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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the epoch-making book for me was Theodore Parker’s Discourse of Religion. Reading a notice of it in the Athenæum, soon after its publication (somewhere about the year 1845), I sent for it, and words fail to tell the satisfaction and encouragement it gave me. One must have been isolated and care-laden as I to estimate the value of such a book. I had come, as I have narrated above, to the main conclusions of Parker,—namely, the absolute goodness of God and the non-veracity of popular Christianity,—three years before; so that it has been a mistake into which some of my friends have fallen when they have described me as converted from orthodoxy by Parker. But his book threw a flood of light on my difficult way. It was, in the first place, infinitely satisfactory to find the ideas which I had hammered out painfully and often imperfectly, at last welded together, set forth in lucid order, supported by apparently adequate erudition and heartwarmed by fervent piety. But, in the second place, the Discourse helped me most importantly by teaching me to regard Divine Inspiration no longer as a miraculous and therefore incredible thing; but as normal, and in accordance with the natural relations of the infinite and finite spirit; a Divine inflowing of mental Light precisely analogous to that moral influence which divines call Grace. As every devout and obedient soul may expect to share in Divine Grace, so the devout and obedient souls of all the ages have shared (as Parker taught) in Divine Inspiration. And, as the reception of Grace, even in large measure, does not render us impeccable, so neither does the reception of Inspiration make us Infallible. It is at this point that Deism stops and Theism begins; namely, when our faith transcends all that can be gleaned from the testimony of the bodily senses and accepts as supremely trustworthy the direct Divine teaching, the “original revelation” of God’s holiness and love in the depths of the soul. Theodore Parker adopted the alternative synonym to mark the vital difference in the philosophy which underlies the two creeds; a theoretic difference leading to most important practical consequences in the whole temper and spirit of Theism as distinct from Deism. I saw all this clearly ere long, and ranged myself thenceforth as a Theist: a name now familiar to everybody, but which, when my family came to know I took it, led them to tell me with some contempt that it was “a word in a Dictionary, not a Religion.”

A few months after I had absorbed Parker’s Discourse, the great sorrow of my life befell me. My mother, whose health had been feeble ever since I could remember her, and who was now seventy years of age, passed away from a world which has surely held few spirits so pure and sweet. She died with her weeping husband and sons beside her bed and with her head resting on my breast. Almost her last words were to tell me I had been “the pride and joy” of her life. The agony I suffered when I realised that she was gone I shall not try to tell. She was the one being in the world whom I truly loved through all the passionate years of youth and early womanhood; the only one who really loved me. Never one word of anger or bitterness had passed from her lips to me, nor (thank God!) from mine to her in the twenty-four years in which she blessed my life; and for the latter part of that time her physical weakness had drawn a thousand tender cares of mine around her. No relationship in all the world, I think, can ever be so perfect as that of mother and daughter under such circumstances, when the strength of youth becomes the support of age, and the sweet dependance of childhood is reversed.

But it was all over—I was alone; no more motherly love and tenderness were ever again to reach my thirsting heart. But this was not as I recall it, the worst pang in that dreadful agony. I had (as I said above) ceased to believe in a future life, and therefore I had no choice but to think that that most beautiful soul which was worth all the kingdoms of earth had actually ceased to be. She was a “Memory;” nothing more

I was not then or at any time one of those fortunate people who can suddenly cast aside the conclusions which they have reached by careful intellectual processes, and leap to opposite opinions at the call of sentiment. I played no tricks with my convictions, but strove as best I could to endure the awful strain, and to recognise the Divine Justice and Goodness through the darkness of death. I need not and cannot say more on the subject.

Happily for me, there were many duties waiting for me, and I could recognise even then that, though pleasure seemed gone for ever, yet it was a relief to feel I had still duties. “Something to do for others” was an assuagement of misery. My father claimed first and much attention, and the position I now held of the female head of the family and household gave me a good deal of employment. To this I added teaching in my village school a mile from our house two or three times a week, and looking after all the sick and hungry in the two villages of Donabate and Balisk. Those were the years of Famine and Fever in Ireland, and there was abundant call for all our energies to combat them. I shall write of these matters in the next chapter.

I had, though with pain, kept my heresies secret during my mother’s declining years and till my father had somewhat recovered from his sorrow. I had continued to attend family prayers and church services, with the exception of the Communion, and had only vaguely allowed it to be understood that I was not in harmony with them all. When my poor father learned the full extent of my “infidelity,” it was a terrible blow to him, for which I have, in later years, sincerely pitied him. He could not trust himself to speak to me, but though I was in his house, he wrote to tell me I had better go away. My second brother, a barrister, had a year before given up his house in Queen Anne Street under a terrible affliction, and had gone, broken-hearted, to live on a farm which he hired in the wilds of Donegal. There I went as my father desired and remained for nearly a year; not knowing whether I should ever be permitted to return home and rather expecting to be disinherited. He wrote to me two or three times and said that if my doubts only extended in certain directions he could bear with them, “but if I rejected Christ and disbelieved the Bible, a man was called upon to keep the plague of such opinions from his own house.” Then he required me to answer him on those points categorically. Of course I did so plainly, and told him I did not believe that Christ was God; and I did not (in his sense) believe in the inspiration or authority of the Bible. After this ensued a very long silence, in which I remained entirely ignorant of my destiny and braced myself to think of earning my future livelihood. I was absolutely lonely; my brother, though always very kind to me, had not the least sympathy with my heresies, and thought my father’s conduct (as I do) quite natural; and I had not a friend or relative from whom I could look for any sort of comfort. A young cousin to whom I had spoken of them freely, and who had, in a way, adopted my ideas, wrote to me to say she had been shown the error of them, and was shocked to think she had been so misguided. This was the last straw. After I received this letter I wandered out in the dusk as usual down to a favourite nook—a natural seat under the bank in a bend of the river which ran through Bonny Glen,—and buried my face in the grass. As I did so my lips touched a primrose which had blossomed in that precise spot since I had last been there, and the soft, sweet flower which I had in childhood chosen for my mother’s birthday garland seemed actually to kiss my face. No one who has not experienced utter loneliness can perhaps quite imagine how much comfort such an incident can bring.

As I had no duties in Donegal, and seldom saw our few neighbours, I occupied myself, often for seven or eight or even nine hours a day, in writing an Essay on True Religion. I possess this MS. still, and have been lately examining it. Of course, as a first literary effort, it has many faults, and my limited opportunities for reference render parts of it very incomplete; but it is not a bad piece of work. The first part is employed in setting forth my reasons for belief in God. The second, those for not believing in (the apocalyptic part of) Christianity. The chapter on Miracles and Prophecy (written from the literal and matter-of-fact standpoint of that epoch) are not ill-done, while the moral failure of the Bible and of the orthodox theology, the histories of Jacob, Jael, David, &c., and the dogmas of Original Sin, the Atonement, a Devil and eternal Hell, are criticised pretty successfully. A considerable part of the book consists in a comparison in parallel columns of moral precepts from the Old and New Testaments on one side, and from non-Christian writers, Euripides, Socrates (Xenophon), Plutarch, Sextius, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, the Zend Avesta (Anquetil du Perron’s), The Institutes of Menu (Sir W. Jones’), the Damma Padan, the Talmud, &c., on the other. For years I had seized every opportunity of collecting the most striking ethical dicta, and I thus marshalled them to what appeared to me good purpose, namely, the disproof of the originality or exceptional loftiness of Christian Morals. I did not apprehend till later years, how the supreme achievement of Christianity was not the inculcation of a new, still less of a systematic Morality; but the introduction of a new spirit into Morality; as Christ himself said, a leaven into the lump.

Reading Parker’s Discourse, as I did very naturally in my solitude once again, it occurred to me to write to him and ask him to tell me on what ground he based the faith which I perceived he held, in a life after death? It had seemed to me that the guarantee of Revelation having proved worthless, there remained no sufficient reason for hope to counter-weigh the obvious difficulty of conceiving of a survival of the soul. Parker answered me in a most kind letter, accompanied by his Sermon of the Immortal Life. Of course I studied this with utmost care and sympathy, and by slow, very slow degrees, as I came more to take in the full scope of the Theistic, as distinguished from the Deistic view, I saw my way to a renewal of the Hope of the Human Race which, twenty years later, I set forth as best as I could in the little book of that name. I learned to trust the intuition of Immortality which is “written in the heart of man by a Hand which writes no falsehoods.” I deemed also that I could see (as Parker says) the evidence of “a summer yet to be in the buds which lie folded through our northern winter;” the presence in human nature of many efflorescences—and they the fairest of all—quite unaccountable and unmeaning on the hypothesis that the end of the man is in the grave. In later years I think, as the gloom of the evil and cruelty of the world has shrouded more the almost cloudless skies of my youth, I have almost fervently held by the doctrine of Immortality because it is, to me the indispensable corollary of that of the Goodness of God. I am not afraid to repeat the words, which so deeply shocked, when they were first published, my old friend, F. W. Newman. “If Man be not immortal, God is not Just.”

Recovering this faith, as I may say, rationally and not by any gust of emotion, I had the inexpressible happiness of thinking henceforth of my mother as still existing in God’s universe, and (as well as I knew) loving me wherever she might be, and under whatever loftier condition of being. To meet her again “spirit to spirit, ghost to ghost,” has been to me for forty years, the sweetest thought connected with death. Ere long, now, it must be realised.

After nine or ten months of this, by no means harsh, exile, my father summoned me to return home. I resumed my place as his daughter in doing all I could for his comfort, and as the head of his house; merely thenceforth abstaining from attendance either at Church or at family prayer. I had several favourite nooks and huts near and far in the woods, which I made into little Oratories for myself, and to one or other of them I resorted almost every evening at dusk; making it a habit—not broken for many years afterwards, to repeat a certain versified Litany of Thanksgiving which I had written and read to my mother. On Sundays, when the rest of the family went to the village church, I had the old garden for a beautiful cathedral. Having let myself in with my own key, and locked the doors, I knew I had the lovely six acres within the high walls, free for hours from all observation or intrusion. How much difference it makes in life to have at command such peace and solitude it is hard to estimate. I look back to some of the summer forenoons spent alone in that garden as to the flowering time of my seventy years. God grant that the afterglow of such hours may remain with me to the last, and that “at eventide it may be light!”

I knew that there were Unitarian chapels in Dublin at this time, and much wished to attend them now and then; but I would not cause annoyance to my father by the notice which my journey to the town on a Sunday would have attracted. Only on New Year’s Day I thought I might go unobserved and interpolate attendance at the service among my usual engagements. I went accordingly to Dublin one 1st of January and drove to the chapel of which I had heard in Eustace Street. It was a big, dreary place with scarcely a quarter of the seats occupied, and a middle-class congregation apparently very cool and indifferent. The service was a miserable, hybrid affair, neither Christian as I understood Christianity, nor yet Theistic; but it was a pleasure to me merely to stand and kneel with other people at the hymns and prayers. At last, the sermon, for which I might almost say, I was hungry, arrived. The old Minister in his black-gown ascended the pulpit, having taken with him—what?—could I believe my eyes? It was an old printed book, bound in the blue and drab old fuzzy paper of the year 1810 or thereabouts, and out of this he proceeded to read an erudite discourse by some father of English Socinianism, on the precise value of the Greek article when used before the word Θεός! My disappointment not to say disgust were such that,—as it was easy from my seat to leave the place without disturbing any one,—I escaped into the street, never (it may be believed) to repeat my experiment.

It was an anomalous position that which I held at Newbridge from the time of my return from Donegal, till my father’s death eight years later. I took my place as head of the household at the family table and in welcoming our guests, but I was all the time in a sort of moral Coventry, under a vague atmosphere of disapprobation wherein all I said was listened to cautiously as likely to conceal some poisonous heresy. Everything of this kind, however, wears down and becomes easier and softer as time goes on, and most so when people are, au fond, just-minded and good-hearted; and the years during which I remained at home till my father’s death, though mentally very lonely, were far from unhappy. In particular, the perfect clearness and straightforwardness of my position was, and has ever since been, a source of strength and satisfaction to me, for which I have thanked God a thousand times. My inner life was made happy by my simple faith in God’s infinite and perfect love; and I never had any doubt whether I had erred in abandoning the creed of my youth. On the contrary, as the whole tendency of modern science and criticism showed itself stronger and stronger against the old orthodoxy, my hopes were unduly raised of a not distant New Reformation which I might even live to see. These sanguine hopes have faded. As Dean Stanley seems to have felt, there was, somewhere between the years ’74 and ’78, a turn in the tide of men’s thoughts (due, I think, to the paramount influence and insolence which physical science then assumed), which has postponed any decisive “broad” movement for years beyond my possible span of life. But though nothing appears quite so bright to my old eyes as all things did to me in youth, though familiarity with human wickedness and misery, and still more with the horrors of scientific cruelty to animals, have strained my faith in God’s justice sometimes even to agony,—I know that no form of religious creed could have helped me any more than my own or as much as it has done to bear the brunt of such trial; and I remain to the present unshaken both in respect to the denials and the affirmations of Theism. There are great difficulties, soul-torturing difficulties besetting it; but the same or worse, beset every other form of faith in God; and infinitely more, and to my mind insurmountable ones, beset Atheism.

For fifty years Theism has been my staff of life. I must soon try how it will support me down the last few steps of my earthly way. I believe it will do so well.