Life of Frances Power Cobbe, as told by herself / with additions by the author, and introduction by Blanche Atkinson

by Frances Power Cobbe

“And, lastly, if Religion is still to be to mankind in the future what it has been in the past, it must still be a religion of Prayer. Nothing is changed in human nature because it has outgrown some of the errors of the past. The spiritual experience of the saintly souls of old was true and real experience, even when their intellectual creeds were full of mistakes. By the gate through which they entered the paradise of love and peace, even by that same narrow portal of Prayer must we pass into it. No present or future discoveries in science will ever transmute the moral dross in human nature into the pure gold of virtue. No spectrum analysis of the light of the nebulæ will enable us to find God. If we are to be made holy, we must ask the Holy One to sanctify us. If we are to know the infinite joy of Divine Love, we must seek it in Divine communion.”

This book was first published in 1871; one of the years of the rising tide of liberal-religious hope. A third edition was called for in 1881, when the ebb had set in. In a short Preface to this third edition I notice this fact, and say that those hopes were doubtless all too hasty for the slow order of Divine things.

“Nay, it would seem that, far from the immediate aurora of such a morning, the world is destined first to endure a great ‘horror of darkness,’ and to pass through the dreary and disaster-laden experience of a night of materialism and agnosticism. Perhaps it will only be when men have seen with their eyes how the universe appears without a thought of God to illumine its dark places, and gauged for themselves where human life will sink without hope of immortality to elevate it, that they will recognise aright the unutterable preciousness of religion. Faith, when restored after such an eclipse, will be prized as it has never been prized heretofore....

“And Faith must return to mankind sooner or later. So sure as God is, so sure must it be that he will not finally leave his creatures, whom he has led upward for thousands of years, to lose sight of him altogether, or to be drowned for ever in the slough of atheism and carnalism. He will doubtless reveal himself afresh to the souls of men in his own time and in his own way,—whether, as of old, through prophet-souls filled with inspiration, or by other methods yet unknown. God is over us, and Heaven is waiting for us all the same, even though all the men of science in Europe unite to tell us there is only Matter in the universe, and only corruption in the grave. Atheism may prevail for a night, but faith cometh in the morning. Theism is ‘bound to win’ at last; not necessarily that special type of Theism which our poor thoughts in this generation have striven to define; but that great fundamental faith,—the needful substructure of every other possible religious faith—the faith in a Righteous and loving God, and in a life for man beyond the tomb.”

The book contains 72 Prayers; half of which refer to the outer and half to the inner life. Among the former, are Noon and Sunset prayers; thanksgivings for the love of friends, and for the beauty of the world; also a Prayer respecting the sufferings of animals from human cruelty. In the second part some of the Prayers are named, “In the Wilderness”; “On the Right Way”; “God afar off”; “Doubt and Faith”; “Fiat Lux”; “Fiat Pax”; “Thanksgiving for Religious Truth”; “For Pardon of a Careless Life”; “For a Devoted Life”; “Joy in God”; “Here and Hereafter.”

I never expected that more than a very few friends would have cared for this book, and in fact printed it with the intention of almost private circulation; but it has been continuously, though slowly, called for during the 23 years which have elapsed since it was compiled.

I wrote the essays included in the volume “Hopes of the Human Race,” in 1873–1874. This has run through several editions. The long Introduction to this book was written immediately after the publication of Mr. Mill’s Essay on Religion; a most important work of which Miss Taylor had kindly put the proof sheets in my hands, and to which I was eagerly anxious to offer such rejoinder from the side of faith as might be in my power. Whether I succeeded in making an adequate reply in the fifty pages I devoted to the subject, I cannot presume to say. The Pessimist side, taken by Mr. Mill has been gaining ground ever since, but there are symptoms that a reaction is taking place, beginning (of all countries!) in France. I conclude this Preface thus—p. 53.

“But I quit the ungracious, and, in my case, most ungrateful, task of offering my feeble protest against the last words given to us by a man so good and great, that even his mistakes and deficiencies (as I needs must deem them) are more instructive to us than a million platitudes and truisms of teachers whom his transcendent intellectual honesty should put to the blush, and whose souls never kindled with a spark of the generous ardour for the welfare of his race which flamed in his noble heart and animated his entire career.”

The book contains two long Essays on the Life after Death contributed originally to the Theological Review. In the first of these, after stating at length the reasons for supposing that human existence ends at death, I ask: “What have we to place against them in the scale of Hope?” and I begin by observing that all the usual arguments for immortality involve at the crucial point the assumption that we possess some guarantee that mankind will not be deceived, that Justice will eventually triumph and that human affairs are the concern of a Power whose purposes cannot fail. Were the faith which supplies such warrant to fail, the whole structure raised upon it must fall to the ground. Belief in Immortality is pre-eminently a matter of Faith; a corollary from faith in God. To imagine that we can reach it by any other road is vain. Heaven will always be (as Dr. Martineau has said) “a part of our Religion, not a Branch of our Geography.” But in addressing men and women who believe in God’s Justice and Love, I hope to show that, not by one only but by many convergent lines, Faith uniformly points to a Life after Death; and that if we follow her guidance in any one direction implicitly, we are invariably conducted to the same conclusion. Nay more; we cannot stop short of this conclusion and retain entire faith in any thing beyond the experience of the senses. Every idea of Justice, of Love and of Duty is truncated if we deny to it the extension of eternity; and as for our conception of God himself, I see not how any one who has realised the dread darkness of “the riddle of the painful earth,” can call him “Good” unless he can look forward to the solution of that problem hereafter. The following are channels through which Faith inevitably flows towards Immortality:

1st. The human race longs for Justice. Even “if the Heavens fall,” we feel Justice ought to be done. All literature, from Æschylus and Job to our own time, has for its highest theme the triumph of Justice, or the tragedy of the disappointment of human hope thereof. But where did we obtain this idea? The world has never seen a Reign of Astræa. Injustice and Cruelty prevail largely, even now in the world; and as we go back up the stream of time to ruder ages where Might was more completely dominant over Right, the case was worse and worse. Where then, did Man derive his idea that the Power ruling the world,—Zeus, or Jehovah, or Ormusd,—was Just? Not only could no ancestral experience have caused the “set of our brains” towards the expectation of Justice, but experience, under many conditions of society, pointed quite the other way. It is assuredly (if anything can be so reckoned) the Divine spirit in man which causes him to love Justice, and to believe that his Maker is just, for it is inconceivable how he could have arrived at such faith otherwise. But if death be the end of human existence this expectation of justice has been only a miserable delusion. God has created us, poor children of the dust, to love and hope for Justice, but He Himself has disregarded it, on the scale of a disappointed world. After referring to the thousands of cases where the bad have died successful and peacefully, and the good,—like Christ,—have perished in misery and agony, I say “boldly and so much the more reverently: Either Man is Immortal or God is not Just.”