Anand
Gholap
Theosophy
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Theosophy
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It is a difficult thing to tell the story of a life, and yet more difficult when
that life is one's own. At the best, the telling has a savour of vanity, and the
only excuse for the proceeding is that the life, being an average one, reflects
many others, and in troublous times like ours may give the experience of many
rather than of one. And so the autobiographer does his work because he thinks
that, at the cost of some unpleasantness to himself, he may throw light on some
of the typical problems that are vexing the souls of his contemporaries, and
perchance may stretch out a helping hand to some brother who is struggling in
the darkness, and so bring him cheer when despair has him in its grip. Since all
of us, men and women of this restless and eager generation—surrounded by forces
we dimly see but cannot as yet understand, discontented with old ideas and half
afraid of new, greedy for the material results of the knowledge brought us by
Science but looking askance at her agnosticism as regards the soul, fearful of
superstition but still more fearful of atheism, turning from the husks of
outgrown creeds but filled with desperate hunger for spiritual ideals--since all
of us have the same anxieties, the same griefs, the same yearning hopes, the
same passionate desire for knowledge, it may well be that the story of one may
help all, and that the tale of one should that went out alone into the darkness
and on the other side found light, that struggled through the Storm and on the
other side found Peace, may bring some ray of light and of peace into the
darkness and the storm of other lives.
ANNIE BESANT.
The Theosophical Society,
17 & 19, Avenue Road, Regent's Park,
August, 1893.
CHAP.
I.
"OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE INTO THE HERE"
II.
EARLY CHILDHOOD
III.
GIRLHOOD
IV.
MARRIAGE
VII.
ATHEISM AS I KNEW AND TAUGHT IT
VIII.
AT WORK
XII.
STILL FIGHTING
XIII.
SOCIALISM
1.
On October 1,
1847, I am credibly informed, my baby eyes opened to the light(?) of a
2.
A friendly
astrologer has drawn for me the following chart, showing the position of the
planets at this, to me fateful, moment; but I know nothing of astrology, so feel
no wiser as I gaze upon my horoscope.
5.
Keeping in
view the way in which sun, moon, and planets influence the physical condition of
the earth, there is nothing incongruous with the orderly course of nature in the
view that they also influence the physical bodies of men, these being part of
the physical earth, and largely moulded by its conditions. Any one who knows the characteristics ascribed to those who are
born under the several signs of the Zodiac, may very easily pick out the
different types among his own acquaintances, and he may then get them to go to
some astrologer and find out under what signs they were severally born. He will
very quickly discover that two men of completely opposed types are not born
under the same sign, and the invariability of the concurrence will convince him
that law, and not chance, is at work. We are born into earthly life under
certain conditions, just as we were physically affected by them pre-natally, and
these will have their bearing on our subsequent physical evolution. At the most,
astrology, as it is now practised, can only calculate the interaction between
these physical conditions at any given moment, and the conditions brought to
them by a given person whose general constitution and natal condition are known.
It cannot say what the person will do, nor what will
happen to him, but only what will be the physical district, so to speak, in
which he will find himself, and the impulses that will play upon him from
external nature and from his own body. Even on those matters modern astrology is
not quite reliable—judging from the many blunders made—or else its professors
are very badly instructed; but that there is a real science of astrology I have
no doubt, and there are some men who are past masters in it.
6.
It has always
been somewhat of a grievance to me that I was born in
7.
My maternal
grandfather was a typical Irishman, much admired by me and somewhat feared also,
in the childish days. He belonged to a decayed Irish family, the Maurices, and
in a gay youth, with a beautiful wife as light-hearted as himself, he had
merrily run through what remained to him in the way of fortune. In his old age,
with abundant snow-white hair, he still showed the hot Irish blood on the
lightest provocation, stormily angry for a moment and easily appeased. My mother
was the second daughter in a large family, in a family that grew more numerous
as pounds grew fewer, and she was adopted by a maiden aunt, a quaint memory of
whom came through my mother's childhood into mine, and had its moulding effect
on both our characters. This maiden aunt was, as are most Irish folk of decayed
families, very proud of her family tree with its roots in the inevitable
"kings." Her particular kings were the "seven kings of
8.
Thus those
shadowy forms influenced her in childhood, and exercised over her a power that
made her shrink from aught that was unworthy, petty or mean. To her the lightest
breath of dishonour was to be avoided at any cost of pain, and she wrought into
me, her only daughter, that same proud and passionate horror at any taint of
shame or merited disgrace. To the world always a brave front was to be kept, and
a stainless reputation, for suffering might be borne but dishonour never. A
gentlewoman might starve, but she must not run in debt; she might break her
heart, but it must be with a smile on her face. I have often thought that the
training in this reticence and pride of honour was a strange preparation for my
stormy, public, much attacked and slandered life; and certain it is that this
inwrought shrinking from all criticism that touched personal purity and personal
honour added a keenness of suffering to the fronting of public odium that none
can appreciate who has not been trained in some similar school of dignified
self-respect. And yet perhaps there was another result from it that in value
outweighed the added pain: it was the stubbornly resistant feeling that rose and
inwardly asserted its own purity in face of foulest lie, and turning scornful
face against the foe, too proud either to justify itself or to defend, said to
itself in its own heart, when condemnation was loudest: "I am not what you think
me, and your verdict does not change my own self. You cannot make me vile
whatever you think of me, and I will never, in my own eyes, be that which you
deem me to be now." And the very pride became a shield against degradation, for,
however lost my public reputation, I could never bear to become sullied in my
own sight—and that is a thing not without its use to a woman cut off, as I was
at one time, from home, and friends, and Society. So peace to the maiden aunt's
ashes, and to those of her absurd kings, for I owe them something after all. And
I keep grateful memory of that unknown grand-aunt, for what she did in training
my dear mother, the tenderest, sweetest, proudest, purest
of women. It is well to be able to look back to a mother who served as ideal of
all that was noblest and dearest during childhood and girlhood, whose face made
the beauty of home, and whose love was both sun and shield. No other experience
in life could quite make up for missing the perfect tie between mother and
child—a tie that in our case never relaxed and never weakened. Though her grief
at my change of faith and consequent social ostracism did much to hasten her
death-hour, it never brought a cloud between our hearts; though her pleading was
the hardest of all to face in later days, and brought the bitterest agony, it
made no gulf between us, it cast no chill upon our mutual love. And I look back
at her to-day with the same loving gratitude as ever encircled her to me in her
earthly life. 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 honour, 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 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.
9.
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
10.
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 the West in vain.
11.
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 labours 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."
12.
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.
13.
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.
14.
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.
15.
Deeply read
in philosophy, he had outgrown the orthodox beliefs of his day, and his wife,
who loved him too much to criticise, was wont to reconcile her own piety and his
scepticism by holding that "women ought to be religious," while men had a right
to read everything and think as they would, provided that they were upright and
honourable in their lives. But the result of his liberal and unorthodox thought
was to insensibly modify and partially rationalise her own beliefs, and she put
on one side as errors the doctrines of eternal punishment, the vicarious
atonement, the infallibility of the Bible, the equality of the Son with the
Father in the Trinity, and other orthodox beliefs, and rejoiced in her later
years in the writings of such men as Jowett, Colenso, and Stanley. The last
named, indeed, was her ideal Christian gentleman, suave, polished, broad-minded,
devout in a stately way. The baldness of a typical Evangelical service
outraged her taste as much as the crudity of Evangelical dogmas outraged her
intellect; she liked to feel herself a Christian in a dignified and artistic
manner, and to be surrounded by solemn music and splendid architecture when she
"attended Divine service." Familiarity with celestial personages was detestable
to her, and she did her duty of saluting them in a courtly and reverent fashion.
Westminster Abbey was her favourite church, with its dim light and shadowy
distances; there in a carven stall, with choristers chanting in solemn rhythm,
with the many-coloured glories of the painted windows repeating themselves on
upspringing arch and clustering pillars, with the rich harmonies of the pealing
organ throbbing up against screen and monument, with the ashes of the mighty
dead around, and all the stately memories of the past inwrought into the very
masonry, there Religion appeared to her to be intellectually dignified and
emotionally satisfactory.
16.
To me, who
took my religion in strenuous fashion, this dainty and well-bred piety seemed
perilously like Laodicean lukewarmness, while my headlong vigour of conviction
and practice often jarred on her as alien from the delicate balance and absence
of extremes that should characterise the gentlewoman. She was of the old
régime; I of the stuff from which fanatics are made: and I have often
thought, in looking back, that she must have had on her lips many a time
unspoken a phrase that dropped from them when she lay a-dying: "My little one,
you have never made me sad or sorry except for your own sake; you have always
been too religious." And then she murmured to herself: "Yes, it has been darling
Annie's only fault; she has always been too religious." Methinks that, as the
world judges, the dying voice spake truly, and the dying eyes saw with a real
insight. For though I was then kneeling beside her bed, heretic and outcast, the
heart of me was religious in its very fervour of repudiation of a religion, and
in its rebellious uprising against dogmas that crushed the reason and did not
satisfy the soul. I went out into the darkness alone, not because religion was
too good for me, but because it was not good enough; it was too meagre, too
commonplace, too little exacting, too bound up with earthly interests, too
calculating in its accommodations to social conventionalities. The Roman
Catholic Church, had it captured me, as it nearly did, would have sent me on
some mission of danger and sacrifice and utilised me as a martyr; the Church
established by law transformed me into an unbeliever and an antagonist.
17.
For as a
child I was mystical and imaginative religious to the very finger-tips, and with
a certain faculty for seeing visions and dreaming dreams. This faculty is not
uncommon with the Keltic races, and makes them seem "superstitious" to more
solidly-built peoples. Thus, on the day of my father's funeral, my mother sat
with vacant eyes and fixed pallid face—the picture comes back to me yet, it so
impressed my childish imagination—following the funeral service, stage after
stage, and suddenly, with the words, "It is all over!" fell back fainting. She
said afterwards that she had followed the hearse, had attended the service, had walked behind the coffin to the grave. Certain it is that
a few weeks later she determined to go to the Kensal Green Cemetery, where the
body of her husband had been laid, and went thither with a relative; he failed
to find the grave, and while another of the party went in search of an official
to identify the spot, 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." The idea seemed
to her friend, of course, to be absurd; but he would not cross the newly-made
widow, so took her to the chapel. She looked round, left the chapel door, and
followed the path along which the corpse had been borne till she reached the
grave, where she was quietly standing when the caretaker arrived to point it
out. The grave is at some distance from the chapel, and is not on one of the
main roads; it had nothing on it to mark it, save the wooden peg with the
number, and this would be no help to identification at a distance since all the
graves are thus marked, and at a little way off these pegs are not visible. How
she found the grave remained a mystery in the family, as no one believed her
straightforward story that she had been present at the funeral. With my present
knowledge the matter is simple enough, for I now know that the consciousness can
leave the body, take part in events going on at a distance, and, returning,
impress on the physical brain what it has experienced. The very fact that she
asked to be taken to the chapel is significant, showing that she was picking up
a memory of a previous going from that spot to the grave; she could only find
the grave if she started from the place from which she had started before.
Another proof of this ultra-physical capacity was given a few months later, when
her infant son, who had been pining himself ill for "papa," was lying one night
in her arms. On the next morning she said to her sister: "Alf is going to die."
The child had no definite disease, but was wasting away, and it was argued to
her that the returning spring would restore the health lost during the winter.
"No," was her answer. "He was lying asleep in my arms last night, and William"
(her husband) "came to me and said that he wanted Alf with him, but that I might
keep the other two." In vain she was assured that she had been dreaming, that it
was quite natural that she should dream about her husband, and that her anxiety
for the child had given the dream its shape. Nothing would persuade her that she
had not seen her husband, or that the information he had given her was not true.
So it was no matter of surprise to her when in the following March her arms were
empty, and a waxen form lay lifeless in the baby's cot.
18.
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!
19.
I do not
mention these stories because they are in any fashion remarkable or out of the
way, but only to show that the sensitiveness to impressions other than physical
ones, that was a marked feature in my own childhood, was present also in the
family to which I belonged. For the physical nature is inherited from parents,
and sensitiveness to psychic impressions is a property of the physical body; in
our family, as in so many Irish ones, belief in "ghosts" of all descriptions was
general, and my mother has told me of the banshee that she had heard wailing
when the death-hour of one of the family was near. To me in my childhood, elves
and fairies of all sorts were very real things, and my dolls were as really
children as I was myself a child. Punch and Judy were living entities, and the
tragedy in which they bore part cost me many an agony of tears; to this day I
can remember running away when I heard the squawk of the coming Punch, and
burying my head in the pillows that I might shut out the sound of the blows and
the cry of the ill-used baby. All the objects about me were to me alive, the
flowers that I kissed as much as the kitten I petted, and I used to have a
splendid time "making believe" and living out all sorts of lovely stories among
my treasured and so-called inanimate playthings. But there was a more serious
side to this dreamful fancy when it joined hands with religion.
21.
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
22.
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.
23.
"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.
24.
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
25.
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—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
26.
"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."
27.
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.
28.
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.
29.
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.
30.
Miss
Marryat—the favourite 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
31.
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, but of that
love of knowledge which has remained with me ever since as a constant spur to
study.
32.
Her method of
teaching may be of interest to some, who desire to train children with 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 favourite
"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
33.
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.
34.
Miss Marryat
took a beautiful place, Fern Hill, near Charmouth, in Dorsetshire, on the
borders of
35.
Daily, when
our lessons were over, we had plenty of fun; long walks and rides, rides on a
lovely 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.
36.
The dreamy
tendency in the child, that on its worldly side is
fancy, imagination, on its religious side is the germ of mysticism, and I
believe it to be far more common than many people think. But the remorseless
materialism of the day—not the philosophic materialism of the few, but the
religious materialism of the many—crushes out all the delicate buddings forth of
the childish thought, and bandages the eyes that might otherwise see. At first
the child does not distinguish between what it "sees" and what it "fancies"; the
one is as real, as objective, to it as the other, and it will talk to and play
with its dream-comrades as merrily as with children like itself. As a child, I
myself very much preferred the former, and never knew what it was to be lonely.
But clumsy grown-ups come along and tramp right through the dream-garden, and
crush the dream-flowers, and push the dream-children aside, and then say, in
their loud, harsh voices—not soft and singable like the dream-voices—"You must
not tell such naughty stories, Miss Annie; you give me the shivers, and your
mamma will be very vexed with you." But this tendency in me was too strong to be
stifled, and it found its food in the fairy tales I loved, and in the religious
allegories that I found yet more entrancing. How or when I learned to read, I do
not know, for I cannot remember the time when a book was not a delight. At five
years of age I must have read easily, for I remember being often unswathed from
a delightful curtain, in which I used to roll myself with a book, and told to
"go and play," while I was still a five-years'-old dot. And I had a habit of
losing myself so completely in the book that my name might be called in the room
where I was, and I never hear it, so that I used to be blamed for wilfully
hiding myself, when I had simply been away in fairyland, or lying trembling
beneath some friendly cabbage-leaf as a giant went by.
37.
I was between
seven and eight years of age when I first came across some children's allegories
of a religious kind, and a very little later came "Pilgrim's Progress," and
38.
From the age
of eight my education accented the religious side of my character. Under Miss
Marryat's training my religious feeling received a strongly Evangelical bent,
but it was a subject of some distress to me that I could never look back to an
hour of "conversion"; when others gave their experiences, and spoke of the
sudden change they had felt, I used to be sadly conscious that no such change
had occurred in me, and I felt that my dreamy longings were very poor things
compared with the vigorous "sense of sin" spoken of by the preachers, and used
dolefully to wonder if I were "saved." Then I had an uneasy sense that I was
often praised for my piety when emulation and vanity were more to the front than
religion; as when I learned by heart the Epistle of James, far more to
distinguish myself for my good memory than from any love of the text itself; the
sonorous cadences of many parts of the Old and New Testaments pleased my ear,
and I took a dreamy pleasure in repeating them aloud, just as I would recite for
my own amusement hundreds of lines of Milton's "Paradise Lost," as I sat
swinging on some branch of a tree, lying back often on some swaying bough and
gazing into the unfathomable blue of the sky, till I lost myself in an ecstasy
of sound and colour, half chanting the melodious sentences and peopling all the
blue with misty forms. This facility of learning by heart, and the habit of
dreamy recitation, made me very familiar with the Bible and very apt with its
phrases. This stood me in good stead at the prayer-meetings dear to the
Evangelical, in which we all took part; in turn we were called on to pray
aloud—a terrible ordeal to me, for I was painfully shy when attention was called
to me; I used to suffer agonies while I waited for the dreaded words, "Now,
Annie dear, will you speak to our Lord." But when my trembling lips had forced
themselves into speech, all the nervousness used to vanish and I was swept away
by an enthusiasm that readily clothed itself in balanced sentences, and alack! at the end, I too often hoped that God and Auntie had noticed
that I prayed very nicely—a vanity certainly not intended to be fostered by the
pious exercise. On the whole, the somewhat Calvinistic teaching tended, I think,
to make me a little morbid, especially as I always fretted silently after my
mother. I remember she was surprised on one of my home-comings, when Miss
Marryat noted "cheerfulness" as a want in my character, for at home I was ever
the blithest of children, despite my love of solitude; but away, there was
always an aching for home, and the stern religion cast somewhat of a shadow over
me, though, strangely enough, hell never came into my dreamings except in the
interesting shape it took in "Paradise Lost." After reading that, the devil was
to me no horned and hoofed horror, but the beautiful shadowed archangel, and I
always hoped that Jesus, my ideal Prince, would save him in the end. The things
that really frightened me were vague, misty presences that I felt were near, but
could not see; they were so real that I knew just where they were in the room,
and the peculiar terror they excited lay largely in the feeling that I was just
going to see them. If by chance I came across a ghost story it haunted me for
months, for I saw whatever unpleasant spectre was described; and there was one
horrid old woman in a tale by Sir Walter Scott, who glided up to the foot of
your bed and sprang on it in some eerie fashion and glared at you, and who made
my going to bed a terror to me for many weeks. I can still recall the feeling so
vividly that it almost frightens me now!
40.
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 favourite 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 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.
41.
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
42.
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
43.
A couple of
months later we rejoined Miss Marryat in
44.
In the spring
of 1862 it chanced that the Bishop of Ohio visited
45.
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 "schoolroom." 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 schoolroom 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."
46.
During the
winter of 1862-63 Miss Marryat was in
47.
Thus set free
from the schoolroom at 16½, an only daughter, I could do with my time as I
would, save for the couple of hours a day given to music, for the satisfaction
of my mother. From then till I became engaged, just before I was 19, my life
flowed on smoothly, one current visible to all and dancing in the sunlight, the
other running underground, but full and deep and strong. As regards my outer
life, no girl had a brighter, happier life than mine; studying all the mornings
and most of the afternoons in my own way, and spending the latter part of the
day in games and walks and rides—varied with parties at which I was one of the
merriest of guests. I practised archery so zealously that I carried up
triumphantly as prize for the best score the first ring I ever possessed, while
croquet found me a most eager devotee. 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 labour that makes life so easy, ere yet we have
known what life means when the protecting motherwing 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. "Sunshine" they called me in those bright days of merry play and
earnest study. But that study showed the bent of my thought and linked itself to
the hidden life; for the Fathers of the early Christian Church now became my
chief companions, and I pored over the Shepherd of Hernias, the Epistles of
Polycarp, Barnabas, Ignatius, and Clement, the commentaries of Chrysostom, the
confessions of Augustine. With these I studied the writings of Pusey, Liddon,
and Keble, with many another smaller light, joying in the great conception of a
Catholic Church, lasting through the centuries, built on the foundations of
apostles and of martyrs, stretching from the days of Christ Himself down to our
own—"One Lord, one Faith one Baptism," and I myself a child of that Holy Church.
The hidden life grew stronger, constantly fed by these streams of study; weekly
communion became the centre round which my devotional life revolved, with its
ecstatic meditation, its growing intensity of conscious contact with the Divine;
I fasted, according to the ordinances of the Church; occasionally flagellated
myself to see if I could bear physical pain, should I be fortunate enough ever
to tread the pathway trodden by the saints; and ever the Christ was the figure
round which clustered all my hopes and longings, till I often felt that the very
passion of, my devotion would draw Him down from His throne in heaven, present
visibly in form as I felt Him invisibly in spirit. To serve Him through His
Church became more and more a definite ideal in my life, and my thoughts began
to turn towards some kind of "religious life," in which I might prove my love by
sacrifice and turn my passionate gratitude into active service.
48.
Looking back
to-day over my life, I see that its keynote—through all the blunders, and the
blind mistakes, and clumsy follies—has been this longing for sacrifice to
something felt as greater than the self. It has been so strong and so persistent
that I recognise it now as a tendency brought over from a previous life and
dominating the present one; and this is shown by the fact that to follow it is
not the act of a deliberate and conscious will, forcing self into submission and
giving up with pain something the heart desires, but the following it is a
joyous springing forward along the easiest path, the "sacrifice" being the
supremely attractive thing, not to make which would be to deny the deepest
longings of the soul, and to feel oneself polluted and dishonoured. And it is
here that the misjudgment comes in of many generous hearts who have spoken
sometimes lately so strongly in my praise. For the efforts to serve have not
been painful acts of self-denial, but the yielding to an overmastering desire.
We do not praise the mother who, impelled by her protecting love, feeds her
crying infant and stills its wailings at her breast; rather should we blame her
if she turned aside from its weeping to play with some toy. And so with all
those whose ears are opened to the wailings of the great orphan Humanity; they
are less to be praised for helping than they would be to be blamed if they stood
aside. I now know that it is those wailings that have stirred my heart through
life, and that I brought with me the ears open to hear them from previous lives
of service paid to men. It was those lives that drew for the child the alluring
pictures of martyrdom, breathed into the girl the passion of devotion, sent the
woman out to face scoff and odium, and drove her finally into the Theosophy that
rationalises sacrifice, while opening up possibilities of service beside which
all other hopes grow pale.
49.
The Easter of
1866 was a memorable date in my life. I was introduced to the clergyman I
married, and I met and conquered my first religious doubt. A little mission
church had been opened the preceding Christmas in a very poor district of
Clapham. My grandfather's house was near at hand, in
50.
"...
nailed for our advantage to the bitter cross."
51.
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 |
|
MONDAY. |
MONDAY. |
MONDAY. |
MONDAY. |
|
Cursed the fig-tree. Taught in the |
Cursed the fig-tree. Purified the |
Like Matthew. |
—— |
|
TUESDAY. |
TUESDAY. |
TUESDAY. |
TUESDAY. |
|
All chaps, xxi. 20, xxii-xxv., spoken on Tuesday, for xxvi. 2 gives Passover as "after two days." |
Saw fig-tree withered up. Then discourses. |
Discourses. No date shown. |
—— |
|
WEDNESDAY. |
WEDNESDAY. |
WEDNESDAY. |
WEDNESDAY. |
|
Blank.
(Possibly remained in |
|||
|
THURSDAY. |
THURSDAY. |
THURSDAY. |
THURSDAY. |
|
Preparation of Passover. Eating of Passover, and institution of the Holy
Eucharist. |
Same as Matt. |
Same as Matt. |
Discourses with disciples, but before the Passover. Washes the
disciples' feet. Nothing said of Holy Eucharist, nor
of agony in |
|
FRIDAY. |
FRIDAY. |
FRIDAY. |
FRIDAY. |
|
Led to Pilate. Judas hangs himself. Tried. Condemned to death. Scourged and mocked. Led to crucifixion. Darkness from 12 to 3. Died at 3. |
As Matthew, but hour of crucifixion given, 9 a.m. |
Led to Pilate. Sent to Herod. Sent back to Pilate. Rest as in Matthew; but one malefactor repents. |
Taken to Pilate. Jews would not enter, that they might eat the Passover. Scourged by Pilate before condemnation, and mocked. Shown by Pilate to Jews at 12. |
52.
I became
uneasy as I proceeded with my task, for discrepancies leaped at me from my four
columns; the uneasiness grew as the contradictions increased, until I saw with a
shock of horror that my "harmony" was a discord,
and a doubt of the veracity of the story sprang up like a serpent hissing in my
face. It was struck down in a moment, for to me to doubt was sin, and to have
doubted on the very eve of the Passion was an added crime. Quickly I assured
myself that these apparent contradictions were necessary as tests of faith, and
I forced myself to repeat Tertullian's famous "Credo quia impossible," till,
from a wooden recital, it became a triumphant affirmation. I reminded myself
that St. Peter had said of the Pauline Epistles that in them were "some things
hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest
... unto their own destruction." I shudderingly recognised that I must be
very unlearned and unstable to find discord among the Holy Evangelists, and
imposed on myself an extra fast as penance for my ignorance and lack of firmness
in the faith. For my mental position was one to which doubt was one of the worst
of sins. I knew that there were people like Colenso, who questioned the
infallibility of the Bible, but I remembered how the Apostle John had fled from
the Baths when Cerinthus entered them, lest the roof should fall on the heretic,
and crush any one in his neighbourhood, and I looked on all heretics with holy
horror. Pusey had indoctrinated me with his stern hatred of all heresy, and I
was content to rest with him on that faith, "which must be old because it is
eternal, and must be unchangeable because it is true." I would not even read the
works of my mothers favourite Stanley, because he was "unsound," and because
Pusey had condemned his "variegated use of words which destroys all definiteness
of meaning"—a clever and pointed description, be it said in passing, of the
Dean's exquisite phrases, capable of so many readings. It can then be imagined
with what a stab of pain this first doubt struck me, and with what haste I
smothered it up, buried it, and smoothed the turf over its grave. But it had
been there, and it left its mark.
54.
The last year
of my girlish freedom was drawing to its close; how shall I hope to make
commonsense readers understand how I became betrothed maiden ere yet nineteen,
girl-wife when twenty years had struck? Looking back over twenty-five years, I
feel a profound pity for the girl standing at that critical point of life, so
utterly, hopelessly ignorant of all that marriage meant, so filled with
impossible dreams, so unfitted for the rôle of wife. As I have said, my
day-dreams held little place for love, partly from the absence of love novels
from my reading, partly from the mystic fancies that twined themselves round the figure of the Christ. Catholic books of
devotion—English or Roman, it matters not, for to a large extent they are
translations of the same hymns and prayers—are exceedingly glowing in their
language, and the dawning feelings of womanhood unconsciously lend to them a
passionate fervour. 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
Saviour" 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:—
55.
"O crucified
Love, raise in me fresh ardours 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."
56.
"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."
57.
"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."
58.
"O Jesu,
beloved, fairer than the sons of men, draw me after Thee with the cords of Thy
love."
59.
"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."
60.
"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, apostolical
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."
61.
"Oh, that I
could embrace Thee with that most burning love
of angels."
62.
"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."
63.
All girls
have in them the germ of passion, and the line of its development depends on the
character brought into the world, and the surrounding influences of education. I
had but two ideals in my childhood and youth, round whom twined these budding
tendrils of passion; they were my mother and the Christ. I know this may seem
strange, but I am trying to state things as they were in this life-story, and
not give mere conventionalisms, and so it was. I had men friends, but no
lovers—at least, to my knowledge, for I have since heard that my mother received
two or three offers of marriage for me, but declined them on account of my youth
and my childishness—friends with whom I liked to talk, because they knew more
than I did; but they had no place in my day-dreams. These were more and more
filled with the one Ideal Man, and my hopes turned towards the life of the
Sister of Mercy, who ever worships the Christ, and devotes her life to the
service of His poor. I knew my dear mother would set herself against this idea,
but it nestled warm at my heart, for ever that idea of escaping from the humdrum
of ordinary life by some complete sacrifice lured me onwards with its
overmastering fascination.
64.
Now one
unlucky result of this view of religion is the idealisation of the clergyman,
the special messenger and chosen servant of the Lord. Far more lofty than any title bestowed by earthly monarch is that
patent of nobility straight from the hand of the "King of kings," that seems to
give to the mortal something of the authority of the immortal, and to crown the
head of the priest with the diadem that belongs to those who are "kings and
priests unto God." Viewed in this way, the position of the priest'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 which seems to include the wife—it is these things that shed a
glamour over the clerical life which attracts most those who are most apt to
self-devotion, most swayed by imagination. And the saddest pity of all this is
that the glamour is most over those whose brains are quick, whose hearts are
pure, who are responsive to all forms of noble emotions, all suggestions of
personal self-sacrifice; if such in later life 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, the
poverty of the conception seen, 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 nobler faith.
65.
That summer
of 1866 saw me engaged to the young clergyman I had met at the mission church in
the spring, our knowledge of each other being an almost negligeable quantity. We
were thrown together for a week, the only two young ones in a small party of
holiday-makers, and in our walks, rides, and drives we were naturally
companions; an hour or two before he left he asked me to marry him, taking my
consent for granted as I had allowed him such full companionship—a perfectly
fair assumption with girls accustomed to look on all men as possible husbands,
but wholly mistaken as regarded myself, whose thoughts were in quite other
directions. Startled, and my sensitive pride touched by what seemed to my strict
views an assumption that I had been flirting, I hesitated, did not follow my
first impulse of refusal, but took refuge in silence; my suitor had to catch his
train, and bound me over to silence till he could himself speak to my mother,
urging authoritatively that it would be dishonourable of me to break his
confidence, and left me—the most upset and distressed little person on the
Sussex coast. The fortnight that followed was the first unhappy one of my life,
for I had a secret from my mother, a secret which I passionately longed to tell
her, but dared not speak at the risk of doing a dishonourable thing. On meeting
my suitor on our return to town I positively refused to keep silence any longer,
and then out of sheer weakness and fear of inflicting pain I drifted into an
engagement with a man I did not pretend to love. "Drifted" is the right word,
for two or three months passed, on the ground that I was so much of a child,
before my mother would consent to a definite engagement; my dislike of the
thought of marriage faded before the idea of becoming the wife of a priest,
working ever in the Church and among the poor. I had no outlet for my growing
desire for usefulness in my happy and peaceful home-life, where all religious
enthusiasm was regarded as unbalanced and unbecoming; all that was deepest and
truest in my nature chafed against my easy, useless days, longed for work,
yearned to devote itself, as I had read women saints had done, to the service of
the Church and of the poor, to the battling against sin and misery—what empty
names sin and misery then were to me! "You will have more opportunities for
doing good as a clergyman's wife than as anything
else," was one of the pleas urged on my reluctance.
66.
In the autumn
I was definitely betrothed, and I married fourteen months later. Once, in the
interval, I tried to break the engagement, but, on my broaching the subject to
my mother, all her pride rose up in revolt. Would I, her daughter, break my
word, would I dishonour myself by jilting a man I had pledged myself to marry?
She could be stern where honour was involved, that sweet mother of mine, and I
yielded to her wish as I had been ever wont to do, for a look or a word from her
had ever been my law, save where religion was concerned. So I married in the
winter of 1867 with no more idea of the marriage relation than if I had been
four years old instead of twenty. My dreamy life, into which no knowledge of
evil had been allowed to penetrate, in which I had been guarded from all pain,
shielded from all anxiety, kept, innocent on all questions of sex, was no
preparation for married existence, and left me defenceless to face a rude
awakening. Looking back on it 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" may be very beautiful, but it is a perilous possession, and
Eve should have the knowledge of good and evil ere she wanders forth from the
paradise of a mother's love. Many an unhappy marriage dates from its very
beginning, from the terrible shock to a young girl's sensitive modesty and
pride, her helpless bewilderment and fear. Men, with their public school and
college education, or the knowledge that comes by living in the outside world,
may find it hard to realise the possibility of such infantile ignorance in many
girls. None the less, such ignorance is a fact in the case of some girls at
least, and no mother should let her daughter, blindfold, slip
her neck under the marriage yoke.
67.
Before
leaving the harbourage of girlhood to set sail on the troublous sea of life,
there is an occurrence of which I must make mention, as it marks my first
awakening of interest in the outer world of political struggle. In the autumn of
1867 my mother and I were staying with some dear friends of ours, the Robertses,
at Pendleton, near
68.
This was the
hot-tempered and lovable "demagogue," as he was called, with whom we were
staying when Colonel Kelly and Captain Deasy, two Fenian leaders, were arrested
in
69.
My first
experience of an angry crowd was on that day as we drove to the court; the
streets were barricaded, the soldiers were under arms, every approach to the
court crowded with surging throngs. At last our carriage was stopped as we were
passing at a foot's pace through an Irish section of the crowd, and various
vehement fists came through the window, with hearty curses at the "d—d English
who were going to see the boys murdered." The situation was critical, for we
were two women and three girls, when I bethought myself that we were unknown,
and gently 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 curses changed
to cheers, as a road to the court steps was cleared for us.
70.
Alas!
if there was passion on behalf of the prisoners
outside, there was passion against them within, and the very opening of the
trial showed the spirit that animated the prosecution and the bench. Digby
Seymour, Q.C., and Ernest Jones, were briefed for the defence, and Mr. Roberts
did not think that they exercised sufficiently their right of challenge; he
knew, as we all did, that many on the panel had loudly proclaimed their
hostility to the Irish, and Mr. Roberts persisted in challenging them as his
counsel would not. In vain Judge Blackburn threatened to commit the rebellious
solicitor: "These men's lives are at stake, my lord," was his indignant plea.
"Remove that man!" cried the angry judge, but as the officers of the court came
forward very slowly—for all poor men loved and honoured the sturdy fighter—he
changed his mind and let him stay. Despite all his efforts, the jury contained a
man who had declared that he "didn't care what the evidence was, he would hang
every d—d Irishman of the lot." And the result showed that he was not alone in
his view, for evidence of the most disreputable kind was admitted; women of the
lowest type were put into the box as witnesses, and their word taken as
unchallengeable; thus was destroyed an alibi for Maguire, afterwards
accepted by the Crown, a free pardon being issued on the strength of it. Nothing
could save the doomed men from the determined verdict, and I could see from
where I was sitting into a little room behind the bench, where an official was
quietly preparing the black caps before the verdict had been delivered. The
foregone "Guilty" was duly repeated as verdict on each of the five cases, and
the prisoners asked if they had anything to say why sentence of death should not
be passed on them. Allen, boy as he was, made a very brave and manly speech; he
had not fired, save in the air—if he had done so he might have escaped; he had
helped to free Kelly and Deasy, and did not regret it; he was willing to die for
Ireland. Maguire and Condon (he also was reprieved) declared they were not
present, but, like Allen, were ready to die for their country. Sentence of death
was passed, and, as echo to the sardonic "The Lord have mercy on your souls,"
rang back from the dock in five clear voices, with never a quiver of fear in
them, "God save Ireland!" and the men passed one by one from the sight of my
tear-dimmed eyes.
71.
It was a
sorrowful time that followed; the despair of the heart-broken girl who was
Allen's sweetheart, and who cried to us on her knees, "Save my William!" was
hard to see; nothing we or any one could do availed to avert 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 honoured them; here she
buried them as common murderers in quicklime in the prison yard.
72.
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
73.
"Where is our
boasted English freedom when you cross to
74.
In December,
1867, I sailed out of the safe harbour of my happy and peaceful girlhood on to
the wide sea of life, and the waves broke roughly as soon as the bar was
crossed. We were an ill-matched pair, my husband and I, from the very outset;
he, with very high ideas of a husband's authority and a wife's submission,
holding strongly to the "master-in-my-own-house theory," thinking much of the
details of home arrangements, precise, methodical, easily angered and with
difficulty appeased. I, accustomed to freedom,
indifferent to home details, impulsive, very hot-tempered, and proud as Lucifer.
I had never had a harsh word spoken to me, never been ordered to do anything,
had had my way smoothed for my feet, and never a worry had touched me. Harshness
roused first incredulous wonder, then a storm of indignant tears, and after a
time a proud, defiant resistance, cold and hard as iron. The easy-going,
sunshiny, enthusiastic girl changed—and changed pretty rapidly—into a grave,
proud, reticent woman, burying deep in her own heart all her hopes, her fears,
and her disillusions. I must have been a very unsatisfactory wife from the
beginning, though I think other treatment might gradually have turned me into a
fair imitation of the proper conventional article. Beginning with the ignorance
before alluded to, and so scared and outraged at heart from the very first;
knowing nothing of household management or economical use of money—I had never
had an allowance or even bought myself a pair of gloves—though eager to perform
my new duties creditably; unwilling to potter over little things, and liking to
do swiftly what I had to do, and then turn to my beloved books; at heart
fretting for my mother but rarely speaking of her, as I found my longing for her
presence raised jealous vexation; with strangers about me with whom I had no
sympathy; visited by ladies who talked to me only about babies and
servants—troubles of which I knew nothing and which bored me unutterably—and who
were as uninterested in all that had filled my life, in theology, in politics,
in science, as I was uninterested in the discussions on the housemaid's young
man and on the cook's extravagance in using "butter, when dripping would have
done perfectly well, my dear"; was it wonderful that I became timid, dull, and
depressed?
75.
All my eager,
passionate enthusiasm, so attractive to men in a young girl, were doubtless incompatible with "the solid comfort of a
wife," and I must have been inexpressibly tiring to the Rev. Frank Besant. And,
in truth, I ought never to have married, for under the soft, loving, pliable
girl there lay hidden, as much unknown to herself as to her surroundings, a
woman of strong dominant will, strength that panted for expression and rebelled
against restraint, fiery and passionate emotions that were seething under
compression—a most undesirable partner to sit in the lady's arm-chair on the
domestic rug before the fire. [Que le diable faisait-elle dans cette galère,]
I have often thought, looking back at my past self, and asking,
Why did that foolish girl make her bed so foolishly? But self-analysis
shows the contradictories in my nature that led me into so mistaken a course. I
have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength, and have paid
heavily for the weakness. As a child I used to suffer tortures of shyness, and
if my shoe-lace was untied would feel shamefacedly that every eye was fixed on
the unlucky string; as a girl I would shrink away from strangers and think
myself unwanted and unliked, so that I was full of eager gratitude to any one
who noticed me kindly; as the young mistress of a house, I was afraid of my
servants, and would let careless work pass rather than bear the pain of
reproving the ill-doer; when I have been lecturing and debating with no lack of
spirit on the platform, I have preferred to go without what I wanted at the
hotel rather than to ring and make the waiter fetch it; combative on the
platform in defence of any cause I cared for, I shrink from quarrel or
disapproval in the home, and am a coward at heart in private while a good
fighter in public. How often have I passed unhappy quarters of an hour screwing
up my courage to find fault with some subordinate whom my duty compelled me to
reprove, and how often have I jeered at myself for a fraud as the doughty
platform combatant, when shrinking from blaming some lad or lass for doing their
work badly! An unkind look or word has availed to make me shrink into myself as
a snail into its shell, while on the platform opposition makes me speak my best.
So I slid into marriage blindly and stupidly, fearing to give pain; fretted my
heart out for a year; then, roused by harshness and injustice, stiffened and
hardened, and lived with a wall of ice round me within which I waged mental
conflicts that nearly killed me; and learned at last how to live and work in
armour that turned the edge of the weapons that struck it, and left the flesh
beneath unwounded, armour laid aside, but in the presence of a very few.
76.
My first
serious attempts at writing were made in 1868, and I 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 as 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 where-from to collect my
"facts." I do not in the least know what became of that valuable book; I tried
Macmillans with it, and it was sent on by them to some one 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.
77.
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.
78.
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 the 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.
79.
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.
80.
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.
84.
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.
85.
The boy was a
bright, healthy little fellow, but the girl was delicate from birth, suffering
from her mother's unhappiness, and born somewhat prematurely in consequence of a
shock. When, in the spring of 1871, the two children caught the whooping cough,
my Mabel's delicacy made the ordeal well-nigh fatal to her. She was very young
for so trying a disease, 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, day and night, all through
those weary weeks, the tortured baby on my knees. I loved my little ones
passionately, for their clinging love soothed the aching at my
heart, and their baby eyes could not critically scan the unhappiness that
grew deeper month by month; and that steam-filled tent became my world, and
there, alone, I fought with Death for my child. The doctor said that recovery
was impossible, and that in one of the paroxysms of coughing she must die; the
most distressing thing was that, at last, even a drop or two of milk would bring
on the terrible convulsive choking, and it seemed cruel to add to the pain of
the apparently dying child. At length, one morning the doctor said she could not
last through the day; I had sent for him hurriedly, for the body had suddenly
swollen up as a result of the perforation of one of the pleurae, and the
consequent escape of air into the cavity of the chest. While he was there one of
the fits of coughing came on, and it seemed as though it must be the last. He
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 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 silence. He
never breathed a word as to my unhappiness, until in 1878 he came up to town to
give evidence as to cruelty which—had the deed of separation not been held as
condonation—would have secured me a divorce a mensa et thoro.
86.
The child,
however, recovered, and her recovery was due, I think, to that chance thought of
Mr. Winterbotham's about the chloroform, for I used it whenever the first sign
of a fit of coughing appeared, and so warded off the convulsive attack and the
profound exhaustion that followed, in which a mere flicker of breath at the top
of the throat was the only sign of life, and sometimes even that disappeared,
and I thought her gone. For years the child remained ailing and delicate,
requiring the tenderest care, but those weeks of anguish left a deeper trace on
mother than on child. Once she was out of danger I collapsed physically, and lay
in bed for a week unmoving, and then rose to face a struggle which lasted for
three years and two months, and nearly cost me my life, the struggle which
transformed me from a Christian into an Atheist. The agony of the struggle was
in the first nineteen months—a time to be looked back upon with shrinking, as it
was a hell to live through at the time. For no one who has not felt it knows the
fearful anguish inflicted by doubt on the earnestly religious soul. There is in
life no other pain so horrible, so keen in its torture, so crushing in its
weight. It 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 verily may be felt.
Nothing but an imperious intellectual and moral necessity can drive into doubt a
religious mind, for it is as though an earthquake shook the foundations of the
soul, and the very being quivers and sways under the shock. No life in the empty
sky; no gleam in the blackness of the night; no voice to break the deadly
silence; no hand outstretched to save. Empty-brained triflers who have never
tried to think, who take their creed as they take their fashions, speak of
Atheism as the outcome of foul life and vicious desires. In their shallow
heartlessness and shallower thought they cannot even dimly imagine the anguish
of entering 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 that has made the world? Is the echo, 'Children, ye
have no Father,' true? Is all blind chance, is all the clash
of unconscious forces, or are we the sentient toys of an Almighty Power
that sports with our agony, whose peals of awful mockery of laughter ring back
answer to the wailings of our despair?"
87.
How true are
the noble words of Mrs. Hamilton King:—
88.
"For some may
follow Truth from dawn to dark,
As a child follows by his mother's hand,
Knowing no fear, rejoicing all the way;
And unto some her face is as a Star
Set through an avenue of thorns and fires,
And waving branches black without a leaf;
And still It draws them, though the feet must bleed,
Though garments must be rent, and eyes be scorched:
And if the valley of the shadow of death
Be passed, and to the level road they come,
Still with their faces to the polar star,
It is not with the same looks, the same limbs,
But halt, and maimed, and of infirmity.
And for the rest of the way they have to go
It is not day but night, and oftentimes
A night of clouds wherein the stars are lost."[2]
89.
Aye! but never lost is the Star of Truth to which the face is set,
and while that shines all lesser lights may go. It was the long months of
suffering through which I had been passing, with the seemingly purposeless
torturing of my little one as a climax, that struck the
first stunning blow at my belief in God as a merciful Father of men. I had been
visiting the poor a good deal, and had marked the patient suffering of their
lives; my idolised mother had been defrauded by a lawyer she had trusted, and
was plunged into debt by his non-payment of the sums that should have passed
through his hands to others; my own bright life had been enshrouded by pain and
rendered to me degraded by an intolerable sense of bondage; and here was my
helpless, sinless babe tortured for weeks and left frail and suffering. The
smooth brightness of my previous life made all the disillusionment more
startling, and the sudden plunge into conditions so new and so unfavourable
dazed and stunned me. My religious past became the worst enemy of the suffering
present. All my personal belief in Christ, all my intense faith in His constant
direction of affairs, all my habit of continual prayer and of realisation of His
Presence—all were against me now. The very height of my trust was the measure of
the shock when the trust gave way. To me He was no abstract idea, but a living
reality, and all my heart rose up against this Person in whom I believed, and
whose individual finger I saw in my baby's agony, my own misery, the breaking of
my mother's proud heart under a load of debt, and all the bitter suffering of
the poor. The presence of pain and evil in a world made by a good God; the pain
falling on the innocent, as on my seven months' old babe; the pain begun here
reaching on into eternity unhealed; a sorrow-laden world; a lurid, hopeless
hell; all these, while I still believed, drove me desperate, and instead of like
the devils believing and trembling, I believed and hated. All the hitherto
dormant and unsuspected strength of my nature rose up in rebellion; I did not
yet dream of denial, but I would no longer kneel.
90.
As the first
stirrings of this hot rebellion moved in my heart I met a clergyman of a very
noble type, who did much to help me by his ready and wise sympathy. Mr. Besant
brought him to see me during the crisis of the child's illness; he said little,
but on the following day I received from him the following note:—
91.
"April
21, 1871.
92.
"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 any one 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 awaken
such a reflection as
93.
"'And common
was the commonplace,
And vacant chaff well meant for grain.'
94.
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 travelsome 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
95.
"'Reach a
hand through time to catch
The far-off interest of tears.'
96.
That you may
have strength so to do is part of your share in the prayers of
97.
"Yours very
faithfully,
98.
"W. D—."
99.
A noble
letter, but the storm was beating too fiercely to be stilled, and one night in
that summer of 1871 stands out clearly before me. Mr. Besant was away, and there
had been a fierce quarrel before he left. I was outraged, desperate, with no
door of escape from a life that, losing its hope in God, had not yet learned to
live for hope for man. No door of escape? The thought came like a flash: "There
is one!" And before me there swung open, with lure of peace and of safety, the
gateway into silence and security, the gateway of the tomb. I was standing by
the drawing-room window, staring hopelessly at the evening sky; with the thought
came the remembrance that the means was at hand—the chloroform that had soothed
my baby's pain, and that I had locked away upstairs. I ran up to my room, took
out the bottle, and carried it downstairs,
standing again at the window in the summer twilight, glad that the struggle was
over and peace at hand. I uncorked the bottle, and was raising it to my lips,
when, as though the words were spoken softly and clearly, I heard: "O coward,
coward, who used to dream of martyrdom, and cannot bear a few short years of
pain!" A rush of shame swept over me, and I flung the bottle far away among the
shrubs in the garden at my feet, and for a moment I felt strong as for a
struggle, and then fell fainting on the floor. Only once again in all the
strifes of my career did the thought of suicide recur, and then it was but for a
moment, to be put aside as unworthy a strong soul.
100.
My new
friend, Mr. D—, proved a very real help. The endless torture of hell, the
vicarious sacrifice of Christ, the trustworthiness of revelation, doubts on all
these hitherto accepted doctrines grew and heaped themselves
on my bewildered soul. My questionings were neither shirked nor discouraged by
Mr. D—; he was not horrified nor was he sanctimoniously rebukeful, but met them
all with a wide comprehension inexpressibly soothing to one writhing in the
first agonies of doubt. He left Cheltenham in the early autumn of 1871, but the
following extracts from a letter written in November will show the kind of net
in which I was struggling (I had been reading M'Leod Campbell's work "On the
Atonement"):—
101.
"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.
102.
"(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 references to
eternal punishment may be resolved into references 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 love,
justice, &c., are different in kind from ours. Mill and Maurice, from totally
alien points of view, have shown up the preposterous nature of the notion.
103.
"(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?
104.
"Why, the
keynote of all my theology is that Christ is lovable 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
lovableness—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 they find yourself looking at Him through a
blood-coloured glass."
105.
"I am
saturating myself with Maurice, who is the antidote given by God to this age
against all dreary doublings and temptings of the devil to despair."
106.
Many a one,
in this age of controversy over all things once held sacred, has found peace and
new light on this line of thought, and has succeeded in thus reconciling
theological doctrines with the demands of the conscience for love and justice in
a world made by a just and loving God. I could not do so. The awakening to what
the world was, to the facts of human misery, to the ruthless tramp of nature and
of events over the human heart, making no difference between innocent and
guilty—the shock had been too great for the equilibrium to be restored by
arguments that appealed to the emotions and left the intellect unconvinced.
Months of this long-drawn-out mental anguish wrought their natural effects on
physical health, and at last I broke down completely, and lay for weeks helpless
and prostrate, in raging and unceasing head-pain, unable to sleep, unable to
bear the light, lying like a log on the bed, not unconscious, but indifferent to
everything, consciousness centred, as it were, in the ceaseless pain. The doctor
tried every form of relief, but, entrenched in its citadel, the pain defied his
puny efforts. He covered my head with ice, he gave me opium—which only drove me
mad—he did all that skill and kindness could do, but all in vain. Finally the
pain wore itself out, and the moment he dared to do so, he tried mental
diversion; he brought me books on anatomy, on science, and persuaded me to study
them; and out of his busy life would steal an hour to explain to me knotty
points on physiology. He saw that if I were to be brought back to reasonable
life, it could only be by diverting thought from the channels in which the
current had been running to a dangerous extent. I have often felt that I owed
life and sanity to that good man, who felt for the helpless, bewildered
child-woman, beaten down by the cyclone of doubt and misery.
107.
So it will
easily be understood that my religious wretchedness only increased the
unhappiness of homelife, for how absurd it was that any reasonable human being
should be so tossed with anguish over intellectual and moral difficulties on
religious matters, and should make herself ill over
these unsubstantial troubles. Surely it was a woman's business to attend to her
husband's comforts and to see after her children, and not to break her heart
over misery here and hell hereafter, and distract her brain with questions that
had puzzled the greatest thinkers and still remained unsolved! And, truly, women
or men who get themselves concerned about the universe
at large, would do well not to plunge hastily into marriage, for they do not run
smoothly in the double-harness of that honourable estate. Sturm und Drang
should be faced alone, and the soul should go out alone into the wilderness to
be tempted of the devil, and not bring his majesty and all his imps into the
placid circle of the home. Unhappy they who go into marriage with the glamour of
youth upon them and the destiny of conflict imprinted on their nature, for they
make misery for their partner in marriage as well as for themselves. And if that
partner, strong in traditional authority and conventional habits, seeks to
"break in" the turbulent and storm-tossed creature—well, it comes to a mere
trial of strength and endurance, whether that driven creature will fall panting
and crushed, or whether it will turn in its despair, assert its Divine right to
intellectual liberty, rend its fetters in pieces, and, discovering its own
strength in its extremity, speak at all risks its "No" when bidden to live a
lie.
108.
When that
physical crisis was over I decided on my line of action. I resolved to take
Christianity as it had been taught in the Churches, and carefully and thoroughly
examine its dogmas one by one, so that I should never again say "I believe"
where I had not proved, and that, however diminished my area of belief, what was
left of it might at least be firm under my feet. I found that four chief
problems were pressing for solution, and to these I addressed myself. How many
are to-day the souls facing just these problems, and disputing every inch of
their old ground of faith with the steadily advancing waves of historical and
scientific criticism! Alas! for
the many Canutes, as the waves wash over their feet. These problems were:—
(1)
The eternity
of punishment after death.
(2)
The meaning
of "goodness" and "love," as applied to a God who had made this world, with all
its sin and misery.
(3)
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.
(4)
The meaning
of "inspiration" as applied to the Bible, and the reconciliation of the
perfections of the author with the blunders and immoralities of the work.
109.
It will be
seen that the deeper problems of religion—the deity of Christ, the existence of
God, the immortality of the soul—were not yet brought into question, and,
looking back, I cannot but see how orderly was the progression of thought, how
steady the growth, after that first terrible earthquake, and the first wild
swirl of agony. The points that I set myself to study were those which would
naturally be first faced by any one whose first rebellion against the dogmas of
the Churches was a rebellion of the moral nature rather than of the
intellectual, a protest of the conscience rather than of the brain. It was not a
desire for moral licence which gave me the impulse that finally landed me in
Atheism; it was the sense of outraged justice and insulted right. I was a wife
and mother, blameless in moral life, with a deep sense of duty and a proud
self-respect; it was while I was this that doubt struck me, and while I was in
the guarded circle of the home, with no dream of outside work or outside
liberty, that I lost all faith in Christianity. My education, my mother's
example, my inner timidity and self-distrust, all fenced me in from temptations
from without. It was the uprising of an outraged conscience that made me a rebel
against the Churches and finally an unbeliever in God. And I place this on
record, because the progress of Materialism will never be checked by diatribes
against unbelievers, as though they became unbelievers from desire for vice and
for licence to do evil. What Religion has to face in the controversies of to-day
is not the unbelief of the sty, but the unbelief of the educated conscience and
of the soaring intellect; and unless it can arm itself with a loftier ethic and
a grander philosophy than its opponent, it will lose its hold over the purest
and the strongest of the younger generation.
111.
My reading of
heretical and
112.
Mr. D—
continued to write me, striving to guide me along the path which had led his own
soul to contentment, but I can only find room here for two brief extracts, which
will show how to himself he solved the problem. He thought me mistaken in my
view
113.
"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 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.... "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 can 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."
114.
I found more
help in Theistic writers like Grey, and Agnostic like Arnold, than I did in the
Broad Church teachers, but these, of course, served to make 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 kept my doubts to myself. 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 recovered their faith; for the doubter silence was a
duty; the blinded had better keep their misery to themselves.
115.
During these
weary months of anxiety and torment I found some relief from the mental strain
in practical parish work, nursing the sick, trying to brighten the lot of the
poor. I learned then some of the lessons as to the agricultural labourer and the
land that I was able in after-years to teach from the platform. The movement
among the agricultural labourers, due to the energy and devotion of Joseph Arch,
was beginning to be discussed in the fens, and my sympathies went strongly with
the claims of the labourers, for I knew their life-conditions. In one cottage I
had found four generations sleeping in one room—the great-grandfather and his
wife, the unmarried grandmother, the unmarried mother, the little child; 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 human
dwellers. How could I do aught but sympathise with any combination that aimed at
the raising of these poor? But the Agricultural Labourers'
116.
In the early
autumn a ray of light broke the darkness. I was in
117.
But there was
one belief that had not been definitely challenged, but of which the
rationale
was gone with the orthodox dogmas now definitely renounced—the doctrine of the
Deity of Christ. The whole teaching of the
118.
Nor was this
all. If I gave up belief in Christ as God, I must give up Christianity as creed.
Once challenge the unique position of the Christ, and the name Christian seemed
to me to be a hypocrisy, and its renouncement a duty
binding on the upright mind. I was a clergyman's wife; what would be the effect
of such a step? Hitherto mental pain alone had been the price demanded
inexorably from the searcher after truth; but with the renouncing of Christ
outer warfare would be added to the inner, and who might guess the result upon
my life? The struggle was keen but short; I decided to carefully review the
evidence for and against the Deity of Christ, with the result that that belief
followed the others, and I stood, no longer Christian, face to face with a dim
future in which I sensed the coming conflict.
119.
One effort I
made to escape it; I appealed to Dr. Pusey, thinking that if he could not answer
my questionings, no answer to them could be reasonably hoped for. I had a brief
correspondence with him, but was referred only to lines of argument familiar to
me—as those of Liddon in his "Bampton Lectures"—and finally, on his invitation,
went down to Oxford to see him. I found a short, stout gentleman, dressed in a
cassock, looking like a comfortable monk; but keen eyes, steadfastly gazing
straight into mine, told of the force and subtlety enshrined in the fine,
impressive head. But the learned doctor took the wrong line of treatment; he
probably saw I was anxious, shy, and nervous, and he treated me as a penitent
going to confession and seeking the advice of a director, instead of as an
inquirer struggling after truth, and resolute to obtain some firm
standing-ground in the sea of doubt. He would not deal with the question of the
Deity of Jesus as a question for argument. "You are speaking of your Judge," he
retorted sternly, when I pressed a difficulty. The mere suggestion of an
imperfection in the character of Jesus made him shudder, and he checked me with
raised hand. "You are blaspheming. The very thought is a terrible sin." Would he
recommend me any books that might throw light on the subject? "No, no; you have
read too much already. You must pray; you must pray." When I urged 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—nothing of the meek, chastened, submissive spirit with which he was wont
to deal in penitents seeking 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 blind, unreasoning faith that
questioned not. I had not trodden the thorny path of doubt to come to the point
from which I had started; I needed, and would have, solid grounds ere I
believed. He had no conception of the struggles of a sceptical spirit; he had
evidently never felt the pangs of doubt; his own faith was solid as a rock,
firm, satisfied, unshakable; he would as soon have
committed suicide as have doubted of the infallibility of the "
120.
"It is not
your duty to ascertain the truth," he told me, sternly. "It is your duty to
accept and 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?"
121.
"But the fact
of the promise and its value are just the very points on which I am doubtful," I
answered.
122.
He shuddered.
"Pray, pray," he said. "Father, forgive her, for she knows not what she says."
123.
It was in
vain that I urged on him the sincerity of my seeking, pointing out that I had
everything to gain by following his directions, everything to lose by going my
own way, but that it seemed to me untruthful to pretend to accept what was not
really believed.
124.
"Everything
to lose? Yes, indeed. You will be lost for time and lost for eternity."
125.
"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."
126.
"You have no
right to make terms with God," he retorted, "as to what you will believe or what
you will not believe. You are full of intellectual pride."
127.
I sighed
hopelessly. Little feeling of pride was there in me just then, but only a
despairful feeling 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 face the difficulties, openly leaving the Church and
taking the consequences. Then for the first time his serenity was ruffled.
128.
"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."
131.
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 priest-craft,
that could be tender and pitiful to the sinner, repentant, humble, submissive;
but that was iron to the doubter, 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 are centres of infectious disease, and charity to the heretic is "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 has revealed," they can
permit no questionings, they can accept nought but the most complete submission.
But while man aspires after truth, while his mind yearns after knowledge, while
his intellect soars upward into the empyrean of speculation and "beats the air
with tireless wing," so long shall those who demand faith from him be met by
challenge for proof, and those who would blind him shall be defeated by his
resolve to gaze unblenching on the face of Truth, even though her eyes should
turn him into stone. It was during this same autumn of 1872 that I first met Mr.
and Mrs. Scott, introduced to them by Mr. Voysey. At that time Thomas 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. Well born and
wealthy, he had spent his earlier life in adventure in all parts of the world,
and after his marriage he had settled down at Ramsgate, and had made his home a
centre of heretical thought. His wife, "his right hand," as he justly called
her, was young enough to be his daughter—a sweet, strong, gentle, noble woman,
worthy of her husband, and than that no higher praise could be spoken. Mr. Scott
for many years issued monthly a series of pamphlets, all heretical, though very
varying in their shades of thought; all were well written, cultured, and
polished in tone, and to this rule Mr. Scott made no exception; his writers
might say what they liked, but they must have something to say, and must say it
in good English. His correspondence was enormous, from Prime Ministers
downwards. At his house met people of the most varied opinions; it was a
veritable heretical salon. Colenso of Natal, Edward Maitland, E.
Vansittart Neale, Charles Bray, Sarah Hennell, and hundreds more, clerics and
laymen, scholars and thinkers, all coming to this one house, to which the
entrée
was gained only by love of Truth and desire to spread Freedom among men. For
Thomas Scott my first Freethought essay was written a few months after, "On the
Deity of Jesus of Nazareth," by the wife of a benefited clergyman. My name was
not mine to use, so it was agreed that any essays from my pen should be
anonymous.
132.
And now came
the return to Sibsey, and with it the need for definite
steps as to the Church. For now I no longer doubted, I had rejected, and the
time for silence was past. I was willing to attend the Church services, taking
no part in any not directed to God Himself, but I could no longer attend the
Holy Communion, for in that service, full of recognition of Jesus as Deity and
of His atoning sacrifice, I could no longer take part without hypocrisy. This
was agreed to, and well do I remember the pain and trembling wherewith on the
first "Sacrament Sunday" after my return I rose and left the church. That the
vicar's wife should "communicate" was as much a matter of course as that the
vicar should "administer"; I had never done anything in public that would draw
attention to me, and a feeling of deadly sickness nearly overcame me as I made
my exit, conscious that every eye was on me, and that my non-participation would
be the cause of unending comment. As a matter of fact, every one naturally
thought I was taken suddenly ill, and I was overwhelmed with calls and
inquiries. To any direct question I answered quietly that I was unable to take
part in the profession of faith required by an honest communicant, but the
statement was rarely necessary, as the idea of heresy in a vicar's wife is slow
to suggest itself to the ordinary bucolic mind, and I proffered no information
where no question was asked.
133.
It happened
that, shortly after that (to me) memorable Christmas of 1872, a sharp epidemic
of typhoid fever broke out in the
134.
The spring of
1873 brought me knowledge of a power that was to mould much of my future life. I
delivered my first lecture, but delivered it to rows of empty pews in
135.
But the
knowledge remained a secret all to my own self for many a long month, for I
quickly felt ashamed of that foolish speechifying in an empty church; but,
foolish as it was, I note it here, as it was the first effort of that expression
in spoken words which later became to me one of the deepest delights of life.
And, indeed, none can know, save they who have felt it, what joy there is in the
full rush of language that moves and sways; to feel a crowd respond to the
lightest touch; to see the faces brighten or darken at your bidding; to know
that the sources of human emotion and human passion gush forth at the word of
the speaker as the stream from the riven rock; to feel that the thought which
thrills through a thousand hearers has its impulse from you, and throbs back to
you the fuller from a thousand heart-beats. Is there any emotional joy in life
more brilliant than this, fuller of passionate triumph, and of the very essence
of intellectual delight?
136.
In 1873 my
marriage tie was broken. I took no new step, but my absence from the Communion
led to some gossip, and a relative of Mr. Besant pressed on him highly-coloured
views of the social and professional dangers which would accrue if my heresy
became known. My health, never really restored since the autumn of 1871, grew
worse and worse, serious heart trouble having arisen from the constant strain
under which I lived. At last, in July or August, 1873, the crisis came. I was
told that I must conform to the outward observances of the Church, and attend
the Communion; I refused. Then came
the distinct alternative; conformity or exclusion from home—in other words,
hypocrisy or expulsion. I chose the latter.
137.
A bitterly
sad time followed. My dear mother was heart-broken. To her, with her wide and
vague form of Christianity, loosely held, the intensity of my feeling that where
I did not believe I would not pretend belief,
was incomprehensible. She recognised far more fully than I did all that a
separation from my home meant for me, and the difficulties that would surround a
young woman, not yet twenty-six, living alone. She knew how brutally the world
judges, and how the mere fact that a woman was young and alone justified any
coarseness of slander. Then I did not guess how cruel men and women could be,
how venomous their tongues; now, knowing it, having faced slander and lived it
down, I deliberately say that were the choice again before me I would choose as
I chose then; I would rather go through it all again than live "in Society"
under the burden of an acted lie.
138.
The hardest
struggle was against my mother's tears and pleading; to cause her pain was
tenfold pain to me. Against harshness I had been rigid as steel, but it was hard
to remain steadfast when my darling mother, whom I loved as I loved nothing else
on earth, threw herself on her knees before me, imploring me to yield. It seemed
like a crime to bring such anguish on her; and I felt as a murderer as the snowy
head was pressed against my knees. And yet—to live a lie? Not even for her was
that shame possible; in that worst crisis of blinding agony my will clung fast
to Truth. And it is true now as it ever was that he who loves father or mother
better than Truth is not worthy of her, and the flint-strewn path of honesty is
the way to Light and Peace.
139.
Then there
were the children, the two little ones who worshipped me, who was to them
mother, nurse, and playfellow. Were they, too, demanded at my hands? Not
wholly—for a time. Facts which I need not touch on here enabled my brother to
obtain for me a legal separation, and when everything was arranged, I found
myself guardian of my little daughter, and possessor of a small monthly income
sufficient for respectable starvation. With a great price I had obtained my
freedom, but—I was free. Home, friends, social position, were the price demanded
and paid, and, being free, I wondered what to do with my freedom. I could have
had a home with my brother if I would give up my heretical friends and keep
quiet, but I had no mind to put my limbs into fetters again, and in my youthful
inexperience I determined to find something to do. The difficulty was the
"something," and I spent various shillings in agencies, with a quite wonderful
unanimity of failures. I tried fancy needle-work, offered to "ladies in reduced
circumstances," and earned 4s. 6d. by some weeks of stitching. I experimented
with a Birmingham firm, who generously offered every one the opportunity of
adding to their incomes, and on sending the small fee demanded, received a
pencil-case, with an explanation that I was to sell little articles of that
description, going as far as cruet-stands, to my friends. I did not feel equal
to springing pencil-cases and cruet-stands on my
acquaintances, so did not enter on that line of business, and similar
failures in numerous efforts made me feel, as so many others have found, that
the world-oyster is hard to open. However, I was resolute to build a nest for my
wee daughter, my mother, and myself, and the first thing to do was to save my
monthly pittance to buy furniture. I found a tiny house in
140.
And now the
spring of 1874 had come, and in a few weeks my mother and I were to set up house
together. How we had planned all, and had knitted on the new life together we
anticipated to the old one we remembered! How we had discussed Mabel's
education, and the share which should fall to each! Day-dreams; day-dreams!
never to be realised.
141.
My mother
went up to town, and in a week or two I received a telegram, saying she was
dangerously ill, and as fast as express train would take me I was beside her.
Dying, the doctor said; three days she might live—no more. I told her the
death-sentence, but she said resolutely, "I do not feel that I am going to die
just yet," and she was right. There was an attack of fearful prostration—the
valves of the heart had failed—a very wrestling with Death, and then the grim
shadow drew backwards. I nursed her day and night with a very desperation of
tenderness, for now Fate had touched the thing dearest to me in life. A second
horrible crisis came, and for the second time her tenacity and my love beat back
the death-stroke. She did not wish to die, the love of life was strong in her; I
would not let her die; between us we kept the foe at bay. Then dropsy
supervened, and the end loomed slowly sure.
142.
It was then,
after eighteen months' abstention, that I took the Sacrament for the last time.
My mother had an intense longing to communicate before she died, but absolutely
refused to do so unless I took it with her. "If it be necessary to salvation,"
she persisted, doggedly, "I will not take it if darling Annie is to be shut out.
I would rather be lost with her than saved without her." I went to a clergyman I
knew well, and laid the case before him; as I expected, he refused to allow me
to communicate. I tried a second, with the same result. At last a thought struck
me. There was Dean Stanley, my mother's favourite, a man known to be of the
broadest school within the Church of England; suppose I asked him? I did not
know him, and I felt the request would be an impertinence;
but there was just the chance that he might consent, and what would I not do to
make my darling's death-bed easier? I said nothing to any one, but set out to
the Deanery,
143.
His face
changed to a great softness. "You were quite right to come to me," he answered,
in that low, musical voice of his, his keen gaze having altered into one no less direct, but marvellously
gentle. "Of course I will go and see your mother, and I have little doubt that,
if you will not mind talking over your position with me, we may see our way
clear to doing as your mother wishes."
144.
I could
barely speak my thanks, so much did the kindly sympathy move me; the revulsion
from the anxiety and fear of rebuff was strong enough to be almost pain. But
Dean Stanley did more than I asked. He suggested that he should call that
afternoon, and have a quiet chat with my mother, and
then come again on the following day to administer the Sacrament.
145.
"A stranger's
presence is always trying to a sick person," he said, with rare delicacy of
thought, "and, joined to the excitement of the service, it might be too much for your dear mother. If I
spend half an hour with her to-day, and administer the Sacrament to-morrow, it
will, I think, be better for her."
146.
So Dean
Stanley came that afternoon, all the way to Brompton, and remained talking with
my mother for about half an hour, and then set himself to understand my own
position. He finally told me that conduct was far more important than theory,
and that he regarded all as "Christians" who recognised and tried to follow the
moral law of Christ. On the question of the absolute Deity of Jesus he laid but
little stress; Jesus was "in a special sense the Son of God," but it was folly
to quarrel over words with only human meanings when dealing with the mystery of
the Divine existence, and, above all, it was folly to make such words into
dividing walls between earnest souls. The one important matter was the
recognition of "duty to God and man," and all who were one in that recognition
might rightfully join in an act of worship, the essence of which was not
acceptance of dogma, but love of God and self-sacrifice for man. "The Holy
Communion," he concluded, in his soft tones, "was never meant to divide from
each other hearts that are searching after the one true God. It was meant by its
founder as a symbol of unity, not of strife."
147.
On the
following day Dean Stanley celebrated the Holy Communion by the bedside of my
dear mother, and well was I repaid for the struggle it had cost me to ask so
great a kindness from a stranger, when I saw the comfort that gentle, noble
heart had given to her. He soothed away all her anxiety about
my heresy with tactful wisdom, bidding her have no fear of differences of
opinion where the heart was set on truth. "Remember," she told me he said to
her—"remember that our God is the God of truth, and that therefore the honest
search for truth can never be displeasing in His eyes." Once again after that he
came, and after his visit to my mother we had another long talk. I ventured to
ask him, the conversation having turned that way, how, with views
so broad as his, he found it possible to remain in communion with the
Church of England. "I think," he answered, gently, "that I am of more service to
true religion by remaining in the Church and striving to widen its boundaries
from within, than if I left it and worked from without." And he went on to
explain how, as Dean of Westminster, he was in a rarely independent position,
and could make the Abbey of a wider national service than would otherwise be
possible. In all he said on this his love for and his pride in the glorious
Abbey were manifest, and it was easy to see that old historical associations,
love of music, of painting, of stately architecture, were the bonds that held
him bound to the "old historic Church of England." His emotions, not his
intellect, kept him Churchman, and he shrank, with the over-sensitiveness of the
cultured scholar, from the idea of allowing the old traditions to be handled
roughly by inartistic hands. Naturally of a refined and delicate nature, he had
been rendered yet more exquisitely sensitive by the training of the college and
the court; the polished courtesy of his manners was but the natural expression
of a noble and lofty mind—a mind whose very gentleness sometimes veiled its
strength. I have often heard Dean Stanley harshly spoken of, I have heard his
honesty roughly challenged; but never has he been attacked in my presence that I
have not uttered my protest against the injustice done him, and thus striven to
repay some small fraction of that great debt of gratitude which I shall ever owe
his memory.
148.
And now the
end came swiftly. I had hurriedly furnished a couple of rooms in the little
house, now ours, that I might take my mother into the purer air of Norwood, and
permission was given to drive her down in an invalid carriage. The following
evening she was suddenly taken worse; we lifted her into bed, and telegraphed
for the doctor. But he could do nothing, and she herself felt that the hand of
Death had gripped her. Selfless to the last, she thought but for my loneliness.
"I am leaving you alone," she sighed from time to time; and truly I felt, with
an anguish I did not dare to realise, that when she died I should indeed be
alone on earth.
149.
For two days
longer she was with me, my beloved, and I never left her side for five minutes.
On May 10th the weakness passed into gentle delirium, but even then the faithful
eyes followed me about the room, until at length they closed for ever, and as
the sun sank low in the heavens, the breath came slower and slower, till the
silence of Death came down upon us
and she was gone.
150.
Stunned and
dazed with the loss, I went mechanically through the next few days. I would have
none touch my dead save myself and her favourite sister, who was with us at the
last. Cold and dry-eyed I remained, even when they hid her from me with the
coffin-lid, even all the dreary way to Kensal Green where her husband and her
baby-son were sleeping, and when we left her alone in the chill earth, damp with
the rains of spring. I could not believe that our day-dream was dead and buried,
and the home in ruins ere yet it was fairly built. Truly, my "house was left
unto me desolate," and the rooms, filled with sunshine but unlighted by her
presence, seemed to echo from their bare walls, "You are all alone."
151.
But my little
daughter was there, and her sweet face and dancing feet broke the solitude,
while her imperious claims for love and tendance forced me into attention to the
daily needs of life. And life was hard in those days of spring and summer,
resources small, and work difficult to find. In truth, the two months after my
mother's death were the dreariest my life has known, and they were months of
tolerably hard struggle. The little house in
152.
The small
amount of jewellery I possessed, and all my superfluous clothes, were turned into more necessary articles, and the child, at
least, never suffered a solitary touch of want. My servant Mary was a wonderful
contriver, and kept house on the very slenderest funds that could be put into a
servant's hands, and she also made the little place so bright and fresh-looking
that it was always a pleasure to go into it. Recalling those days of "hard
living," I can now look on them without regret. More, I am glad to have passed
through them, for they have taught me how to sympathise with those who are
struggling as I struggled then, and I never can hear the words fall from pale
lips, "I am hungry," without remembering how painful a thing hunger is, and
without curing that pain, at least for the moment.
153.
The presence
of the child was good for me, keeping alive my aching, lonely heart: she would
play contentedly for hours while I was working, a word now and again being
enough for happiness; when I had to go out without her, she would run to the
door with me, and the "good-bye" would come from down-curved lips; she was ever
watching at the window for my return, and the sunny face was always the first to
welcome me home. Many and many a time have I been coming home, weary, hungry,
and heart-sick, and the glimpse of the little face watching has reminded me that
I must not carry in a grave face to sadden my darling, and the effort to throw
off the depression for her sake threw it off altogether, and brought back the
sunshine. She was the sweetness and joy of my life, my curly-headed darling,
with her red-gold hair and glorious eyes, and passionate, wilful, loving nature.
The torn, bruised tendrils of my heart gradually twined round this little life;
she gave something to love and to tend, and thus gratified one of the strongest
impulses of my nature.
155.
During all
these months the intellectual life had not stood still; I was slowly, cautiously
feeling my way onward. And in the intellectual and social side of my life I
found a delight unknown in the old days of bondage. First, there was the joy of
freedom, the joy of speaking out frankly and honestly each thought. Truly, I had
a right to say: "With a great price obtained I this freedom," and having paid the price, I revelled in the
liberty I had bought. Mr. Scott's valuable library was at my service; his keen
brain challenged my opinions, probed my assertions, and suggested phases of
thought hitherto untouched. I studied harder than ever, and the study now was
unchecked by any fear of possible consequences. I had nothing left of the old
faith save belief in "a God," and that began slowly to melt away. The Theistic
axiom: "If there be a God at all He must be at least as good as His highest
creature," began with an "if," and to that "if" I turned my attention. "Of all
impossible things," writes Miss Frances Power Cobbe, "the most impossible must
surely be that a man should dream something of the good and the noble, and that
it should prove at last that his Creator was less good and less noble than he
had dreamed." But, I questioned, are we sure that there is a Creator? Granted
that, if there is, He must be above His highest creature, but—is there such a
being? "The ground," says the Rev. Charles Voysey, "on which our belief in God
rests is man. Man, parent of Bibles and Churches, inspirer of all good thoughts
and good deeds. Man, the masterpiece of God's thought on earth. Man, the
text-book of all spiritual knowledge. Neither miraculous nor infallible, man is
nevertheless the only trustworthy record of the Divine mind in things pertaining
to God. Man's reason, conscience, and affections are the only true revelation of
his Maker." But what if God were only man's own image reflected in the mirror of
man's mind? What if man were the creator, not the revelation of his God?
156.
It was
inevitable that such thoughts should arise after the more palpably indefensible
doctrines of Christianity had been discarded. Once encourage the human mind to
think, and bounds to the thinking can never again be set by authority. Once
challenge traditional beliefs, and the challenge will ring on every shield which
is hanging in the intellectual arena. Around me was the atmosphere of conflict,
and, freed from its long repression, my mind leapt up to share in the strife
with a joy in the intellectual tumult, the intellectual strain.
157.
I often
attended South Place Chapel, where Moncure D. Conway was then preaching, and
discussion with him did something towards widening my views on the deeper
religious problems; I re-read Dean Mansel's "Bampton Lectures," and they did
much towards turning me in the direction of Atheism; I re-read Mill's
"Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy," and studied carefully
Comte's "Philosophie Positive." Gradually I recognised the limitations of human
intelligence and its incapacity for understanding the nature of God, presented
as infinite and absolute; I had given up the use of prayer as a blasphemous
absurdity, since an all-wise God could not need my suggestions, nor an all-good
God require my promptings. But God fades out of the daily life of those who
never pray; a personal God who is not a Providence is a superfluity; when from
the heaven does not smile a listening Father, it soon becomes an empty space,
whence resounds no echo of man's cry. I could then reach no loftier conception
of the Divine than that offered by the orthodox, and that broke hopelessly away
as I analysed it.
158.
At last I
said to Mr. Scott, "Mr. Scott, may I write a tract on the nature and existence
of God?"
159.
He glanced at
me keenly. "Ah, little lady, you are facing, then, that problem at last? I
thought it must come. Write away."
160.
While this
pamphlet was in MS. an event occurred which coloured all my
succeeding life. I met Charles Bradlaugh. One day in the late spring,
talking with Mrs. Conway—one of the sweetest and steadiest natures whom it has
been my lot to meet, and to whom, as to her husband, I owe much for kindness
generously shown when I was poor and had but few friends—she asked me if I had
been to the Hall of Science, Old Street. I answered, with the stupid, ignorant
reflection of other people's prejudices so sadly common, "No, I have never been
there. Mr. Bradlaugh is rather a rough sort of speaker, is he not?"
161.
"He is the
finest speaker of Saxon-English that I have ever heard," she answered, "except,
perhaps, John Bright, and his power over a crowd is something marvellous.
Whether you agree with him or not, you should hear him."
164.
In the
following July I went into the shop of Mr. Edward Truelove, 256, High Holborn,
in search of some Comtist publications, having come across his name as a
publisher in the course of my study at the British Museum. On the counter was a
copy of the National Reformer, and, attracted by the title, I bought it.
I read it placidly in the omnibus on my way to Victoria Station, and found it
excellent, and was sent into convulsions of inward merriment when, glancing up,
I saw an old gentleman gazing at me, with horror speaking from every line of his
countenance. To see a young woman, respectably dressed in crape, reading an
Atheistic journal, had evidently upset his peace of mind, and he looked so hard
at the paper that I was tempted to offer it to him, but repressed the
mischievous inclination.
165.
This first
copy of the paper with which I was to be so closely connected bore date July 19,
1874, and contained two long letters from a Mr. Arnold of Northampton, attacking
Mr. Bradlaugh, and a brief and singularly self-restrained answer from the
latter. There was also an article on the National Secular Society, which made me
aware that there was an organisation devoted to the propagandism of Free
Thought. I felt that if such a society existed, I ought to belong to it, and I
consequently wrote a short note to the editor of the National Reformer,
asking whether it was necessary for a person to profess Atheism before being
admitted to the Society. The answer appeared in the National Reformer:—
166.
"S.E.—To be a member of the National Secular Society it is only
necessary to be able honestly to accept the four principles, as given in the
National Reformer of June 14th. This any person may do without being
required to avow himself an Atheist. Candidly, we can see no logical
resting-place between the entire acceptance of authority, as in the Roman
Catholic Church, and the most extreme Rationalism. If, on again looking to the
Principles of the Society, you can accept them, we repeat to you our
invitation."
167.
I sent my
name in as an active member, and find it is recorded in the National Reformer
of August 9th. Having received an intimation that Londoners could receive their
certificates at the Hall of Science from Mr. Bradlaugh on any Sunday evening, I
betook myself thither, and it was on August 2, 1874, that I first set foot in a
Freethought hall. The Hall was crowded to suffocation, and, at the very moment
announced for the lecture, a roar of cheering burst forth, a tall figure passed
swiftly up the Hall to the platform,
and, with a slight bow in answer to the voluminous greeting, Charles Bradlaugh
took his seat. I looked at him with interest, impressed and surprised. The
grave, quiet, stern, strong face, the massive head, the keen eyes, the
magnificent breadth and height of forehead—was this the man I had heard
described as a blatant agitator, an ignorant demagogue?
168.
He began
quietly and simply, tracing out the resemblances between the
169.
He came down
the Hall with some certificates in his hand, glanced round, and handed me mine
with a questioning "Mrs. Besant?" Then he said, referring to my question as to a
profession of Atheism, that
he would willingly talk over the subject of Atheism with me if I would make an
appointment, and offered me a book he had been using in his lecture. Long
afterwards I asked him how he knew me, whom he had never seen, that he came
straight to me in such fashion. He laughed and said he did not know, but,
glancing over the faces, he felt sure that I was Annie Besant.
170.
From that
first meeting in the Hall of Science dated a friendship that lasted unbroken
till Death severed the earthly bond, and that to me
stretches through Death's gateway and links us together still. As friends, not
as strangers, we met—swift recognition, as it were, leaping from eye to eye; and
I know now that the instinctive friendliness was in very truth an outgrowth of
strong friendship in other lives, and that on that August day we took up again
an ancient tie, we did not begin a new one. And so in lives to come we shall
meet again, and help each other as we helped each other in this. And let me here
place on record, as I have done before, some word of what I owe him for his true
friendship; though, indeed, how great is my debt to him I can never tell. Some
of his wise phrases have ever remained in my memory. "You should never say you
have an opinion on a subject until you have tried to study the strongest things
said against the view to which you are inclined." "You must not think you know a
subject until you are acquainted with all that the best minds have said about
it." "No steady work can be done in public unless the worker
study
at home far more than he talks outside." "Be your own harshest judge, listen to
your own speech and criticise it; read abuse of yourself and see what grains of
truth are in it." "Do not waste time by reading opinions that are mere echoes of
your own; read opinions you disagree with, and you will catch aspects of truth
you do not readily see." Through our long comradeship he was my sternest as well
as gentlest critic, pointing out to me that in a party like ours, where our own
education and knowledge were above those whom we led, it was very easy to gain
indiscriminate praise and unstinted admiration; on the other hand, we received
from Christians equally indiscriminate abuse and hatred. It was, therefore,
needful that we should be our own harshest judges, and that we should be sure
that we knew thoroughly every subject that we taught. He saved me from the
superficiality that my "fatal facility" of speech might so easily have induced;
and when I began to taste the intoxication of easily won applause, his criticism
of weak points, his challenge of weak arguments, his trained judgment, were of
priceless service to me, and what of value there is in my work is very largely
due to his influence, which at once stimulated and restrained.
171.
One very
charming characteristic of his was his extreme courtesy in private life,
especially to women. This outward polish, which sat so gracefully on his massive
frame and stately presence, was foreign rather than English—for the English, as
a rule, save such as go to Court, are a singularly unpolished people—and it gave
his manner a peculiar charm. I asked him once where he had learned his gracious
fashions that were so un-English—he would stand with uplifted hat as he asked a
question of a maidservant, or handed a woman into a carriage—and he answered,
with a half-smile, half-scoff, that it was only in England he was an outcast
from society. In
172.
Our first
conversation, after the meeting at the Hall of Science, took place a day or two
later in his little study in 29,
173.
In order that
I may not colour my past thinkings by my present thought, I take my statements
from pamphlets written when I adopted the Atheistic philosophy and while I
continued an adherent thereof. No charge can then be made that I have softened
my old opinions for the sake of reconciling them with those now held.
175.
The first
step which leaves behind the idea of a limited and personal God, an extra-cosmic
Creator, and leads the student to the point whence Atheism and Pantheism
diverge, is the recognition that a profound unity of substance underlies the
infinite diversities of natural phenomena, the discernment of the One beneath
the Many. This was the step I had taken ere my first meeting with Charles
Bradlaugh, and I had written:—
176.
"It is
manifest to all who will take the trouble to think steadily, that there can be
only one eternal and underived substance, and that matter and spirit must,
therefore, only be varying manifestations of this one substance. The distinction
made between matter and spirit is, then, simply made for the sake of convenience
and clearness, just as we may distinguish perception from judgment, both of
which, however, are alike processes of thought. Matter is, in its constituent
elements, the same as spirit; existence is one, however manifold in its
phenomena; life is one, however multiform in its evolution. As the heat of the
coal differs from the coal itself, so do memory, perception, judgment, emotion,
and will differ from the brain which is the instrument of thought. But
nevertheless they are all equally products of the one sole substance, varying
only in their conditions.... I find myself, then, compelled to believe that one
only substance exists in all around me; that the universe is eternal, or at
least eternal so far as our faculties are concerned, since we cannot, as some
one has quaintly put it, 'get to the outside of everywhere'; that a Deity cannot
be conceived of as apart from the universe; that the Worker and the Work are
inextricably interwoven, and in some sense eternally and indissolubly combined.
Having got so far, we will proceed to examine into the possibility of proving
the existence of that one essence popularly called by the name of God,
under the conditions strictly defined by the orthodox. Having demonstrated, as I
hope to do, that the orthodox idea of God is unreasonable and absurd, we will
endeavour to ascertain whether any idea of God, worthy to be called an
idea, is attainable in the present state of our faculties." "The Deity must of
necessity be that one and only substance out of which all things are evolved,
under the uncreated conditions and eternal laws of the universe; He must be, as
Theodore Parker somewhat oddly puts it, 'the materiality of matter as well as
the spirituality of spirit'—i.e., these must both be products of this one
substance; a truth which is readily accepted as soon as spirit and matter are
seen to be but different modes of one essence. Thus we identify substance with
the all-comprehending and vivifying force of nature, and in so doing
we
simply reduce to a physical impossibility the existence of the Being described
by the orthodox as a God possessing the attributes of personality. The Deity
becomes identified with nature, co-extensive with the universe, but the God
of the orthodox no longer exists; we may change the signification of God, and
use the word to express a different idea, but we can no longer mean by it a
Personal Being in the orthodox sense, possessing an individuality which divides
Him from the rest of the universe."[3]
177.
Proceeding to
search whether any idea of God was attainable, I came to the conclusion
that evidence of the existence of a conscious Power was lacking, and that the
ordinary proofs offered were inconclusive; that we could grasp phenomena and no
more. "There appears, also, to be a possibility of a mind in nature, though we
have seen that intelligence is, strictly speaking, impossible. There cannot be
perception, memory, comparison, or judgment, but may there not be a perfect
mind, unchanging, calm, and still? Our faculties fail us when we try to estimate
the Deity, and we are betrayed into contradictions and absurdities; but does it
therefore follow that He is
not? It seems to me that to deny His existence is to overstep the boundaries of
our thought-power almost as much as to try and define it. We pretend to know the
Unknown if we declare Him to be the Unknowable. Unknowable to us at present,
yes! Unknowable for ever, in other possible stages of existence? We have reached
a region into which we cannot penetrate; here all human faculties fail us; we
bow our heads on 'the threshold of the unknown.'
178.
"'And the ear
of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see,
But if we could see and hear, this vision—were it not He?'
179.
Thus sings
Alfred Tennyson, the poet of metaphysics: 'if we could see and hear.'
Alas! it is always an 'if!'[4]
180.
This refusal
to believe without evidence, and the declaration that anything "behind
phenomena" is unknowable to man as at present constituted—these are the two
chief planks of the Atheistic platform, as Atheism was held by Charles Bradlaugh
and myself. In 1876 this position was clearly
reaffirmed. "It is necessary to put briefly the Atheistic position, for no
position is more continuously and more persistently misrepresented. Atheism is
without God. It does not assert no God. 'The Atheist does not say "There is no God,"
but he says, "I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God; the
word God is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation. I do not
deny God, because I cannot deny that of which I have no conception, and the
conception of which, by its affirmer, is so imperfect that he is unable to
define it to me."' (Charles Bradlaugh, "Freethinker's Text-book," p. 118.) The
Atheist neither affirms nor denies the possibility of phenomena differing from
those recognised by human experience.... As his knowledge of the universe is
extremely limited and very imperfect, the Atheist declines either to deny or to
affirm anything with regard to modes of existence of which he knows nothing.
Further, he refuses to believe anything concerning that of which he knows
nothing, and affirms that that which can never be the subject of knowledge ought
never to be the object of belief. While the Atheist, then, neither affirms nor
denies the unknown, he does deny all which conflicts with the knowledge to
which he has already attained. For example, he knows that one is one, and
that three times one are three; he denies that three times one are, or
can be, one. The position of the Atheist is a clear and a reasonable one: I know
nothing about 'God,' and therefore I do not believe in Him or in it; what you
tell me about your God is self-contradictory, and is therefore incredible. I do
not deny 'God,' which is an unknown tongue to me; I do deny your God, who is
an impossibility. I am without God."[5] Up to 1887 I find myself writing on the same
lines: "No man can rationally affirm 'There is no God,' until the word 'God' has
for him a definite meaning, and until everything that exists is known to him,
and known with what Leibnitz calls 'perfect knowledge.' The Atheist's denial of
the Gods begins only when these Gods are defined or described. Never yet has a
God been defined in terms which were not palpably self-contradictory and absurd;
never yet has a God been described so that a concept of Him was made possible to
human thought—Nor is anything gained by the assertors of Deity when they allege
that He is incomprehensible. If 'God' exists and is incomprehensible, His
incomprehensibility is an admirable reason for being silent about Him, but can
never justify the affirmation of self-contradictory propositions, and the
threatening of people with damnation if they do not accept them."[6]
"The belief of the Atheist stops where his evidence stops. He believes in the
existence of the universe, judging the accessible proof thereof to be adequate,
and he finds in this universe sufficient cause for the happening of all
phenomena. He finds no intellectual satisfaction in placing a gigantic conundrum
behind the universe, which only adds its own unintelligibility to the already
sufficiently difficult problem of existence. Our lungs are not fitted to breathe
beyond the atmosphere which surrounds our globe, and our faculties cannot
breathe outside the atmosphere of the phenomenal."[7]
And I summed up this essay with the words: "I do not believe in God. My mind
finds no grounds on which to build up a reasonable faith. My heart revolts
against the spectre of an Almighty Indifference to the pain of sentient beings.
My conscience rebels against the injustice, the cruelty, the inequality, which
surround me on every side. But I believe in
181.
These views
of existence naturally colour all views of life and of the existence of the
Soul. And here steps in the profound difference between Atheism and Pantheism;
both posit an Existence at present inscrutable by human faculties, of which all
phenomena are modes; but to the Atheist that Existence manifests as
Force-Matter, unconscious, unintelligent, while to the Pantheist it manifests as
Life-Matter, conscious, intelligent. To the one, life and consciousness are
attributes, properties, dependent upon arrangements of matter; to the other they
are fundamental, essential, and only limited in their manifestation by
arrangements of matter. Despite the attraction held for me in Spinoza's luminous
arguments, the over-mastering sway which Science was beginning to exercise over
me drove me to seek for the explanation of all problems of life and mind at the
hands of the biologist and the chemist. They had done so much, explained so
much, could they not explain all? Surely, I thought, the one safe ground is that
of experiment,
and the remembered agony of doubt made me very slow to believe where I could not
prove. So I was fain to regard life as an attribute, and this again strengthened
the Atheistic position. "Scientifically regarded, life is not an entity but a
property; it is not a mode of existence, but a characteristic of certain modes.
Life is the result of an arrangement of matter, and when rearrangement occurs
the former result can no longer be present; we call the result of the changed
arrangement death. Life and death are two convenient words for expressing the
general outcome of two arrangements of matter, one of which is always found to
precede the other."[9]
And then, having resorted to chemistry for one illustration, I took another from
one of those striking and easily grasped analogies, facility for seeing and
presenting which has ever been one of the secrets of my success as a
propagandist. Like pictures, they impress the mind of the hearer with a vivid
sense of reality. "Every one knows the exquisite iridiscence of mother-of-pearl,
the tender, delicate hues which melt into each other, glowing with soft
radiance. How different is the dull, dead surface of a piece of wax. Yet take
that dull, black wax and mould it so closely to the surface of the
mother-of-pearl that it shall take every delicate marking of the shell, and when
you raise it the seven-hued glory shall smile at you from the erstwhile
colourless surface. For, though it be to the naked eye imperceptible, all the
surface of the mother-of-pearl is in delicate ridges and furrows, like the
surface of a newly-ploughed field; and when the waves of light come dashing up
against the ridged surface, they are broken like the waves on a shingly shore,
and are flung backwards, so that they cross each other and the oncoming waves;
and, as every ray of white light is made up of waves of seven colours, and these
waves differ in length each from the others, the fairy ridges fling them
backward separately, and each ray reaches the eye by itself; so that the colour
of the mother-of-pearl is really the spray of the light waves, and comes from
arrangement of matter once again. Give the dull, black wax the same ridges and
furrows, and its glory shall differ in nothing from that of the shell. To apply
our illustration: as the colour belongs to one arrangement of matter and the
dead surface to another, so life belongs to some arrangements of matter and is
their resultant, while the resultant of other arrangements is death."[10]
182.
The same line
of reasoning naturally was applied to the existence of "spirit" in man, and it
was argued that mental activity, the domain of the "spirit," was dependent on
bodily organisation. "When the babe is born it shows no sign of mind. For a
brief space hunger and repletion, cold and warmth are its only sensations.
Slowly the specialised senses begin to function; still more slowly muscular
movements, at first aimless and reflex, become co-ordinated and consciously
directed. There is no sign here of an intelligent spirit controlling a
mechanism; there is every sign of a learning and developing intelligence, developing pari
passu with the organism of which it is a function. As the body grows, the
mind grows with it, and the childish mind of the child develops into the hasty,
quickly-judging, half-informed, unbalanced youthful mind of the youth; with
maturity of years comes maturity of mind, and body and mind are vigorous and in
their prime. As old age comes on and the bodily functions decay, the mind decays
also, until age passes into senility, and body and mind sink into second
childhood. Has the immortal spirit decayed with the organisation, or is it
dwelling in sorrow, bound in its 'house of clay'? If this be so, the 'spirit'
must be unconscious, or else separate from the very individual whose essence it
is supposed to be, for the old man does not suffer when his mind is senile, but
is contented as a little child. And not only is this constant, simultaneous
growth and decay of body and mind to be observed, but we know
that mental functions are disordered and suspended by various physical
conditions. Alcohol, many drugs, fever, disorder the
mind; a blow on the cranium suspends its functions, and the 'spirit' returns
with the surgeon's trepanning. Does the 'spirit' take part in dreams? Is it
absent from the idiot, from the lunatic? Is it guilty of manslaughter when the
madman murders, or does it helplessly watch its own
instrument performing actions at which it shudders? If it can only work here
through an organism, is its nature changed in its independent life, severed from
all with which it was identified? Can it, in its 'disembodied state,' have
anything in common with its past?"[11]
183.
It will be
seen that my unbelief in the existence of the Soul or Spirit was a matter of
cold, calm reasoning. As I wrote in 1885: "For many of us evidence must precede
belief. I would gladly believe in a happy immortality for all, as I would gladly
believe that all misery and crime and poverty will disappear in 1885—if I
could. But I am unable to believe an improbable proposition unless
convincing evidence is brought in support of it. Immortality is most improbable;
no evidence is brought forward in its favour. I cannot believe only because I
wish."[12]
Such was the philosophy by which I lived from 1874 to 1886, when first some
researches that will be dealt with in their proper place, and which led me
ultimately to the evidence I had before vainly demanded, began to shake my
confidence in its adequacy. Amid outer storm and turmoil and conflict, I found
it satisfy my intellect, while lofty ideals of morality fed my emotions. I
called myself Atheist, and rightly so, for I was without God, and my horizon was
bounded by life on earth; I gloried in the name then, as it is dear to my heart
now, for all the associations with which it is
connected. "Atheist is one of the grandest titles a man can wear; it is the
Order of Merit of the world's heroes. Most great discoverers, most deep-thinking
philosophers, most earnest reformers, most toiling pioneers of progress, have in
their turn had flung at them the name of Atheist. It was howled over the grave
of Copernicus; it was clamoured round the death-pile of Bruno; it was yelled at
Vanini, at Spinoza, at Priestley, at Voltaire, at Paine; it has become the
laurel-bay of the hero, the halo of the martyr; in the world's history it has
meant the pioneer of progress, and where the cry of 'Atheist' is raised there
may we be sure that another step is being taken towards the redemption of
humanity. The saviours of the world are too often howled at as Atheists, and
then worshipped as Deities. The Atheists are the vanguard of the army of
Freethought, on whom falls the brunt of the battle, and are shivered the hardest
of the blows; their feet trample down the thorns that others may tread
unwounded; their bodies fill up the ditch that, by the bridge thus made, others
may pass to victory. Honour to the pioneers of progress, honour to the vanguard
of
184.
This poor
sketch of the conception of the universe, to which I had conquered my way at the
cost of so much pain, and which was the inner centre round which my life
revolved for twelve years, may perhaps show that the Atheistic Philosophy is
misjudged sorely when it is scouted as vile or condemned as intellectually
degraded. It has outgrown anthropomorphic deities, and it leaves us face to face
with Nature, open to all her purifying, strengthening inspirations. "There is
only one kind of prayer," it says, "which is reasonable, and that is the deep,
silent adoration of the greatness and beauty and order around us, as revealed in
the realms of non-rational life and in Humanity; as we bow our heads before the
laws of the universe, and mould our lives into obedience to their voice, we find
a strong, calm peace steal over our hearts, a perfect trust in the ultimate
triumph of the right, a quiet determination to 'make our lives sublime.' Before
our own high ideals, before those lives which show us 'how high the tides of
Divine life have risen in the human world,' we stand with hushed voice and
veiled face; from them we draw strength to emulate, and even dare struggle to
excel. The contemplation of the ideal is true prayer; it inspires, it
strengthens, it ennobles. The other part of prayer is work; from contemplation
to labour, from the forest to the street. Study nature's laws, conform to them,
work in harmony with them, and work becomes a prayer and a thanksgiving, an
adoration of the universal wisdom, and a true obedience to the universal law."[14]
185.
To a woman of
my temperament, filled with passionate desire for the bettering of the world,
the elevation of humanity, a lofty system of ethics was of even more importance
than a logical, intellectual conception of the universe; and the total loss of
all faith in a righteous God only made me more strenuously assertive of the
binding nature of duty and the overwhelming importance of conduct. In 1874 this
conviction found voice in a pamphlet on the "True Basis of Morality," and in all
the years of my propaganda on the platform of the National Secular Society no
subject was more frequently dealt with in my lectures than that of human ethical
growth and the duty of man to man. No thought was more constantly in my mind
than that of the importance of morals, and it was voiced at the very outset of
my public career. Speaking of the danger lest "in these stirring times of
inquiry," old sanctions of right conduct should be cast aside ere new ones were
firmly established, I wrote: "It therefore becomes the duty of every one who
fights in the ranks of Freethought, and who ventures to attack the dogmas of the
Churches, and to strike down the superstitions which enslave men's intellect, to
beware how he uproots sanctions of morality which he is too weak to replace, or
how, before he is prepared with better ones, he removes the barriers which do
yet, however poorly, to some extent check vice and repress crime.... That which
touches morality touches the heart of society; a high and pure morality is the
life-blood of humanity; mistakes in belief are inevitable, and are of little
moment; mistakes in life destroy happiness, and their destructive consequences
spread far and wide. It is, then, a very important question whether we, who are
endeavouring to take away from the world the authority on which has hitherto
been based all its morality, can offer a new and firm ground whereupon may
safely be built up the fair edifice of a noble life."
186.
I then
proceeded to analyse revelation and intuition as a basis for morals, and,
discarding both, I asserted: "The true basis of morality is utility; that is,
the adaptation of our actions to the promotion of the general welfare and
happiness; the endeavour so to rule our lives that we may serve and bless
mankind." And I argued for this basis, showing that the effort after virtue was
implied in the search for happiness: "Virtue is an indispensable part of all
true and solid happiness.... But it is, after all, only reasonable that
happiness should be the ultimate test of right and wrong, if we live, as we do,
in a realm of law. Obedience to law must necessarily result in harmony, and
disobedience in discord. But if obedience to law result in harmony it must also
result in happiness—all through nature obedience to law results in happiness,
and through obedience each living thing fulfils the perfection of its being, and
in that perfection finds its true happiness." It seemed to me most important to
remove morality from the controversies about religion, and to give it a basis of
its own: "As, then, the grave subject of the existence of Deity is a matter of
dispute, it is evidently of deep importance to society that morality should not
be dragged into this battlefield, to stand or totter with the various theories
of the Divine nature which human thought creates and destroys. If we can found
morality on a basis apart from theology, we shall do humanity a service which
can scarcely be overestimated." A study of the facts of nature, of the
consequences of man in society, seemed sufficient for such a basis. "Our
faculties do not suffice to tell us about God; they do suffice to study
phenomena, and to deduce laws from correlated facts. Surely, then, we should do
wisely to concentrate our strength and our energies on the discovery of the
attainable, instead of on the search after the unknowable. If we are told that
morality consists in obedience to the supposed will of a supposed perfectly
moral being, because in so doing we please God, then we are at once placed in a
region where our faculties are useless to us, and where our judgment is at
fault. But if we are told that we are to lead noble lives, because nobility of
life is desirable for itself alone, because in so doing we are acting in harmony
with the laws of Nature, because in so doing we spread happiness around our
pathway and gladden our fellow-men—then, indeed, motives are appealed to which
spring forward to meet the call, and chords are struck in our hearts which
respond in music to the touch." It was to the establishment of this secure basis
that I bent my energies, this that was to me of supreme moment. "Amid the fervid
movement of society, with its wild theories and crude social reforms, with its
righteous fury against oppression and its unconsidered notions of wider freedom
and gladder life, it is of vital importance that morality should stand on a
foundation unshakable; that so through all political and religious revolutions
human life may grow purer and nobler, may rise upwards into settled freedom, and
not sink downwards into anarchy. Only utility can afford us a sure basis, the
reasonableness of which will be accepted alike by thoughtful student and
hard-headed artisan. Utility appeals to all alike, and sets in action motives
which are found equally in every human heart. Well shall it be for humanity that
creeds and dogmas pass away, that superstition vanishes, and the clear light of
freedom and science dawns on a regenerated earth—but well only if men draw
tighter and closer the links of trustworthiness, of honour, and of truth.
Equality before the law is necessary and just; liberty is the birthright of
every man and woman; free individual development will elevate and glorify the
race. But little worth these priceless jewels, little worth liberty and equality
with all their promise for mankind, little worth even wider happiness, if that
happiness be selfish, if true fraternity, true brotherhood, do not knit man to
man, and heart to heart, in loyal service to the common need, and generous
self-sacrifice to the common good."[15]
187.
To the
forwarding of this moral growth of man, two things seemed to me necessary—an
Ideal which should stir the emotions and impel to action, and a clear
understanding of the sources of evil and of the methods by which they might be
drained. Into the drawing of the first I threw all the passion of my nature,
striving to paint the Ideal in colours which should enthral and fascinate, so
that love and desire to realise might stir man to effort. If "morality touched
by emotion" be religion, then truly was I the most religious of Atheists,
finding in this dwelling on and glorifying of the Ideal full satisfaction for
the loftiest emotions. To meet the fascination exercised over men's hearts by
the Man of Sorrows, I raised the image of man triumphant, man perfected.
"Rightly is the ideal Christian type of humanity a Man of Sorrows. Jesus, with
worn and wasted body; with sad, thin lips, curved into a mournful droop of
penitence for human sin; with weary eyes gazing up to heaven because despairing
of earth; bowed down and aged with grief and pain, broken-hearted with long
anguish, broken-spirited with unresisted ill-usage—such is the ideal man of the
Christian creed. Beautiful with a certain pathetic beauty, telling of the long
travail of earth, eloquent of the sufferings of humanity, but not the model type
to which men should conform their lives, if they would make humanity glorious.
And, therefore, in radiant contrast with this, stands out in the sunshine and
under the blue summer sky, far from graveyards and torture of death agony, the
fair ideal Humanity of the Atheist. In form strong and fair, perfect in physical
development as the Hercules of Grecian art, radiant with love, glorious in
self-reliant power; with lips bent firm to resist oppression, and melting into
soft curves of passion and of pity; with deep, far-seeing eyes, gazing
piercingly into the secrets of the unknown, and resting lovingly on the beauties
around him; with hands strong to work in the present; with heart full of hope
which the future shall realise; making earth glad with his labour and beautiful
with his skill—this, this is the Ideal Man, enshrined in the Atheist's heart.
The ideal humanity of the Christian is the humanity of the slave, poor, meek,
broken-spirited, humble, submissive to authority, however oppressive and unjust;
the ideal humanity of the Atheist is the humanity of the free man who knows no
lord, who brooks no tyranny, who relies on his own strength, who makes his
brother's quarrel his, proud, true-hearted, loyal, brave."[16]
188.
A one-sided
view? Yes. But a very natural outcome of a sunny nature, for years held down by
unhappiness and the harshness of an outgrown creed. It was the rebound of such a
nature suddenly set free, rejoicing in its liberty and self-conscious strength,
and it carried with it a great power of rousing the sympathetic enthusiasm of
men and women, deeply conscious of their own restrictions and their own
longings. It was the cry of the freed soul that had found articulate expression,
and the many inarticulate and prisoned souls answered to it tumultously, with
fluttering of caged wings. With hot insistence I battled for the inspiration to
be drawn from the beauty and grandeur of which human life was capable. "Will any
one exclaim, 'You are taking all beauty out of human life, all hope, all warmth,
all inspiration; you give us cold duty for filial obedience, and inexorable law
in the place of God'? All beauty from life? Is there, then, no beauty in the
idea of forming part of the great life of the universe, no beauty in conscious
harmony with Nature, no beauty in faithful service, no beauty in ideals of every
virtue? 'All hope'? Why, I give you more than hope, I give you certainty; if I
bid you labour for this world, it is with the knowledge that this world will
repay you a, thousand-fold, because society will grow purer, freedom more
settled, law more honoured, life more full and glad. What is your heaven? A
heaven in the clouds! I point to a heaven attainable on earth. 'All warmth'?
What! you serve warmly a God unknown and invisible, in
a sense the projected shadow of your own imaginings, and can only serve coldly
your brother whom you see at your side? There is no warmth in brightening the
lot of the sad, in reforming abuses, in establishing equal justice for rich and
poor? You find warmth in the church, but none in the home? Warmth in imagining
the cloud glories of heaven, but none in creating substantial glories on earth?'
All inspiration'? If you want inspiration to feeling, to sentiment, perhaps you
had better keep to your Bible and your creeds; if you want inspiration to work,
go and walk through the East of London, or the back streets of
189.
With equal
vigour did I maintain that "virtue was its own reward," and that payment on the
other side of the grave was unnecessary as an incentive to right
living. "What shall we say to Miss Cobbe's contention that duty will
'grow grey and cold' without God and immortality? Yes, for those with whom duty
is a matter of selfish calculation, and who are virtuous only because they look
for a 'golden crown' in payment on the other side the grave. Those of us who
find joy in right-doing, who work because work is useful to our fellows, who
live well because in such living we pay our contribution to the world's wealth,
leaving earth richer than we found it—we need no paltry payment after death for
our life's labour, for in that labour is its own 'exceeding great reward.'"[18]
But did any one yearn for immortality, that "not all of
me shall die"? "Is it true that Atheism has no immortality? What is true
immortality? Is Beethoven's true immortality in his continued personal
consciousness, or in his glorious music deathless while the world
endures? Is Shelley's true life in his existence in some far-off heaven, or in
the pulsing liberty his lyrics send through men's hearts, when they respond to
the strains of his lyre? Music does not die, though one instrument
be broken; thought does not die, though one brain be shivered; love does
not die, though one heart's strings be rent; and no great thinker dies so long
as his thought re-echoes through the ages, its melody the fuller-toned the more
human brains send its music on. Not only to the hero and the sage is this
immortality given; it belongs to each according to the measure of his deeds;
world-wide life for world-wide service; straitened life for straitened work;
each reaps as he sows, and the harvest is gathered by each in his rightful
order."[19]
190.
This longing
to leave behind a name that will live among men by right of service done them,
this yearning for human love and approval that springs naturally from the
practical and intense realisation of human brotherhood—these will be found as
strong motives in the breasts of the most earnest men and women who have in our
generation identified themselves with the Freethought cause. They shine through
the written and spoken words of Charles Bradlaugh all through his life, and
every friend of his knows how often he has expressed the longing that "when the
grass grows green over my grave, men may love me a little for the work I tried
to do."
191.
Needless to
say that, in the many controversies in which I took part, it was often urged
against me that such motives were insufficient, that they appealed only to
natures already ethically developed, and left the average man, and, above all,
the man below the average, with no sufficiently constraining motive for right
conduct. I resolutely held to my faith in human nature, and the inherent
response of the human heart when appealed to from the highest grounds; strange—I
often think now—this instinctive certainty I had of man's innate grandeur, that
governed all my thought, inconsistent as that certainty was with my belief in
his purely animal ancestry. Pressed too hard, I would take refuge in a
passionate disdain for all who did not hear the thrilling voice of Virtue and
love her for her own sweet sake. "I have myself heard the question asked: 'Why
should I seek for truth, and why should I lead a good life, if there be no
immortality in which to reap a reward?' To this question the Freethinker has one
clear and short answer: 'There is no reason why you should seek Truth, if to you
the search has no attracting power. There is no reason why you should lead a
noble life, if you find your happiness in leading a poor and a base one.'
Friends, no one can enjoy a happiness which is too high for his capabilities; a
book may be of intensest interest, but a dog will very much prefer being given a
bone. To him whose highest interest is centred in his own miserable self, to him
who cares only to gain his own ends, to him who seeks only his own individual
comfort, to that man Freethought can have no attraction. Such a man may indeed
be made religious by a bribe of heaven; he may be led to seek for truth, because
he hopes to gain his reward hereafter by the search; but Truth disdains the
service of the self-seeker; she cannot be grasped by a hand that itches for
reward. If Truth is not loved for her own pure sake, if to lead a noble life, if
to make men happier, if to spread brightness around us, if to leave the world
better than we found it—if these aims have no attraction for us, if these
thoughts do not inspire us, then we are not worthy to be Secularists, we have no
right to the proud title of Freethinkers. If you want to be paid for your good
lives by living for ever in a lazy and useless fashion in an idle heaven; if you
want to be bribed into nobility of life; if, like silly children, you learn your
lesson not to gain knowledge but to win sugar-plums, then you had better go back
to your creeds and your churches; they are all you are fit for; you are not
worthy to be free. But we—who, having caught a glimpse of the beauty of Truth,
deem the possession of her worth more than all the world beside; who have made
up our minds to do our work ungrudgingly, asking for no reward beyond the
results which spring up from our labour—we will spread the Gospel of Freethought
among men, until the sad minor melodies of Christianity have sobbed out their
last mournful notes on the dying evening breeze, and on the fresh morning winds
shall ring out the chorus of hope and joyfulness, from the glad lips of men whom
the Truth has at last set free."[20]
192.
The
intellectual comprehension of the sources of evil and the method of its
extinction was the second great plank in my ethical platform. The study of
Darwin and Herbert Spencer, of Huxley, Büchner and Haeckel, had not only
convinced me of the truth of evolution, but, with help from W.H. Clifford,
Lubbock, Buckle, Lecky, and many another, had led me to see in the evolution of
the social instinct the explanation of the growth of conscience and of the
strengthening of man's mental and moral nature. If man by study of the
conditions surrounding him and by the application of intelligence to the subdual
of external nature, had already accomplished so much, why should not further
persistence along the same road lead to his complete emancipation? All the evil,
anti-social side of his nature was an inheritance from his brute ancestry, and
could be gradually eradicated; he could not only "let the ape and tiger die,"
but he could kill them out." It may be frankly acknowledged that man inherits
from his brute progenitors various bestial tendencies which are in course of
elimination. The wild-beast desire to fight is one of these, and this has been
encouraged, not checked, by religion.... Another bestial tendency is the lust of
the male for the female apart from love, duty, and loyalty; this again has been
encouraged by religion, as witness the polygamy and concubinage of the
Hebrews—as in Abraham, David, and Solomon, not to mention the precepts of the
Mosaic laws—the bands of male and female prostitutes in connection with Pagan
temples, and the curious outbursts of sexual passion in connection with
religious revivals and missions. Another bestial tendency is greed, the
strongest grabbing all he can and trampling down the weak, in the mad struggle
for wealth; how and when has religion modified this tendency, sanctified as it
is in our present civilisation? All these bestial tendencies will be eradicated
only by the recognition of human duty, of the social bond. Religion has not
eradicated them, but science, by tracing them to their source in our brute
ancestry, has explained them and has shown them in their true light. As each
recognises that the anti-social tendencies are the bestial tendencies in man,
and that man in evolving further must evolve out of these, each also feels it
part of his personal duty to curb these in himself, and so to rise further from
the brute. This rational 'co-operation with Nature' distinguishes the scientific
from the religious person, and this constraining sense of obligation is becoming
stronger and stronger in all those who, in losing faith in God, have gained hope
for man."[21]
193.
For this
rational setting of oneself on the side of the forces working for evolution
implied active co-operation by personal purity and nobility." To the Atheist it
seems that the knowledge that the perfecting of the race is only possible by the
improvement of the individual, supplies the most constraining motive which can
be imagined for efforts after personal perfection. The Theist may desire
personal perfection, but his desire is self-centred; each righteous individual
is righteous, as it were, alone, and his righteousness does not benefit his
fellows save as it may make him helpful and loving in his dealings with them.
The Atheist desires personal perfection not only for his joy in it as beautiful
in itself, but because science has taught him the unity of the race, and he
knows that each fresh conquest of his over the baser parts of his nature, and
each strengthening of the higher, is a gain for all, and not for himself alone."[22]
194.
Besides all
this, the struggle against evil, regarded as transitory and as a necessary
concomitant of evolution, loses its bitterness. "In dealing with evil, Atheism
is full of hope instead of despair. To the Christian, evil is as everlasting as
good; it exists by the permission of God, and, therefore, by the will of God.
Our nature is corrupt, inclined to evil; the devil is ever near us, working all
sin and all misery. What hope has the Christian face to face with a world's
wickedness? what answer to the question, Whence comes
sin? To the Atheist the terrible problem has in it no figure of despair. Evil
comes from ignorance, we say; ignorance of physical and of moral facts.
Primarily, from ignorance of physical order; parents who dwell in filthy,
unventilated, unweathertight houses, who live on insufficient, innutritious,
unwholesome food, will necessarily be unhealthy, will lack vitality, will
probably have disease lurking in their veins; such parents will bring into the
world ill-nurtured children, in whom the brain will generally be the least
developed part of the body; such children, by their very formation, will incline
to the animal rather than to the human, and by leading an animal, or natural,
life will be deficient in those qualities which are necessary in social life.
Their surroundings as they grow up, the home, the food, the associates, all are
bad. They are trained into vice, educated into criminality;
so surely as from the sown corn rises the wheat-ear, so
from the sowing of misery, filth, and starvation shall arise crime. And the root
of all is poverty and ignorance. Educate the children, and give them fair wage
for fair work in their maturity, and crime will
gradually diminish and ultimately disappear. Man is God-made, says Theism; man
is circumstance-made, says Atheism. Man is the resultant of what his parents
were, of what his surroundings have been and are, and of what they have made
him; himself the result of the past he modifies the actual, and so the action
and reaction go on, he himself the effect of what is past, and one of the causes
of what is to come. Make the circumstances good and the results will be good,
for healthy bodies and healthy brains may be built up, and from a State composed
of such the disease of crime will have disappeared. Thus is our work full of
hope; no terrible will of God have we to struggle against; no despairful future
to look forward to, of a world growing more and more evil, until it is, at last,
to burned up; but a glad, fair future of an ever-rising race, where more equal
laws, more general education, more just division, shall eradicate pauperism,
destroy ignorance, nourish independence, a future to be made the grander by our
struggles, a future to be made the nearer by our toil."[23]
195.
This joyous,
self-reliant facing of the world with the resolute determination to improve it
is characteristic of the noblest Atheism of our day. And it is thus a distintly
elevating factor in the midst of the selfishness, luxury, and greed of modern
civilisation. It is a virile virtue in the midst of the calculating and slothful
spirit which too ofter veils itself under the pretence or religion. It will have
no putting off of justice to a far-off day of reckoning, and it is ever spurred
on by the feeling, "The night cometh, when no man can work." Bereft of all hope
of a personal future, it binds up its hopes with that of the race; unbelieving
in any aid from Deity, it struggles the more strenuously to work out man's
salvation by his own strength. "To us there is but small comfort in Miss Cobbe's
assurance that 'earth's wrongs and agonies' 'will be righted hereafter.'
Granting for a moment that man survives death what certainty have we that 'the
next world' will be any improvement on this? Miss Cobbe assures us that this is
'God's world'; whose world will the next be, if not also His? Will He be
stronger there or better, that He should set right in that world the wrongs He
has permitted here? Will He have changed His mind, or have become weary of the
contemplation of suffering? To me the thought that the world was in the hands of
a God who permitted all the present wrongs and pains to exist would be
intolerable, maddening in its hopelessness. There is every hope of righting
earth's wrongs and of curing earth's pains if the reason and skill of man which
have already done so much are free to do the rest; but if they are to strive
against omnipotence, hopeless indeed is the future of the world. It is in this
sense that the Atheist looks on good as 'the final goal of ill,' and believing
that that goal will be reached the sooner the more strenuous the efforts of each
individual, he works in the glad certainty that he is aiding the world's
progress thitherward. Not dreaming of a personal reward hereafter, not craving a
personal payment from heavenly treasury, he works and loves, content that he is
building a future fairer than his present, joyous that he is creating a new
earth for a happier race."[24]
196.
Such was the
creed and such the morality which governed my life and thoughts from 1874 to
1886, and with some misgivings to 1889, and from which I drew strength
and happiness amid all outer struggles and distress. And I shall ever remain
grateful for the intellectual and moral training it gave me, for the
self-reliance it nurtured, for the altruism it inculcated, for the deep feeling
of the unity of man that it fostered, for the inspiration to work that it lent.
And perhaps the chief debt of gratitude I owe to Freethought is that it left the
mind ever open to new truth, encouraged the most unshrinking questioning of
Nature, and shrank from no new conclusions, however adverse to the old, that
were based on solid evidence. I admit sorrowfully that all Freethinkers do not
learn this lesson, but I worked side by side with Charles Bradlaugh, and the
Freethought we strove to spread was strong-headed and broad-hearted.
197.
The
antagonism which, as we shall see in a few moments, blazed out against me from
the commencement of my platform work, was based partly on ignorance, was partly
aroused by my direct attacks on Christianity, and by the combative spirit I
myself showed in those attacks, and very largely by my extreme Radicalism in
politics. I had against me all the conventional beliefs and traditions of
society in general, and I attacked them, not with bated breath and abundant
apologies, but joyously and defiantly, with sheer delight in the intellectual
strife. I was fired, too, with passionate sympathy for the sufferings of the
poor, for the overburdened, overdriven masses of the people, not only here but
in every land, and wherever a blow was struck at
198.
The
antagonism that grew out of ignorance regarded Atheism as implying degraded
morality and bestial life, and they assailed my conduct not on evidence that it
was evil, but on the presumption that an Atheist must be immoral. Thus a
Christian opponent at Leicester assailed me as a teacher of free love, fathering
on me views which were maintained in a book that I had not read, but which,
before I had ever seen the National Reformer, had been reviewed in its
columns—as it was reviewed in other London papers—and had been commended for its
clear statement of the Malthusian position, but not for its contention as to
free love, a theory to which Mr. Bradlaugh was very strongly opposed. Nor were
the attacks confined to the ascription to me of theories which I did not hold,
but agents of the Christian Evidence Society, in their street preaching, made
the foulest accusations against me of personal immorality. Remonstrances
addressed to the Rev. Mr. Engström, the secretary of the society, brought
voluble protestations of disavowal and disapproval; but as the peccant agents
were continued in their employment, the apologies were of small value. No
accusation was too coarse, no slander too baseless, for circulation by these
men; and for a long time these indignities caused me bitter suffering, outraging
my pride, and soiling my good name. The time was to come when I should throw
that good name to the winds for the sake of the miserable, but in those early
days I had done nothing to merit, even ostensibly, such attacks. Even by
educated writers, who should have known better, the most wanton accusations of
violence and would-be destructiveness were brought against Atheists; thus Miss
Frances Power Cobbe wrote in the Contemporary Review that loss of faith
in God would bring about the secularisation or destruction of all
cathedrals, churches, and chapels. "Why," I wrote in answer, "should cathedrals,
churches, and chapels be destroyed? Atheism will utilise, not destroy, the
beautiful edifices which, once wasted on God, shall hereafter be consecrated for
man. Destroy Westminster Abbey, with its exquisite arches, its glorious tones of
soft, rich colour, its stonework light as if of cloud, its dreamy, subdued
twilight, soothing as the 'shadow of a great rock in a weary land'? Nay, but
reconsecrate it to humanity. The fat cherubs who tumble over guns and banners on
soldiers' graves will fitly be removed to some spot where their clumsy forms
will no longer mar the upward-springing grace of lines of pillar and of arch;
but the glorious building wherein now barbaric psalms are chanted and droning
canons preach of Eastern follies, shall hereafter echo the majestic music of
Wagner and Beethoven, and the teachers of the future shall there unveil to
thronging multitudes the beauties and the wonders of the world. The 'towers and
spires' will not be effaced, but they will no longer be symbols of a religion
which sacrifices earth to heaven and Man to God."[25]
Between the cultured and the uncultured burlesques of Atheism we came off pretty
badly, being for the most part regarded, as the late Cardinal Manning termed us,
as mere "cattle."
199.
The moral
purity and elevation of Atheistic teaching were overlooked by many who heard
only of my bitter attacks on Christian theology. Against the teachings of
eternal torture, of the vicarious atonement, of the infallibility of the Bible,
I levelled all the strength of my brain and tongue, and I exposed the history of
the Christian Church with unsparing hand, its persecutions, its religious wars,
its cruelties, its oppressions. Smarting under the suffering inflicted on
myself, and wroth with the cruel pressure continually put on Freethinkers by
Christian employers, speaking under constant threats of prosecution, identifying
Christianity with the political and social tyrannies of Christendom, I used
every weapon that history, science, criticism, scholarship could give me against
the Churches; eloquence, sarcasm, mockery, all were called on to make breaches
in the wall of traditional belief and crass superstition.
200.
To argument
and reason I was ever ready to listen, but I turned a front of stubborn defiance
to all attempts to compel assent to Christianity by appeals to force. "The
threat and the enforcement of legal and social penalties against unbelief can
never compel belief. Belief must be gained by demonstration; it can never be
forced by punishment. Persecution makes the stronger among us bitter; the weaker
among us hypocrites; it never has made and never can make an honest convert."[26]
201.
That men and
women are now able to speak and think as openly as they do, that a broader
spirit is visible in the Churches, that heresy is no longer regarded as morally
disgraceful—these things are very largely due to the active and militant
propaganda carried on under the leadership of Charles Bradlaugh, whose nearest
and most trusted friend I was. That my tongue was in the early days bitterer
than it should have been, I frankly acknowledge; that I ignored the services
done by Christianity and threw light only on its crimes, thus committing
injustice, I am ready to admit. But these faults were conquered long ere I left
the Atheistic camp, and they were the faults of my personality, not of the
Atheistic philosophy. And my main contentions were true, and needed to be made;
from many a Christian pulpit to-day may be heard the echo of the Freethought
teachings; men's minds have been awakened, their knowledge enlarged; and while I
condemn the unnecessary harshness of some of my language, I rejoice that I
played my part in that educating of England which has made impossible for
evermore the crude superstitions of the past, and the repetition of the
cruelties and injustices under which preceding heretics suffered.
202.
But my
extreme political views had also much to do with the general feeling of hatred
with which I was regarded. Politics, as such, I cared not for at all, for the
necessary compromises of political life were intolerable to me; but wherever
they touched on the life of the people they became to me of burning interest.
The land question, the incidence of taxation, the cost of Royalty, the
obstructive power of the House of Lords—these were the matters to which I put my
hand; I was a Home Ruler, too, of course, and a passionate opponent of all
injustice to nations weaker than ourselves, so that I found myself always in
opposition to the Government of the day. Against our aggressive and oppressive
policy in
204.
From this
sketch of the inner sources of action let me turn to the actions themselves, and
see how the outer life was led which fed itself at these springs.
205.
I have said
that the friendship between Mr. Bradlaugh and myself dated from our first
meeting, and a few days after our talk in Turner Street he came down to see me
at Norwood. It was characteristic of the man that he refused my first
invitation, and bade me to think well ere I asked him to my house. He told me
that he was so hated by English society that any friend of his would be certain
to suffer, and that I should pay heavily for any friendship extended to him.
When, however, I wrote to him, repeating my invitation, and telling him that I
had counted the cost, he came to see me. His words came true; my friendship for
him alienated from me even many professed Freethinkers, but the strength and the
happiness of it outweighed a thousand times the loss it brought, and never has a
shadow of regret touched me that I clasped hands with him in 1874, and won the
noblest friend that woman ever had. He never spoke to me a harsh word; where we
differed, he never tried to override my judgment, nor force on me his views; we
discussed all points of difference as equal friends; he guarded me from all
suffering as far as friend might, and shared with me all the pain he could not
turn aside; all the brightness of my stormy life came to me through him, from
his tender thoughtfulness, his ever-ready sympathy, his generous love. He was
the most unselfish man I ever knew, and as patient as he was strong. My quick,
impulsive nature found in him the restful strength it needed, and learned from
him the self-control it lacked.
206.
He was the
merriest of companions in our rare hours of relaxation; for many years he was
wont to come to my house in the morning, after the hours always set aside by him
for receiving poor men who wanted advice on legal and other matters—for he was a
veritable poor man's lawyer, always ready to help and counsel—and, bringing his
books and papers, he would sit writing, hour after hour, I equally busy with my
own work, now and then, perhaps, exchanging a word, breaking off just for lunch
and dinner, and working on again in the evening till about ten o'clock—he always
went early to bed when at home—he would take himself off again to his lodgings,
about three-quarters of a mile away. Sometimes he would play cards for an hour,
euchre being our favourite game. But while we were mostly busy and grave, we
would make holiday sometimes, and then he was like a boy, brimming over with
mirth, full of quaint turns of thought and speech; all the country round London
has for me bright memories of our wanderings—Richmond, where we tramped across
the park, and sat under its mighty trees; Windsor, with its groves of bracken;
Kew, where we had tea in a funny little room, with watercress ad libitum;
Hampton Court, with its dishevelled beauties; Maidenhead and Taplow, where the
river was the attraction; and, above all, Broxbourne, where he delighted to
spend the day with his fishing-rod, wandering along the river, of which he knew
every eddy. For he was a great fisherman, and he taught me all the mysteries of
the craft, mirthfully disdainful of my dislike of the fish when I had caught
them. And in those days he would talk of all his hopes of the future, of his
work, of his duty to the thousands who looked to him for guidance, of the time
when he would sit in Parliament as member for Northampton, and help to pass into
laws the projects of reform for which he was battling with pen and tongue. How
often he would voice his love of
207.
A place on
the staff of the National Reformer was offered me by Mr. Bradlaugh a few
days after our first meeting, and the small weekly salary thus earned—it was
only a guinea, for national reformers are always poor—was a very welcome
addition to my resources. My first contribution appeared in the number for
August 30, 1874, over the signature of "
208.
The name was
suggested by the famous statue of "Ajax Crying for Light," a cast of which may
be seen in the centre walk by any visitor to the
209.
"If our fate
be death
Give light, and let us die!"
210.
To see, to
know, to understand, even though the seeing blind, though the knowledge sadden,
though the understanding shatter the dearest hopes—such has ever been the
craving of the upward-striving mind in man. Some regard it as a weakness, as a
folly, but I am sure that it exists most strongly in some of the noblest of our
race; that from the lips of those who have done most in lifting the burden of
ignorance from the overstrained and bowed shoulders of a stumbling world has
gone out most often into the empty darkness the pleading, impassioned cry:
211.
"Give light!"
212.
The light may
come with a blinding flash, but it is light none the less, and we can see.
213.
And now the
time had come when I was to use that gift of speech which I had discovered in
214.
"He had the
support of the working classes; having heard him speak I knew him to be a man of
ability, and he had proved that he was the reverse of a demagogue by placing
himself in strong opposition to the prevailing opinion of the Democratic party
on two such important subjects as Malthusianism and Proportional Representation.
Men of this sort, who, while sharing the democratic feeling of the working
classes, judge political questions for themselves, and have the courage to
assert their individual convictions against popular opposition, were needed, as
it seemed to me, in Parliament; and I did not think that Mr. Bradlaugh's
anti-religious opinions (even though he had been intemperate in the expression
of them) ought to exclude him."
215.
It has been
said that Mr. Mill's support of Mr. Bradlaugh's candidature at
216.
At this
election of September, 1874—the second in the year, for the general election had
taken place in the February, and Mr. Bradlaugh had been put up and defeated
during his absence in America—I went down to Northampton to report
electioneering incidents for the National Reformer, and spent some days
there in the whirl of the struggle. The Whig party was more bitter against Mr. Bradlaugh than was the Tory.
Strenuous efforts were made to procure a Liberal candidate, who would be able at
least to prevent Mr. Bradlaugh's return, and, by dividing the Liberal and
Radical party, should let in a Tory rather than the detested Radical. Messrs.
Bell and James and Dr. Pearce came on the scene only to disappear. Mr. Jacob
Bright and Mr. Arnold Morley were vainly suggested. Mr. Ayrton's name was
whispered. Major Lumley was recommended by Mr. Bernal Osborne. Dr. Kenealy
proclaimed himself ready to come to the rescue of the
Whigs. Mr. Tillett, of Norwich, Mr. Cox, of Belper, were invited, but neither
would consent to oppose a good Radical who had fought two elections at
Northampton and had been the chosen of the Radical workers for six years. At
last Mr. William Fowler, a banker, accepted the task of handing over the
representation of a Liberal and Radical borough to a Tory, and duly succeeded in
giving the seat to Mr. Mereweather, a very reputable Tory lawyer. Mr. Bradlaugh
polled 1,766, thus adding another 133 voters to those who had polled for him in
the previous February.
217.
That election
gave me my first experience of anything in the nature of rioting. The violent
abuse levelled against Mr. Bradlaugh by the Whigs, and the foul and wicked
slanders circulated against him, assailing his private life and family
relations, had angered almost to madness those who knew and loved him; and when
it was found that the unscrupulous Whig devices had triumphed, had turned the
election against him, and given over the borough to a Tory, the fury broke out
into open violence. One illustration may be given as a type of these cruel
slanders. It was known that Mr. Bradlaugh was separated from his wife, and it
was alleged that being an Atheist, and, (therefore!) an opponent of marriage, he
had deserted his wife and children, and left them to the workhouse. The cause of
the separation was known to very few, for Mr. Bradlaugh was chivalrously
honourable to women, and he would not shield his own good name at the cost of
that of the wife of his youth and the mother of his children. But since his
death his only remaining child has, in devotion to her father's memory, stated
the melancholy truth: that Mrs. Bradlaugh gave way to drink; that for long years
he bore with her and did all that man could do to save her; that finally,
hopeless of cure, he broke up his home, and placed his wife in the care of her
parents in the country, leaving her daughters with her, while he worked for
their support. No man could have acted more generously and wisely under these
cruel circumstances than he did, but it was, perhaps, going to an extreme of
Quixotism, that he concealed the real state of the case, and let the public
blame him as it would. His
218.
In the
following January (1875), after much thought and self-analysis, I resolved to
give myself wholly to propagandist work, as a Freethinker and a Social Reformer,
and to use my tongue as well as my pen in the struggle. I counted the cost ere I
determined on this step, for I knew that it would not only outrage the feelings
of such new friends as I had already made, but would be likely to imperil my
custody of my little girl. I knew that an Atheist was outside the law, obnoxious
to its penalties, but deprived of its protection, and that the step I
contemplated might carry me into conflicts in which everything might be lost and
nothing could be gained. But the desire to spread liberty and truer thought
among men, to war against bigotry and superstition, to make the world freer and
better than I found it—all this impelled me with a force that would not be
denied. I seemed to hear the voice of Truth ringing over the battlefield: "Who
will go? Who will speak for me?" And I sprang forward with passionate
enthusiasm, with resolute cry: "Here am I, send me!" Nor have I ever regretted
for one hour that resolution, come to in solitude, carried
out amid the surging life of men, to devote to that sacred cause every power of
brain and tongue that I possessed. Very solemn to me is the responsibility of
the public teacher, standing forth in Press and on platform to partly mould the
thought of his time, swaying thousands of readers and hearers year after year.
No weighter responsibility can any take, no more sacred
charge. The written and the spoken word start forces none may measure, set
working brain after brain, influence numbers unknown to the forthgiver of the
word, work for good or for evil all down the stream of time. Feeling the
greatness of the career, the solemnity of the duty, I pledged my word then to
the cause I loved that no effort on my part should be wanted to render myself
worthy of the privilege of service that I took; that I would read and study, and
would train every faculty that I had; that I would polish my language,
discipline my thought, widen my knowledge; and this, at least, I may say, that
if I have written and spoken much, I have studied and thought more, and that I
have not given to my mistress Truth that "which hath cost me nothing."
219.
This same
year (1875) that saw me launched on the world as a public advocate of
Freethought, saw also the founding of the Theosophical Society to which my
Freethought was to lead me. I have often since thought with pleasure that at the
very time I began lecturing in
220.
I started my
definite lecturing work at South Place Chapel in January, 1875, Mr. Moncure D.
Conway presiding for me, and I find in the National Reformer
for January 17th, the announcement that "Mrs. Annie Besant ('
221.
On February
12th I started on my first provincial lecturing tour, and after speaking at
Birkenhead that evening went on by the night mail to
222.
"What is
that?" stammered my drunken companion.
223.
"They are
putting on the brakes to stop the train," I answered very slowly and distinctly,
though a very passion of relief made it hard to say quietly the measured words.
224.
The man sat
down stupidly, staring at me, and in a minute or two the train pulled up at a
station—it had been stopped by signal. My immobility was gone. In a moment I was
at the window, called the guard, and explained rapidly that I was a woman
travelling alone, and that a half-drunken man was in the carriage. With the
usual kindness of a railway official, he at once moved me and my baggage into
another compartment, into which he locked me, and he kept a friendly watch over
me at every station at which we stopped until he landed me safely at
225.
At
226.
On February
28th I stood for the first time on the platform of the Hall of Science,
227.
It would be
wearisome to go step by step over eighteen years of platform work, so I will
only select here and there incidents illustrative of the whole. And here let me
say that the frequent attacks made on myself
and others, that we were attracted to Free-thought propaganda by the gains it
offered, formed a somewhat grotesque contrast to the facts. On one occasion I
spent eight days in Northumberland and
228.
Lecturing in
June, 1875, at
229.
I may add
that far warmer praise than that bestowed on this book by Mr. Bradlaugh was
given by other writers, who were never attacked in the same way.
230.
In the
Reasoner, edited by Mr. George Jacob Holyoake, I find warmer praise of it
than in the National Reformer; in the review the following passage
appears:—
231.
"In some
respects all books of this class are evils: but it would be weakness and
criminal prudery—a prudery as criminal as vice itself—not to say that such a
book as the one in question is not only a far lesser evil than the one that it
combats, but in one sense a book which it is a mercy to issue and courage to
publish."
232.
The
Examiner, reviewing the same book, declared it to be—
233.
"A very
valuable, though rather heterogeneous book.... This is, we believe, the only
book that has fully, honestly, and in a scientific spirit recognised all the
elements in the problem—How are mankind to triumph over poverty, with its train
of attendant evils?—and fearlessly endeavoured to find a practical solution."
234.
The
British Journal of Homoeopathy wrote:—
235.
"Though quite
out of the province of our journal, we cannot refrain from stating that this
work is unquestionably the most remarkable one, in many respects, we have ever
met with. Though we differ toto coelo from the author in his views of
religion and morality, and hold some of his remedies to tend rather to a dissolution than a reconstruction of society, yet we are
bound to admit the benevolence and philanthropy of his motives. The scope of the
work is nothing less than the whole field of political economy."
236.
Ernest Jones
and others wrote yet more strongly, but out of all these Charles Bradlaugh alone
has been selected for reproach, and has had the peculiar views of the anonymous
author fathered on himself.
237.
Some of the
lecture work in those days was pretty rough. In Darwen,
238.
In September,
1875, Mr. Bradlaugh again sailed for
239.
"This long
and severe illness has disappointed the hopes and retarded the object for which
he came to this country; but he is gentleness and patience itself in his
sickness in this strange land, and has endeared himself greatly to his
physicians and attendants by his gratitude and appreciation of the slightest
attention."
240.
His fortitude
in face of death was also much commented on, lying there as he did far from home
and from all he loved best. Never a quiver of fear touched him as he walked down
into the valley of the shadow of death; the Rev. Mr. Frothingham bore public and
admiring testimony in his own church to Mr. Bradlaugh's noble serenity, at once
fearless and unpretending, and, himself a Theist, gave willing witness to the
Atheist's calm strength. He came back to us at the end of September, worn to a
shadow, weak as a child, and for many a long month he bore the traces of his
wrestle with death.
241.
One part of
my autumn's work during his absence was the delivery and subsequent publication
of six lectures on the French Revolution. That stormy time had for me an intense
fascination. I brooded over it, dreamed over it, and longed to tell the story
from the people's point of view. I consequently read a large amount of the
current literature of the time, as well as Louis Blanc's monumental work and the
histories of Michelet, Lamartine, and others. Fortunately for me, Mr. Bradlaugh
had a splendid collection of books on the subject, and ere we left England he
brought me two cabs-full of volumes, aristocratic, ecclesiastical, democratic,
and I studied all these diligently, and lived in them, till the French
Revolution became to me as a drama in which I had myself taken part, and the
actors were to me as personal friends and foes. In this, again, as in so much of
my public work, I have to thank Mr. Bradlaugh for the influence which led me to
read fully all sides of a question, and to read most carefully those from which
I differed most, ere I considered myself competent to write or to speak thereon.
From 1875 onwards I held office as one of the vice-presidents of the National
Secular Society—a society founded on a broad basis of liberty, with the
inspiring motto, "We Search for Truth." Mr. Bradlaugh was president, and I held
office under him till he resigned his post in February, 1890, nine months after
I had joined the Theosophical Society. The N.S.S., under his judicious and
far-sighted leadership, became a real force in the country, theologically and
politically, embracing large numbers of men and women who were Freethinkers as
well as Radicals, and forming a nucleus of earnest workers, able to gather round
them still larger numbers of others, and thus to powerfully affect public
opinion. Once a year the society met in conference, and many a strong and
lasting friendship between men living far apart dated from these yearly
gatherings, so that all over the country spread a net-work of comradeship
between the staunch followers of "our Charlie." These were the men and women who
paid his election expenses over and over again, supported him in his
Parliamentary struggle, came up to London to swell the demonstrations in his
favour. And round them grew up a huge party—"the largest personal following of
any public man since Mr. Gladstone," it was once said by an eminent man—who
differed from him in theology, but passionately supported him in politics;
miners, cutlers, weavers, spinners, shoemakers, operatives of every trade,
strong, sturdy, self-reliant men who loved him to the last.
243.
The year 1877
dawned, and in its early days began a struggle which, ending in victory all
along the line, brought with it pain and anguish that I scarcely care to recall.
An American physician, Dr. Charles Knowlton, convinced of the truth of the
teaching of the Rev. Mr. Malthus, and seeing that that teaching had either no
practical value or tended to the great increase of prostitution, unless married
people were taught to limit their families within their means of
livelihood—wrote a pamphlet on the voluntary limitation of the family. It was
published somewhere in the Thirties—about 1835, I think—and was sold
unchallenged in
244.
"We republish
this pamphlet, honestly believing that on all questions affecting the happiness
of the people, whether they be theological, political, or social, fullest right
of free discussion ought to be maintained at all hazards. We do not personally
endorse all that Dr. Knowlton says: his 'Philosophical Proem' seems to us full
of philosophical mistakes, and—as we are neither of us doctors—we are not
prepared to endorse his medical views; but since progress can only be made
through discussion, and no discussion is possible where differing opinions are
suppressed, we claim the right to publish all opinions, so that the public,
enabled to see all sides of a question, may have the materials for forming a
sound judgment."
245.
We were not
blind to the danger to which this defiance of the authorities exposed us, but it
was not the danger of failure, with the prison as penalty, that gave us pause.
It was the horrible misconceptions that we saw might arise; the odious
imputations on honour and purity that would follow. Could we, the teachers of a
lofty morality, venture to face a prosecution for publishing what would be
technically described as an obscene book, and risk the ruin of our future,
dependent as that was on our fair fame? To Mr. Bradlaugh it meant, as he felt,
the almost certain destruction of his Parliamentary position, the forging by his
own hands of a weapon that in the hands of his foes would be well-nigh fatal. To
me it meant the loss of the pure reputation I prized, the good name I had
guarded—scandal the most terrible a woman could face. But I had seen the misery
of the poor, of my sister-women with children crying for bread; the wages of the
workmen were often sufficient for four, but eight or ten they could not
maintain. Should I set my own safety, my own good name, against the helping of
these? Did it matter that my reputation should be ruined, if its ruin helped to
bring remedy to this otherwise hopeless wretchedness of thousands? What was
worth all my talk about self-sacrifice and self-surrender, if, brought to the
test, I failed? So, with heart aching but steady, I came to my resolution; and
though I know now that I was wrong intellectually, and blundered in the remedy,
I was right morally in the will to sacrifice all to help the poor, and I can
rejoice that I faced a storm of obloquy fiercer and harder to bear than any
other which can ever touch me again. I learned a lesson of stern indifference to
all judgments from without that were not endorsed by condemnation from within.
The long suffering that followed was a splendid school for the teaching of
endurance.
246.
The day
before the pamphlet was put on sale we ourselves delivered copies to the Chief
Clerk of the Magistrates at Guildhall, to the officer in charge at the City
Police Office in Old Jewry, and to the Solicitor for the City of
247.
After our
arrest we were taken to the police-station in
248.
The trial
commenced on June 18th before the Lord Chief Justice of England and a special
jury, Sir Hardinge Giffard, the Solicitor-General of the Tory Government,
leading against us, and we defending ourselves. The Lord Chief Justice "summed
up strongly for an acquittal," as a morning paper said; he declared that "a more
ill-advised and more injudicious proceeding in the way of a prosecution was
probably never brought into a court of justice," and described us as "two
enthusiasts who have been actuated by a desire to do good in a particular
department of society." He then went on to a splendid statement of the law of
population, and ended by praising our straightforwardness and asserting
Knowlton's honesty of intention. Every one in court thought that we had won our
case, but they had not taken into account the religious and political hatred
against us and the presence on the jury of such men as Mr. Walter, of the
Times. After an hour and thirty-five minutes of delay the verdict was a
compromise: "We are unanimously of opinion that the book in question is
calculated to deprave public morals, but at the same time we entirely exonerate
the defendants from any corrupt motive in publishing it." The Lord Chief Justice
looked troubled, and said that he should have to translate the verdict into one
of guilty, and on that some of the jury turned to leave the box, it having been
agreed—we heard later from one of them—that if the verdict were not accepted in
that form they should retire again, as six of the jury were against convicting
us; but the foreman, who was bitterly hostile, jumped at the chance of snatching
a conviction, and none of those in our favour had the courage to contradict him
on the spur of the moment, so the foreman's "Guilty" passed, and the judge set
us free, on Mr. Bradlaugh's recognisances to come up for judgment that day week.
249.
On that day
we moved to quash the indictment and for a new trial, partly on a technical
ground and partly on the ground that the verdict, having acquitted us of wrong
motive, was in our favour, not against us. On this the Court did not agree with
us, holding that the part of the indictment alleging corrupt motive was
superfluous. Then came the question of sentence, and on this the Lord Chief
Justice did his best to save us; we were acquitted of any intent to violate the
law; would we submit to the verdict of the jury and promise not to sell the
book? No, we would not; we claimed the right to sell, and meant to vindicate it.
The judge pleaded, argued, finally got angry with us, and, at last, compelled to
pass sentence, he stated that if we would have yielded he would have let us go
free without penalty, but that as we would set ourselves against the law, break
it and defy it—a sore offence from the judge's point of view—he could only pass
a heavy sentence on each of six months' imprisonment, a fine of £200, and
recognisances of £500 for two years, and this, as he again repeated, upon the
assumption "that they do intend to set the law at defiance." Even despite this
he made us first-class misdemeanants. Then, as Mr. Bradlaugh stated that we
should move for a writ of error, he liberated us on Mr. Bradlaugh's recognisance
for £100, the queerest comment on his view of the case and of our characters,
since we were liable jointly to £1,400 under the sentence, to say nothing of the
imprisonment. But prison and money penalties vanished into thin air, for the
writ of error was granted, proved successful, and the verdict was quashed.
250.
Then ensued a
somewhat anxious time. We were resolute to continue selling; were our opponents
equally resolved to prosecute us? We could not tell. I wrote a pamphlet entitled
"The Law of Population," giving the arguments which had convinced me of its
truth, the terrible distress and degradation entailed on families by
overcrowding and the lack of the necessaries of life, pleading for early
marriages that prostitution might be destroyed, and limitation of the family
that pauperism might be avoided; finally, giving the information which rendered
early marriage without these evils possible. This pamphlet was put in
circulation as representing our view of the subject, and we again took up the
sale of Knowlton's. Mr. Bradlaugh carried the war into the enemy's country, and
commenced an action against the police for the recovery of some pamphlets they
had seized; he carried the action to a successful issue, recovered the
pamphlets, bore them off in triumph, and we sold them all with an inscription
across them, "Recovered from the police." We continued the sale of Knowlton's
tract for some time, until we received an intimation
that no further prosecution would be attempted, and on this we at once dropped
its publication, substituting for it my "Law of Population."
251.
But the worst
part of the fight, for me, was to come. Prosecution of the "Law of Population"
was threatened, but never commenced; a worse weapon against me was in store. An
attempt had been made in August, 1875, to deprive me of the custody of my little
girl by hiding her away when she went on her annual visit of one month to her
father, but I had promptly recovered her by threatening to issue a writ of
habeas corpus. Now it was felt that the Knowlton trial might be added to the
charges of blasphemy that could be urged against me, and that this
double-barrelled gun might be discharged with effect. I received notice in
January, 1878, that an application was to be made to the High Court of Chancery
to deprive me of the child, but the petition was not filed till the following
April. Mabel was dangerously ill with scarlet fever at the time, and though this
fact was communicated to her father I received a copy of the petition while
sitting at her bedside. The petition alleged that, "The said Annie Besant is, by
addresses, lectures, and writings, endeavouring to propagate the principles of
Atheism, and has published a book entitled 'The Gospel of Atheism.' She has also
associated herself with an infidel lecturer and author named Charles Bradlaugh
in giving lectures and in publishing books and pamphlets, whereby the truth of
the Christian religion is impeached, and disbelief in all religion inculcated."
252.
It further
alleged against me the publication of the Knowlton pamphlet, and the writing of
the "Law of Population." Unhappily, the petition came for hearing before the
then Master of the Rolls, Sir George Jessel, a man animated by the old spirit of
Hebrew bigotry, to which he had added the time-serving morality of a "man of the
world," sceptical as to all sincerity, and contemptuous of all devotion to an
unpopular cause. The treatment I received at his hands on my first appearance in
court told me what I had to expect. I had already had some experience of English
judges, the stately kindness and gentleness of the Lord Chief Justice, the
perfect impartiality and dignified courtesy of the Lords Justices of Appeal. My
astonishment, then, can be imagined when, in answer to a statement by Mr. Ince,
Q.C., that I appeared in person, I heard a harsh, loud voice exclaim:
253.
"Appear in
person? A lady appear in person? Never heard of such a
thing! Does the lady really appear in person?"
254.
As the
255.
"I am the
respondent, my lord, Mrs. Besant."
256.
"Then I
advise you, Mrs. Besant, to employ counsel to represent you, if you can afford
it; and I suppose you can."
257.
"With all
submission to your lordship, I am afraid I must claim my right of arguing my
case in person."
258.
"You will do
so if you please, of course, but I think you had much better appear by counsel.
I give you notice that, if you do not, you must not expect to be shown any
consideration. You will not be heard by me at any greater length than the case
requires, nor allowed to go into irrelevant matter, as persons who argue their
own cases usually do."
259.
"I trust I
shall not do so, my lord; but in any case I shall be arguing under your
lordship's complete control."
260.
This
encouraging beginning may be taken as a sample of the case—it was one long fight
against clever counsel, aided by a counsel instead of a judge on the bench. Only
once did judge and counsel fall out. Mr. Ince and Mr. Bardswell had been arguing
that my Atheism and Malthusianism made me an unfit guardian for my child; Mr.
Ince declared that Mabel, educated by me, would "be helpless for good in this
world," and "hopeless for good hereafter, outcast in this life and damned in the
next." Mr. Bardswell implored the judge to consider that my custody of her
"would be detrimental to the future prospects of the child in society, to say
nothing of her eternal prospects." Had not the matter been to me of such
heart-breaking importance, I could have laughed at the mixture of Mrs. Grundy,
marriage establishment, and hell, presented as an argument for robbing a mother
of her child. But Mr. Bardswell carelessly forgot that Sir George Jessel was a
Jew, and lifting eyes to heaven in horrified appeal, he gasped out:
261.
"Your
lordship, I think, will scarcely credit it, but Mrs. Besant says, in a later
affidavit, that she took away the Testament from the child because it contained
coarse passages unfit for a child to read."
262.
The
opportunity was too tempting for a Jew to refrain from striking at a book
written by apostate Jews, and Sir George Jessel answered sharply:
263.
"It is not
true to say there are no passages unfit for a child's reading, because I think
there are a great many."
264.
"I do not
know of any passages that could fairly be called coarse."
265.
"I cannot
quite assent to that."
266.
Barring this
little episode judge and counsel showed a charming unanimity. I distinctly said
I was an Atheist, that I had withdrawn the child from religious instruction at
the day-school she attended, that I had written various anti-Christian books,
and so on; but I claimed the child's custody on the ground that the deed of
separation distinctly gave it to me, and had been executed by her father after I
had left the Christian Church, and that my opinions were not sufficient to
invalidate it. It was admitted on the other side that the child was admirably
cared for, and there was no attempt at attacking my personal character. The
judge stated that I had taken the greatest possible care of the child, but
decided that the mere fact of my refusing to give the child religious
instruction was sufficient ground for depriving me of her custody. Secular
education he regarded as "not only reprehensible, but detestable, and likely to
work utter ruin to the child, and I certainly should upon this ground alone
decide that this child ought not to remain another day under the care of her
mother."
267.
Sir George
Jessel denounced also my Malthusian views in a fashion at once so brutal and so
untruthful as to facts, that some years later another judge, the senior puisne
judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, declared in a judgment delivered
in his own court that there was "no language used by Lord Cockburn which
justified the Master of the Rolls in assuming that Lord Cockburn regarded the
book as obscene," and that "little weight is to be attached to his opinion on a
point not submitted for his decision"; he went on to administer a sharp rebuke
for the way in which Sir George Jessel travelled outside the case, and remarked
that "abuse, however, of an unpopular opinion, whether indulged in by judges or
other people, is not argument, nor can the vituperation of opponents in opinion
prove them to be immoral." However, Sir George Jessel was all-powerful in his
own court, and he deprived me of my child, refusing to stay the order even until
the hearing of my appeal against his decision. A messenger from the father came
to my house, and the little child was carried away by main force, shrieking and
struggling, still weak from the fever, and nearly frantic with fear and
passionate resistance. No access to her was given me, and I gave notice that if
access were denied me, I would sue for a restitution of conjugal rights, merely
that I might see my children. But the strain had been too great, and I nearly
went mad, spending hours pacing up and down the empty rooms, striving to weary
myself to exhaustion that I might forget. The loneliness and silence of the
house, of which my darling had always been the sunshine and the music, weighed
on me like an evil dream; I listened for the patter of the dancing feet, and
merry, thrilling laughter that rang through the garden, the sweet music of the
childish voice; during my sleepless nights I missed in the darkness the soft
breathing of the little child; each morning I longed in vain for the clinging
arms and soft, sweet kisses. At last health broke down, and fever struck me, and
mercifully gave me the rest of pain and delirium instead of the agony of
conscious loss. Through that terrible illness, day after day, Mr. Bradlaugh came
to me, and sat writing beside me, feeding me with ice and milk, refused from all
others, and behaving more like a tender mother than a man friend; he saved my
life, though it seemed to me for awhile of little value, till the first months
of lonely pain were over. When recovered, I took steps to set aside an order
obtained by Mr. Besant during my illness, forbidding me to bring any suit
against him, and even the Master of the Rolls, on hearing that all access had
been denied to me, and the money due to me stopped, uttered words of strong
condemnation of the way in which I had been treated. Finally the deed of
separation executed in 1873 was held to be good as protecting Mr. Besant from
any suit brought by me, whether for divorce or for restitution of conjugal
rights, while the clauses giving me the custody of the child were set aside. The
Court of Appeal in April, 1879, upheld the decision, the absolute right of the
father as against a married mother being upheld. This ignoring of all right to
her children on the part of the married mother is a scandal and a wrong that has
since been redressed by Parliament, and the husband has no longer in his grasp
this instrument of torture, whose power to agonise depends on the tenderness and
strength of the motherliness of the wife. In the days when the law took my child
from me, it virtually said to all women: "Choose which of these two positions,
as wife and mother, you will occupy. If you are legally your husband's wife, you
can have no legal claim to your children; if legally you are your husband's
mistress, your rights as mother are secure." That stigma on marriage is now
removed.
268.
One thing I
gained in the Court of Appeal. The Court expressed a strong view as to my right
of access, and directed me to apply to Sir George Jessel for it, adding that it
could not doubt he would grant it. Under cover of this I applied to the Master
of the Rolls, and obtained liberal access to the children; but I found that my
visits kept Mabel in a continual state of longing and fretting for me, while the
ingenious forms of petty insult that were devised against me and used in the
children's presence would soon become palpable to them and cause continual pain.
So, after a painful struggle with myself, I resolved to give up the right of
seeing them, feeling that thus only could I save them from constantly recurring
conflict, destructive of all happiness and of all respect for one or the other
parent. Resolutely I turned my back on them that I might spare them trouble, and
determined that, robbed of my own,
I would be a mother to all helpless children I could aid, and cure the pain at
my own heart by soothing the pain of others.
269.
As far as
regards this whole struggle over the Knowlton pamphlet, victory was finally won
all along the line. Not only did we, as related, recover all our seized
pamphlets, and continue the sale till all prosecution and threat of prosecution
were definitely surrendered; but my own tract had an enormous sale, so that when
I withdrew it from sale in June, 1891, I was offered a large sum for the
copyright, an offer which I, of course, refused. Since that time not a copy has
been sold with my knowledge or permission, but long ere that the pamphlet had
received a very complete legal vindication. For while it circulated untouched in
England, a prosecution was attempted against it in New South Wales, but was put
an end to by an eloquent and luminous judgment by the senior puisne judge of the
Supreme Court, Mr. Justice Windmeyer, in December, 1888. This judge, the most
respected in the great Australian colony, spoke out plainly and strongly on the
morality of such teaching. "Take the case," he said, "of a woman married to a
drunken husband, steadily ruining his constitution and hastening to the
drunkard's doom, loss of employment for himself, semi-starvation for his family,
and finally death, without a shilling to leave those whom he has brought into
the world, but armed with the authority of the law to treat his wife as his
slave, ever brutally insisting on the indulgence of his marital rights. Where is
the immorality, if, already broken in health from unresting maternity, having
already a larger family than she can support when the miserable breadwinner has
drunk himself to death, the woman avails herself of the information given in
this book, and so averts the consequences of yielding to her husband's brutal
insistence on his marital rights? Already weighted with a family that she is
unable to decently bring up, the immorality, it seems to me, would be in the
reckless and criminal disregard of precautions which would prevent her bringing
into the world daughters whose future outlook as a career would be prostitution,
or sons whose inherited taint of alcoholism would soon drag them down with their
sisters to herd with the seething mass of degenerate and criminal humanity that
constitutes the dangerous classes of great cities. In all these cases the appeal
is from thoughtless, unreasoning prejudice to conscience, and, if listened to,
its voice will be heard unmistakably indicating where the path of duty lies."
270.
The judge
forcibly refused to be any party to the prohibition of such a pamphlet,
regarding it as of high service to the community. He said: "So strong is the
dread of the world's censure upon this topic that few have the courage openly to
express their views upon it; and its nature is such that it is only amongst
thinkers who discuss all subjects, or amongst intimate acquaintances, that
community of thought upon the question is discovered. But let any one inquire
amongst those who have sufficient education and ability to think for themselves,
and who do not idly float, slaves to the current of conventional opinion, and he
will discover that numbers of men and women of purest lives, of noblest
aspirations, pious, cultivated, and refined, see no wrong in teaching the
ignorant that it is wrong to bring into the world children to whom they cannot
do justice, and who think it folly to stop short in telling them simply and
plainly how to prevent it. A more robust view of morals teaches that it is
puerile to ignore human passions and human physiology. A clearer perception of
truth and the safety of trusting to it teaches that in
law, as in religion, it is useless trying to limit the knowledge of mankind by
any inquisitorial attempts to place upon a judicial Index Expurgatorius works
written with an earnest purpose, and commending themselves to thinkers of
well-balanced minds. I will be no party to any such attempt. I do not believe
that it was ever meant that the Obscene Publication Act should apply to cases of
this kind, but only to the publication of such matter as all good men would
regard as lewd and filthy, to lewd and bawdy novels, pictures and exhibitions,
evidently published and given for lucre's sake. It could never have been
intended to stifle the expression of thought by the earnest-minded on a subject
of transcendent national importance like the present, and I will not strain it
for that purpose. As pointed out by Lord Cockburn in the case of the Queen v.
Bradlaugh and Besant, all prosecutions of this kind should be regarded as
mischievous, even by those who disapprove the opinions sought to be stifled,
inasmuch as they only tend more widely to diffuse the teaching objected to. To
those, on the other hand, who desire its promulgation, it must be a matter of
congratulation that this, like all attempted persecutions of thinkers, will
defeat its own object, and that truth, like a torch, 'the more it's shook it shines.'"
271.
The argument
of Mr. Justice Windmeyer for the Neo-Malthusian position was (as any one may see
who reads the full text of the judgment) one of the most luminous and cogent I
have ever read. The judgment was spoken of at the time in the English press as a
"brilliant triumph for Mrs. Besant," and so I suppose it was; but no legal
judgment could undo the harm wrought on the public mind in
272.
And now, in
August, 1893, we find the Christian World, the representative organ of
orthodox Christian Protestantism, proclaiming the right and the duty of
voluntary limitation of the family. In a leading article, after a number of
letters had been inserted, it said:—
273.
"The
conditions are assuredly wrong which bring one member of the married partnership
into a bondage so cruel. It is no less evident that the
cause of the bondage in such cases lies in the too rapid multiplication of the
family. There was a time when any idea of voluntary limitation was regarded by
pious people as interfering with
274.
Thus has
opinion changed in sixteen years, and all the obloquy poured on us is seen to
have been the outcome of ignorance and bigotry.
275.
As for the
children, what was gained by their separation from me? The moment they were old
enough to free themselves, they came back to me, my little girl's too brief stay
with me being ended by her happy marriage, and I fancy the fears expressed for
her eternal future will prove as groundless as the fears for her temporal ruin
have proved to be! Not only so, but both are treading in my steps as regards
their views of the nature and destiny of man, and have joined in their bright
youth the Theosophical Society to which, after so many struggles, I won my way.
276.
The struggle
on the right to discuss the prudential restraint of population did not, however,
conclude without a martyr. Mr. Edward Truelove, alluded to above, was prosecuted for selling a treatise by
Robert Dale Owen on "Moral Physiology," and a pamphlet entitled, "Individual,
Family, and National Poverty." He was tried on February 1, 1878, before the Lord
Chief Justice in the Court of Queen's Bench, and was most ably defended by
Professor W.A. Hunter. The jury spent two hours in considering their verdict,
and returned into court and stated that they were unable to agree. The majority
of the jury were ready to convict, if they felt sure that Mr. Truelove would not
be punished, but one of them boldly declared in court: "As to the book, it is
written in plain language for plain people, and I think that many more persons
ought to know what the contents of the book are." The jury was discharged, in
consequence of this one man's courage, but Mr. Truelove's persecutors—the Vice
Society—were determined not to let their victim free. They proceeded
to trial a second time, and wisely endeavoured to secure a special jury, feeling
that as prudential restraint would raise wages by limiting the supply of labour,
they would be more likely to obtain a verdict from a jury of "gentlemen" than
from one composed of workers. This attempt was circumvented by Mr. Truelove's
legal advisers, who let a procedendo go which sent back the trial to the
Old Bailey. The second trial was held on May 16th at the Central Criminal Court
before Baron Pollock and a common jury, Professor Hunter and Mr. J.M. Davidson
appearing for the defence. The jury convicted, and the brave old man,
sixty-eight years of age, was condemned to four months' imprisonment and £50
fine for selling a pamphlet which had been sold unchallenged, during a period of
forty-five years, by James Watson, George Jacob Holyoake, Austin Holyoake, and
Charles Watts. Mr. Grain, the counsel employed by the Vice Society, most
unfairly used against Mr. Truelove my "Law of Population," a pamphlet which
contained, Baron Pollock said, "the head and front of the offence in the other
[the Knowlton] case." I find an indignant protest against this odious unfairness
in the National Reformer for May 19th: "My 'Law of Population' was used
against Mr. Truelove as an aggravation of his offence, passing over the utter
meanness—worthy only of Collette—of using against a prisoner a book whose author
has never been attacked for writing it—does Mr. Collette, or do the authorities,
imagine that the severity shown to Mr. Truelove will in any fashion deter me
from continuing the Malthusian propaganda? Let me here assure them, one and all,
that it will do nothing of the kind; I shall continue to sell the 'Law of
Population' and to advocate scientific checks to population, just as though Mr.
Collette and his Vice Society were all dead and buried. In commonest justice
they are bound to prosecute me, and if they get, and keep, a verdict against me,
and succeed in sending me to prison, they will only make people more anxious to
read my book, and make me more personally powerful as a teacher of the views
which they attack."
277.
A persistent
attempt was made to obtain a writ of error in Mr. Truelove's case, but the Tory
Attorney-General, Sir John Holker, refused it, although the ground on which it
was asked was one of the grounds on which a similar writ had been granted to Mr.
Bradlaugh and myself. Mr. Truelove was therefore
compelled to suffer his sentence, but memorials, signed by 11,000 persons,
asking for his release, were sent to the Home Secretary from every part of the
country, and a crowded meeting in St. James's Hall, London, demanded his
liberation with only six dissentients. The whole agitation did not shorten Mr.
Truelove's sentence by a single day, and he was not released from Coldbath
Fields Prison until September 5th. On the 12th of the same month the Hall of
Science was crowded with enthusiastic friends, who assembled to do him honour,
and he was presented with a beautifully-illuminated address and a purse
containing £177 (subsequent subscriptions raised the amount to £197 16s. 6d.).
278.
It is
scarcely necessary to say that one of the results of the prosecution was a great
agitation throughout the country, and a wide popularisation of Malthusian views.
Some huge demonstrations were held in favour of free discussion; on one occasion
the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, was crowded to the doors; on another the Star
Music Hall, Bradford, was crammed in every corner; on another the Town Hall,
Birmingham, had not a seat or a bit of standing-room unoccupied. Wherever we
went, separately or together, it was the same story, and not only were
Malthusian lectures eagerly attended, and Malthusian literature eagerly bought,
but curiosity brought many to listen to our Radical and Freethought lectures,
and thousands heard for the first time what Secularism really meant. The Press,
both
279.
Among the
useful results of the prosecution was the establishment of the Malthusian
League, "to agitate for the abolition of all penalties on the public discussion
of the population question," and "to spread among the people, by all practicable
means, a knowledge of the law of population, of its
consequences, and of its bearing upon human conduct and morals." The first
general meeting of the League was held at the Hall of Science on July 26, 1877,
and a council of twenty persons was elected, and this council on August 2nd
elected Dr. C.R. Drysdale, M.D., President; Mr. Swaagman, Treasurer; Mrs.
Besant, Secretary; Mr. Shearer, Assistant-Secretary; and Mr. Hember, Financial
Secretary. Since 1877 the League, under the same indefatigable president, has
worked hard to carry out its objects; it has issued a large number of leaflets
and tracts; it supports a monthly journal, the Malthusian; numerous
lectures have been delivered under its auspices in all parts of the country; and
it has now a medical branch, into which none but duly qualified medical men and
women are admitted, with members in all European countries.
280.
Another
result of the prosecution was the accession of "D." to the staff of the
National Reformer. This able and thoughtful writer came forward and joined
our ranks as soon as he heard of the attack on us, and he further volunteered to
conduct the journal during our expected imprisonment. From that time to this—a
period of fifteen years—articles from his pen appeared in its columns week by
week, and during all that time not one solitary difficulty arose between editors
and contributor. In public a trustworthy colleague, in private a warm and
sincere friend, "D." proved an unmixed benefit bestowed upon us by the
prosecution.
281.
Nor was "D."
the only friend brought to us by our foes. I cannot ever think of that time
without remembering that the prosecution brought me first into close intimacy
with Mrs. Annie Parris—the wife of Mr. Touzeau Parris, the Secretary of the
Defence Committee throughout all the fight—a lady who, during that long
struggle, and during the, for me, far worse struggle that succeeded it, over the
custody of my daughter, proved to me the most loving and sisterly of friends.
One or two other friendships which will, I hope, last my life, date from that
same time of strife and anxiety.
282.
The amount of
money subscribed by the public during the Knowlton and succeeding prosecutions
gives some idea of the interest felt in the struggle. The Defence Fund Committee
in March, 1878, presented a balance-sheet, showing subscriptions amounting to
£1,292 5s. 4d., and total expenditure in the Queen v. Bradlaugh and Besant, the
Queen v. Truelove, and the appeal against Mr. Vaughan's order (the last two up
to date) of £1,274 10s. This account was then closed and the balance of £17 15s.
4d. passed on to a new fund for the defence of Mr. Truelove, the carrying on of
the appeal against the destruction of the Knowlton pamphlet, and the bearing of
the costs incident on the petition lodged against myself. In July this new fund had reached £196 16s. 7d., and after paying the remainder of the costs in Mr.
Truelove's case, a balance of £26 15s. 2d. was carried on. This again rose to
£247 15s. 2½d., and the fund bore the expenses of Mr.
Bradlaugh's successful appeal on the Knowlton pamphlet, the petition and
subsequent proceedings in which I was concerned in the Court of Chancery, and an
appeal on Mr. Truelove's behalf, unfortunately unsuccessful, against an order
for the destruction of the Dale Owen pamphlet. This last decision was given on
February 21, 1880, and on this the Defence Fund was closed. On Mr. Truelove's
release, as mentioned above, a testimonial to the amount of £197 16s. 6d. was
presented to him, and after the close of the struggle some anonymous friend sent
to me personally £200 as "thanks for the courage and ability shown." In addition
to all this, the Malthusian League received no less than £455 11s. 9d. during
the first year of its life, and started on its second year with a balance in
hand of £77 5s. 8d.
283.
A somewhat
similar prosecution in
284.
"Friends, Mr.
Bradlaugh has spoken of the duty that calls us here to-night. It is pleasant to
think that in our work that duty is one to which we are not unaccustomed. In our
army there are more true soldiers than traitors, more that
are faithful to the trust of keeping the truth than those who shrink when the
hour of danger comes. And I would ask Mr. Bennett to-night not to measure
English feeling towards him by the mere number of those present. They that are
here are representatives of many thousands of our fellow-countrymen. Glance down
this middle table, and you will see that it is not without some right that we
claim to welcome you in the name of multitudes of the citizens of
285.
"'ADDRESS.
286.
"'We seek
for Truth.'
287.
"'To D.M.
Bennett.
288.
"'In asking
you to accept at the hands of the National Secular Society of England this
symbol of cordial sympathy and brotherly welcome, we are but putting into act
the motto of our Society. "We seek for Truth" is our badge, and it is as
Truthseeker that we do you homage to-night. Without free speech no search for
Truth is possible; without free speech no discovery of Truth is useful; without
free speech progress is checked, and the nations no longer march forward towards
the nobler life which the future holds for man. Better a thousandfold abuse of
free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day; the denial
slays the life of the people and entombs the hope of the race.
289.
"'In your own
country you have pleaded for free speech, and when, under a wicked and an odious
law, one of your fellow-citizens was imprisoned for the publication of his
opinions, you, not sharing the opinions but faithful to liberty, sprang forward
to defend in him the principle of free speech which you claimed for yourself,
and sold his book while he lay in prison. For this act you were in turn arrested
and sent to jail, and the country which won its freedom by the aid of Paine in
the eighteenth century disgraced itself in the nineteenth by the imprisonment of
a heretic. The Republic of the
290.
"'Charles
Bradlaugh, President.'
291.
"Soldier of
liberty, we give you this. Do in the future the same good service that you have
done in the past, and your reward shall be in the love that true men shall bear
to you."
292.
That,
however, which no force could compel me to do, which I refused to threats of
fine and prison, to separation from my children, to social ostracism, and to
insults and ignominy worse to bear than death, I surrendered freely when all the
struggle was over, and a great part of society and of public opinion had adopted
the view that cost Mr. Bradlaugh and myself so dear. I may as well complete the
story here, so as not to have to refer to it again. I gave up Neo-Malthusianism
in April, 1891, its renunciation being part of the outcome of two years'
instruction from Mdme. H.P. Blavatsky, who showed me that however justifiable
Neo-Malthusianism might be while man was regarded only as the most perfect
outcome of physical evolution, it was wholly incompatible with the view of man
as a spiritual being, whose material form and environment were the results of
his own mental activity. Why and how I embraced Theosophy, and accepted H.P.
Blavatsky as teacher, will soon be told in its proper place. Here I am concerned
only with the why and how of my renunciation of the Neo-Malthusian teaching, for
which I had fought so hard and suffered so much.
293.
When I built
my life on the basis of Materialism I judged all actions by their effect on
human happiness in this world now and in future generations, regarding man as an
organism that lived on earth and there perished, with activities confined to
earth and limited by physical laws. The object of life was the ultimate
building-up of a physically, mentally, morally perfect man by the cumulative
effects of heredity—mental and moral tendencies being regarded as the outcome of
material conditions, to be slowly but surely evolved by rational selection and
the transmission to offspring of qualities carefully acquired by, and developed
in, parents. The most characteristic note of this serious and lofty Materialism
had been struck by Professor W. K. Clifford in his noble article on the "Ethics
of Belief."
294.
Taking this
view of human duty in regard to the rational co-operation with nature in the
evolution of the human race, it became of the first importance to rescue the
control of the generation of offspring from mere blind brute passion, and to
transfer it to the reason and to the intelligence; to impress on parents the
sacredness of the parental office, the tremendous responsibility of the exercise
of the creative function. And since, further, one of the most pressing problems
for solution in the older countries is that of poverty, the horrible slums and
dens into which are crowded and in which are festering families of eight and ten
children, whose parents are earning an uncertain 10s., 12s., 15s., and 20s. a week; since an immediate
palliative is wanted, if popular risings impelled by starvation are to be
avoided; since the lives of men and women of the poorer classes, and of the
worst paid professional classes, are one long, heart-breaking struggle "to make
both ends meet and keep respectable"; since in the middle class marriage is
often avoided, or delayed till late in life, from the dread of the large family,
and late marriage is followed by its shadow, the prevalence of vice and the
moral and social ruin of thousands of women; for these, and many other reasons,
the teaching of the duty of limiting the family within the means of subsistence
is the logical outcome of Materialism linked with the scientific view of
evolution, and with a knowledge of the physical law, by which evolution is
accelerated or retarded. Seeking to improve the physical type, scientific
Materialism, it seemed to me, must forbid parentage to any but healthy married
couples; it must restrict childbearing within the limits consistent with the
thorough health and physical well-being of the mother; it must impose it as a
duty never to bring children into the world unless the conditions for their fair
nurture and development are present. Regarding it as hopeless, as well as
mischievous, to preach asceticism, and looking on the conjunction of nominal
celibacy with widespread prostitution as inevitable, from the constitution of
human nature, scientific Materialism—quite rationally and logically—advises
deliberate restriction of the production of offspring, while sanctioning the
exercise of the sexual instinct within the limits imposed by temperance, the
highest physical and mental efficiency, the good order and dignity of society,
and the self-respect of the individual.
295.
In all this
there is nothing which for one moment implies approval of licentiousness,
profligacy, unbridled self-indulgence. On the contrary, it is a well-considered
and intellectually-defensible scheme of human evolution, regarding all natural
instincts as matters for regulation, not for destruction, and seeking to develop
the perfectly healthy and well-balanced physical body as the necessary basis for
the healthy and well-balanced mind. If the premises of Materialism be true,
there is no answer to the Neo-Malthusian conclusions; for even those Socialists
who have bitterly opposed the promulgation of Neo-Malthusianism—regarding it as
a "red herring intended to draw the attention of the proletariat away from the
real cause of poverty, the monopoly of land and capital by a class"—admit that
when society is built on the foundation of common property in all that is
necessary for the production of wealth, the time will come for the consideration
of the population question. Nor do I now see, any more than I saw then, how any
Materialist can rationally avoid the Neo-Malthusian position. For if man be the
outcome of purely physical causes, it is with these that we must deal in guiding
his future evolution. If he be related but to terrestrial existence, he is but
the loftiest organism of earth; and, failing to see his past and his future, how
should my eyes not have been then blinded to the deep-lying causes of his
present woe? I brought a material cure to a disease which appeared to me to be
of material origin; but how when the evil came from a subtler source, and its
causes lay not on the material plane? How if the remedy only set up new causes
for a future evil, and, while immediately a palliative, strengthened the disease
itself, and ensured its reappearance in the future? This was the view of the
problem set before me by H.P. Blavatsky when she unrolled the story of man, told
of his origin and his destiny, showed me the forces that went to the making of
man, and the true relation between his past, his present, and his future.
296.
For what is
man in the light of Theosophy? He is a spiritual intelligence, eternal and
uncreate, treading a vast cycle of human experience, born and reborn on
earth millennium after millennium, evolving slowly into the ideal man. He is not
the product of matter, but is encased in matter, and the forms of matter with
which he clothes himself are of his own making. For the intelligence and will of
man are creative forces—not creative ex nihilo, but creative as is the
brain of the painter—and these forces are exercised by man in every act of
thought. Thus he is ever creating round him thought-forms, moulding subtlest
matter into shape by these energies, forms which persist as tangible realities
when the body of the thinker has long gone back to earth and air and water. When
the time for rebirth into this earth-life comes for the soul these
thought-forms, its own progeny, help to form the tenuous model into which the
molecules of physical matter are builded for the making of the body, and matter
is thus moulded for the new body in which the soul is to dwell, on the lines
laid down by the intelligent and volitional life of the previous, or of many
previous, incarnations. So does each man create for himself in verity the form
wherein he functions, and what he is in his present is the inevitable outcome of
his own creative energies in his past. Applying this to the Neo-Malthusian
theory, we see in sexual love not only a passion which man has in common with
the brute, and which forms, at the present stage of evolution, a necessary part
of human nature, but an animal passion that may be trained and purified into a
human emotion, which may be used as one of the levers in human progress, one of
the factors in human growth. But, instead of this, man in the past has made his
intellect the servant of his passions; the abnormal development of the sexual
instinct in man—in whom it is far greater and more continuous than in any
brute—is due to the mingling with it of the intellectual element, all sexual
thoughts, desires, and imaginations having created thought-forms, which have
been wrought into the human race, giving rise to a continual demand, far beyond
nature, and in marked contrast with the temperance of normal animal life. Hence
it has become one of the most fruitful sources of human misery and human
degradation, and the satisfaction of its imperious cravings in civilised
countries lies at the root of our worst social evils. This excessive development
has to be fought against, and the instinct reduced within natural limits, and
this will certainly never be done by easy-going self-indulgence within the
marital relation any more than by self-indulgence outside it. By none other road
than that of self-control and self-denial can men and women now set going the
causes which will build for them brains and bodies of a higher type for their
future return to earth-life. They have to hold this instinct in complete
control, to transmute it from passion into tender and self-denying affection, to
develop the intellectual at the expense of the animal, and thus to raise the
whole man to the human stage, in which every intellectual and physical capacity
shall subserve the purposes of the soul. From all this it follows that
Theosophists should sound the note of self-restraint within marriage, and the
gradual—for with the mass it cannot be sudden—restriction of the sexual relation
to the perpetuation of the race.
297.
Such was the
bearing of Theosophical teaching on Neo-Malthusianism, as laid before me by H.P.
Blavatsky, and when I urged, out of my bitter knowledge of the miseries endured
by the poor, that it surely might, for a time at least, be recommended as a
palliative, as a defence in the hands of a woman against intolerable oppression
and enforced suffering, she bade me look beyond the moment, and see how the
suffering must come back and back with every generation, unless we sought to
remove the roots of wrong. "I do not judge a woman," she said, "who has resort
to such means of defence in the midst of circumstances so evil, and whose
ignorance of the real causes of all this misery is her excuse for snatching at
any relief. But it is not for you, an Occultist, to continue to teach a method
which you now know must tend to the perpetuation of the sorrow." I felt that she
was right, and though I shrank from the decision—for my heart somewhat failed me
at withdrawing from the knowledge of the poor, so far as I could, a temporary
palliative of evils which too often wreck their lives and bring many to an early
grave, worn old before even middle age has touched them—yet the decision was
made. I refused to reprint the "Law of Population," or to sell the copyright,
giving pain, as I sadly knew, to all the brave and loyal friends who had so
generously stood by me in that long and bitter struggle, and who saw the results
of victory thrown away on grounds to them inadequate and mistaken! Will it
always be, I wonder, in man's climbing upward, that every step must be set on
his own heart and on the hearts of those he loves?
299.
Coming back
to my work after my long and dangerous illness, I took up again its thread,
heartsick, but with courage unshaken, and I find myself in the National
Reformer for September 15, 1878, saying in a brief note of thanks that
"neither the illness nor the trouble which produced it has in any fashion
lessened my determination to work for the cause." In truth, I plunged into work
with added vigour, for only in that did I find any solace, but the pamphlets
written at this time against Christianity were marked with considerable
bitterness, for it was Christianity that had robbed me of my child, and I struck
mercilessly at it in return. In the political struggles of that time, when the
Beaconsfield Government was in full swing, with its policy of annexation and
aggression, I played my part with tongue and pen, and my articles in defence of
an honest and liberty-loving policy in India, against the invasion of
Afghanistan and other outrages, laid in many an Indian heart a foundation of
affection for me, and seem to me now as a preparation for the work among Indians
to which much of my time and thought to-day are given. In November of this same
year (1878) I wrote a little book on "England, India, and Afghanistan" that has
brought me many a warm letter of thanks, and with this, the carrying on of the
suit against Mr. Besant before alluded to, two and often three lectures every
Sunday, to say nothing of the editorial work on the National Reformer,
the secretarial work on the Malthusian League, and stray lectures during the
week, my time was fairly well filled. But I found that in my reading I developed
a tendency to let my thoughts wander from the subject in hand, and that they
would drift after my lost little one, so I resolved to fill up the gaps in my
scientific education, and to amuse myself by reading up for some examinations; I
thought it would serve as an absorbing form of recreation from my other work,
and would at the same time, by making my knowledge exact, render me more useful
as a speaker on behalf of the causes to which my life was given.
300.
At the
opening of the new year (1879) I met for the first time a man to whom I
subsequently owed much in this department of work—Edward B. Aveling, a D.Sc. of
London University, and a marvellously able teacher of scientific subjects, the
very ablest, in fact, that I have ever met. Clear and accurate in his knowledge,
with a singular gift for lucid exposition, enthusiastic in his love of science,
and taking vivid pleasure in imparting his knowledge to others, he was an ideal
teacher. This young man, in January, 1879, began writing under initials for the
National Reformer, and in February I became his pupil, with the view of
matriculating in June at the
301. In the London Daily News some powerful letters of protest appeared, one from Lord Harberton, in which he declared that "the Inquisition acted on no other principle" than that applied to me; and a second from Mr. Band, in which he sarcastically observed that "this Christian community has for some time had the pleasure of seeing her Majesty's courts repeatedly springing engines of torture upon a young mother—a clergyman's wife who dared to disagree with his creed—and her evident anguish, her long and expensive struggles to save her child, have proved that so far as heretical mothers are concerned modern defenders of the faith need not envy the past those persuasive instruments which so long secured the unity of the Church. In making Mrs. Besant an example, the Master of the Rolls and Lord Justice James have been careful not to allow any of the effect to be lost by confusion of the main point—the intellectual heresy—with side questions. There was a Malthusian matter in the case, but the judges were very clear in stating that without any reference whatever to that, they would simply, on the ground of Mrs. Besant's 'religious, or anti-religious, opinions,' take her child from her." The great provincial papers took a similar tone, the Manchester Examiner going so far as to say of the ruling of the judges: "We do not say they have done so wrongly. We only say that the effect of their judgment is cruel, and it shows that the holding of unpopular opinions is, in the eye of the law, an offence which, despite all we had thought to the contrary, may be visited with the severest punishment a woman and a mother can be possibly called on to bear." The outcome of all this long struggle and of another case of sore injustice—in which Mrs. Agar-Ellis, a Roman Catholic, was separated from her children by a judicial decision obtained against her by her husband, a Protestant—was a change in the law which had vested all power over the children in the hands of the father, and from thenceforth the rights of the
