The Fair Haven

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Shortly after this there happened another misadventure. A lady came
to stay with my mother, and was to sleep in a bed that had been
brought into our nursery, for my father's fortunes had already
failed, and we were living in a humble way. We were still but four
and five years old, so the arrangement was not unnatural, and it was
assumed that we should be asleep before the lady went to bed, and be
downstairs before she would get up in the morning. But the arrival
of this lady and her being put to sleep in the nursery were great
events to us in those days, and being particularly wanted to go to
sleep, we of course sat up in bed talking and keeping ourselves awake
till she should come upstairs. Perhaps we had fancied that she would
give us something, but if so we were disappointed. However, whether
this was the case or not, we were wide awake when our visitor came to
bed, and having no particular object to gain, we made no pretence of
sleeping. The lady kissed us both, told us to lie still and go to
sleep like good children, and then began doing her hair.

I remember that this was the occasion on which my brother discovered
a good many things in connection with the fair sex which had hitherto
been beyond his ken; more especially that the mass of petticoats and
clothes which envelop the female form were not, as he expressed it to
me, "all solid woman," but that women were not in reality more
substantially built than men, and had legs as much as he had, a fact
which he had never yet realised. On this he for a long time
considered them as impostors, who had wronged him by leading him to
suppose that they had far more "body in them" (so he said), than he
now found they had. This was a sort of thing which he regarded with
stern moral reprobation. If he had been old enough to have a
solicitor I believe he would have put the matter into his hands, as
well as certain other things which had lately troubled him. For but
recently my mother had bought a fowl, and he had seen it plucked, and
the inside taken out; his irritation had been extreme on discovering
that fowls were not all solid flesh, but that their insides--and
these formed, as it appeared to him, an enormous percentage of the
bird--were perfectly useless. He was now beginning to understand
that sheep and cows were also hollow as far as good meat was
concerned; the flesh they had was only a mouthful in comparison with
what they ought to have considering their apparent bulk--
insignificant, mere skin and bone covering a cavern. What right had
they, or anything else, to assert themselves as so big, and prove so
empty? And now this discovery of woman's falsehood was quite too
much for him. The world itself was hollow, made up of shams and
delusions, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Truly a prosaic young gentleman enough. Everything with him was to
be exactly in all its parts what it appeared on the face of it, and
everything was to go on doing exactly what it had been doing
hitherto. If a thing looked solid, it was to be very solid; if
hollow, very hollow; nothing was to be half and half, and nothing was
to change unless he had himself already become accustomed to its
times and manners of changing; there were to be no exceptions and no
contradictions; all things were to be perfectly consistent, and all
premises to be carried with extremest rigour to their legitimate
conclusions. Heaven was to be very neat (for he was always tidy
himself), and free from sudden shocks to the nervous system, such as
those caused by dogs barking at him, or cows driven in the streets.
God was to resemble my father, and the Holy Spirit to bear some sort
of indistinct analogy to my mother.

Such were the ideal theories of his childhood--unconsciously formed,
but very firmly believed in. As he grew up he made such
modifications as were forced upon him by enlarged perceptions, but
every modification was an effort to him, in spite of a continual and
successful resistance to what he recognised as his initial mental
defect.

I may perhaps be allowed to say here, in reference to a remark in the
preceding paragraph, that both my brother and myself used to notice
it as an almost invariable rule that children's earliest ideas of God
are modelled upon the character of their father--if they have one.
Should the father be kind, considerate, full of the warmest love,
fond of showing it, and reserved only about his displeasure, the
child having learned to look upon God as His Heavenly Father through
the Lord's Prayer and our Church Services, will feel towards God as
he does towards his own father; this conception will stick to a man
for years and years after he has attained manhood--probably it will
never leave him. For all children love their fathers and mothers, if
these last will only let them; it is not a little unkindness that
will kill so hardy a plant as the love of a child for its parents.
Nature has allowed ample margin for many blunders, provided there be
a genuine desire on the parent's part to make the child feel that he
is loved, and that his natural feelings are respected. This is all
the religious education which a child should have. As he grows older
he will then turn naturally to the waters of life, and thirst after
them of his own accord by reason of the spiritual refreshment which
they, and they only, can afford. Otherwise he will shrink from them,
on account of his recollection of the way in which he was led down to
drink against his will, and perhaps with harshness, when all the
analogies with which he was acquainted pointed in the direction of
their being unpleasant and unwholesome. So soul-satisfying is family
affection to a child, that he who has once enjoyed it cannot bear to
be deprived of the hope that he is possessed in Heaven of a parent
who is like his earthly father--of a friend and counsellor who will
never, never fail him. There is no such religious nor moral
education as kindly genial treatment and a good example; all else may
then be let alone till the child is old enough to feel the want of
it. It is true that the seed will thus be sown late, but in what a
soil! On the other hand, if a man has found his earthly father harsh
and uncongenial, his conception of his Heavenly Parent will be
painful. He will begin by seeing God as an exaggerated likeness of
his father. He will therefore shrink from Him. The rottenness of
stillborn love in the heart of a child poisons the blood of the soul,
and hence, later, crime.

To return, however, to the lady. When she had put on her night-gown,
she knelt down by her bedside and, to our consternation, began to say
her prayers. This was a cruel blow to both of us; we had always been
under the impression that grownup people were not made to say their
prayers, and the idea of any one saying them of his or her own accord
had never occurred to us as possible. Of course the lady would not
say her prayers if she were not obliged; and yet she did say them;
therefore she must be obliged to say them; therefore we should be
obliged to say them, and this was a very great disappointment. Awe-
struck and open-mouthed we listened while the lady prayed in sonorous
accents, for many things which I do not now remember, and finally for
my father and mother and for both of us--shortly afterwards she rose,
blew out the light and got into bed. Every word that she said had
confirmed our worst apprehensions; it was just what we had been
taught to say ourselves.

Next morning we compared notes and drew the most painful inferences;
but in the course of the day our spirits rallied. We agreed that
there were many mysteries in connection with life and things which it
was high time to unravel, and that an opportunity was now afforded us
which might not readily occur again. All we had to do was to be true
to ourselves and equal to the occasion. We laid our plans with great
astuteness. We would be fast asleep when the lady came up to bed,
but our heads should be turned in the direction of her bed, and
covered with clothes, all but a single peep-hole. My brother, as the
eldest, had clearly a right to be nearest the lady, but I could see
very well, and could depend on his reporting faithfully whatever
should escape me.

There was no chance of her giving us anything--if she had meant to do
so she would have done it sooner; she might, indeed, consider the
moment of her departure as the most auspicious for this purpose, but
then she was not going yet, and the interval was at our own disposal.
We spent the afternoon in trying to learn to snore, but we were not
certain about it, and in the end regretfully concluded that as
snoring was not de rigueur we had better dispense with it.

We were put to bed; the light was taken away; we were told to go to
sleep, and promised faithfully that we would do so; the tongue indeed
swore, but the mind was unsworn. It was agreed that we should keep
pinching one another to prevent our going to sleep. We did so at
frequent intervals; at last our patience was rewarded with the heavy
creak, as of a stout elderly lady labouring up the stairs, and
presently our victim entered.

To cut a long story short, the lady on satisfying herself that we
were asleep, never said her prayers at all; during the remainder of
her visit whenever she found us awake she always said them, but when
she thought we were asleep, she never prayed. It is needless to add
that we had the matter out with her before she left, and that the
consequences were unpleasant for all parties; they added to the
troubles in which we were already involved as to our prayers, and
were indirectly among the earliest causes which led my brother to
look with scepticism upon religion.

For a while, however, all went on as though nothing had happened. An
effect of distrust, indeed, remained after the cause had been
forgotten, but my brother was still too young to oppose anything that
my mother told him, and to all outward appearance he grew in grace no
less rapidly than in stature.

For years we led a quiet and eventless life, broken only by the one
great sorrow of our father's death. Shortly after this we were sent
to a day school in Bloomsbury. We were neither of us very happy
there, but my brother, who always took kindly to his books, picked up
a fair knowledge of Latin and Greek; he also learned to draw, and to
exercise himself a little in English composition. When I was about
fourteen my mother capitalised a part of her income and started me
off to America, where she had friends who could give me a helping
hand; by their kindness I was enabled, after an absence of twenty
years, to return with a handsome income, but not, alas, before the
death of my mother.

Up to the time of my departure my mother continued to read the Bible
with us and explain it. She had become deeply impressed with the
millenarian fervour which laid hold of so many some twenty-five or
thirty years ago. The Apocalypse was perhaps her favourite book in
the Bible, and she was imbued with the fullest conviction that all
the threatened horrors with which it teems were upon the eve of their
accomplishment. The year eighteen hundred and forty-eight was to be
(as indeed it was) a time of general bloodshed and confusion, while
in eighteen hundred and sixty-six, should it please God to spare her,
her eyes would be gladdened by the visible descent of the Son of Man
with a shout, with the voice of the Archangel, with the trump of God;
and the dead in Christ should rise first; then she, as one of them
that were alive, would be caught up with other saints into the air,
and would possibly receive while rising some distinguishing token of
confidence and approbation which should fall with due impressiveness
upon the surrounding multitude; then would come the consummation of
all things, and she would be ever with the Lord. She died peaceably
in her bed before she could know that a commercial panic was the
nearest approach to the fulfilment of prophecy which the year
eighteen hundred and sixty-six brought forth.

These opinions of my mother's were positively disastrous--injuring
her naturally healthy and vigorous mind by leading her to indulge in
all manner of dreamy and fanciful interpretations of Scripture, which
any but the most narrow literalist would feel at once to be
untenable. Thus several times she expressed to us her conviction
that my brother and myself were to be the two witnesses mentioned in
the eleventh chapter of the Book of Revelation, and dilated upon the
gratification she should experience upon finding that we had indeed
been reserved for a position of such distinction. We were as yet
mere children, and naturally took all for granted that our mother
told us; we therefore made a careful examination of the passage which
threw light upon our future; but on finding that the prospect was
gloomy and full of bloodshed we protested against the honours which
were intended for us, more especially when we reflected that the
mother of the two witnesses was not menaced in Scripture with any
particular discomfort. If we were to be martyrs, my mother ought to
wish to be a martyr too, whereas nothing was farther from her
intention. Her notion clearly was that we were to be massacred
somewhere in the streets of London, in consequence of the anti-
Christian machinations of the Pope; that after lying about unburied
for three days and a half we were to come to life again; and,
finally, that we should conspicuously ascend to heaven, in front,
perhaps, of the Foundling Hospital.

She was not herself indeed to share either our martyrdom or our
glorification, but was to survive us many years on earth, living in
an odour of great sanctity and reflected splendour, as the central
and most august figure in a select society. She would perhaps be
able indirectly, through her sons' influence with the Almighty, to
have a voice in most of the arrangements both of this world and of
the next. If all this were to come true (and things seemed very like
it), those friends who had neglected us in our adversity would not
find it too easy to be restored to favour, however greatly they might
desire it--that is to say, they would not have found it too easy in
the case of one less magnanimous and spiritually-minded than herself.
My mother said but little of the above directly, but the fragments
which occasionally escaped her were pregnant, and on looking back it
is easy to perceive that she must have been building one of the most
stupendous aerial fabrics that have ever been reared.

I have given the above in its more amusing aspect, and am half afraid
that I may appear to be making a jest of weakness on the part of one
of the most devotedly unselfish mothers who have ever existed. But
one can love while smiling, and the very wildness of my mother's
dream serves to show how entirely her whole soul was occupied with
the things which are above. To her, religion was all in all; the
earth was but a place of pilgrimage--only so far important as it was
a possible road to heaven. She impressed this upon both of us by
every word and action--instant in season and out of season, so that
she might fill us more deeply with a sense of God. But the
inevitable consequences happened; my mother had aimed too high and
had overshot her mark. The influence indeed of her guileless and
unworldly nature remained impressed upon my brother even during the
time of his extremest unbelief (perhaps his ultimate safety is in the
main referable to this cause, and to the happy memories of my father,
which had predisposed him to love God), but my mother had insisted on
the most minute verbal accuracy of every part of the Bible; she had
also dwelt upon the duty of independent research, and on the
necessity of giving up everything rather than assent to things which
our conscience did not assent to. No one could have more effectually
taught us to try TO THINK the truth, and we had taken her at her word
because our hearts told us that she was right. But she required
three incompatible things. When my brother grew older he came to
feel that independent and unflinching examination, with a
determination to abide by the results, would lead him to reject the
point which to my mother was more important than any other--I mean
the absolute accuracy of the Gospel records. My mother was
inexpressibly shocked at hearing my brother doubt the authenticity of
the Epistle to the Hebrews; and then, as it appeared to him, she
tried to make him violate the duties of examination and candour which
he had learnt too thoroughly to unlearn. Thereon came pain and an
estrangement which was none the less profound for being mutually
concealed.

This estrangement was the gradual work of some five or six years,
during which my brother was between eleven and seventeen years old.
At seventeen, I am told that he was remarkably well informed and
clever. His manners were, like my father's, singularly genial, and
his appearance very prepossessing. He had as yet no doubt concerning
the soundness of any fundamental Christian doctrine, but his mind was
too active to allow of his being contented with my mother's child-
like faith. There were points on which he did not indeed doubt, but
which it would none the less be interesting to consider; such for
example as the perfectibility of the regenerate Christian, and the
meaning of the mysterious central chapters of the Epistle to the
Romans. He was engaged in these researches though still only a boy,
when an event occurred which gave the first real shock to his faith.

He was accustomed to teach in a school for the poorest children every
Sunday afternoon, a task for which his patience and good temper well
fitted him. On one occasion, however, while he was explaining the
effect of baptism to one of his favourite pupils, he discovered to
his great surprise that the boy had never been baptised. He pushed
his inquiries further, and found that out of the fifteen boys in his
class only five had been baptised, and, not only so, but that no
difference in disposition or conduct could be discovered between the
regenerate boys and the unregenerate. The good and bad boys were
distributed in proportions equal to the respective numbers of the
baptised and unbaptised. In spite of a certain impetuosity of
natural character, he was also of a matter-of-fact and experimental
turn of mind; he therefore went through the whole school, which
numbered about a hundred boys, and found out who had been baptised
and who had not. The same results appeared. The majority had not
been baptised; yet the good and bad dispositions were so distributed
as to preclude all possibility of maintaining that the baptised boys
were better than the unbaptised.

The reader may smile at the idea of any one's faith being troubled by
a fact of which the explanation is so obvious, but in truth my
brother was seriously and painfully shocked. The teacher to whom he
applied for a solution of the difficulty was not a man of any real
power, and reported my brother to the rector for having disturbed the
school by his inquiries. The rector was old and self-opinionated;
the difficulty, indeed, was plainly as new to him as it had been to
my brother, but instead of saying so at once, and referring to any
recognised theological authority, he tried to put him off with words
which seemed intended to silence him rather than to satisfy him;
finally he lost his temper, and my brother fell under suspicion of
unorthodoxy.

This kind of treatment might answer with some people, but not with my
brother. He alludes to it resentfully in the introductory chapter of
his book. He became suspicious that a preconceived opinion was being
defended at the expense of honest scrutiny, and was thus driven upon
his own unaided investigation. The result may be guessed: he began
to go astray, and strayed further and further. The children of God,
he reasoned, the members of Christ and inheritors of the kingdom of
Heaven, were no more spiritually minded than the children of the
world and the devil. Was then the grace of God a gift which left no
trace whatever upon those who were possessed of it--a thing the
presence or absence of which might be ascertained by consulting the
parish registry, but was not discernible in conduct? The grace of
man was more clearly perceptible than this. Assuredly there must be
a screw loose somewhere, which, for aught he knew, might be
jeopardising the salvation of all Christendom. Where then was this
loose screw to be found?

He concluded after some months of reflection that the mischief was
caused by the system of sponsors and by infant baptism. He
therefore, to my mother's inexpressible grief, joined the Baptists
and was immersed in a pond near Dorking. With the Baptists he
remained quiet about three months, and then began to quarrel with his
instructors as to their doctrine of predestination. Shortly
afterwards he came accidentally upon a fascinating stranger who was
no less struck with my brother than my brother with him, and this
gentleman, who turned out to be a Roman Catholic missionary, landed
him in the Church of Rome, where he felt sure that he had now found
rest for his soul. But here, too, he was mistaken; after about two
years he rebelled against the stifling of all free inquiry; on this
rebellion the flood-gates of scepticism were opened, and he was soon
battling with unbelief. He then fell in with one who was a pure
Deist, and was shorn of every shred of dogma which he had ever held,
except a belief in the personality and providence of the Creator.

On reviewing his letters written to me about this time, I am
painfully struck with the manner in which they show that all these
pitiable vagaries were to be traced to a single cause--a cause which
still exists to the misleading of hundreds of thousands, and which, I
fear, seems likely to continue in full force for many a year to come-
-I mean, to a false system of training which teaches people to regard
Christianity as a thing one and indivisible, to be accepted entirely
in the strictest reading of the letter, or to be rejected as
absolutely untrue. The fact is, that all permanent truth is as one
of those coal measures, a seam of which lies near the surface, and
even crops up above the ground, but which is generally of an inferior
quality and soon worked out; beneath it there comes a layer of sand
and clay, and then at last the true seam of precious quality and in
virtually inexhaustible supply. The truth which is on the surface is
rarely the whole truth. It is seldom until this has been worked out
and done with--as in the case of the apparent flatness of the earth--
that unchangeable truth is discovered. It is the glory of the Lord
to conceal a matter: it is the glory of the king to find it out. If
my brother, from whom I have taken the above illustration, had had
some judicious and wide-minded friend to correct and supplement the
mainly admirable principles which had been instilled into him by my
mother, he would have been saved years of spiritual wandering; but,
as it was, he fell in with one after another, each in his own way as
literal and unspiritual as the other--each impressed with one aspect
of religious truth, and with one only. In the end he became perhaps
the widest-minded and most original thinker whom I have ever met; but
no one from his early manhood could have augured this result; on the
contrary, he shewed every sign of being likely to develop into one of
those who can never see more than one side of a question at a time,
in spite of their seeing that side with singular clearness of mental
vision. In after life, he often met with mere lads who seemed to him
to be years and years in advance of what he had been at their age,
and would say, smiling, "With a great sum obtained I this freedom;
but thou wast free-born."

Yet when one comes to think of it, a late development and laborious
growth are generally more fruitful than those which are over-early
luxuriant. Drawing an illustration from the art of painting, with
which he was well acquainted, my brother used to say that all the
greatest painters had begun with a hard and precise manner from which
they had only broken after several years of effort; and that in like
manner all the early schools were founded upon definiteness of
outline to the exclusion of truth of effect. This may be true; but
in my brother's case there was something even more unpromising than
this; there was a commonness, so to speak, of mental execution, from
which no one could have foreseen his after-emancipation. Yet in the
course of time he was indeed emancipated to the very uttermost, while
his bonds will, I firmly trust, be found to have been of inestimable
service to the whole human race.

For although it was so many years before he was enabled to see the
Christian scheme AS A WHOLE, or even to conceive the idea that there
was any whole at all, other than each one of the stages of opinion
through which he was at the time passing; yet when the idea was at
length presented to him by one whom I must not name, the discarded
fragments of his faith assumed shape, and formed themselves into a
consistently organised scheme. Then became apparent the value of his
knowledge of the details of so many different sides of Christian
verity. Buried in the details, he had hitherto ignored the fact that
they were only the unessential developments of certain component
parts. Awakening to the perception of the whole after an intimate
acquaintance with the details, he was able to realise the position
and meaning of all that he had hitherto experienced in a way which
has been vouchsafed to few, if any others.

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