III. CONVERSION

EARLY IN THE YEAR 1847 began a period of great interior trouble, which Miss Drane thus describes:—

“I began to be conscious that the religiousness which I had hitherto professed was in reality of no substance or worth, and very little more than a bundle of artistic tastes. At the same time I had come to feel the need of something earnest, something that would guide and support me in a time of difficulty.

“At first I could hardly believe that I did not possess it. I had worked my way, I may say, out of so many storms into an atmosphere which seemed by contrast so passionless and tranquil, that suddenly to have the veil torn rudely away, and to be made to see and know that it was all vanity and emptiness, unreal as a shadow, worthless as the veriest husks of the swine, was terrible indeed.

“Yet it was true. Be it remembered that deep down in my heart there was a conviction, but I had never looked it in the face. It lay there as whales may lie in the deep waters, and just come up at intervals to breathe. So also, it came to the surface now and then, to be thrust down again and ignored. But with it there, thus ignored, all the work at the surface was of no avail. My sister Louisa partly knew this, and used often to tell me I was one half Papist and the other half infidel. Of course I was, and so must every one be who with the Faith, or its germ in his heart, obeys and follows a different system.

“However, the truth was coming to the surface now, and manifesting itself with terrible earnestness. I did not at first see what would come of it, all I saw was the entire break up of my whole interior peace. I had nothing to rest on. I was like a person who has walked in fancied security on a plank, which suddenly gives way and leaves him in mid-air. It was dreadful suffering, and all that spring and summer I spent vainly struggling to make it out, and to free myself from what I can only compare to a serpent that had locked me in its folds.”

The conviction lying in the depths of her soul was the truth, gradually assuming a definite shape in her mind, that she was not in the Catholic Church, and that she ought at any sacrifice to enter its fold. Her mind was too logical, and her character too sincere, to allow her to rest long in the utterly illogical and essentially fragmentary system of Anglicanism.

In the summer of 1847 Mr. Coleridge died, and she felt his loss acutely. He was succeeded as Vicar of S. Mary Church by Mr. Maskell, who, afterwards himself a Catholic, was then a follower of the Oxford movement, and of more advanced and decided views than his predecessor; but though Miss Drane had long felt the want of confession, “the idea of opening my mind to anyone (but a priest, whispered conscience now and then) never suggested itself. It was a year of torture.

“In August, my mother and sister went to Scotland on some long-promised visits, and the process went on. Sometimes I tried to drive it all from me, but there was the terrible hand tearing away all disguises, pursuing me with that pitiless analysis of motives, that unbearable searching into every thought and act and habit of the past. What did I see? Absolutely nothing! A barren fig-tree, with leaves upon leaves, but no fruit. At last it became unbearable. An interior voice gave me this advice: What are you about? This all comes from your inveterate habit of self-inspection; you treat your soul as children treat flowers, picking them to pieces to see how they are made. Shut it all up, and have done with it. Life is made up of duty, and duty deals with facts, not fancies. Now just look at facts and do your duty, and all will go right.

“This seemed excellent advice, and I resolved to follow it. With the strongest effort of the will (the will unaided by grace) I ever was conscious of, I turned my back on my troubles, drove away the image of them, and set about, by dint of a fixed resolve, to be happy and cheerful, and deal with facts.

“It was like fighting with an inundation. And the fact, the very little fact, that broke my dike and let in the pouring flood, till it roared and swept through my whole being, was so very little, I am afraid almost to name it. One wet autumn evening I was sitting buttoned up in my excellent resolution to deal with exterior fact, and to have nothing more to do with self-introspection, when an organ-grinder came to the garden door and played a tune. It was ‘The Ivy Green;’ I well remember it. It was one I had been used to hear, and it produced a strange effect; I can no more say why or how, than why or how any other mystery is wrought in souls by seeming trifles. It broke down my dike. I laid my head on the table, and sobbed for an hour; and there was an end of my resolutions.

“My mother came home from Scotland, and found me really ill—so ill that for weeks and weeks I kept my room and my bed, and had time and leisure enough to consider what I was to do. I had meekly to submit to the work of destruction being completed by that unseen hand that had set to work to tear away my plaster and whitewash. When it was all gone, and I saw my life ‘perished without fruit,’ I asked myself what remained to be done. Then, at last, the only true conviction of my soul spoke out, and made itself heard. Smothered for nearly nine years, at last it spoke, and spoke plainly—Confession, and to a Catholic Priest. Confession, to ease an over burdened heart, to a Priest, to get absolution, and to a Roman Catholic priest, because there is nobody else who can give it.”

Having come to this conclusion, Miss Drane consulted a friend in whom she had confidence, and the advice given her was to put herself into communication with some Anglican authority first, lest under the pressure of overwrought nerves she might take a fatal step from which there could be no return. In accordance with this advice she sought the aid of John Keble, and the result must be told in her own words.

“Keble, I think, was an unsatisfactory director. He was kind, amiable, and his own humble pious character made itself felt in his letters and personal intercourse. But he never laid hands on the soul, or even attempted it, and his directions were always in the way of ‘suggestions.’ The burning question of confession was at once brought forward, and Keble’s direction was amusingly original if not theological. The way he suggested of settling it was this: Write out your general confession and send it to me; then go to church and listen to the general absolution with great reverence; and that will do until you can make it in person. Meanwhile, keep a copy of your confession, and read it over on certain more solemn days, Fridays, or eves of the greater feasts!’ A pleasant way of preparing for one’s ‘greater feasts,’ and a nice sort of feeling that one’s unhappy general was always locked up in one’s private desk ready for use! But I do not intend to be savage, and indeed I loved and reverenced Keble greatly, only I felt I had shot an arrow’s length beyond the mark he aimed at; I do not mean in goodness, God forbid! but in apprehension of what the Catholic Sacraments really meant. For, in fact, to write out one’s sins and post them, and then go to church and make-believe that the ‘misereatur vestri’ of the public service is your own private and particular absolution, was too transparent a sham for me to succeed in practising. I tried it, and was too much ashamed of the absurdity ever to try it again. With the profoundest respect for one so venerable as he undoubtedly was, I felt that I was asking for bread and he was giving me a stone.

“In my sick-room, where I remained for two months, I tried to build up some little shed in which to shelter myself, for one could not go on living among ruins. I had become conscious of my own profound ignorance of ‘vital Christianity.’ I read all manner of spiritual books, Jeremy Taylor’s, Holy Living,’ Baxter’s ‘Saint’s Rest,’ Sherlock’s ‘Practical Christian,’ and for the first time, oh! never-to-be-forgotten experience, St. Augustine’s ‘Confessions,’ which, with its picture of a soul somewhat similarly shaken and shattered to pieces by an inward storm (sent how or whence, who can say?), went through me like a thousand arrows.”

This was a period of severe family affliction as well as or personal trial for her own mind, for her father was dangerously ill with an attack of jaundice, her brother was prostrate with jungle-fever after returning from Ceylon, while every servant in the house was laid up with illness, and her mother left to nurse everybody. As soon as possible, therefore, Augusta left her sick-room to aid her mother, and the necessity of exertion was of benefit to her health, and distracted her from her mental trials. Still her state of health was the cause of much anxiety, and the doctors advised both exercise and change of air.

“So it was decreed that I was to go to London to my sister’s, and until that could be effected, I was to ride. It was all one to me just then what they did with me; some years had passed since I had had a mount, and one February morning I found myself cantering along to see the hounds throw off, under the escort of two gentlemen, both mighty hunters, and one of them a Catholic.

“Anyone who knows the peculiar overpowering sensation of a first expedition into open air after a...