“And what funny things people say at dinner. Lately—not here—a very ‘great lady’ said to me, ‘I can assure you that the consciousness of being well dressed gives me an inward peace which religion could never bestow.’”
Journal.
“Holmhurst, Jan. 21, 1899.—I sit alone on my hilltop, amid the swirling mists, and howling winds, and swelching rain, and am often very desolate and full of melancholy thoughts, which require active work to drive them away. But I ought not to complain, for before Christmas I was a week with the kind Llangattocks at the Hendre in beautiful Monmouthshire, seeing much that was interesting, and driving with four horses and postillions, to Raglan, and through the beautiful brown billowy country of the Forest of Dean. Then I had a quietly happy fortnight at Torquay with my kind Thornycroft cousins; and went from them to Mount Ebford to Pamela Turner, a very pleasant first cousin I had not seen for years; paying, lastly, a sad visit—because probably the last ever possible—to beautiful Cobham.... Yet I am alone now, and perhaps it is as well that my thoughts should be always turning to the ‘undiscovered country’ which will be so much to us, and of which we know nothing, even though we may be very near its shores. I work on, I enjoy on, but I feel more that life is becoming a waiting time.
‘I have a journey, sir, shortly to go;
My master calls me, I must not say no.’[593]
And there is a sentence of Epictetus which seems to demand thinking about. ‘If the Master call, run to the ship, forsaking all these things, and looking not behind. And if thou be in old age, go not far from the ship at any time, lest the Master should ask, and thou not be ready.’ ... It was Adrienne de Lafayette who said, ‘Must we not all die? The great thing is to be always ready; as for the kind of death, that is only a detail.’ I think and think, as so many millions have thought, how it can be after death, and such inquiries and searchings have no answer. Still, as Jowett wrote towards the close of life, ‘Though we cannot see into another life, we believe, with inextinguishable hope, that there is still something reserved for us.’
“I feel the view usually held now on these subjects is wholesomer than that of my childhood, when ‘good people’ talked with such dogmatic assurance, in all ‘le bel air de leur devotion,’ of how glorious their life in another world would be, whilst definitely condemning so many of their neighbours to the hell which, in their imagination, was their God’s vindictive retaliation for His injuries. I often remember her words, and I think I realise the feeling with which my dear old friend Mrs. Duncan Stewart once said to me, ‘I should say, like Dr. Johnson, I am speaking in crass ignorance, according to the failings of my fallible human nature; and yet, may we not all, whilst acting like fallible human beings as we are, trust respectfully to God’s mercy, though speaking of no glorious future as reserved for us, lest He should say, “What hast thou done to deserve this?”’
“Lord Llangattock writes urging me to join the Anti-vivisection Society; but I answer I am not competent to judge of it. Then he sends me its pamphlets, which seem to me rather blasphemous, asserting that ‘Christ died just as much for all animals as for all human beings.’ What! for bugs, lice, ringworms, mosquitoes? ‘Don’t kill that flea; Christ died for it.’ Then how about cobras and puff-adders? Surely it must have been the Devil that died for those. What nonsense people, especially ‘religious people,’ write in these little pamphlets, almost as great nonsense as most country clergy preach in the dreary Sahara of their endless sermons. ‘Long texts, short sermons,’ was John Wesley’s maxim, and what a good one!”