In the following diary, as much as possible of what fell from her on different subjects has been preserved. To have written down all would have required as many scribes as there are reporters for a daily newspaper. “Thoughts come into my head as wind comes in at the window,” Lady Hester used to say. Topic succeeded topic, one thing followed another, and it required a tenacious memory to retain such a profusion of matter, and much leisure to put it on paper.
The religious opinions of a person like Lady Hester Stanhope may probably be an object of curiosity to those who consider a man’s mode of faith the true criterion by which to estimate him. As far, however, as professed creeds went, it is doubtful whether she ever subscribed to any. She was accustomed to say, “What my religion is nobody knows. Jews and Christians have tried me hard, and questioned me pretty closely, but they were not wiser when they ended than when they began.”
“Doctor,” one day she said to me, “you have no religion—what I mean by religion is, adoration of the Almighty. Religion, as people profess it, is nothing but a dress. One man puts on one coat, and another another; but the feeling that I have is quite a different thing, and I thank God that he has opened my eyes. You will never learn of me, because you cannot comprehend my ideas, and therefore it is of no use teaching you. Nobody opens a book to an idiot, that would spit and splutter over it; for you never could make him read. Ah!—I see my way a little before me, and God vouchsafes to enlighten me perhaps more than other people.
“I know my own imperfections and my own merits; and I hope, by rendering myself pure in thought and deed, to become acceptable in the eyes of God. In all my gaieties, I was always the same as I am now. I saw there was a system of mythology, a system of medicine, of politics, of all sorts of things; but they did not satisfy me, and I used to say to myself I must find all this out. I know now a great deal more than I did then; and, if I were to sit down to dictate all I know, it would take me two years to do it. Yet, after all, when I look round and see the boundless extent of knowledge, I feel my own littleness. But what are half the people in the world? I hold them in the most sovereign contempt. Sir J. Mackintosh, who makes a speech, and makes a talk at a dinner-table, and then says he doesn’t know what about witchcraft—he may say what he likes, but there are evil spirits in mankind. Go into a madhouse!—all madnesses are not alike—and where you suspect the presence of an evil spirit.... But there, you will go and speak of these things to common persons, who will make fun of it, just as Dr. Madden and Dr. Clarke did....”
She went on, “I never can imagine that all the celebrated Greeks and Romans were a pack of old women; and therefore what they believed in must be as good as what other people believe in. But many, who see these things with the same eyes as I do, are still in the dark. It is like that looking-glass—everybody knows it reflects his face, but many do not know how and in what manner that is effected. Now I understand all the heathen mythology, not from reading about it, or hearing people talk about it, but from my own penetration and the depth of my reflections. And, if I could but get hold of some books that would give me the opinions and doctrines of all the ancient philosophers, I would then write down my own, and would support them by quotations; as thus—such a thing is so and so, and Plato, or Socrates, or Cicero, or somebody else, has such a passage in confirmation of what I assert.
“It was ever an object with me to search out why I came into the world; what I ought to do in it, and where I shall go to. God has given me the extraordinary faculty of seeing into futurity; for a clear judgment becomes matter of fact. It has ever been my study to know myself. I may thank God for my sufferings, as they have enabled me to dive deeper into the subject than, I believe, any person living. The theory of the soul, doctor, what an awful thing!
“My religion is to try to do as well as I can in God’s eyes. That is the only merit I have: I try to do the best I can. Some of the servants sometimes talk about my religion—dyn es Syt,[39] as they call it—and I let them talk; for they explain it to people by saying, it is to do what is right, and to avoid all uncleanliness.
“My views of the Creator are very different. I believe that all things are calculated, and what is written is written; but I do not suppose that the devil is independent of God: he receives his orders. Not that God goes and gives them to him, any more than the big my lord goes and gives orders to his shoeblack. There is some secondary being that does that—some intendant.
“There are angels of different degrees, from the highest down to the devil. It must be an awful sight to see an angel! There is something so transcendent and beautiful in them, that a person must be half out of his senses to bear the sight. For, when you are looking down, and happen to raise your head, and there is the angel standing before you, you can’t say whether it came up through the earth, or down from the sky, or how—there he is, and may go in the same way. But angels don’t appear to every body. You know, doctor, you can’t suppose that, if you were a little dirty apothecary, keeping a shop in a narrow street, a prime minister would waste his time in going to call on you; or that, if a man is sitting over his glass all the evening, or playing whist, or lounging all the morning, an angel will come to him. But when there is a mortal of high rectitude and integrity, then such a being may be supposed to condescend to seek him out.
“God is my friend—that is enough: and, if I am to see no happiness in this world, my share of it, I trust, will be greater in the next, if I am firm in the execution of those principles which he has inspired me with.”