Lucy Maude Montgomery is best known for her novel “Anne of Green Gables” about life on Prince Edward Island. She was a devout Presbyterian and kept a detailed diary throughout her life. Her are some of her thoughts about making a religious decision, denominations, and revising her beliefs about hell:
October 7th, 1897 [age 22]
Cavendish, Prince Edward Island
The only social function we have had this summer was prayer-meeting, that faithful old stand-by. The prayer-meeting of today however is very different from its predecessor. It has evolved into a “Christian Endeavor Society”. I can’t say I approve of the change.
Looking back on my past life I think I have had a rather peculiar spiritual experience. I am not “religiously inclined”, as the phrase goes, but I have always possessed a deep CURIOSITY about “things spiritual and eternal”. I want to FIND OUT — to KNOW — and hence I am always poking and probing into creeds and religions, dead and alive, wanting to know for knowledge’ sake what vital spark of immortal truth might be buried among all the verbiage of theologies and systems.
When I was very young — about eight or nine — I began to think of these things very deeply and passed through a great many bitter spiritual struggles, of which I could not have said a word to those about me. My theology was very primitive and I took everything very literally. I supposed heaven was a city of golden houses and streets, where we would always walk around with harps and crowns and sing hymns all the time and where it would be “one endless Sabbath day”. I could not help thinking it would be dreadfully dull. ONE Sunday on earth seemed ENDLESS — how then would it be with one that really WAS endless? But I also thought that this was very wicked of me — that there was something in me radically wrong when heaven had no attraction for me. But anyway, it would be better than hell which I also implicitly believed to be a lake of fire and brimstone, haunted by the devil and all his angels. While I had a vague impression that heaven was spread all over the other side of the blue sky above us hell seemed to me to be situated away off to the southeast!! I was terribly frightened of hell and my fear frequently drove me into trying desperately “to be a Christian”.
I had some bitter seasons. I remember that when I was about ten I got it into my head that the Catholic church was the only right one and that outside its pale all were heretics doomed to penal fires! I got these ideas out of a sample copy of a newspaper called “The Catholic World” which had been sent to the post-master. Its statements were so dogmatic that they impressed me as authoritative. How I suffered because of this! It seems both funny and pitiful to me now. But it was very real and inexorable then. And I was so miserably ALONE — there was no one to whom I could go for help. I would only have been laughed at, or, at best, met with some dogmatic statement which would have been of no help to me at all. In silence and secrecy I had to fight out my own battles and flounder through my quagmires.
Somehow or other I gradually got over or outgrew my difficulty about Mother Church only to stumble helplessly into another. The Baptist and Presbyterian girls in school — the “big girls” — were always disputing on doctrinal points, especially on Baptism, and I began to fear that the Baptists, and they only, were right and that I would certainly be “lost” if I were not immersed. I worried over this on many a sleepless pillow and argued fiercely with myself over it for weeks. Finally, however, I passed out from this shadow also.
At intervals — always in winter; I was never troubled with conscience spasms in summer — I “fell under conviction of sin” — that is I remembered about hell and got frightened! — cried, prayed, and determined desperately to be “good” — to like reading the Bible better than story books, not to get tired — that is to say “bored”, only I wasn’t acquainted with that word then — in church, and NOT to dislike Sunday. Besides, I would rigidly practise a hundred repressions and denials of my childish instincts. For instance, I would, when setting the table, conscientiously put for myself a certain knife which I hated and therefore thought everyone else must also hate. Last winter I read for the first time “The Story of An African Farm”. The writer was describing just such experiences of childhood. When I came to the sentence, “We conscientiously put the cracked coffee cup for ourselves at breakfast” I leaned back and laughed. It was as if I had unexpectedly seen my own face peering out at me from a mirror. So this Boer girl, living thousands of miles away in South Africa, had had exactly the same experience as mine! Truly, we are not so different from each other as we like to imagine.
To resume: — the fit would pass in a few weeks and I would lapse back into “wickedness” and indifference again until the next attack.
As I grew up all this ceased. Then came that time in town when B. Faye Mills — who has since gone over to the Unitarians, by the way — turned it upside down. I hardly know what induced me to “join the church” then. The whole air seemed to be thrilling with a kind of magnetism and it was hard for anyone to resist the influence, especially one so extremely sensitive and impressionable as I am. Then there was Mary C. who really wanted to “come out” and wouldn’t unless I would; and so, partly far her sake, partly because I was tired of being urged and pestered and harangued every time a revivalist came around, I surrendered and “came out”, too. I think it was a mistake, for I put myself in a false position. To “join the church” meant assenting to certain teachings which I did NOT and COULD not accept.
I cannot recall just when I ceased to believe implicitly in those teachings — the process was so gradual. My belief in the fine old hell of literal fire and brimstone went first — it and others seemed to drop away like an outgrown husk, so easily that I knew it not until one day it dawned upon me that they had been gone a long time. I have not yet formulated any working belief to replace that which I have outgrown. Perhaps it will come in time. These things must GROW, like everything else. [all emphasis is hers]