Leslie Stephen

On 23 March 1875 the novelist Thomas Hardy received "a mysterious note" from the editor of the Cornhill Magazine, asking him to call. He found Leslie Stephen in his library. Stephen, Hardy remembered, "said he wanted me to witness his signature to what, for a moment, I thought was his will; but it turned out to be a deed renunciatory of holy orders, under the Act of 1870." Stephen "said grimly that he was really a reverend gentleman still, little as he might look it, and that he thought it as well to cut himself adrift of a calling for which, to say the least, he had always been utterly unfit."¹²³

He had been ordained twenty years before, as a young tutor at Cambridge. He had stopped believing about ten years before, and had given up his college teaching because of it. Only an Act of 1870 had made it possible for a clergyman to stop being one. The next year he published the essay that gave a new word its currency in English: "An Agnostic's Apology." This chapter follows the grandson of an evangelical abolitionist through the Church and out of it, and asks what he meant when he said, more than once, that he had never really believed at all.

The Clapham inheritance

He was born on 28 November 1832 at his father's house in Kensington Gore, in London, the third son of James Stephen of the Colonial Office and Jane Catherine Venn.⁴ His grandfather, also James Stephen, had led the campaign against slavery in Parliament, married William Wilberforce's sister, and died a few weeks before Leslie was born; his mother was the daughter of the Rector of Clapham.⁵⁶ "My family," he wrote, "belonged to the second generation of the so-called 'Clapham Sect.'" They "believed too implicitly in Noah's ark," but "they impressed me (very unintentionally) with the conviction that a man may be incomparably better than the creed which he honestly takes himself to believe."⁷⁸⁹

His father kept the faith in a looser way than his own father had. Leslie later described him as a man who "began life as a strong evangelical, and never avowedly changed," but who came to hold "the inherited doctrine in a latitudinarian sense."¹⁰¹¹ Sir James had a particular fear for his sons. "My daily and nightly terror," he wrote in his journal, "is that they should be 'patent Christians' — formalists, praters, cheats, without meaning or even knowing it."¹²¹³

The boy was delicate and acutely sensitive. He was brought up on Watts's Catechism, and his mother noted in her diary that he would not read his prayers, because "he could not feel that he was praying to God if he read them."¹⁴¹⁵¹⁶ His health sent him to a school at Brighton and then, as a day-boy, to Eton, which he left at fourteen; at Eton the Anglican catechism was "irritating."¹⁵¹⁷ At King's College London he heard the theologian F. D. Maurice and was impressed by his saintly character.¹⁸¹⁹

That childhood scruple was not yet doubt. It was a conscience about sincerity, the same conscience that would later make it impossible for him to read services he did not believe.

Orders

He went up to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1850, where his father was Regius Professor of Modern History.²⁰ After his degree he was offered a fellowship that required him to take holy orders within a year, and on 21 December 1855 the Archbishop of York ordained him deacon. In April 1856, at twenty-three, he became a junior tutor of the college.²¹²²

Why did he do it? He said later that it was partly to free his father from supporting him and partly because he was attached to Cambridge. "By taking the tutorship I became independent, and after my degree I never cost my father anything."²³²⁴ His father dearly wanted one son in the Church, and the eldest surviving son, Fitzjames, had chosen the law.²⁵ His biographer F. W. Maitland found no "serious call," and thought Stephen "took such things pretty easily in those days," trusting that Maurice was clearing away the difficulties.²³¹⁹

He was a "muscular Christian" who coached the college boat to the head of the river and won university races.²⁶ His pupils remembered that he said little about religion; one thought he was "not an agnostic, but ... certainly going on towards agnosticism."²⁷ Meanwhile his shorthand notebooks show him reading Maurice and Butler, then Comte's Positive Philosophy, finished on 28 May 1859, and Kant's Critique in German, finished on 9 July 1860, and coming under the influence of John Stuart Mill.²⁸ "I read Comte, too," he wrote, "and became convinced, among other things, that Noah's flood was a fiction (or rather convinced that I had never believed in it) and that it was wrong for me to read the story as if it were a sacred truth."²⁹³⁰

Yet on Trinity Sunday 1859 he was ordained priest at Ely. Maitland took that second submission to the bishops as "a proof that his doubts accumulated but slowly."³¹

The chapel services

In the summer of 1862 he could not go on. "Upon my stating in the summer of 1862 that I could no longer take part in the chapel services," he wrote, "I resigned my tutorship at the request of the Master."³²³³ One senior fellow said he "could not stand an unorthodox tutor in the college for fear of the effect on the morals of the undergraduates."³⁴³⁵ Stephen was grateful to him afterwards: "In that he did me a great service as I should otherwise perhaps have been buried in Cambridge to this day."³⁶ The college let him keep his fellowship, largely through the good offices of his friend Henry Fawcett, though what the rules allowed is unclear, and Maitland suspected the fellows "were desirous to be convinced."³⁷

How painful was it? The two accounts differ. A friend who knew him from 1859 remembered "mental torture" while the doubts grew.³⁸ Stephen himself always said the opposite: "In truth, I did not feel that the solid ground was giving way beneath my feet, but rather that I was being relieved of a cumbrous burden. I was not discovering that my creed was false, but that I had never really believed it."³⁹⁴⁰ Maitland's reconciliation was that the struggle came before the decision and the relief after it.³⁸

In 1863 he went to America, where he made friends with Charles Eliot Norton and James Russell Lowell and saw a country at civil war. "At that time," he wrote, "I had given up Noah's ark and my old calling."⁴¹ At the end of 1864 he left Cambridge for London and journalism.⁴² On 26 January 1865 he wrote in shorthand, for his own eyes only: "My faith in anything like religion has been gradually growing dimmer. I can scarcely believe that two and a half years ago I was still reading prayers as a parson, and that little more than a year ago I was preaching. I now believe in nothing, to put it shortly; but I do not the less believe in morality."⁴³⁴⁴ Maitland said that the negative side of his creed never changed again.⁴⁵

Plain speaking

In London he lived by his pen, writing for the Saturday Review, the Pall Mall Gazette and a fortnightly letter to the New York Nation.⁴⁶ In 1867 he married Minny Thackeray, and his fellowship lapsed with the marriage.⁴⁷ In 1870 he was on a committee for a Bill "for enabling me to get rid of the last rags of my parsonhood," the Clerical Disabilities Act.⁴⁸⁴⁹

He began to write against the Church in the monthlies, and in 1873 collected the essays as Essays on Freethinking and Plainspeaking.⁵⁰ The book's purpose, he said, was "an appeal to people who already agree in my conclusions to state their agreement in plain terms."⁵¹ What drove him was honesty. "Destroy credit, and you ruin commerce; destroy all faith in religious honesty and you ruin something of infinitely more importance than commerce."⁵² And he said, thirty years before his memoir said it again, that losing faith was "not, in fact, an abandonment of beliefs seriously held and firmly implanted in the mind, but a gradual recognition of the truth that you never really held them."³⁹⁵³ He named one moral motive above others: "the disgust excited by the doctrine of everlasting damnation is amongst the strongest motives to popular infidelity."⁵⁴⁵⁵

In March 1875, with Hardy as his witness, he signed away his orders.¹

An Agnostic's Apology

Late in 1875 Minny died. In the weeks of grief that followed he wrote the essay that made his name as an unbeliever, and it appeared in the Fortnightly Review in June 1876.⁵⁶⁵⁷ He took his label from Huxley. "The name Agnostic, originally coined by Professor Huxley about 1869, has gained general acceptance," he began, and he rejected the other word: "Dogmatic Atheism — the doctrine that there is no God, whatever may be meant by God — is, to say the least, a rare phase of opinion."⁵⁸⁵⁹⁶⁰

His argument turned the theologians' own humility against them. Men like Newman had said that reason, left to itself, ends in unbelief. "Trust your reason, we have been told till we are tired of the phrase, and you will become Atheists or Agnostics. We take you at your word: we become Agnostics."⁶¹⁶² He quoted Newman's claim that there was "no medium, in true philosophy, between Atheism and Catholicity," and accepted half of it.⁶³ The grief shows in one line: "Is there a more cutting piece of satire in the language than the reference in our funeral service to the 'sure and certain hope of a blessed resurrection'?"⁶⁴ So does his moral charge against the creed. "If I were to assert that of every ten beings born into this world nine would be damned," he wrote, and he went on to apply it to those who would not believe what they did not hold to be proved. For him the doctrine of damnation was the creed's own case against itself.⁵⁴⁶⁵

He ended with a challenge to the pulpit. "Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant?" Until the clergy could answer, "we shall be content to admit openly, what you whisper under your breath or hide in technical jargon, that the ancient secret is a secret still; that man knows nothing of the Infinite and Absolute; and that, knowing nothing, he had better not be dogmatic about his ignorance."⁶⁶⁶⁷ Huxley had coined the word, but a later historian, quoted by Maitland, judged that its success was due to Stephen.⁵⁸

Critics

Some of his critics were churchmen of Maurice's school. In 1874 J. Llewelyn Davies, a disciple of Maurice, did him "the honour," as Stephen put it, of "coupling me with J. M. as the two devil's advocates."⁶⁸ The Spectator thought him "a psychological curiosity" for calling Maurice "muddle-headed."⁶⁹ Stephen had in fact written privately that "of all the muddle-headed, intricate, futile persons I ever studied, he was about the most utterly bewildering."⁷⁰

The sharpest attack came in 1900, from a preacher in St Mary's, Cambridge, looking back on Stephen's Cambridge years: "It never occurred to him that his cynicism was the Medusa's head that petrified the company."⁷¹ Stephen replied in a letter. He had been reticent, not cynical, and almost too much so: "I have often thought that I pushed my reticence to cowardice." What had happened was simple: "I became gradually convinced, after the most serious reflection I could give, that the Christian position was untenable. I therefore gave up my profession and took to literature."⁴²⁷²⁷³ And the Broad Church compromise had never satisfied him, because "after abandoning the doctrine of verbal inspiration, there is no real stopping-place till you give up the supernatural character of the Bible altogether."⁷⁴

The Dictionary and the family

In 1878 he married Julia Duckworth, a widow and his neighbour in Hyde Park Gate.⁷⁵ They had four children, Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia and Adrian, and the family lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate.⁷⁶ He edited the Dictionary of National Biography from its first volume in 1885 until 1891.⁷⁷ In 1893, at Norton's urging, he gathered his religious essays as An Agnostic's Apology and Other Essays.⁷⁸

His views did change at the edges. He never stopped stating "in the plainest terms his rejection of Christian dogma," Maitland wrote, which "seemed to him not only untrue, but harmful," but late in life he came to have doubts about the "ring-fence" agnostics drew around the knowable, both where it stood and why.⁷⁹ In 1895 he wrote a long letter to his children about his life and warned them that it held none of "those narratives of inward events, conversions, or spiritual crises which give interest to some autobiographies."⁸⁰⁸¹

He died at 22 Hyde Park Gate shortly before seven in the morning of 22 February 1904.⁸² His last written words, on 5 February, began a list of the friends who had come to see him: "I must put down their names as I can remember them."⁸³ The next day Richard Haldane wrote to his daughter that "he was like Socrates in the calmness of his wisdom."⁸⁴

What he left

Stephen's unbelief was quiet in its making and plain in its statement. A child too honest to read prayers he did not feel, he took orders for a living and a college, read his way out of the creed in his late twenties, gave up his teaching rather than read the chapel services, and then spent years waiting for the law to let him stop being a priest. When he spoke in public he made a modest claim, not that there is no God, but that "the ancient secret is a secret still." His own judgement of the whole story was that he had not lost a faith, only discovered that he had never had one. The man who witnessed the deed that ended his orders, Thomas Hardy, had travelled a similar road with far more regret, and he has his own chapter in this book.