Charles and Emma by Deborah Heiligman Page B

were not big enough for Charles, Emma, a butler, a cook, a maid, and all the beetles, fossils, and shells. He moaned to Emma in a letter, “Houses are very scarce and the landlords are all gone mad, they ask such prices. Erasmus takes it to heart even more than I do, and declares I ought to end all my letters to you, ‘yours inconsolably.’”
    In the mornings he was not only writing about hawks and owls, he was also pouring out his ideas about religion and faith, and about morality and conscience. His thoughts spilled into his notebooks, and out of them, onto scraps of paper, and onto stationery from the Athenaeum Club, where he took most of his dinners. He wondered if morality was innate, not learned or taught. He scribbled, “I suspect conscience, an hereditary compound passion. Like avarice.” If people were, in essence, naturally moral, what was the need for religion, really? Don’t we all have the right moral instincts? In his “N” notebook, he observed, “It does not hurt the conscience of a Boy to swear, though reason may tell him not, but it does hurt his conscience, if he has been cowardly, or has injured another bad, vindictive.—or lied &c &c.” The acts we do that hurt others seem wrong to us. Why? Are we born knowing right from wrong, or do we have to learn it?
    He had grown up with the Ten Commandments—including “Thou shalt not bear false witness”—and with the injunction to love your neighbor as yourself. But soon after his mother died, he had told a classmate that you could grow different-colored flowers by watering them with colored water and that his mother had taught him how to figure out the name of a plant by looking inside its blossom. Charles had made this all up and felt terrible about his lie later. Thoughmaybe he shouldn’t have—his classmate went on to become a well-known lichenologist and botanist, and he said that Charles had roused his attention and curiosity.
    Charles thought back to his boyish lies and misdeeds. He once picked fruit from one of his father’s trees and hid it in the bushes. Then he ran in “breathless haste” and “spread the news” that he had discovered a hoard of stolen fruit. He also stole fruit to eat and to give away to some poor people who lived nearby. Once he killed a bird with a stone, and he still felt bad about that, too. He felt ashamed about all of this and confessed these incidents in his autobiography, which he wrote as an old man.
    Charles thought about arguments for belief—Emma’s and other people’s. He pondered his own reactions to those arguments. He read other people’s ideas, not only those of Malthus, but also of Adam Smith, who had written in the previous century about free-market economics and capitalism. Charles read scholars and theologians who wrote about religion and philosophy. He talked to his friends, to Erasmus and to Hensleigh. They questioned just as he did. He thought of his mentor, John Stevens Henslow, who was a scientist and was also religious, as was Charles Lyell. He thought about Captain FitzRoy, who had married a religious woman and was now a Bible literalist—he thought every word in the Bible was true. Thomas Carlyle thought about these questions, too, and he wrote what would become a motto of the Victorian era: The dilemma was that they were becoming “destitute of faith, yet terrified of skepticism.”
    Charles was skeptical, and was scared to take it public. He wasn’t ready to shake up the world. He had to think of Emma’s feelings. In his private notes, Charles wrote that people do believe in things that can’t be proved. Belief was not about reason, he concluded: “Belief allied to instinct.”
    He made notes to himself about the strong emotions that make one think about God and heaven. “The emotions of terror & wonder so often concomitant with sublime.” He realized that it