1867, A sad letter
122, George St.,
Edinburgh,
Maundy Thursday, 1867.
MY DEAR MISS SKENE,
On this day, which was to have seen my First Communion, I do not believe I should have the heart to write and tell you that it has all failed, if it were not for a sort of hard, cold, listless feeling of utter apathy to everything Divine which is new to me, but which has, as it were, petrified me since my fall.
The long and short is that the Protestants—i.e. the Lord Chancellor and his Court; my Guardians; my friends and relations; and Mansel, Liddon, and Co. have extorted from me a promise not to become a Catholic till I am of age. They are jubilant with the jubilation of devils over a lost soul; but I am hopeless and weary to a degree.
There remains nothing to say now, except that I am utterly wrecked. I have not dared to pray since. I have heard Mass twice, but I looked on with an indifference greater than if I had been at a play. I feel no moral principle either. It is simply all up. Instead of feeling these holy days, the thought of the suffering of Christ simply haunts me like a nightmare. I try to drown it and drive it away.
There is no use in going on this way. It is a triumph for which Mansel, etc., are thanking God (!). I know what my own position is. It is hopeless, and graceless, and godless.
Most sincerely yours,
BUTE AND DUMFRIES.
If the well-meaning divines and others who had wrung from Bute, under the severest moral pressure, the much-desired promise, had had an opportunity of perusing the above letter, the "jubilation" of which he speaks would surely have been considerably modified. It is a sad enough document to have been written by a youth in his twentieth year, to whom his opening manhood seemed to offer, from a worldly point of view, everything that was most brilliant and most desirable. The day on which it was dated, and the thought of all that day was to have been to him, and yet was not, naturally deepened the depression under which it was penned, and led him perhaps to exaggerate the condition of spiritual dereliction which he so pathetically described. But if his life was not in reality wrecked, if he had not in truth (and we know that he had not) lost all sense of moral principles, it is impossible to avoid the reflection that no thanks for this are due to those who seem utterly to have misapprehended the strength and sincerity of his religious convictions, and the very grave responsibility they incurred (to say nothing of the risk to himself) in persuading him to stifle them, even for a time. It was their hope, doubtless, that the delay they had secured would ultimately lead to the abandonment of his purpose; but nothing is more certain that while resolved to abide faithfully by his promise, he was inflexibly determined to follow his conscience and carry out his declared intention at the very moment that he was free to do so. This resolution taken, his wonted tranquillity returned, and he went back to Christ Church for the summer term to resume undisturbed, and with a mind at rest, his quiet life of study and other congenial occupations. Reproduced here is a rough sketch from his pen, dated at this time (May 13, 1867), but not otherwise described. The drawing, which is not devoid of charm and power, depicts apparently the Communion of St. Margaret, Queen of Scotland. On the same sheet is another sketch which seems to be a design for a stained glass window representing Scottish Saints.