CHAPTER XXI: I AM BAPTIZED IN JORDAN
"Do 'ee love the Lord?" my Grandmother was for ever asking.
"Yes, Grandmother," I always replied.
Down in my heart I knew it was not true. There was belief in me, and awe; but of that passion for God which I envied in her, no semblance. If it were really love I felt for Him (I put it to myself) "my heart would warm within me whenever I think of Him, as it does when I think of Robbie: or of Mother." When I tried to conjure Him up, all I could ever see was a blurred bearded man on a high grey throne; and if I peered harder for face and features, a dark mist like a rain-cloud always filled the space where they should be.
I knew I could never love Any One Whose face I could never see.
"You do not love Him as you do Robbie," kept saying the accusing voice within. It is true, and the thought horrified me. Until I could feel this greater love, I knew I had not "got religion."
For all my godly upbringing, for all my pious ways, I was no more privileged than ninety-nine of a hundred mere averagely religious grown-ups. Like theirs, my religion was but an affair of education, habit, intellect, morality. The Rapture was withheld. I had not got religion.
I knew my Bible as well as any child in England, and I loved it as well. I believed in all the doctrines of the Saints, not vaguely either, like a normal unreflecting child: but had pondered on them, and within my capabilities thought them out and personally accepted them. No atheist doubts oppressed me. The Tempter had not assailed me, as he had assailed my friend John Bunyan, with "Is Christianity no better than other religions, just one religion among many?" and other such wicked doubts. But I had not got religion.
And fear beset me: fear of other people, of the Devil, of Eternity, and, now as I grew older, of myself. The glimpses I had of the evil natures in me affrighted me. Sometimes in brooding over some wrong done me, my imagination ran riot in fantastic excesses of cruelty and revenge till I drew back appalled at the horrors of which, in thought at any rate, I was capable. I would brood over the unhappiness of my life and the injustice meted out to me every day, till my soul was a dark seething mass of revengefulness and hate. Not till I found myself visualizing the very act of murder did I draw back affrighted.
With the change in my nature that came as I grew into girlhood, a new series of evil visions possessed me. I found myself picturing fleshly and disgraceful things, things I had never heard of nor known to be possible, thrown up from the wells of original sin within. Pleasurable sensations lured me on till I drew back appalled at the sickening deeds that I, godly little Plymouth Sister, conceived myself as doing. Of course they were things I never should really do—oh dear no! that was foul, unimaginable!—but Conscience quoted Matthew five, twenty-eight, and though I stuffed my fingers in my ears she kept dinning it. You have committed it already in your heart.