by Seth Koven
3.2. Punch mocked male Simple Lifers, whose inept attempts to rusticate themselves signaled their failure to perform their husbandly duties. “The Simple Life,” William Gunning King, illustrator, Punch’s Almanack for 1906 (Courtesy of Punch, Ltd.).
Muriel did not have a conversion experience akin to Hobhouse’s; nor did her deepening commitment to living by Tolstoy’s principles estrange her from Henry and Rachel Lester. Reading Tolstoy, however, did mark a decisive moment in her thinking and left her a convinced pacifist and apostle of non-violent resistance. “It changed the very quality of life for me,” she recalled.24 We can find in Tolstoy’s religious, spiritual, and social writings the seeds of many concepts that Muriel later adopted and adapted. Tolstoy and his far-flung army of disciples, including Muriel, sought to regenerate the world from within. Change began with the self, not with social, economic, and political institutions. Muriel, like Tolstoy, turned away from the great and powerful and immersed herself in the “life lived by unconsidered millions.”25 Muriel accepted Tolstoy’s “law of non-resistance” and his “law of Love” forbidding all forms of violence, especially violence against evildoers who themselves used force to harm others.26 In What Do I Believe (1884), Tolstoy insisted that geopolitical boundaries separating nations—“frontier lines”—had no impact on moral obligations to others and the essential unity of all people across borders. His public denunciation of militarism and the “coarse fraud” of patriotism made him persona non grata with secular authorities in Czarist Russia and forced some followers into exile. He revered Christ’s teachings and perfect life, but his unapologetic disdain for Church dogma and organized religion prompted the Orthodox Church to excommunicate him. Tolstoy cultivated the persona of an angry Old Testament prophet, denouncing the sins of materialism in favor of simplicity of life. His critics belittled him as a latter-day Quixote, battling the windmills of modernity.
Tolstoy’s disciples, committed to their master’s injunction to speak the truth fearlessly and wholly, proved unflattering biographers. The publication of Aylmer Maude’s candidly critical Life of Tolstoy (1910–11) revealed to British readers the narcissism of Tolstoy’s self-denial and the lengths to which others went to subsidize his asceticism. (Maude was among the first speakers Muriel invited to address workers at her Sunday evening services at Kingsley Hall in 1915.) Tolstoy’s striving for ethical perfection could—and did—look a lot like lunacy to others. Maude’s Life convinced Bernard Shaw, one of Britain’s most eccentric connoisseurs of eccentricity, that Tolstoy and the Tolstoyans had gone too far. Shaw concluded that the public Tolstoy was a man of genius, but the private Tolstoy an insensitive sham, capable of “inhuman callousness”: “in the ordinary affairs of life he shirked every uncongenial responsibility whilst availing himself of every luxury he really cared for.” “We are amazed,” Shaw lamented, “at the extent to which a man who was boundlessly sympathetic on paper with imaginary beings could be so outrageously inconsiderate to real people at his own home.”27 Muriel, unlike Shaw and Maude, seems to have turned a blind eye to Tolstoy’s peccadillos. She cared only for his ideas.
The British Tolstoyans whose social and theological views most closely anticipated Muriel’s own clustered around the first Brotherhood Church in Croydon in 1894. Muriel was well acquainted with the church by World War I, when angry patriotic mobs vandalized it as an unpatriotic pacifist outpost. One of its founders, John Coleman Kenworthy, believed that the truths of the Kingdom of God resided within each person.28 They would be revealed through an un-heroic revolution of “small things” enacted according to principles of everyday brotherliness. An ardent anti-colonialist, he condemned Britain’s “robberies and oppressions in Ireland, India, South Africa and the world over” as a modern version of ancient Rome’s tyrannical moral turpitude. The fiction of Pax Britannica was sustained by the reality of endemic violence to human dignity. Living as Jesus lived would “revolutionise the conduct of individual life” and create a “new and fraternal order outside the capitalistic system”—a “voluntary cooperative commonwealth.” It would hasten a “new social order right through the old one” with “the mildness and gentleness of the sunrise which shines away the night and ushers in the day.”29 God’s love, not the combined forces of a revolutionary proletariat, would cleanse Church and State. The true Christian forgave injuries rather than demanded reparation for them.30 To a remarkable extent, Kenworthy prefigured Muriel’s vision of conflict resolution and the means by which God’s love would precipitate Christian revolution.
Fellow Brotherhood Church leader William Jupp, like Henry Lester and Muriel, put “reconciliation” at the heart of his theology and social philosophy. A former Congregationalist minister heavily influenced by Whitmanic ideas of manly comradeship and a member of the socialist Fellowship of the New Life, Jupp anticipated Muriel’s formulation of the relationship between an all-loving Christ and the “law of reconciliation.”31 He proposed a Darwinian meta-narrative of religious evolution marked by stages, the last of which he called “the light of reconciliation and great peace.” “It was not pardon for wrong things done,” he explained, “but reconciliation with the righteousness yet to be attained that alone could save or satisfy the upward reaching soul.” Reconciliation entailed yielding to Jesus’s ideal of goodness. It was a process of becoming that invited imperfect men and women to bask in the “restoring power of love and friendship.”32
Restorative love and friendship also animated the Anglo-Canadian Lily Dougall’s Christian mysticism and provided yet another model for Muriel’s emerging theological thinking. For Dougall, neither wrath nor suffering had any place in God’s nature and activity: “only love and good are infinite, eternal, and omnipotent.” In place of punishment and retribution for wrongdoing, she extolled the “recreative power of friendship”—in which individual and corporate meld together, warmed by God’s loving friendship.33 Where Muriel always yoked her vision of God’s loving friendship to doing in and for the world, Underhill cared much more for the perfecting of the inner life.
One stream of thought conspicuously—and surprisingly—absent from Muriel’s writings about her ethico-religious education was Theosophy. The London Theosophical Society, at the urging of Annie Besant, had founded a club for match factory girls in its “Bow Lodge” at 193 Bow Road in the aftermath of the Match Girls’ strike of 1888.34 Officers of Bow Lodge were connected to some of East London’s most prominent philanthropic organizations: its Treasurer, the school teacher Harry Banbery, resided at Toynbee Hall’s bohemian student hostel, Balliol House, in the 1890s and tried to improve conditions for inmates of the Whitechapel Poor Law casual ward and infirmary.35 When Muriel began visiting Bow around 1902, Bow Lodge had a thriving Boys’ Brotherhood Club devoted to “the great work of the Universal Brotherhood.”36 Men and women affiliated with Theosophy figured prominently in Muriel’s life. George Lansbury, the Lester sisters’ chief guide and political patron in Bow and Poplar, served on the Building Committee of the Theosophical Society in 1911. He offered a lengthy justification for his support of Theosophy’s fraternal principles in My Life (1928). The Society’s supporters included feminist luminaries Charlotte Despard and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, both part of Muriel’s broad circle of “advanced” women engaged in suffrage, antiwar, and social welfare work.37 All of this strongly suggests that Muriel must have been familiar with Theosophy, its teaching, and its socio-political outreach in Bow in the decade before World War I.
Theosophy’s hospitality to the feminine aspects of the Divine, its close alliance with anti-colonial movements in India in the first decades of the twentieth century, and its spiritualization of everyday life harmonized with Muriel’s vision of women’s potential as religious leaders and her growing receptivity to non-Western challenges to empire. Theosophists shared Muriel and Doris’s admiration for Tolstoy’s “Unecclesiastical Christianity” with its soul-centered critique of materialism.38 The Lesters would certainly have had no cause to disagree with the princ
iple uniting Theosophists across their differences: their devotion to fostering the “Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or color.” Unconditional love for all creation, animate and inanimate, buttressed the “Universal Divine Principle” elucidated by Theosophy’s charismatic Russian leader, Madame Helena Blavatsky. HPB, as she was called, developed a syncretic anti-dogmatic fusion of Eastern and Western philosophical, scientific, and religious teachings based on divine messages from Tibetan Mahatmas that she faithfully recorded. Moses and Jesus offered profound wisdom, Blavatsky acknowledged, but they mattered a good deal less to her than Buddhist and Hindu teachings.
This was undoubtedly the rub for Muriel and Doris. They remained unapologetically certain that Jesus and Christianity had a monopoly on religious truth. Neither she nor Doris flirted with anything like religious relativism.39 Nor were they initially drawn to the various mystical impulses then coursing through Christian spiritual questers like Evelyn Underhill in prewar Britain.40 Years later, Muriel confessed to Gandhi that she was startled by the depth of his grasp of the Sermon on the Mount and Christianity and embarrassed by her own aversion to Hinduism. No matter how hard she tried to understand Hinduism, she “never found anything in it” and disliked its institutions.41 Her respect for human difference fell short of reverence for religious diversity. If Muriel had once joined the Theosophical match girls’ club in Bow in 1902 (as her only biographer believes), she went out of her way to conceal this association with a religion whose occult and esoteric mysteries were incompatible with how she understood her Christian faith.
Heterodox champions of God’s Law of Love powerfully influenced Muriel’s ideas about being a Christian. But so too did several mainstream strands of religious thought and action that increasingly overlapped by the outset of the new century. Pan-denominational “social gospel” Christianity joined gospel preaching with outreach to the urban poor. Incarnational theology, with its sacramental reverence for the body, increasingly made common cause with Christian socialism. Liberal Protestant theological emphasis on God’s immanence and growing interest in the humanity and divinity of the historical Jesus encouraged people of faith to solve earthly problems. What all these theological developments shared in common was intense focus on Jesus’s embodied life on earth, which in turn justified growing concern for the material and economic hardships faced by the poor. The most influential mid-century advocate of social Christianity was Reverend F. D. Maurice. He forged a path between the sin-centered theology of evangelicals and the incense, vestments, and rituals of High Churchmen. His Christian socialism emphasized that the “Fatherhood of God” necessitated the “brotherhood of mankind.” Rejecting the doctrine of eternal punishment, he offered a domesticated language of Christian fraternity to Britons frightened by Chartists’ and continental socialists’ strident language of class.
By the 1890s and 1900s, High, Low, and Broad churchmen alike claimed Maurice as their common theological forbear. His Christian socialist heirs numbered gadfly radical outsiders like the feminist anti-imperialist Fabian socialist, the Reverend Stewart Headlam.42 They also included powerful leaders within the established Church like Charles Gore, who held the bishoprics of Worcester, Birmingham, and Oxford. Love, divine and human, was at the heart of Bishop Gore’s moderate—and influential—Christian socialist theology. In Lux Mundi (1889), he combined sacramentalism, evidence about the historical Jesus, and a plea for workers’ rights with the conviction that the Incarnation was a “self-emptying of God.” God had chosen to reveal Himself “under conditions of human nature and from the human point of view.”43 By taking human form as His son Jesus Christ, God accepted the limits of what Jesus, as man, knew at that particular moment in history. Science was no threat to faith because there was no need to make Jesus’s teachings match the findings of modern inquiry. His Bampton Lectures (1891) detailed the implications of his view of the Incarnation. Because God chose to “express” and “limit” Himself in “true manhood,” He contains “the prototype of human self-sacrifice … for God is love.” Men and women returned God’s love for humanity through loving “self-effacement.”44 Forgetting the claims of self was the path to God and an expression of the divine within each person. Well-to-do Christians like Muriel demonstrated “self-effacement” by caring for others, especially the poor. This required a profound sympathy of thinking, seeing, and feeling with another. It was also a call to action based on love, not struggle, between rich and poor.
The historical Jesus led some to doubt, deism, and the religion of humanity. For others like Muriel, Jesus’s earthly life strengthened their sense of the importance of His doctrine of love for modern life. With the English translation of What is Christianity? (1901), the Lutheran Church historian and practical theologian Adolf von Harnack brought his understanding of the historical Jesus to a large British audience, including the Lester sisters. Doris used Harnack to develop a series of lessons for the boys in her Loughton Sunday school class.45 Harnack balanced a critical historical approach to the Bible with faith and a keen sense of obligation to the poor. He abhorred extremism in all its forms and discounted miracles and mysticism. He meticulously applied historical methods to the Gospels, but he did so to understand—rather than permanently fix—their contextual meaning. It was an essential high privilege of Christianity “to adapt its shape to the course of history,” to interpret the Gospel in light of modern needs. He dismissed Franciscan-style ascetic renunciation, then gaining a small number of adherents in the 1890s across Europe, as sentimental coquetting with misery. So too he argued that the Gospel provided no blueprints for the economic reorganization of society along socialist lines. Christianity did offer a powerful model of the right relationship between individuals and society that rejected class conflict in favor of solidarity between rich and poor within “a community … as wide as human life itself and as deep as human need.” This Christian community would transform the socialism of “conflicting interests” into one resting on “spiritual unity.”46 Christians otherwise divided by national, political, and religious commitments shared Harnack’s longing for an alternative to the proletariat’s war against capital. Spurred by the godless mischief of socialists, even the reactionary Holy Father, Leo XIII, awakened to the “utter poverty of the masses” and enjoined “brotherly love and friendship” as an antidote to class conflict in Rerum Novarum (1891).
For Muriel, Doris, and their pupils, Harnack challenged them to imagine their own world reorganized according to the laws of the Kingdom of Heaven, and to imagine living their own lives following Christ. Like so many other Christians in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Europe and America, the Lester sisters demanded that religious devotion ally itself with “social enthusiasm” in finding answers to urgent industrial questions.47 Individual salvation and the regeneration of society went hand in hand. The evangelical founders of the Salvation Army, Catherine and William Booth, had come to this conclusion as Catherine faced her fatal cancer. William launched his comprehensive scheme In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890) with its vast apparatus of physical, social, and moral redemption: slum lassies for the infirm, farm labor colonies for the unemployed, soup kitchens for the hungry, marching bands for the masses, even a lucifer match factory. In return for such largesse, the poor were expected to sit through an hour or two of religious services.48 Muriel disliked the fevered emotions unleashed by evangelicals like the Booths, whose belief in fallen humanity starkly divided the damned and the saved. The Salvation Army loved and forgave sinners, the better to convert and save them. This was not how Muriel understood God’s work or her own.
The roots of Muriel’s abhorrence of sin-focused religion must be found in Henry Lester’s determination to liberate his children from the psychic horrors of the hellfire religion to which his own father had subjected him.49 Even as Henry Lester assumed ever more prominent public duties as President of the Essex Baptist Union, first in 1887–88 and once again in 1903–4, he and
his family never felt bound to a single church or denomination.50 In the 1900s, Muriel and Doris worshipped in the family’s Loughton Baptist Union church along with Anglican churches, Congregationalist and Wesleyan Methodist chapels, and Quaker meetings. At her mother’s urging, Doris regularly took tea at the rectory with the Anglican rector of Bow, Reverend Kitcat, and his wife. It pleased Rachel Lester to know that the Kitcats were keeping an eye on her youngest daughter during her lengthening sojourns into the surrounding slum streets.
3.3. Reverend Reginald John Campbell’s dramatic good looks were part of his theatrical public persona as Edwardian London’s most celebrated preacher. Charles T. Bateman, R. J. Campbell, M. A., Pastor of the City Temple, London, photograph by E. H. Mills (London, 1903), frontispiece.
Sometime between 1905 and 1910, Muriel finally found a preacher, a theology, and a movement that spoke to her deepest needs to combine outward action bringing citizenship to the poor with inward contemplation drawing her close to God. Various streams of “God is Love” theology, progressive politics, and social activism converged in a controversial religious movement cleverly packaged under the vague but catchy name, The New Theology. The New Theology electrified the Lester sisters and a broad swath of the British public. It owed much of its success to its flamboyantly ascetic white-haired high priest, the Congregationalist minister R. J. Campbell. (See fig. 3.3.) For a few brief years before World War I, Campbell made theology matter to men and women across the religious and social spectrum. “The man in the street began talking about immanence and transcendence,” one disaffected disciple recalled, “with the same familiarity with which he discussed free trade and protection.” The Lester sisters joined thousands who crowded into the City Temple, “the Mecca of theological rebels,” to hear his pan-denominational sermons.51 Eloquence and passion more than made up for theological inconsistencies, at least until Campbell subjected his own teachings to critical scrutiny and abandoned them in favor of more orthodox Anglicanism during World War I.
