My quest for God

Front matter

BL 200 .T73 1897 Trevor, John, 1855- My quest for God

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Contents

PAGE

NOTES TO ILLUSTRATIONS V

PROLOGUE yjj

Epilogue

PAGE I20

127 148

187 200 207 219 226

253 266 272

NOTES TO ILLUSTRATIONS.

Frontispiece. — My Wife. From a photograph taken in New York a few months before our marriage.

Page i. — My Paternal Grandfather. These portraits of my grandparents are given to illustrate what I have said of my maternal and paternal heritage, which needs some qualification, however. For this grandfather was intensely sensitive to music, a sensitiveness which runs in his family, though with no developed ear for it. On the other hand, I am aware of no susceptibility to music in my mother's family. My inability to live alone may also be traced to this grandfather, who married again in his old age, because he found life with only the semblance of home unendurable, arrangements made for his comfort notwithstanding. As I think of myself, I feel grateful to this somewhat severe old man, that neither could he accept the lines which relatives so thoughtfully laid down for him. A spark of humour there must have been, after all, somewhere in the depths of him. Did he not shock his second wife with his inability to refrain from getting up from the tea-table and dancing to the music of a hurdy-gurdy — its strains so irresistible ! A kind of unripened humour, I imagine, waiting for further development in later generations, who will laugh the more soundly for all this involved in him. Yet how shocked he was when he found us climbing over the bald head of our maternal grandfather, coming upon us suddenly in our riot, and lecturing us sternly on our want of respect for old age ! It is all very funny. But how darkly and deeply we are rooted ! — And I learn that my dear old grandmother's novel reading was carried to almost blamable extremes in one so pious ! She was deaf, and made her deafness an excuse for reading even at meals, though grudging none the less to lose anything of the conversation, and being rather exacting in expecting people to turn their faces to her in talking. And her needlework was neglected, too ! She would set herself about it — with a novel, innocently closed, not too far from her basket — would, after a few stitches, take it up, just to see what it was about — but the needlework would somehow slip from her hands, the novel thenceforth the real thing for her, absorbing her entirely. Dear old folk ! I thank God for your failings, blended as they were with such virtues !

vi NOTES TO ILLUSTRATIONS.

Page 2. — From a photograph taken not long after my father's death. These and the following portraits of myself are given to illustrate this story as a study in personal development.

,, 4. — Lynn Road, Wisbech — as I knew it. My Grandmother's house, the home of my boyhood, is the nearest of the three under the windmill— the one with the bay window.

,, 7. — My Maternal Grandmother.

„ 16. — From a photograph taken when I was about twelve.

„ 19. — The River at Wisbech.

„ 41. — My Uncle's Garden — wherein I read David Elginbrod— sacred to me as my Wife's Home, now about to pass into the hands of strangers.

„ 5^- — From a photograph taken before sailing for Sydney — which shows how near I came to being beaten then.

„ ^6. — Sydney Harbour, as I saw it across the Domain from my bedroom balcony.

„ 86. — The Grose Vallej^, from the point by Govett's Leap whence I first saw it.

„ 104.— A Sheet from the MS. of this Book, Placed here to qualify what I have said on page 179 — showing that, if I write easily, I am not easily satisfied, this work of reshaping and finishing being itself a labour of love with me. Indeed, but for stern necessity, I should keep back this book for much more thorough and prolonged revision than circumstances now permit. — This page may stand, too, as a comment on anything I may say, here or hereafter, on Freedom as an inward possession.

134. — Meadville Theological School, with the Professors and some of the Students, Session 1878-79.

156. — From a photograph taken soon after my return to Architecture, my Wife being about to visit America,

184. — Our Home at Ballingdon. From a water-colour drawing which I made on leaving,

200. — On the Yare near Norwich. In memory of a day spent there with wife and children, the latter sailing their boats while I made this water-colour sketch.

244, — From a photograph taken at the end of 1891, about two months after the opening of the Labour Church in Manchester.

266. — From a photograph taken at the time of completing this book — Autumn, 1897,

Prologue

In the Art of Living, it is as though we had to work for years with shutters closed, in such dim hght as may still pass through, or by such borrowed light as we can get, always with uncertainty and fear as to the final result. Then some unseen Hand throws open the shutters unawares, and we see our work in a strange glow of light, effects and meanings there of which we had not dreamed, our bUndest bunglings appearing as cool transparent shadows wherein the eye can now gratefully rest. In which moment of vision we learn many things — that it was enough that we meant to paint a picture, to do our best, though bungling about in the dark — that it was enough that we had a purpose in our work, though not the highest and truest, but the highest and truest we knew — that, to faithful effort, even in the dark, the Eye was not wanting that could guide our hand, though not yet realised as, in part, our own. But this, perhaps, surprises us most — that the product of our toil is stamped with that highest artistic quality — Inevitability — which reveals a Genius we had not suspected in our work. With all this sudden insight, a joy thrills through us, like that of a little child, whom some kindly visitor assures that he has grown. Then, when the shutters again fall to, we have confidence — a Self-confidence which transcends our self^that our work will tell ; though not, perhaps, as we had hoped.

To him who has once seen his past in the glow of this revealing light, life can never be the same again, though the glow may not last. Fate is known as a Friend, and Will as a gracious gift, not blind, though working in the dark.

Of ill-advised ambition and of pride I would stand clear, but yet to me I feel That an internal brightness is vouchsafed That must not die, that must not pass away.

Possessions have I that are solely mine, Something within which yet is shared by none, Not e'en the nearest to me and most dear, Something which power and effort may impart. I would impart it, I would spread it wide.

Wordsworth. — The Recluse.

[To face p. i.

Chapter I. Childhood

Had infanticide prevailed at the time of my birth, I should scarcely have been permitted to live. I was so poor a thing, that a relative expressed the opinion that it would be better for me to die. Certainly no influence of connections would have saved me; for my father was but a struggling linen-draper, in Scotland Road, Liverpool. Soon after my birth, which occurred on October yth, 1855, he failed. When I was but five months old, my mother, with my sister and myself, went to live with her parents at Wisbech, while my father took a situation for a short time in London. There he rejoined us, and we lived in a small cottage next to the comparatively large house and garden of my father's parents, who also lived at Wisbech. Thus my earliest years were associated with poverty and sorrow. ■

My paternal grandfather was a retired Lincolnshire farmer— a fine old Puritan, who shaved on Saturday night to avoid needless labour on the Sabbath, and objected to wearing linen fronts to cotton shirts. Both he and my grandmother had rectitude indelibly stamped upon them. They had become dissenters from conviction, and had thereby incurred the ostracism of their relatives in the Church. In those days dissent meant dissent indeed. Once I asked why we did not keep Good Friday, and was answered, "Because the Church people do." It was a question whether any member of the National Church could be saved.

My maternal grandfather had been a grocer and draper at

Wisbech, and was now living in retirement upon an income which strict economy made sufficient for the needs of very simple lives. He was a joyous, contented, humble soul, much given to meditation on heavenly things. Yet he was keenly interested in human affairs. Only this do I remember of him —that he used to take my sister and myself for walks, especially to a particular farm-yard to see the turkeys ; and that he was accustomed to sit alone in the dark, with a coloured silk handkerchief over his head, and a glass of ale by his side ; in which solitary musings or naps he contentedly allowed himself to be disturbed by us children, even to letting us climb into his chair and over his bald head.

From Wisbech we removed to Norwich, where my father's brother was prospering in business. Here also we lived in a small cottage overlooking what, in my memory, was a very large garden, with a wonderful green summerhouse on the further side. Some years since I sought out my former humble home, and found the garden, that loomed so large in memory, to be very small and commonplace.

In this cottage my father died when I was but four years old. I have a very vague recollection of him smoking a long clay pipe — a habit recommended to him, I believe, by his doctor. That is all. But one fact which I was early told of him made a deep impression on me, and was often a support to me in the religious struggles of my boyhood. At a time when my life was despaired of, he prayed, as a father would, that I might be spared ; but added, that he would rather I should die in infancy than grow up to be unsaved by the grace of God. When I was old enough to have the need of redemption impressed upon me — which was very early — the terror which fell upon me was sometimes alleviated by the conviction that this prayer of my father's would be answered, and that I had not been allowed to live to be lost in hell at last.

My father was a lover of books, and my own shelves contain several from the small collection which he left at his death. I have read some of his letters to my mother, and have a MS. book of his into which he used to copy extracts in poetry and prose. These remains all suggest a mind that had little opportunity for expansion, and insufficient force to break its fetters. On the other hand, he must have been well abreast of his times.

ITofaccp.

CHILDHOOD. 3

for I have a card showing that he was a member of the Anti Corn Law League, and among his books were the twenty-seven volumes of the Penny Cyclopaedia, Chambers' Encyclopedia OF Literature, RolHn's Ancient History, and a large volume of Shakspeare. These things indicate whither his tastes were leading him ; and they might have led him much further but for poverty and early death.

I daresay that an uninstructed person, reading the letters of my parents, would conclude that theirs was a religion of mere phrases, so constantly did their ideas express themselves in stereotyped terms. I remember well, for instance, how frequently the antithesis occurs between " the creature and the Creator," and, •' Nature and Grace ; " and how, by the habitual use of such set phrases, thought seems to be stifled and life quenched. But such a judgment would be wide of the truth. Formal as their religion was in its expression, it was very real in its experiences, and gave them strength to pass confidently through lives of exceptional pain and distress. Completely as I have myself abandoned this formal outside, I am increasingly convinced of the reality of that communion with God which was its inward essence, and that no life which does not flower into such communion has realised its own reality, or entered into that higher form of consciousness which is the goal of human development.

After my father's death, we removed again to Wisbech, where we lived in a small house on the Walsoken Road, occupied by my maternal grandparents, and an aunt, their only unmarried child. My mother soon became a confirmed invalid, and died when I was nine years old. I remember almost as little of her as of my father, for during the last years of her life she was too ill to have charge of her children— my sister and myself I knew she had much suffering to endure; and the knowledge of this, and of my father's early death, impressed me deeply with the tragic side of human life. But this tragic side of life, so early revealed to me, was not allowed to stand alone. I knew it was accepted with resignation and confidence, as from the hands of a loving Father, who did all things well. Suffering was to me, therefore, never a meaningless mystery, much less a horrible curse. It had its place in the divine economy, as a discipline for this life, and a preparation for the life to come.

V

A year after my father's death, my maternal grandparents removed to a house on the Lynn Road, which Hves in my memory as the home of my boyhood. I can see the old place vividly as I write — the stone-coloured bay window, the wide road, the eight-sailed mill, which many a time told me whether the wind was suitable for sailing my boats, the canal with its muddy banks joining the tidal river at the end of the road, where I often watched the vessels load and unload their cargoes of coal and timber and salt. The little garden at the back I also see, with the rockery in the middle, covered with Poor-man's-Pepper and London Pride, the rose-covered trellis-work at the end, hiding the outbuildings beyond, and behind which I was allowed to make fires of the kindling stored in the shed ; the large bowlinggreen adjoining the garden, wherein, from the bedroom windows, I sometimes witnessed fireworks, and once saw Blondin perform his wonderful feats on the rope.

My surroundings were thus of the most commonplace sort, but they were the scene of an intense though simple life, into which I was early initiated. Here were made known to me, in many a soul-stirring talk, the mysteries of life and death, of righteousness and sin, of redemption and damnation, of predestination and free grace, and of the crowning act of God's love in appearing in human form on earth, and suffering on the cross. I was indeed a "child of many prayers," my grandmother and my aunt feeling doubtless the more anxious about me because the natural guardians of my childhood were withdrawn.

Within a year from our removal to Lynn Road, my grandfather died. The house still remained my home ; but after the death of my other grandfather, my sister went to live with his widow — a second wife. My sister and I were thus permanently separated, and the loneliness of my boyhood increased.

My grandmother's talks on religion made a most profound impression on my sensitive mind. My earliest clear recollections are associated with the fear of Hell. I used to sleep in the same room with my aunt, in a dark blue iron crib which stood beside her bed. Well do I remember waking up one morning, in this little crib, with a most distinct vision of Satan, with broad black wings, hovering over my head, as if he had come to carry me away in my sleep. I frequently had nightmare. Besides the more usual kinds, there was one which was exceptionally and in-

CHILDHOOD. 5

describably terrible. I used to fancy myself looking through a

key-hole into an empty room, which immediately grew bigger and

bigger, the walls receding continually from me with great rapidity.

My mind, meanwhile, suffered the intensest agony, as though

it were being drawn out to fill the ever growing space ; and I

woke with the sense of having been stretched on a mental rack,

until my whole being had been almost wrenched asunder. The /

impression of infinity as endless extension, and the intense torture

I experienced in feeling myself, as it were, drawn out and out ,

to fill this growing space, were doubtless the result of my terrified

broodings over the endless pain and duration of Hell.

How to escape Hell ! — that was the one absorbing problem ^

of my early years. I remember once persuading myself that, if I could keep one of the Ten Commandments unbroken, I might escape ; the one I felt pretty sure of obeying being, " Thou shalt do no murder." Unfortunately for my peace of mind, I sought a confirmation of my opinion, but was assured that, not only would keeping one commandment be insufficient to save me, but that breaking one was equal to breaking them all. To enforce this statement, James, ii. to, was quoted. " For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is become guilty of all." The law was regarded as a chain, one link of which being broken, the whole would fall to the ground.

Thus, while I was still so young, the dark cloud of Hell began to overshadow my whole life. It was not because it was pre- ^

sented to me very dramatically in my religious teaching, though it was always there — real, awful, unending, and only to be avoided through faith in the blood of Christ. There must have been something in my own mind which could not allow so frightful a reality to remain in the background, but which insisted upon dragging it out into the fullest light. If Hell was there, I must know all about it, cost me what mental torture it would. So I eagerly filled up from the Bible itself what was left untold of my possible fate — the worm that dieth not, the fire that is not quenched, the smoke of their torment ascending for ever and ever. I feel appalled even now as I recall the sensations which these pictures produced.

Above all things was a thunderstorm terrible to me, especially at night. Bathed in perspiration and trembling with terror, I asked myself what it would be if, that very night, I were killed and awoke in Hell, where I should never cease to suffer, and whence there would be absolutely no hope of escape. It was the endlessness of the thing that horrified me, the thought that, after a thousand years, or a million years, the torment of pain and despair would but have begun. No murderer walking to his doom on the scaffold has suffered more terribly than I thus suffered as a child. Over and over again have I wished that I had never been born.

Very early I came to say to myself, " It is I ! " Like a red hot furnace around me was the awful sense of being unable to escape from my own personality. After all the millions and millions of people who had been born upon this earth, I at last had come, conscious of myself as no one else could be conscious of me, and with a consciousness that could never die. It was not another's life that I was conscious of ; it was my own life ; and, once begun, it could never, never, cease. Often, in my lessons, or at play, this thought, " It is I ! " would suddenly fill my mind to the exclusion of all else, making my brain reel with its tremendous import.

It is impossible to describe this experience in all its frightful reality — the perception of the difference of my own personality from the personality of those about me ; the feeling that, amidst all these conscious bodies, it was this one alone that was filled with the consciousness of my particular self; the conviction that the most awful and irreparable doom might already be mine in the consciousness of God, in which I had been taught that past, present and future lived as one ever-present thought ; the knowledge that no human soul could interfere in my relations with God, which were already determined in his unchangeable will. A naked, solitary soul, I lay on the burning desert of life, no shelter possible from the searching eye of God. All this mental agony, prompted by the thought, " It is I ! " became so acute, that I gradually discarded the idea of Hell as a place of physical torment ; for in my own mind I bore a pain unspeakably worse than any physical pain I had known.

And yet my grandmother, to whom I was most indebted for religious teaching, had, like my grandfather, a warm and generous heart, and was very human withal. None the less was she so affectionately faithful in seeking the salvation of souls, that her conversations were dreaded, not by myself alone, but by all the

CtilLDHOOb. f

unsaved young people with whom she came in contact. On the other hand, she was, in her old age, a great reader of novels and of advanced literature. The first novel I ever read, Agatha's Husband, was one which had been lent to her, and which she had no objection to my reading. She had the Examiner, too, every week, sent to her regularly by a friend, and passed on by her to other friends, after she had carefully cut out anything she considered dangerous. I well remember reading Ecce Homo to her. This, however, ended with the remark, "You had better put that book away, John, and get the Bible." Indeed, in the only picture of her that lives in my memory, I see her seated at the table in the little dining-room with the bay window overlooking the small garden, with glasses on, a large Bible before her, and a tender smile of deep peace illumining her aged face. Whatever excursions she made in her reading, the Bible was still her one book.

Her friend in these excursions into the world of letters was a young lady of exceptional vitality, who long rebelled against the restrictions laid upon her in the name of Religion, and was as much of a Revoltress, and therefore a heroine, as such a community could well produce. She visited my grandmother regularly, and lent her books, with the express stipulation that she was never to be talked to about her soul; a condition which my grandmother, I believe, loyally observed. In her old age this friendship kept the world open to her, and gave her intercourse with a kindred though more youthful spirit. Once, when remonstrated with on the ground of her novel-reading, she excused herself by saying, that she was so old that she quickly forgot what she read.

To me there is something quaintly pathetic in all this — the human heart, even in old age, asserting itself half-apologetically in defiance of a narrow creed, which was yet so sincerely believed. If I, too, had been strong enough to have demanded a truce to these conversations of the soul, and to have lived with my grandmother in the cooler atmosphere of Novels, Ecce Homo ! and the Examiner — ! Still, I had these open to me ; and though I was too young to make much of them at the time, I think they were as a seed in my life which afterwards bore fruit. I have the memory, too, of my grandmother, apart from her terrible creed — the memory of a devout, tender and strong soul, bowed down with deepest sorrow, yet sustained by the very faith which gave the keenest pang to her grief. For she had lost her oldest and dearest son— a very able and charming man— "without hope," as her creed compelled her to believe. She, too, had had her Gethsemane, and had accepted the awful cup. At what cost had she not kept her warm heart, her broad sympathies, and the tender lines on her face !

Of my Aunt, who was for years a mother to me, how can I adequately speak ? She still lives, in her old age bearing much physical suffering with a brave and warm heart. Such freedom for expansion as I enjoyed in early life I owe chiefly to her. It was she who allowed me to make the above-mentioned fires at the bottom of the garden, never once complaining of the waste of wood, though always obliged to be very economical in her housekeeping. Later, when 1 wanted to make dutch-ovens, tin boilers, and wooden boats, she never laid me under the least restraint. She loved me dearly, as a child of her own ; and with a fear lest she should be unkind to me, as the child of another. From little things that I still recall, I am sure I helped to fill a lonely corner in her heart. Deeply religious as she was, I cannot remember that she talked to me systematically as her mother did, though she was very faithful to me when I committed a fault, pointing out the wrong I had done, and then praying with me that I might be forgiven.

I was never taught to " say my prayers," and never encouraged to pray as an act which was in itself a means of grace. Nothing was allowed to come into my mind as a possible medium between myself and God. I always had a sense that it was with God immediately that I had to do. Prayer to God could be of no service, save so far as it was prompted by his Holy Spirit ; and my relatives had the wit to understand that the Holy Spirit would not prompt a child to repeat "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild," every night on going to bed.

Moreover, prayer to Jesus was not allowed ; only prayer in the name of Jesus. Jesus was "God manifest in the flesh," not the Son of God manifest in the flesh. While the deity of Christ was held, the doctrine of the Trinity was denied. The unity of the Godhead was asserted without compromise — Father, Son and Holy Ghost being but different manifestations of the one Eternal Spirit. The idea that " Jesus laid His glory by " was declared to

CHILDHOOD. 9

be unscriptural, for there was no Jesus before the incarnation. Equally false was the conception, more prevalent then than now, that God needed reconciling to the world, and that Jesus came to the rescue of fallen man by offering himself as a sacrifice to appease the Divine wrath. They accepted simply the statement of Paul, "that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself." I never thought that the God against whom I had sinned, and the God who suffered to save me, were two different persons of a Triune God.

Thus the realities of the religious life were brought awfully near to me as a child. There was no hocus-pocus of any kind— no infant baptism, no god-fathers and god-mothers, no repetition of prayers, no catechism, no means of grace save the immediate operation of God's Spirit in the heart. Adult baptism was practised, though not in itself as a means of grace, but as a grateful confession of faith, and as a symbol of a spiritual regeneration which had already taken place. So, too, the Lord's Supper was partaken by all baptised persons, as an act of gratitude and the symbol of a permanent spiritual condition. Indeed, taking the Bible for their sole guide, these people seem to me to have penetrated to bottom facts more deeply than most. At any rate there was none of the weakness either of Liberalism or of Ceremonialism among them ; no attempt to explain away or to dress up the naked realities of their faith.

The longer I live in this world of convenient make-believe, the more I thank God for the influence of these pious old folk. False as many of their beliefs may have been, how sound and solid and true they themselves were ! There was something heroic, indeed, in the lives of many of them. Though to all the world their grocery and their drapery seemed their sole standard, and the sum total of their achievement ; yet, behind the counter, and behind the little dining-room whence the counter could be watched, and behind the narrow yard full of boxes and tubs, their real life was lived— a tremendous soul-drama, ending in triumphant entrance into immortal bliss. Whatever sorrow my boyhood brought me, I am sure that intimate contact with such intense living, though it almost scorched me up, was well worth the cost. It made it for ever impossible for me to mistake external appearances for the inward realites of life, or to accept any cheap interpretation of human existence.