The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
woman has married a bad man: ‘In N. H— lived Mr. and Mrs. B—. The
husband was a rough, profane, wicked man, a despiser of the Gospel of
Christ, caring only for the things of this life. His wife was awakened to
an interest in spiritual things, and at length, as she hoped, became a new
creature in Christ.’ She walked six miles to church to profess herself as a
sinner and be reborn in Christ, while her husband despised her effort. Her
regular attendance at church and her new religious state introduced severe
tension in their relationship: ‘The conflict was severe, but not long. He felt
himself to be the chief of sinners and was enabled soon to surrender all to
Christ. His wife’s strict and patient performance of duty, and her simple
loving prayers were the means which God blessed to his conversion.’ 79
The evangelical narrative had the ability to be inverted from romance to
horror. In the full-length 1894 novel, The Sacrifice of Catherine Ballard,
the story began at an auction in London with a man buying the forty-yearold
diary of a young woman. The reader gradually realises that the
purchaser, Oliver, had sought the hand of the diarist, Catherine, in marriage
in the 1830s, but Catherine’s father had blocked it. What Oliver discovered
from the diary was that Catherine’s father had given her in marriage
to Gideon, the planter son of a business partner, because of business debts.
Oliver learns, many decades on, that Catherine was an unwilling bride,
marrying to please her father and save his business:
We pass over the wedding. The awful lie was consummated. God’s
name was outraged, as it too often is at the marriage service. And all
the fearful enormity of Catherine’s sacrifice and her sin came so overpoweringly
to her soul, as that service closed, that, with white face
and listless, nerveless frame, she sank fainting at the communion
rails. 80
Oliver learns from the diary that things went from bad to worse for
Catherine. She joined her husband Gideon on his Jamaican plantation and
bore him a daughter in 1832. The year following, slavery was abolished, a
development Catherine not only welcomed but which set her to teaching
the Bible to her husband’s slaves, encouraging them to seek their own
dignity in the Lord. On hearing this, Gideon had become a monster, telling
her:
‘I hate you, loathe you, would like to shoot you down as I would a
nigger – only that would be too quick, too easy a death for you. ...
I bought you on purpose to kill you, but to kill you slowly. I found
out from your father that some one else, some canting religious sneak,
wanted you, and you wanted him, I believe; so I bought you right
out to take you down . . . Yes, madam!’ he hissed; ‘my slave. Bought
with gold, as I bought all my field hands. Aha! Madame Sanctimonious,
that has found out your temper, has it?’ 81
76