314 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



' the Bible was his constant companion.'* Three weeks 

 before his death Mrs. Jefferies was reading to him from 

 St. Luke (vi. 20), and Jefferies said : * Those are the 

 words of Jesus ; they are true, and all philosophy is 

 hollow, 't At another time he said : ' I have done wrong 

 and thought wrong ; it was my intellectual vanity. 'J 

 Later still, apparently, Mrs. Jefferies told Mr. J. W. North § 

 that their time had long been spent in prayer together 

 and in reading St. Luke. ' Almost his last intelligible 

 words were : " Yes, yes ; that is so. Help, Lord, for 

 Jesus' sake. Darling, good-bye. God bless you and 

 the children, and save you all from such great pain." ' 

 f Lying sleepless in the night, according to Besant, I| 

 who wrote within a year of Jefferies' death, * the simple 

 old faith came back to him,' and he ' died listening with 

 faith and love to the words contained in the old Book ' 

 {i.e., the Bible). But a few years later, discussing this 

 ' conversion ' with Mr. Henry S. Salt, Besant wrote : 



* I stated in my " Eulogy " that he died a Christian. 

 His wife read to him from the Gospel of St. Luke, and he 

 acquiesced. But, / have since been informed,h.e was weak — 

 too weak not to acquiesce, and his views never changed 

 from the time that he wrote " The Story of My Heart." 

 For my own part, it surprised me to hear that a man who 

 had written those pages should ever return to orthodoxy, 

 but I had no choice but to record the story as it happened 

 and was told to me. . . . When a man gets as far as 

 Jefferies — when he has shed and scattered to the winds 

 all sacerdotalism and authority' — he does not go back. 

 You neglected to notice that, if he went back at all, it 

 was not to ask for the priest or the last Sacraments of 

 the Church. He was satisfied with the words of the 

 great socialist and anti-sacerdotalist ' {i.e., Jesus). ^ 



* C. W. M., in Gir/s' Own Paper, December 2J, 1889. 

 t Ibid. \ Ibid. 



§ Pall Mall Gazette, August 16, 1887. 

 II Etilo^s^y of Richard Jefferies. 

 \ Quoted in The Faith of Richard Jefferies, by Henry S. Salt. 



