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Annie Besant - An Autobiography by Annie Wood Besant
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the sums that should have passed through his hands to others; my own
bright life had been enshrouded by pain and rendered to me degraded by
an intolerable sense of bondage; and here was my helpless, sinless babe
tortured for weeks and left frail and suffering. The smooth brightness
of my previous life made all the disillusionment more startling, and
the sudden plunge into conditions so new and so unfavourable dazed and
stunned me. My religious past became the worst enemy of the suffering
present. All my personal belief in Christ, all my intense faith in His
constant direction of affairs, all my habit of continual prayer and of
realisation of His Presence--all were against me now. The very height
of my trust was the measure of the shock when the trust gave way. To me
He was no abstract idea, but a living reality, and all my heart rose up
against this Person in whom I believed, and whose individual finger I
saw in my baby's agony, my own misery, the breaking of my mother's
proud heart under a load of debt, and all the bitter suffering of the
poor. The presence of pain and evil in a world made by a good God; the
pain falling on the innocent, as on my seven months' old babe; the pain
begun here reaching on into eternity unhealed; a sorrow-laden world; a
lurid, hopeless hell; all these, while I still believed, drove me
desperate, and instead of like the devils believing and trembling, I
believed and hated. All the hitherto dormant and unsuspected strength
of my nature rose up in rebellion; I did not yet dream of denial, but I
would no longer kneel.

As the first stirrings of this hot rebellion moved in my heart I met a
clergyman of a very noble type, who did much to help me by his ready
and wise sympathy. Mr. Besant brought him to see me during the crisis
of the child's illness; he said little, but on the following day I
received from him the following note:--

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