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.