Annie Besant by Annie Besant
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Annie Besant >> Annie Besant
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When that physical crisis was over I decided on my line of action. I
resolved to take Christianity as it had been taught in the Churches,
and carefully and thoroughly examine its dogmas one by one, so that I
should never again say "I believe" where I had not proved, and that,
however diminished my area of belief, what was left of it might at
least be firm under my feet. I found that four chief problems were
pressing for solution, and to these I addressed myself. How many are
to-day the souls facing just these problems, and disputing every inch
of their old ground of faith with the steadily advancing waves of
historical and scientific criticism! Alas! for the many Canutes, as the
waves wash over their feet. These problems were:--
(1) The eternity of punishment after death.
(2) The meaning of "goodness" and "love," as applied to a God who had
made this world, with all its sin and misery.
(3) The nature of the atonement of Christ, and the "justice" of God in
accepting a vicarious suffering from Christ, and a vicarious
righteousness from the sinner.
(4) The meaning of "inspiration" as applied to the Bible, and the
reconciliation of the perfections of the author with the blunders and
immoralities of the work.
It will be seen that the deeper problems of religion--the deity of
Christ, the existence of God, the immortality of the soul--were not yet
brought into question, and, looking back, I cannot but see how orderly
was the progression of thought, how steady the growth, after that first
terrible earthquake, and the first wild swirl of agony. The points that
I set myself to study were those which would naturally be first faced
by any one whose first rebellion against the dogmas of the Churches was
a rebellion of the moral nature rather than of the intellectual, a
protest of the conscience rather than of the brain. It was not a desire
for moral licence which gave me the impulse that finally landed me in
Atheism; it was the sense of outraged justice and insulted right. I was
a wife and mother, blameless in moral life, with a deep sense of duty
and a proud self-respect; it was while I was this that doubt struck me,
and while I was in the guarded circle of the home, with no dream of
outside work or outside liberty, that I lost all faith in Christianity.
My education, my mother's example, my inner timidity and self-distrust,
all fenced me in from temptations from without. It was the uprising of
an outraged conscience that made me a rebel against the Churches and
finally an unbeliever in God. And I place this on record, because the
progress of Materialism will never be checked by diatribes against
unbelievers, as though they became unbelievers from desire for vice and
for licence to do evil. What Religion has to face in the controversies
of to-day is not the unbelief of the sty, but the unbelief of the
educated conscience and of the soaring intellect; and unless it can arm
itself with a loftier ethic and a grander philosophy than its opponent,
it will lose its hold over the purest and the strongest of the younger
generation.
CHAPTER V.
THE STORM OF DOUBT.
My reading of heretical and Broad Church works on one side, and of
orthodox ones on the other, now occupied a large part of my time, and
our removal to Sibsey, in Lincolnshire, an agricultural village with a
scattered population, increased my leisure. I read the works of
Robertson, Stopford Brooke, Stanley, Greg, Matthew Arnold, Liddon,
Mansel, and many another, and my scepticism grew deeper and deeper as
I read. The Broad Church arguments appeared to me to be of the nature
of special pleading, skilful evasions of difficulties rather than the
real meeting and solving of them. For the problem was: Given a good
God, how can He have created mankind, knowing beforehand that the vast
majority of those whom He created were to be tortured for ever? Given
a just God, how can He punish people for being sinful, when they have
inherited a sinful nature without their own choice and of necessity?
Given a righteous God, how can He allow sin to exist for ever, so that
evil shall be as eternal as good, and Satan shall reign in hell as
long as Christ in heaven? Worst of all puzzles, perhaps, was that of
the existence of evil and of misery, and the racking doubt whether God
_could_ be good, and yet look on the evil and the misery of the world
unmoved and untouched. It seemed so impossible to believe that a
Creator could be either cruel enough to be indifferent to the misery,
or weak enough to be unable to stop it. The old dilemma faced me
incessantly: "If He can prevent it and does not, He is not good; if He
wishes to prevent it and cannot, He is not almighty." I racked my
brains for an answer. I searched writings of believers for a clue, but
I found no way of escape. Not yet had any doubt of the existence of
God crossed my mind.
Mr. D---- continued to write me, striving to guide me along the path
which had led his own soul to contentment, but I can only find room
here for two brief extracts, which will show how to himself he solved
the problem. He thought me mistaken in my view
"Of the nature of the _sin_ and _error_ which is supposed to grieve
God. I take it that sin is an absolutely necessary factor in the
production of the perfect man. It was foreseen and allowed as means to
an end--as, in fact, an education. The view of all the sin and misery
in the world cannot grieve God any more than it can grieve you to see
Digby fail in his first attempt to build a card-castle or a
rabbit-hutch. All is part of the training. God looks at the ideal man
to which all tends.... "No, Mrs. Besant; I never feel at all inclined
to give up the search, or to suppose that the other side may be right.
I claim no merit for it, but I have an invincible faith in the
morality of God and the moral order of the world. I have no more doubt
about the falsehood of the popular theology than I have about the
unreality of six robbers who attacked me three nights ago in a horrid
dream. I exult and rejoice in the grandeur and freedom of the little
bit of truth it has been given me to see. I am told that 'Present-day
Papers,' by Bishop Ewing (edited), are a wonderful help, many of them,
to puzzled people; I mean to get them. But I am sure you will find
that the truth will (even so little as we may be able to find out)
grow on you, make you free, light your path, and dispel, at no distant
time, your _painful_ difficulties and doubts. I should say on no
account give up your reading. I think with you that you could not do
without it. It will be a wonderful source of help and peace to you.
For there are struggles far more fearful than those of intellectual
doubt. I am keenly alive to the gathered-up sadness of which your last
two pages are an expression. I was sorrier than I can say to read
them. They reminded me of a long and very dark time in my own life,
when I thought the light never would come. Thank God it came, or I
think I could not have held out much longer. But you have evidently
strength to bear it now. The more dangerous time, I should fancy, has
passed. You will have to mind that the fermentation leaves clear
spiritual wine, and not (as too often) vinegar. I wish I could write
something more helpful to you in this great matter. But as I sit in
front of my large bay window and see the shadows on the grass and the
sunlight on the leaves, and the soft glimmer of the rosebuds left by
the storms, I can but believe that all will be very well. 'Trust in
the Lord, wait patiently for Him'--they are trite words. But He made
the grass, the leaves, the rosebuds, and the sunshine, and He is the
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And now the trite words have swelled
into a mighty argument."
I found more help in Theistic writers like Grey, and Agnostic like
Arnold, than I did in the Broad Church teachers, but these, of course,
served to make return to the old faith more and more impossible. The
Church services were a weekly torture, but feeling as I did that I was
only a doubter, I kept my doubts to myself. It was possible, I felt,
that all my difficulties might be cleared up, and I had no right to
shake the faith of others while in uncertainty myself. Others had
doubted and had afterwards recovered their faith; for the doubter
silence was a duty; the blinded had better keep their misery to
themselves.
During these weary months of anxiety and torment I found some relief
from the mental strain in practical parish work, nursing the sick,
trying to brighten the lot of the poor. I learned then some of the
lessons as to the agricultural labourer and the land that I was able
in after-years to teach from the platform. The movement among the
agricultural labourers, due to the energy and devotion of Joseph Arch,
was beginning to be discussed in the fens, and my sympathies went
strongly with the claims of the labourers, for I knew their
life-conditions. In one cottage I had found four generations sleeping
in one room--the great-grandfather and his wife, the unmarried
grandmother, the unmarried mother, the little child; three men lodgers
completed the tale of eight human beings crowded into that narrow,
ill-ventilated garret. Other cottages were hovels, through the broken
roofs of which poured the rain, and wherein rheumatism and ague lived
with the human dwellers. How could I do aught but sympathise with any
combination that aimed at the raising of these poor? But the
Agricultural Labourers' Union was bitterly opposed by the farmers, and
they would give no work to a "Union man." One example may serve for
all. There was a young married man with two small children, who was
sinful enough to go to a Union meeting and sinful enough to talk of it
on his return home. No farmer would employ him in all the district
round. He tramped about vainly looking for work, grew reckless, and
took to drink. Visiting his cottage, consisting of one room and a
"lean-to," I found his wife ill with fever, a fever-stricken babe in
her arms, the second child lying dead on the bed. In answer to my
soft-spoken questions: Yes, she was pining (starving), there was no
work. Why did she leave the dead child on the bed? Because she had no
other place for it till the coffin came. And at night the unhappy,
driven man, the fever-stricken wife, the fever-stricken child, the
dead child, all lay in the one bed. The farmers hated the Union
because its success meant higher wages for the men, and it never
struck them that they might well pay less rent to the absent landlord
and higher wage to the men who tilled their fields. They had only
civil words for the burden that crushed them, hard words for the
mowers of their harvests and the builders-up of their ricks; they made
common cause with their enemies instead of with their friends, and
instead of leaguing themselves together with the labourers as forming
together the true agricultural interest, they leagued themselves with
the landlords against the labourers, and so made ruinous fratricidal
strife instead of easy victory over the common foe. And, seeing all
this, I learned some useful lessons, and the political education
progressed while the theological strife went on within.
In the early autumn a ray of light broke the darkness. I was in London
with my mother, and wandered one Sunday morning into St. George's
Hall, where the Rev. Charles Voysey was preaching. There to my delight
I found, on listening to the sermon and buying some literature on sale
in the ante-room, that there were people who had passed through my own
difficulties, and had given up the dogmas that I found so revolting. I
went again on the following Sunday, and when the service was over I
noticed that the outgoing stream of people were passing by Mr. and
Mrs. Voysey, and that many who were evidently strangers spoke a word
of thanks to him as they went on. Moved by a strong desire, after the
long months of lonely striving, to speak to one who had struggled out
of Christian difficulties, I said to Mr. Voysey, as I passed in my
turn, "I must thank you for very great help in what you said this
morning," for in truth, never having yet doubted the existence of God,
the teaching of Mr. Voysey that He was "loving unto _every_ man, and
His tender mercy over _all_ His works," came like a gleam of light
across the stormy sea of doubt and distress on which I had so long
been tossing. The next Sunday saw me again at the Hall, and Mrs.
Voysey gave me a cordial invitation to visit them in their Dulwich
home. I found their Theism was free from the defects that had revolted
me in Christianity, and they opened up to me new views of religion. I
read Theodore Parker's "Discourse on Religion," Francis Newman's
works, those of Miss Frances Power Cobbe, and of others; the anguish
of the tension relaxed; the nightmare of an Almighty Evil passed away;
my belief in God, not yet touched, was cleared from all the dark spots
that had sullied it, and I no longer doubted whether the dogmas that
had shocked my conscience were true or false. I shook them off, once
for all, with all their pain and horror and darkness, and felt, with
joy and relief inexpressible, that they were delusions of the
ignorance of man, not the revelations of a God.
But there was one belief that had not been definitely challenged, but
of which the _rationale_ was gone with the orthodox dogmas now
definitely renounced--the doctrine of the Deity of Christ. The whole
teaching of the Broad Church school tends, of course, to emphasise the
humanity of Christ at the expense of His Deity, and when eternal
punishment and the substitutionary atonement had gone there seemed no
reason remaining sufficient to account for so tremendous a miracle as
the incarnation of the Deity. In the course of my reading I had become
familiar with the idea of Avataras in Eastern creeds, and I saw that
the incarnate God was put forward as a fact by all ancient religions,
and thus the way was paved for challenging the especially Christian
teaching, when the doctrines morally repulsive were cleared away. But
I shrank from the thought of placing in the crucible a doctrine so
dear from all the associations of the past; there was so much that was
soothing and ennobling in the idea of a union between Man and God,
between a perfect man and a Divine life, between a human heart and an
almighty strength. Jesus as God was interwoven with all art and all
beauty in religion; to break with the Deity of Jesus was to break with
music, with painting, with literature; the Divine Babe in His Mother's
arms; the Divine Man in His Passion and His Triumph; the Friend of Man
encircled with the majesty of the Godhead. Did inexorable Truth demand
that this ideal Figure, with all its pathos, its beauty, its human
love, should pass away into the Pantheon of the dead Gods of the Past?
Nor was this all. If I gave up belief in Christ as God, I must give up
Christianity as creed. Once challenge the unique position of the
Christ, and the name Christian seemed to me to be a hypocrisy, and its
renouncement a duty binding on the upright mind. I was a clergyman's
wife; what would be the effect of such a step? Hitherto mental pain
alone had been the price demanded inexorably from the searcher after
truth; but with the renouncing of Christ outer warfare would be added
to the inner, and who might guess the result upon my life? The
struggle was keen but short; I decided to carefully review the
evidence for and against the Deity of Christ, with the result that
that belief followed the others, and I stood, no longer Christian,
face to face with a dim future in which I sensed the coming conflict.
One effort I made to escape it; I appealed to Dr. Pusey, thinking that
if he could not answer my questionings, no answer to them could be
reasonably hoped for. I had a brief correspondence with him, but was
referred only to lines of argument familiar to me--as those of Liddon
in his "Bampton Lectures"--and finally, on his invitation, went down
to Oxford to see him. I found a short, stout gentleman, dressed in a
cassock, looking like a comfortable monk; but keen eyes, steadfastly
gazing straight into mine, told of the force and subtlety enshrined in
the fine, impressive head. But the learned doctor took the wrong line
of treatment; he probably saw I was anxious, shy, and nervous, and he
treated me as a penitent going to confession and seeking the advice of
a director, instead of as an inquirer struggling after truth, and
resolute to obtain some firm standing-ground in the sea of doubt. He
would not deal with the question of the Deity of Jesus as a question
for argument. "You are speaking of your Judge," he retorted sternly,
when I pressed a difficulty. The mere suggestion of an imperfection in
the character of Jesus made him shudder, and he checked me with raised
hand. "You are blaspheming. The very thought is a terrible sin." Would
he recommend me any books that might throw light on the subject? "No,
no; you have read too much already. You must pray; you must pray."
When I urged that I could not believe without proof, I was told,
"Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed"; and my
further questioning was checked by the murmur, "O my child, how
undisciplined! how impatient!" Truly, he must have found in me--hot,
eager, passionate in my determination to _know_, resolute not to
profess belief while belief was absent--nothing of the meek,
chastened, submissive spirit with which he was wont to deal in
penitents seeking his counsel as their spiritual guide. In vain did he
bid me pray as though I believed; in vain did he urge the duty of
blind submission to the authority of the Church, of blind, unreasoning
faith that questioned not. I had not trodden the thorny path of doubt
to come to the point from which I had started; I needed, and would
have, solid grounds ere I believed. He had no conception of the
struggles of a sceptical spirit; he had evidently never felt the pangs
of doubt; his own faith was solid as a rock, firm, satisfied,
unshakable; he would as soon have committed suicide as have doubted of
the infallibility of the "Universal Church."
"It is not your duty to ascertain the truth," he told me, sternly. "It
is your duty to accept and believe the truth as laid down by the
Church. At your peril you reject it. The responsibility is not yours
so long as you dutifully accept that which the Church has laid down
for your acceptance. Did not the Lord promise that the presence of the
Spirit should be ever with His Church, to guide her into all truth?"
"But the fact of the promise and its value are just the very points on
which I am doubtful," I answered.
He shuddered. "Pray, pray," he said. "Father, forgive her, for she
knows not what she says."
It was in vain that I urged on him the sincerity of my seeking,
pointing out that I had everything to gain by following his
directions, everything to lose by going my own way, but that it seemed
to me untruthful to pretend to accept what was not really believed.
"Everything to lose? Yes, indeed. You will be lost for time and lost
for eternity."
"Lost or not," I rejoined, "I must and will try to find out what is
true, and I will not believe till I am sure."
"You have no right to make terms with God," he retorted, "as to what
you will believe or what you will not believe. You are full of
intellectual pride."
I sighed hopelessly. Little feeling of pride was there in me just
then, but only a despairful feeling that in this rigid, unyielding
dogmatism there was no comprehension of my difficulties, no help for
me in my strugglings. I rose, and, thanking him for his courtesy, said
that I would not waste his time further, that I must go home and face
the difficulties, openly leaving the Church and taking the
consequences. Then for the first time his serenity was ruffled.
"I forbid you to speak of your disbelief," he cried. "I forbid you to
lead into your own lost state the souls for whom Christ died."
[Illustration: THOMAS SCOTT.]
Slowly and sadly I took my way back to the station, knowing that my
last chance of escape had failed me. I recognised in this famous
divine the spirit of priest-craft, that could be tender and pitiful to
the sinner, repentant, humble, submissive; but that was iron to the
doubter, the heretic, and would crush out all questionings of
"revealed truth," silencing by force, not by argument, all challenge
of the traditions of the Church. Out of such men were made the
Inquisitors of the Middle Ages, perfectly conscientious, perfectly
rigid, perfectly merciless to the heretic. To them heretics are
centres of infectious disease, and charity to the heretic is "the
worst cruelty to the souls of men." Certain that they hold, "by no
merit of our own, but by the mercy of our God, the one truth which He
has revealed," they can permit no questionings, they can accept nought
but the most complete submission. But while man aspires after truth,
while his mind yearns after knowledge, while his intellect soars
upward into the empyrean of speculation and "beats the air with
tireless wing," so long shall those who demand faith from him be met
by challenge for proof, and those who would blind him shall be
defeated by his resolve to gaze unblenching on the face of Truth, even
though her eyes should turn him into stone. It was during this same
autumn of 1872 that I first met Mr. and Mrs. Scott, introduced to them
by Mr. Voysey. At that time Thomas Scott was an old man, with
beautiful white hair, and eyes like those of a hawk gleaming from
under shaggy eyebrows. He had been a man of magnificent physique, and,
though his frame was then enfeebled, the splendid lion-like head kept
its impressive strength and beauty, and told of a unique personality.
Well born and wealthy, he had spent his earlier life in adventure in
all parts of the world, and after his marriage he had settled down at
Ramsgate, and had made his home a centre of heretical thought. His
wife, "his right hand," as he justly called her, was young enough to
be his daughter--a sweet, strong, gentle, noble woman, worthy of her
husband, and than that no higher praise could be spoken. Mr. Scott for
many years issued monthly a series of pamphlets, all heretical, though
very varying in their shades of thought; all were well written,
cultured, and polished in tone, and to this rule Mr. Scott made no
exception; his writers might say what they liked, but they must have
something to say, and must say it in good English. His correspondence
was enormous, from Prime Ministers downwards. At his house met people
of the most varied opinions; it was a veritable heretical _salon_.
Colenso of Natal, Edward Maitland, E. Vansittart Neale, Charles Bray,
Sarah Hennell, and hundreds more, clerics and laymen, scholars and
thinkers, all coming to this one house, to which the _entree_ was
gained only by love of Truth and desire to spread Freedom among men.
For Thomas Scott my first Freethought essay was written a few months
after, "On the Deity of Jesus of Nazareth," by the wife of a benefited
clergyman. My name was not mine to use, so it was agreed that any
essays from my pen should be anonymous.
And now came the return to Sibsey, and with it the need for definite
steps as to the Church. For now I no longer doubted, I had rejected,
and the time for silence was past. I was willing to attend the Church
services, taking no part in any not directed to God Himself, but I
could no longer attend the Holy Communion, for in that service, full
of recognition of Jesus as Deity and of His atoning sacrifice, I could
no longer take part without hypocrisy. This was agreed to, and well do
I remember the pain and trembling wherewith on the first "Sacrament
Sunday" after my return I rose and left the church. That the vicar's
wife should "communicate" was as much a matter of course as that the
vicar should "administer"; I had never done anything in public that
would draw attention to me, and a feeling of deadly sickness nearly
overcame me as I made my exit, conscious that every eye was on me, and
that my non-participation would be the cause of unending comment. As a
matter of fact, every one naturally thought I was taken suddenly ill,
and I was overwhelmed with calls and inquiries. To any direct question
I answered quietly that I was unable to take part in the profession of
faith required by an honest communicant, but the statement was rarely
necessary, as the idea of heresy in a vicar's wife is slow to suggest
itself to the ordinary bucolic mind, and I proffered no information
where no question was asked.
It happened that, shortly after that (to me) memorable Christmas of
1872, a sharp epidemic of typhoid fever broke out in the village of
Sibsey. The drainage there was of the most primitive type, and the
contagion spread rapidly. Naturally fond of nursing, I found in this
epidemic work just fitted to my hand, and I was fortunate enough to be
able to lend personal help that made me welcome in the homes of the
stricken poor. The mothers who slept exhausted while I watched beside
their darlings' bedsides will never, I like to fancy, think
over-harshly of the heretic whose hand was as tender and often more
skilful than their own. I think Mother Nature meant me for a nurse,
for I take a sheer delight in nursing any one, provided only that
there is peril in the sickness, so that there is the strange and
solemn feeling of the struggle between the human skill one wields and
the supreme enemy, Death. There is a strange fascination in fighting
Death, step by step, and this is of course felt to the full where one
fights for life as life, and not for a life one loves. When the
patient is beloved the struggle is touched with agony, but where one
fights with Death over the body of a stranger there is a weird
enchantment in the contest without personal pain, and as one forces
back the hated foe there is a curious triumph in the feeling which
marks the death-grip yielding up its prey, as one snatches back to
earth the life which had well-nigh perished.
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