The Story of Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland and of the new Gospel of Interpretation. Edward Maitland
principle, and spoke of the various Economies or Dispensations of the Eternal. I understood these passages 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 anticipation 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 investiture, 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 perishing for want of them—he turned his back upon it, and—entering the Church of Rome—wrote his "Grammar of Assent," 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 hitherto 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 God," even the "Woman," Intuition—the mind's feminine mode, wherein it represents the perceptions and recollections of the Soul—who is ever "Mother of God" 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.
FRONTISPIECES.
| I.—Portrait of Dr. Anna Kingsford. |
| Born, Sep. 16th, 1846; Died, Feb. 22nd, 1888. |
| II.—Portrait of Edward Maitland (B.A., Cantab). |
| Born, Oct. 27th, 1824; Died, Oct, 2nd, 1897. |
ABBREVIATIONS.
A.K., for Anna Kingsford.
B.O.A.I., for "The Bible's Own Account of Itself," by E.M.; second edition, 1905.
C.W.S., for "Clothed With The Sun," being the book of the Illuminations of A.K.; edited by E.M., 1889.
D. and D.-S., for "Dreams and Dream-Stones," by A.K., edited by E.M.; second edition, 1888.
E.C.U., for "The Esoteric Christian Union," founded by E.M. in 1891.
E. and I., for "England and Islam; or, The Counsel of Caiaphas," by E.M., 1877.
E.M., for Edward Maitland.
Life A.K., for "The Life of Anna Kingsford," by E.M., 1896.
P.W., for "The Perfect Way; or, The Finding of Christ," by A.K. and E.M.; third edition, revised, 1890.
Statement, E.C.U., for "The New Gospel of Interpretation; being an Abstract of the Doctrine and Statement of the Objects of the Esoteric Christian Union," by E.M.; revised and enlarged edition, 1892.
BIRMINGHAM:
THE RUSKIN PRESS, RUSKIN HOUSE,
STAFFORD STREET.
1905.
THE STORY OF ANNA KINGSFORD AND
EDWARD MAITLAND
AND
OF THE NEW GOSPEL OF
INTERPRETATION.
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, née 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 Shropshire, 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 Essex, on the 16th September, 1846, long after the last of her many brothers and sisters, and endowed with the most fragile of constitutions and liabilities the most distressing of bodily weakness and suffering, and differing widely, moreover, in temperament from all with whom she was associated, 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 assiduously 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 assuming 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 amusements, 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