Part 3 (1/2)
That you th so to do is part of your share in the prayers of
”Yours very faithfully,
”W D----”
A noble letter, but the storht in that summer of 1871 stands out clearly before me Mr
Besant ay, and there had been a fierce quarrel before he left I was outraged, desperate, with no door of escape fro its hope in God, had not yet learned to live for hope for ht ca open, with lure of peace and of safety, the gateway into silence and security, the gateway of the to 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 rooain at thein the sule was over and peace at hand I uncorked the bottle, and was raising it to h 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 sha the shrubs in the garden at le, and then fell fainting on the floor Only once again in all the strifes of ht of suicide recur, and then it was but for asoul
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 thes were neither shi+rked nor discouraged by Mr D----; he was not horrified nor was he sanctimoniously rebukeful, butto one writhing in the first agonies of doubt
He left Cheltenha extracts from a letter written in Nove (I had been reading M'Leod Careat principle--that God is impassive, cannot suffer
Christ, _qua_ 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'--_ie, abhorrence of sin, and love of the sinner_ But to infer fros which Christ experienced solely in hu
”(2) I felt strongly inclined to blow you up for the last part of your letter You assuratuitously, that God condemns theYou 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 seeospel of Christ! All Christ's references to eternal punishment may be resolved into references to the Valley of Hinnoery; with the exception of the Dives parable, where is distinctly inferred a rave 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 seerieved and shaken, you ought to feel encouraged and thankful that God is so ht 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 y 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
”(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 testi?
”Why, the keynote of all y 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 froospel which contained doctrines that would not stand the test of such perfect lovableness--doctrines hard, or cruel, or unjust--I should reject hi that neither could be Christ's Know Christ and judge religions by Hiions, and then coh a blood-coloured glass”
”I aiven by God to this age against all dreary doublings and tee 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 worldGod I could not do so The awakening to what the world was, to the facts of human misery, to the ruthless tra no difference between innocent and guilty--the shock had been too great for the equilibriuuments that appealed to the emotions and left the intellect unconvinced Months of this long-drawn-out ht their natural effects on physical health, and at last I broke down co 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 ave 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 ht 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 y He saw that if I were to be brought back to reasonable life, it could only be by diverting thought froerous 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 ious wretchedness only increased the unhappiness of ho should be so tossed with anguish over intellectual and ious 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 reet thee, would do well not to plunge hastily into e, for they do not run smoothly in the double-harness of that honourable estate _Sturo out alone into the wilderness to be te his majesty and all his io into lamour of youth upon them and the destiny of conflict imprinted on their nature, for they e as well as for the in traditional authority and conventional habits, seeks to ”break in” the turbulent and storth 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
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 exaain say ”I believe” where I had not proved, and that, however diht at least be firm underfor solution, and to these I addressedjust these probleround 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 punishoodness” and ”love,” as applied to a God who had made this world, with all its sin and misery
(3) The nature of the atone a vicarious suffering frohteousness fro of ”inspiration” as applied to the Bible, and the reconciliation of the perfections of the author with the blunders and immoralities of the work
It will be seen that the deeper probleion--the deity of Christ, the existence of God, the iht 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 ave me the impulse that finally landed ed 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 hile I was this that doubt struck uarded 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 fencedof an outraged conscience that ainst the Churches and finally an unbeliever in God And I place this on record, because the progress of Materialisainst unbelievers, as though they became unbelievers froion 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 arrander philosophy than its opponent, it will lose its hold over the purest and the strongest of the younger generation
CHAPTER V
THE STORM OF DOUBT
My reading of heretical and Broad Church works on one side, and of orthodox ones on the other, now occupied a large part of ricultural village with a scattered population, increased my leisure I read the works of Robertson, Stopford Brooke, Stanley, Greg, Matthew Arnold, Liddon, Mansel, and rew deeper and deeper as I read The Broad Church argu, skilful evasions of difficulties rather than the real ood God, how can He have createdbeforehand that the vast majority of those whom He created were to be tortured for ever? Given a just God, how can He punish people for being sinful, when they have inherited a sinful nature without their own choice and of necessity?
Given a righteous God, how can He allow sin to exist for ever, so that evil shall be as eternal as good, and Satan shall reign in hell as long as Christ in heaven? Worst of all puzzles, perhaps, was that of the existence of evil and of ood, and yet look on the evil and the misery of the world unmoved and untouched It seemed so impossible to believe that a Creator could be either cruel enough to be indifferent to the h to be unable to stop it The old dilemma faced me incessantly: ”If He can prevent it and does not, He is not good; if He wishes to prevent it and cannot, He is not als of believers for a clue, but I found no way of escape Not yet had any doubt of the existence of God crossed uidethe path which had led his own soul to contentment, but I can only find room here for two brief extracts, which will sho to hiht me mistaken in my view
”Of the nature of the _sin_ and _error_ which is supposed to grieve God I take it that sin is an absolutely necessary factor in the production of the perfect man It was foreseen and allowed as means to an end--as, in fact, an education The view of all the sin and rieve 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 ht