The Story of Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland and of the new Gospel of Interpretation Part 1

The Story of Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland and of the new Gospel of Interpretation.

by Edward Maitland.

PREFACE

TO THE THIRD EDITION.

Since the publication in 1893 of this book which, as stated in Chapter VII., was "intended but as an epitome and instalment" of a far larger book then in course of preparation, the full and final account of the "New Gospel of Interpretation" has been given to the world. In 1896 Edward Maitland published his _magnum opus_, "The Life of Anna Kingsford," in two large volumes of 420 pages, "ill.u.s.trated with portraits, views, and facsimiles." This is, and will always be, the biography _par excellence_ of Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland, and it is absolutely indispensable for those who would know all that there is to be known of them and their work and of the "New Gospel of Interpretation." As that book, however, on account of its great length, must always be a costly book, and therefore beyond the means of many who would like to have some reliable information concerning Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland and their work, and as there are many who, on account of their time for reading being limited or their inclination to read being little, require information within the compa.s.s of a small book or go without it altogether, there will, notwithstanding the publication of the "Life of Anna Kingsford," be a demand for this shorter "Story," which is so admirably suited to meet the needs or requirements of these cla.s.ses of persons; for, be it noted, the publication of "The Life of Anna Kingsford" has not in any way depreciated the value of this book in this sense that, having been written by one of the two recipients of the "New Gospel of Interpretation," it is a first authority second to none for the statements therein contained.

The change in the t.i.tle of the book from "The Story of the New Gospel of Interpretation" to the present t.i.tle calls for some explanation and justification, because the former t.i.tle was an excellent one in many respects, and the book has become known to many by that t.i.tle. The "Gospel of Interpretation" is the name or description which was given by its Divine Inspirers, the Hierarchy of the Spheres Celestial, to the work of which this book tells the story, in token of its relation to the previous "Gospel of Manifestation." The former t.i.tle implied, as the Author pointed out in his preface, that that which this book propounded was "not really a new Gospel, but one of Interpretation only"; and this is not really new, but, as the Author has also pointed out, "so old as to have become forgotten and lost, being the purely spiritual sense, as discerned from the purely spiritual standpoint originally intended and insisted on by Scripture itself as its true sense and standpoint, and those which alone render Scripture intelligible"[1]. But notwithstanding this, and notwithstanding that on the front page it was expressly stated that "There shall nothing new be told; but that which is ancient shall be interpreted," the former t.i.tle failed to convey to the minds of some the meaning that it was intended to convey, and it gave no indication of the biographical nature of the work. Many who otherwise would have read the book refrained from doing so because they thought that a new Gospel, inconsistent with and perhaps opposed to if not intended to supersede the old Gospel, was propounded. It is necessary, therefore, for me to state, if possible more explicitly than it was stated in the previous editions of this book, that this is not an attempt to create a new Gospel differing from that of Jesus Christ[2]. Anna Kingsford's and Edward Maitland's mission and aim was to interpret the Christ, not to rival or supersede Him. The "New Gospel" is, first and foremost, _interpretative_, and is destructive only in the sense of reconstructive. "It tells nothing new; it simply restores and reinforces the old, even the Gnosis, which, as the doctrine of the Church unfallen, is that also of the Church fallen, though the latter has lost the key to its interpretation"[3]. Nor is the teaching represented by this book opposed to the existence of an objective Church. Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland fully recognised the necessity of such an organisation for the formulation, propagation, and exposition of religion. Their opposition was "only to the recognition by the Church of the objective, historical, and materialistic aspect of religion, _to the exclusion_ of that which really const.i.tutes religion, namely, its subjective, spiritual, and substantial aspect, wherein alone it appeals to the mind and soul, and is efficacious for redemption." The aim of the New Gospel "is defined exactly," said Edward Maitland, "in the following citation from St. Dionysius the Areopagite 'not to destroy, but to construct; or, rather, to destroy by construction; to conquer error by the full presentment of truth.' As will be obvious, such a design does not necessarily involve the destruction of anything that exists whether of symbol or ritual, or ecclesiastical organisation, but only their regeneration by means of their translation into their spiritual and divinely intended sense. And it is precisely because that sense has been lost--as declared in Scripture it had long been, and would yet long be, lost--that a new 'Gospel of Interpretation' has been vouchsafed in fulfilment of the promises in Scripture to that effect; and this from the source of the original Divine revelation, namely, the Church Celestial, and by the method which always was that of such revelation, namely, the intuition operating under special illumination.... Even the priest, though hitherto deservedly regarded as the 'enemy of man,' will not be destroyed under the new _regime_ whose inauguration we are witnessing. For in becoming interpreter as well as administrator, he will be prophet as well as priest, and speak out the things of G.o.d and the soul instead of concealing them under a veil. So will the 'veil be taken away,' and Cain, the priest, instead of killing Abel, the prophet, as. .h.i.therto, will unite with him, becoming prophet and priest in one.

And instead of any longer corrupting the 'woman' Intuition, and suppressing the 'man' Intellect, he will purify and exalt her, and enable her to fulfil her proper function as 'the Mother of G.o.d' in man, and will recognise the intellect, when duly conjoined with her, as the heir of all things. Thus, becoming interpreter as well as administrator, prophet as well as priest, and recognising interpretation as the corollary of the understanding, the prophet-priest of the regeneration will give to men freely of the waters of life, that only true bread of Heaven, which is the food of the understanding, instead of the indigestible 'stones' and poisonous 'serpents' of doctrines, the profession of which, by divorcing a.s.sent from conviction, involves that moral and intellectual suicide, to induce others to join him in committing which Cardinal Newman wrote his 'Grammar of a.s.sent,' True it is 'faith that saves,' but the faith that is without understanding is not faith, but credulity"[4]. It is for the above-mentioned reasons that the t.i.tle of this book has been changed. The t.i.tle must be subservient to the book, and it is hoped that, the change having been made, there will not be any further misunderstanding--even on the part of those who are most superficial--as to the nature and object of "The Story of the New Gospel of Interpretation."

Edward Maitland did not long survive the completion of the great task that he undertook when he set himself to write a full account of his life and that of his colleague. He retained his full mental vigour until the publication of "The Life of Anna Kingsford"; but after that he rapidly declined, and on the 2nd October, 1897, at the close of his seventy-third year, a little over nine years after the death of Anna Kingsford[5], he pa.s.sed away peacefully at "The Warders" at Tonbridge, the home (at that time) of his friends Colonel and Mrs. Currie, with whom, and under whose loving care, he spent the last few months of his life--a life concerning which, as also that of Anna Kingsford, I will not say anything here, for this book will testify. Blessed are the souls whom the just commemorate before G.o.d.

Many who read these pages will not rest until they know more of those great prophets the story of whose lives is here told, and of the Divine Gnosis that it was their high mission to proclaim. I have indicated whence they can obtain this information. This "Story," interesting as it is and much as there is in it, is little more than an indication of some of the facts that are fully stated and dealt with in "The Life of Anna Kingsford," and there is much of importance that (as it could not possibly receive proper treatment in a book of this size) was pa.s.sed over here to be related in the larger biography. I have not thought it expedient to alter the character of or to add much to this book, but I have enlarged it by incorporating therein, from "The Life of Anna Kingsford," some additional matter which is of interest, and which should add to the value of the book. The most important additions are the account of Anna Kingsford's vision of "The Doomed Train," on p.p.

43-47; the account of Anna Kingsford's vision of Adonai, on pp. 64-68; the "Exhortation of Hermes to his Neophytes," on pp. 110-112; the verses "Concerning the Pa.s.sage of the Soul," on pp. 169-170; and the illumination of Anna Kingsford concerning the "Work of Power," on pp. 180-181. I have also amplified the text in some places when, on comparing it with corresponding pa.s.sages in "The Life of Anna Kingsford," I found that I could do so with advantage. These amplifications are not otherwise noted. Finally, I have added some notes where I thought that further explanation was desirable or would prove acceptable.

SAML. HOPGOOD HART.

Croydon, December, 1905.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] E.M. Letter in "Light" of 29th August, 1891.

[2] See further as to this, an article by A.K. and E.M. in "Light" of 23rd September, 1882, reprinted in Life A.K. Vol. II. p. 77.

[3] E.M. Letter in "Light" of 22nd July, 1893.

[4] E.M. Letter in "Light" of 17th December, 1892.

[5] A.K. died on the 22nd February, 1888

INTRODUCTION.

There are certain introductory remarks which, in view of the prevailing tendency to reject prior to examination whatever conflicts with strongly cherished preconceptions--as anything purporting to be a "new Gospel" is undoubtedly calculated to do--may be made with advantage. Those remarks are as follows:--

(1) As its t.i.tle implies[6], that which is propounded is not really a new Gospel, but one of Interpretation only, which is precisely what is admitted by all serious and thoughtful persons to be the supreme need of the times. It was said, for instance, by the late Matthew Arnold, "At the present moment there are two things about the Christian religion which must be obvious to every percipient person: one, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is."

(2) As also its t.i.tle implies[6] nothing new is told in it, but that only which is old is interpreted; and the appeal on its behalf is not to authority, whether of Book, Tradition, or Inst.i.tution, but to the Understanding--a quality which accords not only with the spirit of the times, but also--as shewn herein--with that of religion itself, properly so called.

(3) Scripture manifestly comprises two conflicting systems of doctrine and practice, having for their representatives respectively the priest and the prophet, one only of which systems, and this the system reprobated in Scripture itself, has. .h.i.therto obtained recognition from Christendom. It is the purpose of the New Gospel of Interpretation to expound the system represented by the prophet and approved in Scripture, with a view to replacing the other.

(4) For those who attach value to the prophecies contained in the Bible, so far from there being an _a priori_ improbability against the delivery of a new revelation in interpretation, confirmation, or completion of the former revelation, and in correction of the false presentment of it, the probability ought to be all in favour of such an event. This is because Scripture abounds in predictions of a restoration both of faculty and of knowledge, as to take place at the present time and under the existing conditions of Church and World; and this of such kind as shall const.i.tute a second and spiritual manifestation of the Christ in rectification of the perversion of the import of His first and personal manifestation, and in arrest of the great Apostacy, not only from the true faith of Christ but from religion itself, of which that perversion has been the cause.

(5) So far from the idea of a new revelation which shall have for its end the disclosure, as the true sense of Scripture and Dogma, of a sense differing so widely from that hitherto accepted as to be virtually destructive of it,--so far from this idea being universally repugnant to orthodox ecclesiastics, it has found warm recognition from one of the foremost of modern churchmen. This is the late Cardinal Newman.

Said Dr Newman in his _Apologia pro vita sua_, speaking of his earlier days, "The broad philosophy of Clement and Origen carried me away; the philosophy, not the theological doctrine.... Some portions of their teaching, magnificent in themselves, came like music to my inward ear, as if the response to ideas, which, with little external to encourage them, I had cherished so long. These were based on the mystical or sacramental principle, and spoke of the various Economies or Dispensations of the Eternal. I understood these pa.s.sages to mean that the exterior world, physical and historical, was but the manifestation to our senses of realities greater than itself. Nature was a parable: Scripture was an allegory:.... The process of change had been slow; it had been done not rashly, but by rule and measure, 'at sundry times and in divers manners,' first one disclosure and then another, till the whole evangelical doctrine was brought into full manifestation. And thus room was made for the antic.i.p.ation of further and deeper disclosures of truths still under the veil of the letter, and in their season to be revealed. The visible world still remains without its divine interpretation: Holy Church in her sacraments and her hierarchical appointments, will remain, even to the end of the world, after all but a symbol of those heavenly facts which fill eternity. Her mysteries are but the expressions, in human language, of truths to which the human mind is unequal"[7].

Dr Newman is credited also with the remark, made on visiting Rome for his invest.i.ture, that he saw no hope for religion save in a new revelation.

These are utterances the value of which is in no way diminished by the fact that their utterer failed to bring his own life into accordance with them. He could write, indeed, the hymn "Lead, kindly light"; but when the "kindly light" was vouchsafed him of those suggestions of a system of thought concealed within the Christian Symbology, "magnificent in themselves" and making "music to his inward ear," which he found in the patristic writings; instead of following that lead, and striving to exhume the treasures of divine truth thus buried and hidden from sight, for the salvation of a world peris.h.i.+ng for want of them,--he turned his back upon it, and--entering the Church of Rome--wrote his "Grammar of a.s.sent," calling upon others to follow him in committing the suicide, intellectual and moral, of renouncing the understanding and divorcing profession from conviction.

This was a catastrophe the explanation of which is not far to seek. Dr Newman had in him the elements which go to make both priest and prophet.

But the former proved the stronger; and the Cain, the priest in him, suppressed the Abel, the prophet in him. Thus was he a type of the Church as. .h.i.therto she has been. But, happily, not as henceforth she will be. For "now is the Gospel of Interpretation come, and the kingdom of the Mother of G.o.d," even the "Woman," Intuition,--the mind's feminine mode, wherein it represents the perceptions and recollections of the Soul--who is ever "Mother of G.o.d" in man, and whose sons the prophets ever are, the greatest of them being called emphatically, for the fulness and purity of his intuition, the "Son of the Woman" and she a "virgin."

E.M.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] The original t.i.tle of this book was "The Story of the New Gospel of Interpretation." See preface to the present edition. S.H.H.

[7] Apologia pro vita sua, by J. H. Newman. New edition of 1893, pp. 26, 27.

CHAPTER I.

THE VOCATION.

My colleague in the work, the history of which I am about to render some account, was the late Anna Kingsford, _nee_ Bonus, M.D. of the University of Paris.

There was a link between her husband's family and mine, but we were not personally acquainted until, in the summer of 1873, she was led by reading one of my books[8] to open a correspondence with me, which disclosed so striking a community between us of ideas, aims, and methods, that I accepted an invitation to visit her at her husband's rectory at Pontesbury, Salop, in Shrops.h.i.+re, for the sake of a fuller discussion of them. This visit which lasted nearly a fortnight, took place in February, 1874[9].

The account I received of her history was in this wise. Born at Stratford, in Ess.e.x, on the 16th September, 1846, long after the last of her many brothers and sisters, and endowed with the most fragile of const.i.tutions and liabilities the most distressing of bodily weakness and suffering, and differing widely, moreover, in temperament from all with whom she was a.s.sociated, her young life had enjoyed but a scanty share of human sympathy, and was largely one of solitude and meditation, and such as to foster the highly artistic, idealistic, and mystic tendencies with which she was born. Singularly energetic of will, and conscious of powers both transcending in degree and differing in kind from any that she recognised in others, she a.s.siduously exercised her faculties in many and various directions in the hope of discovering the special direction in which her mission lay. For, from her earliest childhood she had been conscious of a mission, for the accomplishment of which she had expressly come into the earth-life. And she claimed even to have distinct recollection of having been strongly dissuaded from coming, on account of the terrible suffering which awaited her in the event of her a.s.suming a body of flesh. Indeed, so little conscious was she of the reality of her human parentage that she was wont to look upon herself as a suppositious child of fairy origin; and on her first visit to the pantomime, when the fairies made their appearance on the stage, she declared that they were her proper people, and cried and struggled to get to them with such vehemence that it was necessary to remove her from the theatre. Among her amus.e.m.e.nts, her chief delight was in the ample gardens around her homes at Stratford and Blackheath, where she would hold familiar converse with the flowers, putting into their petals tiny notes for her lost relatives, the fairies, who in return would visit her in her dreams and a.s.sure her of their continued affection, and counsel her to have patience and courage.

The chief occupation of her girlhood was the writing of poems and tales[10] which were tinged with an exquisite mysticism, and showed a ripeness of soul and maturity of feeling and knowledge wholly unaccountable for by her years, her experiences, or her physical heredity. At school she always obtained the first prizes for composition, and her faculty of improvisation was the delight of her companions; the subjects of these her earlier romances being lovely princesses, gallant knights, castles, dragons, and the like, when--as may readily be supposed--her tall and slender frame, long golden hair, delicacy of complexion, deep-set hazel eyes, beauty of feature, the brow and the mouth being especially notable, the brightness of her looks, vivacity of her manner, her musical voice, and the easy eloquence of her diction,--all combined to make her an ideal heroine for her own romances. She could hardly, however, be said to be a _persona grata_ with her pastors and masters. For while her independence of character and strength of will were apt to bring her into conflict with rules and regulations of which she failed to recognise the need, her thirst for knowledge, especially on religious subjects, prompted her to the proposition of questions which were highly embarra.s.sing to her teachers; and nothing that they could say succeeded in convincing her that her duty lay in believing what she was told, and not in understanding it.

She very early learnt to resent the disabilities of her s.e.x, and to insist that they were not real but artificial, the result of masculine selfishness and injustice. This hatred of injustice and its correlative cruelty, especially towards animals, attained in her the force and dignity of a pa.s.sion, her sensitiveness on this score making the chief mental misery of her life.

Of one gift possessed by her she early learnt to repress the manifestation. This was the faculty for seeing apparitions and divining the characters and fortunes of people. For she was a born seer. But the inability of her elders to comprehend the faculty, and their consequent ascription of it to pathological causes, were wont to lead to references to the family doctor with results so eminently disagreeable and even injurious to her, as soon to suggest the wisdom of keeping silence respecting her experiences.

Her first published compositions were written at the age of thirteen[11], the editors who accepted her contributions to their magazines being under the impression that they came from a grown-up person and not from the mere child that she was. They cost her, she a.s.sured me, little labour, especially the poems, but seemed to come to her ready-made, and to flow through her spontaneously. And whatever the country in which their scene lay, the local colouring and descriptions were always faithful and vivid, as if the places and their inhabitants were familiar and even actually visible to her.

It was not, however, to any encouragement of her peculiar gifts that such excellency as she exhibited was due. Rather were they severely repressed, especially in respect of drawing, singing and music, lest she should be tempted to follow them as a profession; a fear which had been excited by the suggestions of her masters that she would be certain of success in any of those lines.

Her innate consciousness of a mission seemed to her to indicate her as destined for some redemptive work, not only for others, but also for herself. For, while the instincts of the Champion and the Saviour were potent in her, she was dimly conscious of its possessing also an expiatory element, in virtue of which her own salvation would largely depend upon her endeavours to save others. She had as yet no theory whereby to explain this or any other of the problems she was to herself.

All that she knew was that she possessed, or rather was possessed of, these feelings and impulses. It was easy to see by her account of herself that she was as one driven of the Spirit long before the Spirit definitely revealed itself to her. The two departments of humanity which she felt especially impelled to succour and save were her own s.e.x and the animals. For she would recognise no hard and fast line between masculine and feminine, human and animal, or even between animal and plant. In her eyes everything that lived was humanity, only in different stages of its unfoldment. Even the flowers were persons for her.