The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [38]
The harder Carter tried to feel God’s presence, the more elusive God seemed to become. One evening in July 1851, he writes, “You had reason to think the Holy Spirit had roused you, but alas, an amazing and fearful backsliding has occurred.” In the twelve days leading up to this confession, he had tallied an entire “column of filthy sins,” while at the same time, all “thoughts of God” were “absent.” And for this, he entirely blamed himself.
Carter did have faith in some things—faith that faith existed, faith that other people had faith in God—but he had at least as many doubts. Nowhere is this more apparent than in an intricate chart he created in Reflections. Here, he put his internal debate down on paper, weighing the pros and cons of being a devout Christian. To begin, he listed thirteen arguments in favor of choosing such a life and then, in a corresponding column to the right, an equal number against, each one effectively canceling the other out. For instance, number 8: he would have “general serenity of mind” as a Christian and, yet, “frequent mental conflicts.”
On first glance, I was amused by this elaborate entry, dated October 1851 and spilling over onto two full pages. The rambling title scrawled atop the chart made me smile: “In Deciding for a Christian Life in Future: A comparative statement of arguments For and Against, Advantages and Disadvantages, Encouragements and Discouragements, in a worldly point of view.”
“Worldly” it was not, to my eyes. On the contrary, the chart looked like the work of an endearingly naïve young man. It reminded me of a similar chart in Carter’s daily diary that served as a ledger of correspondence, letters received scrupulously balanced against each one sent out. But the more I studied this entry, the more heartbreaking it became. Along with his concern about whether he would ever be a good Christian was a second painful issue, though he intertwined the two: the repercussions of being a Dissenter. The term Dissenter applied to any non-Anglican denomination, but certain religions at the time were far more marginalized and despised than others, such as Evangelicalism, considered the most extreme, conservative branch of Christianity. Whatever his specific faith, Carter definitely saw himself as part of this minority, or, in other words, as a religious outsider. If publicly identified as such, he would suffer “jeers and ridicule,” “persecution—open and concealed,” “constant humiliation,” “no sympathy with many,” and on a personal level, “depression.”
As I read of his fears, I felt great sympathy; moreover, I found myself identifying with this tortured Christian English Victorian diarist, a man both 25 years younger and 155 years older than I am right now. The question he was agonizing over, boiled down to its essence, was the same question that had plagued me as a young man: should I come out? In his case, should I come out as a Dissenter? Pausing over these two pages, I wished for him what I myself had desperately wanted at age twenty: for that perfect, knowing someone to show up and say that perfect, knowing thing—the answer to everything. Absent that, I was glad that, like me, Carter had a place to pour out his soul.
Compounding his isolation, Carter was unable to speak of his struggle with friends such as Henry Gray. He feared jeopardizing his standing at the hospital. (Henry Gray, as the son of an employee of the royal family, was presumably a loyal son of the Church of England.) Nor did he confide to John Sawyer and his family. (Though Dr. Sawyer was not religious, his wife and daughters were Dissenters, though, as Carter implies, of a diametrically opposed denomination.) And to his fellow parishioners, he did not dare voice his doubts, lest he be labeled a skeptic.
While it doesn’t lessen the poignancy of H. V. Carter’s situation, with hindsight one can see that his intensely private struggle was a reflection of larger conflicts arising during the mid-Victorian