I was able to move.

But the hour of doubt and difficulty was approaching. The first question which ever arose in my mind was concerning the miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. I can recall the scene vividly. It was a winter’s night, my father was reading the Sunday evening Sermon in the dining-room. The servants, whose attendance was _de rigueur_, were seated in a row down the room. My father faced them, and my mother and I and my governess sat round the fire near him. I was opposite the beautiful classic black marble mantelpiece, surmounted with an antique head of Jupiter Serapis (all photographed on my brain even now), and listening with all my might, as in duty bound, to the sermon which described the miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. “How did it happen exactly?” I began cheerfully to think, quite imagining I was doing the right thing to try to understand it all. “Well! first there were the fishes and the loaves. But what was done to them? Did the fish grow and grow as they were eaten and broken? And the bread the same? No! that is nonsense. And then the twelve basketsful taken up at the end, when there was not nearly so much at the beginning. It is not possible!” “O! Heavens! (was the next thought) _I am doubting the Bible!_ God forgive me! I must never think of it again.”

But the little rift had begun, and as time went on other difficulties arose. Nothing very seriously, however, distracted my faith or altered the intensity of my religious feelings for the next two years, till in October, 1836, I was sent to school as I have narrated in the last chapter, at Brighton and a new description of life opened. At school I came under influence of two kinds. One was the preaching of the Evangelical Mr. Vaughan, in whose church (Christ Church) were our seats; and I recall vividly the emotion with which one winter’s night I listened to his sermon on the great theme, “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as wool.” The sense of “the exceeding sinfulness of sin,” the rapturous joy of purification therefrom, came home to me, and as I walked back to school with the waves thundering up the Brighton beach beside us and the wind tossing the clouds in the evening sky overhead, the whole tremendous realities of the moral life seemed borne in on my heart. On the other hand, the perpetual overstrain of schoolwork, and unjust blame and penalty for failure to do what it was impossible to accomplish in the given time, drove me to all sorts of faults for which I hated and despised myself. When I knelt by my bed at night, after the schoolfellow who shared my room was, as I fancied, asleep, she would get up and pound my head with a bolster, laughing and crying out, “Get up, you horrid hypocrite; get up! I’ll go on beating you till you do!” It was not strange if, under such circumstances, my beautiful childish religion fell into abeyance and my conscience into disquietude. But, as I have narrated, I came home at sixteen, and then, once more able to enjoy the solitude of the woods and of my own bedroom and its inner study where no one intruded, the old feelings, tinged with deep remorse for the failures of my school life and for many present faults (amongst others a very bitter and unforgiving temper) come back with fresh vigour. I have always considered that in that summer in my seventeenth year I went through what Evangelical Christians call “conversion.” Religion became the supreme interest of life; and the sense that I was pardoned its greatest joy. I was, of course, a Christian of the usual Protestant type, finding infinite pleasure in the simple old “Communion” of those pre-ritualistic days, and in endless Bible readings to myself. Sometimes I rose in the early summer dawn and read a whole Gospel before I dressed. I think I never ran up into my room in the daytime for any change of attire without glancing into the book and carrying away some echo of what I believed to be “God’s Word.” Nobody knew anything about all this, of course; but as time went on there were great and terrible perturbations in my inner life, and these perhaps I did not always succeed in concealing from the watchful eyes of my dear mother.

So far as I can recall, the ideas of Christ and of God the Father, were for all practical religious purposes identified in my young mind. It was as God upon earth,—the Redeemer God, that I worshipped Jesus. To be pardoned through his “atonement” and at death to enter Heaven, were the religious objects of life. But a new and most disturbing element here entered my thoughts. How did anybody know all that story of Galilee to be true? How could we believe the miracles? I had read very carefully Gibbon’s XV. and XVI. chapters, and other books enough to teach me that everything in historical Christianity had been questioned; and my own awakening critical, and reasoning, and above all, ethical,—faculties supplied fresh crops of doubts of the truth of the story and of the morality of much of the Old Testament history, and of the scheme of Atonement itself.

Then ensued four years on which I look back as pitiful in the extreme. In complete mental solitude and great ignorance, I found myself facing all the dread problems of human existence. For a long time my intense desire to remain a Christian predominated, and brought me back from each return to scepticism in a passion of repentance and prayer to Christ to take my life or my reason sooner than allow me to stray from his fold. In those days no such thing was heard of as “Broad” interpretations of Scripture doctrines. We were fifty years before _Lux Mundi_ and thirty before even _Essays and Reviews_. To be a “Christian,” then, was to believe implicitly in the verbal inspiration of every word of the Bible, and to adore Christ as “very God of very God.” With such implicit belief it was permitted to hope we might, by a good life and through Christ’s Atonement, attain after death to Heaven. Without the faith or the good life, it was certain we should go to hell. It was taught us all that to be good only from fear of Hell was not the highest motive; the _highest_ motive was the hope of Heaven! Had anything like modern rationalising theories of the Atonement, or modern expositions of the Bible stories, or finally modern loftier doctrines of disinterested morality and religion, been known to me at this crisis of my life, it is possible that the whole course of my spiritual history would have been different. But of all such “raising up the astral spirits of dead creeds,” as Carlyle called it, or as Broad churchmen say, “Liberating the kernel of Christianity from the husk,” I knew, and could know nothing. Evangelical Christianity in 1840 presented itself as a thing to be taken whole, or rejected wholly; and for years the alternations went on in my poor young heart and brain, one week or month of rational and moral disbelief, and the next of vehement, remorseful return to the faith which I supposed could alone give me the joy of religion. As time went on, and my reading supplied me with a little more knowledge and my doubts deepened and accumulated, the returns to Christian faith grew fewer and shorter, and, as I had no idea of the possibility of reaching any other vital religion, I saw all that had made to me the supreme joy and glory of life fade out of it, while that motive which had been presented to me as the mainspring of duty and curb of passion, namely, the Hope of Heaven, vanished as a dream. I always had, as I have described, somewhat of that _mal-du-ciel_ which Lamartine talks of, that longing, as from the very depths of our being for an Eden of Divine eternal love. I could scarcely in those days read even such poor stuff as the song of the Peri in Moore’s _Lalla Rookh_ (not to speak of Bunyan’s vision of the Celestial City) without tears rushing to my eyes. But this, I saw, must all go with the rest. If, as Clough was saying, all unknown to me, about that same time,—

“Christ is not risen, no!
He lies and moulders low.”

If all the Christian revelation were a mass of mistakes and errors, no firmer ground on which to build than the promises of Mahomet, or of Buddha, or of the Old Man of the Mountain,—of course there was (so far as I saw) no reason left for believing in any Heaven at all, or any life after death. Neither had the Moral Law, which had come to me through that supposed revelation on Sinai and the Mount of Galilee, any claim to my obedience other than might be made out by identifying it with principles common to heathen and Christian alike; an identity of which, at that epoch, I had as yet only the vaguest ideas. In short my poor young soul was in a fearful dilemma. On the one hand I had the choice to accept a whole mass of dogmas against which my reason and conscience rebelled; on the other, to abandon those dogmas and strive no more to believe the incredible, or to revere what I instinctively condemned; and then, as a necessary sequel, to cast aside the laws of Duty which I had hitherto cherished; to cease to pray or take the sacrament; and to relinquish the hope of a life beyond the grave.

It was not very wonderful if, as I think I can recall, my disposition underwent a considerable change for the worse while all these tremendous questions were being debated in my solitary walks in the woods and by the sea-shore, and in my room at night over my Gibbon or my Bible. I know I was often bitter and morose and selfish; and then came the alternate spell of paroxysms of self-reproach and fanciful self-tormentings.

The life of a young woman in such a home as mine is so guarded round on every side and the instincts of a girl are so healthy, that the dangers incurred even in such a spiritual landslip as I have described are very limited compared to what they must inevitably be in the case of young men or of women less happily circumstanced. It has been my profound sense of the awful perils of such a downfall of faith as I experienced, the peril of moral shipwreck without compass or anchorage amid the tempests of youth, which has spurred me ever since to strive to forestall for others the hour of danger.

At last my efforts to believe in orthodox Christianity ceased altogether. In the summer after my twentieth birthday I had reached the end of the long struggle. The complete downfall of Evangelicalism,—which seems to have been effected in George Eliot’s strong brain in a single fortnight of intercourse with Mr. and Mrs. Bray,—had taken in my case four long years of miserable mental conflict and unspeakable pain. It left me with something as nearly like a _Tabula rasa_ of faith as can well be imagined. I definitely disbelieved in human immortality and in a supernatural revelation. The existence of God I neither denied nor affirmed. I felt I had no means of coming to any knowledge of Him. I was, in fact (long before the word was invented), precisely—an Agnostic.

One day, while thus literally creedless, I wandered out alone as was my wont into a part of our park a little more wild than the rest, where deer were formerly kept and sat down among the rocks and the gorse which was then in its summer glory of odorous blossoms, ever since rich to me with memories of that hour. It was a sunny day in May, and after reading a little of my favourite Shelley, I fell, as often happened, into mournful thought. I was profoundly miserable; profoundly conscious of the deterioration and sliding down of all my feelings and conduct from the high ambitions of righteousness and holiness which had been mine in the days of my Christian faith and prayer; and at the same time I knew that the whole scaffolding of that higher life had fallen to pieces and could never be built up again. While I was thus musing despairingly, something stirred within me, and I asked myself, “Can I not rise once more, conquer my faults, and live up to my own idea of what is right and good? Even though there be no life after death, I may yet deserve my own respect here and now, and, if there be a God, He must approve me.”

The resolution was made very seriously. I came home to begin a new course and to cultivate a different spirit. Was it strange that in a few days I began instinctively, and almost without reflection, to pray again? No longer did I make any kind of effort to believe this thing or the other about God. I simply addressed Him as the Lord of conscience, whom I implored to strengthen my good resolutions, to forgive my faults, “to lift me out of the mire and clay and set my feet upon a rock and order my goings.” Of course, there was Christian sentiment and the results of Christian training in all I felt and did. I could no more have cast them off than I could have leaped off my shadow. But of dogmatical Christianity there was never any more. I have never from that time, now more than fifty years ago, attached, or wished I could attach, credence to any part of what Dr. Martineau has called the _Apocalyptic side of Christianity_, nor (I may add with thankfulness) have I ever lost faith in God.

The storms of my youth were over. Henceforth through many years there was a progressive advance to Theism as I have attempted to describe it in my books; and there were many, many hard moral fights with various Apollyons all along the road; but no more spiritual revolutions.

About thirty years after that day, to me so memorable, I read in Mr. Stopford Brooke’s _Life of Robertson_, these words which seem truly to tell my own story and which I believe recorded Robertson’s own experience, a little while later:

“It is an awful moment when the soul begins to find that the props on which it blindly rested are many of them rotten.... I know but one way in which a man can come forth from this agony scatheless: it is by holding fast to those things which are certain still. In the darkest hour through which a human soul can pass, whatever else is doubtful, this at least is certain. If there be no God and no future state, even then _it is better to be generous than selfish, better to be true than false, better to be brave than a coward_. Blessed beyond all earthly blessedness is the man who in the tempestuous darkness of the soul has dared to hold fast to these landmarks. I appeal to the recollection of any man who has passed through that agony and stood upon the rock at last, with a faith and hope and trust no longer traditional but his own.”

It may be asked, “What was my creed for those first years of what I may call _indigenous_ religion?” Naturally, with no better guide than the inductive philosophy of Locke and Bacon, I could have no outlook beyond the Deism of the last century. Miracles and miraculous inspiration being formally given up, there remained only (as I supposed) as testimony to the existence and character of God such inductions as were drawn in _Paley’s Theology_ and the _Bridgwater Treatises_; with all of which I was very familiar. Voltaire’s “_Dieu Toutpuissant, Remunerateur Vengeur_,” the God whose garb (as Goethe says,) is woven in “Nature’s roaring loom”; the Beneficent Creator, from whom came all the blessings which filled my cup; these were the outlines of Deity for me for the time. The theoretical connection between such a God and my own duty I had yet to work out through much hard study, but fortunately moral instinct was practically sufficient to identify them; nay, it was, as I have just narrated, _through_ such moral instincts that I was led back straight to religion, and began to pray to my Maker as my Moral Lord, so soon as ever I strove in earnest to obey my conscience.

There was nothing in such simple Deism to warrant a belief in a future life, and I deliberately trained myself to abandon a hope which was always very dear to me. As regards Christ, there was inevitably, at first, some reaction in my mind from the worship of my Christian days. I almost felt I had been led into idolatry, and I bitterly resented then (and ever since) the paramount prominence, the genuflexions at the creed, and the especially reverential voice and language applied constantly by Christians to the Son, rather than to the Father. But after I had read F. W. Newman’s book of the _Soul_, I recognised, with relief, how many of the phenomena of the spiritual life which Christians are wont to treat as exclusively bound up with their creed are, in truth, phases of the natural history of all devout spirits; and my longing has ever since been rather to find grounds of sympathy with believers in Christ and for union with them on the broadest bases of common gratitude, penitence, restoration and adoration, rather than to accentuate our differences. The view which I eventually reached of Christ as an historical human character, is set forth at large in my _Broken Lights_. He was, I think, the man whose life was to the life of Humanity what Regeneration is to the individual soul.

I may here conclude the story of my religious life extending through the years after the above described momentous change. After a time, occupied in part with study and with efforts to be useful to our poor neighbours and to my parents, my Deism was lifted to a higher plane by one of those inflowings of truth which seem the simplest things in the world, but are as rain on the dry ground in summer to the mind which receives them. One day while praying quietly, the thought came to me with extraordinary lucidity: “God’s Goodness is what _I mean_ by Goodness! It is not a mere title, like the ‘Majesty’ of a King. He has really that character which we call ‘Good.’ He is Just, as I understand Justice, only more perfectly just. He is Good as I understand Goodness, only more perfectly good. He is not good in time and tremendous in eternity; not good to some of His creatures and cruel to others, but wholly, eternally, universally good. If I could know and understand all His acts from eternity, there would not be one which would not deepen my reverence and call forth my adoring praise.”

To some readers this discovery may seem a mere platitude and truism: the assertion of a thing which they have never failed to understand. To me it was a real revelation which transformed my religion from one of reverence only into one of vivid love for that Infinite Goodness which I then beheld unclouded. The deep shadow left for years on my soul by the doctrine of eternal Hell had rolled away at last. Another truth came home to me many years later, and not till after I had written my first book. It was one night, after sitting up late in my room reading (for once) no grave work, but a pretty little story by Mrs. Gaskell. Up to that time I had found the pleasures of knowledge the keenest of all, and gloried in the old philosopher’s _dictum_, “Man was created to know and to contemplate.” I looked on the pleasures of the affections as secondary and inferior to those of the intellect, and I strove to perform my duties to those around me, rather in a spirit of moral rectitude and obedience to law than in one of lovingkindness. Suddenly again it came to me to see that Love is greater than Knowledge; that it is more beautiful to serve our brothers freely and tenderly, than to “hive up learning with each studious year,” to compassionate the failures of others and ignore them when possible, rather than undertake the hard process (I always found it so!) of forgiveness of injuries; to say, “What may I be allowed to do to help and bless this one—or that?” rather than “What am I bound by duty to do for him, or her; and how little will suffice?” As these thoughts swelled in my heart, I threw myself down in a passion of happy tears, and passed most of the night thinking how I should work out what I had learned. I had scarcely fallen asleep towards morning when I was wakened by the intelligence that one of the servants, a young laundress, was dying. I hurried to the poor woman’s room which was at a great distance from mine, and found all the men and women servants collected round her. She wished for some one to pray for her, and there was no one to do it but myself, and so, while the innocent girl’s soul passed away, I led, for the first and only time, the prayers of my father’s household.

I had read a good number of books by Deists during the preceding years. Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works (which I greatly admired), Hume, Tindal, Collins, Voltaire, beside as many of the old heathen moralists and philosophers as I could reach; Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, Plutarch’s _Moralia_, Xenophon’s _Memorabilia_, and a little of Plato. But of any modern book touching on the particular questions which had tortured me I knew nothing till, by the merest good fortune, I fell in with _Blanco White’s Life_. How much comfort and help I found in his _Meditations_ the reader may guess. Curiously enough, long years afterwards, Bishop Colenso told me that the same book, falling into his hands in Natal by the singular chance of a colonist possessing the volumes, had determined him to come over to England and bring out his _Pentateuch_. Thus poor Blanco White, after all prophesied rightly when he said that he was “one of those who, falling in the ditch, help other men to pass over”!

Another book some years later was very helpful to me—F. W. Newman’s _Soul_. Dean Stanley told me that he thought in the far future that single book would be held to outweigh in value all that the author’s brother, Cardinal Newman, had ever written. I entered not long after into correspondence with Professor Newman, and have had the pleasure of calling him my friend ever since. We have interchanged letters, or at least friendly greetings, at short intervals now for nearly fifty years.