As a child she had scarcely any religious impressions. Of course she said her prayers; they all did, at the mother's knee, before Sleepy Time came; but that is not saying that she prayed, or even dimly understood the meaning of the word.
At the top of the backstairs, in a dim old corridor, over the wooden bin for the fuel used in that part of the house, a piece of plaster had fallen from the whitewashed wall, about the size, and something in the shape of, a man's head, seen in profile. This the children endowed with awful and supernatural qualities, and entitled it the Boody Man; though I have never been able to discover what the name signified, or how it originated. They crept on tiptoe, and with bated breath, to gaze upon this profile. Then, seized with sudden and unreasoning panic, they would flee trembling from its presence.
Even yet our heroine can recall the chill at her heart, as her trembling little body was carried swiftly away on the flying feet of terror. No pause would they make until, a timid little band, the children stood shaking against the wall, at the extreme end of the corridor,—remaining there, however, only long enough to screw their courage up sufficiently to repeat the same experiment, always with the same result.
I have often wondered what they were afraid of. Had they some dim latent notion that the Boody Man was the Evil One himself, come down in person, on a crumbling whitewashed wall, to punish them for their many childish sins of omission and commission? I can not tell; I have never solved the problem; but this I know, that when, as a woman grown, our heroine revisited her childhood's home, it needed a considerable pinch of moral courage to induce her to mount those dim backstairs alone; and that quite a creepy, uncomfortable feeling came over her, as she gazed upon the time-enlarged features of the memorable Boody Man. Also did it require all her dignity to enable her to turn her back, and retire gracefully from his once fearful presence, and not beat a retreat as hasty and ignominious as those of her baby days.
What is, what can be, a child's religion, after all? It knows very little of the finite and material world around. How, then, can it grasp or understand aught of the spiritual and infinite? I believe it is mostly fear, not love, that governs little children in their regard for God and Truth. The mother simply says, when the child errs: "God does not love a naughty child;" or "God will punish you;" or "God hates a child who tells a lie;" till the child is confused, creates for itself the image of a great, powerful, punishing personality, calls this God, and trembles in its little heart; but does not, can not love this image, for Love casts out fear.
As she grew up she was a naughty child. Looking back now, to those far-off days, I believe she must have been an unusually naughty child,—self-willed, obstinate, possessed of a violent and sulky temper. Of real religion, or love to God, she had none. Her prayers, said nightly beside her bed, were used more as a charm, than anything else; as if mere lip-petitions, of so many set words, could ensure her safety from the phantom dangers of the night. She learned the Catechism, the Collects, the Commandments,—by rote, of course; and though I believe the spirit, as well as the letter, were conscientiously expounded to her, yet were they so many blank pages in her heart.
The family home was in the West of Ireland. The Church had been disestablished, and they lived in the midst of bigoted Roman Catholic peasantry. The Protestant population was small and widely scattered. Some well-meaning and earnest clergyman would conduct morning service at one parish church, drive many miles to have Sunday-school and prayer-meeting in another, and perhaps hold evening services at a third. His day was made up of preaching, exhortation, and bodily discomfort,—as anyone who has ever driven over wild Western Irish hogs, in an Atlantic rainstorm, can testify. Such men, however, were the exception. The rule was, for the rector of the parish to drive on Sunday morning, from his lodgings in the nearest town,—or from the rectory, if the place afforded one,—arriving at church somewhere between the hours of eleven and twelve. If the congregation had arrived, he entered and commenced the service. If not, he waited.
As there was generally an interval, our heroine remembers the long chats, held with cousins and distant neighbors, as they sat on the ancient moss-green wall, under the great beech-trees, or on the crumbling gravestones of her ancestors, who no doubt, in ages long since past, had sauntered and gossiped just as their descendants were doing. Then they would go into the dear old church, where the small gallery was her family's exclusive property,—carpeted, cushioned, with an open grate in one corner.
She always looked forward with eager longing to one part of the Litany,—the middle, I suppose,—and impatiently thought the minister would never reach it. At that point the mother evidently considered the children had knelt long enough, so she allowed them to sit on the hassocks, and gave them biscuits to keep them quiet. The service was rattled over as fast as the minister could talk. Then came hand shakings, more local gossip, and various arrangements for the week. The rector drove off for luncheon, with some hospitably-minded squire, and worship was over till the next Sunday.
As our heroine grew older, theology occupied more of her thoughts. There must be something in religion, or so many people would never conform to its regulations. She was told she must have faith, that she must trust and believe. Have faith, trust, and belief in what or whom? The story of the Bible she knew, and believed it as she did any other history. It appealed to her imagination, but never touched her heart. She accepted it all, was interested in it, and thought the wars of the Israelites as entertaining as those of Greece and Rome. She enjoyed the poetry of the Psalms, the tales of the escapes and adventures of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and the imaginative genius of Saint John's Revelation; but the Testament was to her a book merely, and not much above many other books, after all.
She was sent to school,—first in Wales, where she attended the Episcopal Church, but received little religious instruction of any kind, her whole attention, every service, being concentrated upon the very active flirtation carried on between the pretty English teacher and a dark-haired young man who sat opposite. She trembled, turned hot and cold by turns, and blushed continually crimson, in her agony lest they should be found out; but fortunately, or unfortunately, the Principal seemed blind and deaf to all around her.
After the first term our heroine was removed to another school, in the North of England. Here the Principal was anxious for her pupils' moral welfare, and spared neither time nor strength to make such girls what they ought to be, —true-hearted and pure-thinking English women. Her genuine goodness, without cant or sentimentality, laid, I believe, the foundation of many a happy fireside.
Here the school was divided in its worship, some members attending the Established Church, and others the Dissenting Chapel. As our girl belonged to the Low-Church Irish party, she was allowed her choice. Thinking she had had enough of Episcopal worship, she joined the Congregationalists. After some time she regularly became a church-member, and for the first time partook of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. She had hoped great things of this bread and wine,—that they would bring her peace, and forever still the vague and unsatisfied longing for something higher, better, grander than herself; for even in her schooldays she experienced this unrest. She was disappointed, and again fell back on self as the supply of all her needs. She would acknowledge no need of God; she would utter no cry for help. Moi-méme me suffira, should be her motto for the future,—Myself must Suffice for myself.
Since her earliest babyhood she had felt a consciousness of the need of something to love,—something beside and beyond her brothers and sisters, something that would be hers, her very own, to care for and cherish forever. First, she tried to inspire herself with a genuine affection for her dolls. Senseless things! They never satisfied her for an hour. Then if she only had a dog, a real live dog, that could love her in return,—this surely would make her happy! She had the dog; she lavished upon him all the strength of love in her, and still she was not satisfied.
Then at school ambition seized her. She would work hard, stand first in all her classes, and win fame in her own small world. She succeeded, only to gain the well-merited rebuke from her Principal, that she made this success a god unto herself; and again she was not satisfied. She entered for one of the great public examinations, now held for women, by the Universities. Surely such work as this must entail would fill her life so full that it could need nothing else. For a time, hard study did suffice. Up early and late, taking no rest, was the order of her days; and when the trial-period came, she felt confident of reaping the fruits of her labors. Yet when she gained what she sought, she was still unsatisfied.
One day, in a vacant interval between her examination-studies, she wandered alone into the streets of the great city. Finding herself at the door of a church, she half-unconsciously entered. The building was vast and dim. It was cool and quiet there. The girl dropped on her knees, placed her tired head between her hands, and for a space was calm and quiet. Presently there came a sense of something else besides her own personality in that great empty space. She felt a vague, dim consciousness of wonder at the nothingness of things, at her recent eager anxiety about her marks and her possible failure. She felt like questioning the Great Unknown for the cause of Life, and wondered whether this existence were Life after all, and what was beyond and after it. At last she arose,—quieted, if still unsatisfied; but as she went out, she dipped her hand in the font of holy water by the door, and paused to ask the verger the name of the building, as he drew aside to let her pass into the street. "The Church of the Holy Name," he said; and the girl made a resolve, which she afterwards fulfilled, of revisiting that church as often as she had opportunity. I am not sure but sitting quietly at the end of the long aisle, gazing at the distant altar, with its ever-burning tapers and its slowly ascending incense,—I am not sure but thus sitting still with folded hands, and realizing, half-unconsciously, the emptiness of all her life,—the girl did not come somewhat nearer Truth as it is, than she had ever done before.
Her English schooldays over, she was sent to finish her education at a German pension, where the whole atmosphere was totally different from any she had before breathed. It was a large establishment, conducted by two women, assisted by some half-dozen other teachers, as unalterably wise women as themselves. Coming straight from a life in which—whatever her faults, and they were many—she had been both loved and trusted,—and plunged into what seemed to her a narrow, Puritanical way of life, the girl rebelled hard against authority, and made herself altogether as thoroughly miserable as she could well do under any circumstances. Knowing the old ladies to be suspicious, and feeling herself watched, instead of gradually allaying their fears by her conduct, and proving herself trustworthy, she took the opposite course, and purposely destroyed any good impressions of her they might have formed. I never could discover exactly what were their religious views. The girl cared naught for these things, and understood little of the German language.
She says her teachers were Lutherans of the Old School; but some of their forms and ceremonies seemed little in accordance with the great Reformer's sweeping views. In church, in the dusty gallery where they sat, the girl dreamed of home, or else imagined long tales, which she fondly hoped would one day see the light in print. The monotonous, seemingly endless hymns (sung sitting down), with the preacher's equally long and monotonous sermon, sometimes soothed her into a half-belief that her wild and restless heart was, after all, not so very stormy and unquiet; while at other times she felt driven almost frantic. Oh for an earthquake, a flood, a second Vesuvius, a destruction of Pompeii! Anything, anything, to break the stagnant composure of the placid German teachers, and the plump complacency of the pupils! Nothing ever did happen, and the girl took refuge in books. They at least were friends, companions! So for a time she lived in fiction; and she, who could read the story of the Cross of Calvary unmoved, shed tears over imaginary wrongs and woes, or in mental vision saw herself by the side of Joan of Arc, and heard the battle-cry and deliverance-song of rescued France. She mourned over the hapless Stuarts as warmly, as personally, as though their race had been her own. She watched with Napoleon on the lonely isle, with its surf-worn shore. In short, she became a hero-worshipper, and for a time succeeded in losing her identity in that of past ages; but reading palled, as all else had done, and she was still unsatisfied.
All her life she had been subject to what her school-friends called manias,— violent attention to and interest in one subject, for the time being, to the exclusion of all others. Fancy-work, painting, gardening, even sock-knitting, each in its turn was cast aside, till she began to feel as if there were really nothing left in which she could become interested.
Finally she said to herself: "I will be good and devote myself to others, and thus at last find happiness." So she returned to England, and there gave two years of her life, working for the education of a girl who deceived and disappointed her. She awoke from that dream also, a little older, more sorrowful, and less hopeful than before. Circumstances next took her to the southern coast of England, into a hotbed of High Churchism and Ritualism; and the girl trusted that here she might obtain what she had vainly sought, but could not find. She fasted, she prayed, she read innumerable devout books, she attended early celebrations of the Eucharist. She even humbled herself at the Protestant confessional, though this was strongly opposed to both her own feeling and her early traditions, in the hope of thus ridding herself of the burden that oppressed her. She was here confirmed as a member of the Established Church; but even as she knelt, with the Bishop's hand upon her head, and heard his words of blessing, she knew that there was yet something beyond and behind it all, which she could not grasp. Even with the priest's absolution sounding in her ears, her heart was still empty and unsatisfied. Low Church Protestantism taught her Faith without Works. Ritualism showed her Works indeed, but where was the tangible Faith? So this dream also passed, as the others had done, and still our heroine was not happy.
A great domestic change obliged her to leave England for America. There, bereft of home and friends, she stretched out empty and yearning hands to a dead and empty Heaven. I believe, taking all things together, this must have been her worst experience. Utterly cast down, hopeless, despairing, devoured by a homesickness that was as acute as physical pain, with no beacon for the future and only useless regrets for a dead past, she felt herself "without hope and without God in the world." At last she roused herself once more. Money was, without doubt, the great and ruling power of the universe. She would labor late and early, amass wealth, and make a home and a place for herself among men. So she ate the bread of carefulness, and her leisure hours were few, until sickness came, and instead of having a bank account, she ended that portion of her life in debt.
Then love came into her life, human love; and she thought at last her happiness had come. She wondered at herself, that it did not fill her heart, and satisfy her.
When that dream, too, passed unfulfilled, and this woman found the earth as iron beneath, and the heavens as brass above; when she was completely emptied of all her earthly hopes and longings; when she was alone and desolate, without home or love or ambition; when existence was as dust and ashes within her grasp,—then came Truth. Christian Science called upon her, and awoke her as one awaketh from a deep sleep. Now she knows that all her hopes and fears and failures were blind gropings in the dark; that God is not to be ignorantly believed and feared, but intelligently understood and demonstrated,—that everywhere His blessed Truth (He is Truth!) is brightly shining, and that already she now and then catches a faint glimmer of its purity and radiance, and can look forward to the perfect day. Although she sometimes seems again to lose her way, and grasp blindly in the darkness, she does not grow discouraged; for after such long stumbling it is hard to walk at once firm and erect. She knows that in God alone is Life, and that with His Truth, some day, perhaps in the not far distant future, she will at last be satisfied!
