Edmund Gosse: a Brethren childhood

Although I was born a century after the writer and critic Edmund Gosse the religious dimension of his childhood resonates with me deeply. In Father and Son published on 25 October 1907 Gosse describes his childhood and young adulthood. Following the death of his mother Emily in 1857 when he was just 7, his childhood centred round the towering presence of his father, the naturalist and deeply committed evangelical Christian Philip Gosse.

Edmund’s factual accuracy in Father and Son (as in some of his other works) has been questioned – his claim that his arrival on 21st September 1849 was not welcomed by the Gosses, for example, is demonstrably untrue. But the book is not, as it has sometimes been caricatured, a harsh, critical tirade against his father: in fact in its pages the younger Gosse appears warm, generous and lovingly respectful towards Philip.

For me, the most fascinating aspect of the book is its description of a mid-Victorian upbringing within the Plymouth Brethren and the comparisons and contrasts with my own experiences as a child in the same branch of the Christian Church a hundred years later.

The Brethren meeting place I attended was very similar in layout to ‘The Room’ in Devon which Edmund describes. Each Sunday morning, the saints gathered in the corrugated iron hall, sitting on wooden benches around a plain wooden table on which, beneath a freshly-laundered white cloth, had been lovingly placed the bread on a polished silver plate and the wine in a large, silver goblet.

For an hour and a quarter, as prompted by the Holy Spirit, brethren would pray, announce hymns which would be sung unaccompanied, reflect on passages from the Bible until the climax of the meeting when someone would give thanks for the bread and the wine which would then pass from hand to hand as those who were ‘in fellowship’ (and this excluded the children) shared the Lord’s Supper.

At the evening ‘Gospel service’ the message of grace and forgiveness through Christ’s death was offered Sunday by Sunday to all who would listen, just as it was in Gosse’s Devon. Both his church and mine emphasised the imminence of Christ’s return to take his people to himself, and the urgent need to be ready in the light of this coming.

I was made very aware, as Edmund Gosse had been, of the challenge facing Christians to keep focussed on God’s will for our lives, and to avoid ‘worldliness’, although worldliness for Gosse was defined in a stricter way than it was for most of my generation of Christians. Storybooks were banned from the young Edmund’s house by his mother on the grounds that ‘to “tell a story”, that is, to compose fictitious narrative of any kind, was a sin’,  although after her death Philip gradually relaxed this ban. However, Philip discouraged Edmund’s attendance at children’s parties on spiritual grounds, and there is a famous (if possibly apocryphal) story of the father, who was deeply opposed to celebrating Christmas,  destroying a plum pudding which the servants had secretly given his son while describing it as an ‘accursed thing’.

Few restrictions were placed on my reading, but I was 11 before we had a television in the house, although TVs had been widely available for some years. Once we had our first set, my viewing was carefully monitored by my parents. I was never taken to the cinema – my first visit, when I was allowed to go on educational grounds to see a Greek tragedy as an early teenager was a sheer delight, as having endured Oedipus Rex  I revelled in the B movie, the first feature I’d ever seen. (It was Charade with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn)  Even when I was 17, a school visit to the theatre to see Shaw’s Saint Joan was only permitted on the understanding that I didn’t ‘get a taste for the theatre.’

But over and above these specific warnings of ‘worldliness’ I had a pervading sense as a teenager that as the child of Christian parents I was somehow different, and that I should not engage too closely with those who were not believers.

The impression I’d formed  about Father and Son before reading it was that Edmund Gosse endured a very difficult childhood because of faith-related issues. Certainly the pain of watching his mother die cast a long shadow across his life and increased the pressures placed on him by his parents’ dedication of him to ‘the Lord’s Service’.  But I feel that the pain I suffered as a result of my religious upbringing was severer than that which Gosse endured, although it was the quite unintended result of the sincere desire of those around me to see me following in their footsteps of faith.

From as early as I can remember, I was conscious that I was not ‘saved’, not ‘born again’ and that before I could be sure of getting to heaven, I must reach out to God and ask him to forgive me, and receive his transforming grace. No matter how much I may have been told of God’s love for me (and I’m certain I would have been assured of this) what I remember is my sense of distance from God, of the great gulf fixed between him and me which could only be bridged if I could find the way to believe into what Christ had done for me.

As a child, Gosse seems to have been able to adopt the language of faith and say what was expected of him. In Father and Son he claims that there was always part of him which held out against Christianity, but superficially at least he embraced the faith and at the age of 10 he was baptised by immersion and welcomed into membership of the church his father led.

My childhood and adolescence were punctuated by crises when, wracked with guilt as a result of some sermon I’d heard, I would call out to God to forgive me, and then rise from my knees emotionally untouched with a sickening sense that God had not heard and not answered, and that I remained excluded from the community of Christians and alienated from an unreachable God.

Then there was the fear of the Rapture. In the theology of Philip Gosse and of the church tradition in which I grew up, the Second Coming of Christ to earth as a king and judge in which conservative Christians believe will be preceded by his return to the sky, from where he will ‘Rapture’ – seize up to be with him -  those who have entrusted their lives to him, leaving behind those who have rejected him to face the dire grief of a ‘tribulation‘ which will afflict the earth. Philip Gosse and like-minded believers found reference in the imagery of the Book of Revelation to contemporary figures such as Napoleon III, suggesting that the Rapture was close at hand.

Similar believers in my generation discerned that the symbolism pointed to the Cold War, the European Common Market, the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the rise of China as a superpower and predicted that Christ would soon appear for his people. As a teenager, this terrified me. If Christ came, my parents and all those who brought meaning and security to my life would be taken, and if I had not by then found God, I would face the unimaginable agony of being left behind. Whenever my parents were not where I expected them to be at a particular time I’d be dread-stricken. I’d phone someone I knew was a Christian, and when I heard their voice I’d put the phone down without saying a word, and collapse in relief. The Lord had not come. Not that day. But tomorrow…..?

For the most part, the young Edmund Gosse found it easy to build friendships with people who did not hold Christian beliefs, or who didn’t share his father’s passionate conviction. But during my teen years, I saw my contemporaries as belonging to one or other of two distinct groups – those who were ‘saved’ (the small group) and those who were not (a much larger group). I felt that I myself properly belonged to neither group. It seemed there was an invisible wall between me and those who believed since I did not share their certainty, and an equally impenetrable barrier between me and those who were not believers, who were at home in that unfamiliar cultural territory defined by James Bond, the Beatles and The Man from UNCLE. I lacked the confidence, integrity and relationship skills to connect with the members of either group, and although there was one precious friendship which I did not fully appreciate at the time, in general I felt excluded from both.

If Gosse was conscious of personal hypocrisy as a teenager he seems to have been remarkably free from guilt. I, on the other hand, was guilt-stricken. When I was about 15, someone asked me particularly pointedly whether I had become a Christian. For some reason I told what I knew even as I spoke to be a deliberate lie. Yes, I said. I had been saved, dating this spurious conversion from the most recent occasion when, gripped by guilt and longing during a sermon, I had cried out to God with no result that I was aware of.

This one lie led to others, and eventually I was baptised by immersion in the Baptist Church which my parents and I were by then attending. I did attend baptismal classes led by the minister, but regrettably he did not question me closely, or give me an opportunity to be real about my actual feelings and beliefs.

I anticipated my baptism and my first Lord’s Supper which would follow it with terror. Surely the Lord would be affronted by my hypocrisy and strike me dead. Well, I walked out of the baptismal tank, and swallowed the bread and wine, and lived. But as each Sunday after this approached bringing with it the inevitable Lord’s Supper again I was torn with fear and anguish. Would this be the week God’s patience ran out?

I longed to be able to find this elusive God, and told myself that if only I had the courage to admit my hypocrisy someone would help me. One of the lowest points in my life came when I shared the truth, and was told ‘Don’t be silly! Of course you’re a Christian. This is the devil getting at you,’ by someone whose own sense of security was perhaps threatened by my disclosure. What terrible act would I have to commit to persuade them I was not a believer? I fantasised about doing some terrible thing, and still not being believed, and flinging myself in despair from a city centre bridge. But I made no further attempts to share, and carried my inescapable burden of pain alone.

For these reasons, I believe I was led down badly by the Christian community in which I grew up. I do not label my experiences ‘abuse’, simply because the word implies intention to wound on the part of the abusers, while the Christians I knew, secure in their own beliefs, genuinely thought that in encouraging me to share their faith they were blessing me and seeking my long-term best interests. In additional, my own anxious and introspective personality made me more susceptible to suffering than were other kids brought up in a similar environment, although I realise that saying this brings me close to conceding that my anguish was my own fault, which it wasn’t. But what I experienced as pain, was offered as love.

Despite the similarities, I feel there was a fundamental difference between Edmund Gosse’s inner journey and mine. As a child, Gosse, aware of his ‘dedication’ to the Lord by his parents, felt ‘like a small and solitary bird caught….in a glittering cage.’ He continues: ‘I saw myself imprisoned for ever in the religious system which had caught me.’  Even at the age of 16, he tells us, ‘I was still but a bird fluttering in the net-work of my Father’s will, and incapable of the smallest independent action.’  If Gosse was struggling to get out of a system he felt was controlling him and plotting out his life ahead, I on the other hand felt excluded from the joyous and purposeful reality of the faith I saw in others around me and struggled to get in. For me, freedom was to be found on the inside.

In the end, as he describes in Father and Son, Edmund Gosse rejected the faith he had been brought up in, and embraced ‘the human being’s privilege to fashion his inner life for himself.’ This step away from his father’s faith was apparently much less clear-cut that this would suggest. According to Ann Thwaite’s biography Edmund Gosse: a literary landscape he still considered himself a Christian believer at the beginning of 1873, having realised that he could abandon some of the attitudes of the Brethren without abandoning Christ as well. But a year later, having faced possible death on a runaway horse, he told a friend that ‘the Christian revealed religion had never seemed so little worthy of belief.’

For my part, I finally came at the age of 21 to the point of accepting that the God I had always believed in was real, and that he accepted me. I suppose I had assumed that because my sense exclusion was so desperate, some dramatic divine intervention would be necessary if I were ever to encounter God. In fact my life was changed by a few words from the 16^th chapter of Luke’s gospel. Jesus tells the story of a beggar named Lazarus stationed daily outside the house of a rich man, who pointedly ignores him and his need. Both Lazarus and the rich man die. Lazarus finds himself in heaven, the rich man in the hell he had never believed in or at least taken seriously.

‘Please send Lazarus back to my brothers to warn them of the existence of hell so that they can ensure they don’t come here too,’ the rich man begs. But his request is refused. ‘They have the Scriptures. If they won’t believe their message, then they won’t believe even if they’re warned by someone risen from the dead.’ The instant I read those words, I realised that not only did I have the whole Bible, but also the testimony of someone – Jesus – whom I believed had returned from the dead. What hope was there for me if I rejected this? Nothing more would be given, for nothing more was needed. God came to me in those few words from Jesus’ story, with an inrush of transforming joy, awakening in me a sense of his reality.

That day marked the beginning of a long journey as I explored the great story of the Christian pilgrimage, the story in which I now knew I belonged. I was often still perplexed by the frequent absence of any sense of God’s presence, but there were times on the journey when I felt touched by his love and experienced some healing of the hurts I had suffered.

Much later in life I encountered some of the questions which exercised Edmund Gosse’s sharp intellect as a teenager – questions about how a truly good God can allow suffering, questions about how reasonable it is to regard the Bible as God’s word to us. At the end of this process, the God I believed in was bigger and more mysterious than I imagined, and I had to learn to live with his silences, with the times of struggle and the unanswered questions, but I remain convinced that he is there, speaking, challenging, loving.

Edmund Gosse subtitled his book ‘A study of two temperaments,’ referring to his and his father’s which, he felt, were ‘perhaps innately antagonistic.’ I am very conscious of the fact that people with different personality types seem to experience Christianity with differing degrees of emotional engagement, and I think Christians need to learn not to expect other believers to experience God in exactly the same way as they themselves do.

Certainly my temperament is very different from Edmund Gosse’s – I am compliant and lacking in self-confidence, while Gosse was precociously aware of his own personhood. But I think there is a more fundamental difference between us. Gosse spoke of his ‘growing distaste for the Holy Scripture,’ a distaste which ‘scandalised’ him as his ‘desire was to continue to delight in those sacred pages.’ But he was so familiar with the Bible’s contents that for him they had the ‘colourless triteness of a story retold a hundred times’ and in turning to its pages he experienced an ‘invincible ennui’.

I can understand and empathise with questions about the divine inspiration and reliability of the Bible. But I can’t imagine anyone who has ever been surprised by joy as something in the Bible, no matter how familiar to them as words on  the page or ideas in the mind,  awakens in their heart with newly-minted relevance could ever speak as Gosse does of ‘invincible ennui’.  There may be days of ennui, yes, but it is not invincible since in my experience God will before too long again draw near, clothed in words, his voice stirring the waters of the heart.

So it seems to me that the gulf between the Father and the Son arises not so much from two temperaments as from what the Apostle Paul calls (and it’s a distinction Edmund was aware of)  ‘two natures’, the one awakened, alive, seeking the reality of God, the other somehow asleep, dead, closed to the divine.

Edmund Gosse concludes the main section of Father and Son with a description of an evening during his final year at school, a year in the course of which he experienced a resurgence of spiritual longing and perceptiveness. He looked from a window in the school across an evening landscape of profound beauty, and he sensed that the time had come. Christ must surely return. ’Come now Lord Jesus,’ he cried. ‘Come now and take me to be for ever with Thee in Thy Paradise.’  But nothing happened. The Lord did not come, and at that moment he says he realised that the Lord would never come - never invade his life, never break into history. I believe that what Gosse failed to realise, and what I failed to realise for so many years as a young person, was that the Lord was always there.