CHAPTER VIII
SOME STEPS FORWARD
The spirit of obedience was one of Harriet Beecher’s characteristic traits. So she resolutely devoted herself at Catherine’s command to the critical analysis of Butler’s “Analogy,” a book on the works of God as shown both in nature and in the spiritual realm. It sounds rather profound for a girl in the early teens; but when we recall the titles she chose for the essays she wrote at the school in Litchfield, we are not surprised that she found interest in such a book. Indeed, she discovered a real pleasure in subjects of this kind. At the time when she was improving her mind with the “Analogy,” she was reading also another famous book of spiritual import, Baxter’s “Saints’ Rest.” No other book she ever read moved her so profoundly. It filled her with a sort of exaltation that made her wish as she walked the street that the pavements might sink beneath her if only she might thus find herself in Heaven.
In this mood of spiritual elevation she went to Litchfield for one of her early vacations. While there a sermon preached by her father made a strong appeal to her mind and heart. Dr. Beecher’s text on that Sunday was this: “I call you not servants, but friends,” and his subject was Jesus as a soul-friend offered to every human being.
Forgetting all about theology for the time, Dr. Beecher spoke that day with all simplicity of the faithful, unwearied love of Christ, how He tenderly cares for the soul’s wants through all its wanderings and sorrows, until He brings it through the darkness of earth to the perfection of Heaven.
Even a child could have understood him. Harriet sat absorbed, her eyes gathering tears as she listened; and when the doctor said, “Come, then, and trust your soul to this faithful Friend,” her heart throbbed, “I will.” For a moment she was discouraged by the thought that she had not had any “conviction of sin,” but like a flash came the thought that Jesus could give her that as well as anything else, and that she could trust Him for the whole. And so her earnest young soul went out to the wonderful Friend. She sat through the sacramental service that followed with swelling heart and tearful eyes, and walked home filled with a new joy. She went up to her father’s study in the attic room and, falling into his arms, whispered: “Father, I have given myself to Jesus and He has taken me.” The doctor held her silently to his heart a moment, and his tears dropped on her head. “Is it so?” he said. “Then has a new flower blossomed in the Kingdom this day.”
In this simple and natural way began Harriet’s distinctive religious experience. But we must not think of it as going on always like the flow of a calm river. There were many doubts and tremblings to be mastered, many puzzles to unravel as she went along, especially during the years from twelve to twenty. We may say, however, that the experience of happy trust in God became in the end so much the law of her life that it could never be torn away from her by any of the events of her mature days, whether of suffering or of prosperity.
It seems the greatest pity that the earlier stages of her religious experience should not have gone on smoothly, as that of her wonderful mother had done. Perhaps, however, others with difficulties like hers may be glad to look over the record of her struggles and may take courage from her victories.
We have seen in the last chapter that Harriet had not been many years at Hartford before a shadow seemed to be settling down upon her spirit. There were certainly good reasons for this.
In the first place she was very much overworked as pupil and teacher in the Hartford Female Seminary. Translating Ovid into English verse at thirteen years of age, teaching Virgil and Rhetoric at fourteen, studying French and Italian and drawing and painting, taking a niggardly half hour for the mid-day dinner, and snatching a bit of supper as she could, doing her share and more to keep the domestic wheels of the large household at Hartford running smoothly, and living excitedly in the midst of this company of complex personalities, having no outdoors, no rest, no play—this way of life was enough to interfere with the physical well-being of any growing girl, even with that of a robust one fresh from the Litchfield mountains!
Harriet’s father understood perfectly well the relation between our mental activity and our supply of physical energy. We know this because we so often found him relieving the overstrain by periods of devotion to the woodpile and the garden; and it is interesting to see how he accompanied a prescription for spiritual ills with one enjoining obedience to the laws of the body. None could have given better advice also than he did in regard to the steadying of religious emotionalism during revival among the students in Catherine’s school, to keep them from undue excitement and to make the revival season reasonable in its excitement and permanent in its effects. But it is one thing to advise and another to make people put the counsel into practice.
Catherine probably did not see the rocks ahead either for Harriet or for herself. She was indeed using up her own energies so fast that she was to face a breakdown later on in the very midst of a useful career. Then indeed she did have to listen to the monitors; but only after a period of ill health did she regain strength for work. During all her life thereafter she preached obedience to the laws of health, and found the truth of the old adage, “‘Had I but known!’ is very poor comfort.”
Then we must remember, too, that Harriet had also drained her own spiritual energy in watching the soul-struggles of her sister Catherine during the sensitive years of her early girlhood. Catherine’s grief colored Harriet’s thoughts and wonderings in the years when everything in her own situation looked like a question.
So poor little Harriet fell into a disconsolate mood. She thought that she did nothing right, that she yielded to temptation almost as soon as it assailed her. What most commonly beset her, she believed, was pride; she could trace all her sins back to that fault. She thought she was not fit for anything, and she wanted to die young.
What young growing soul has not been assailed by moods like this? This half child, half grown woman was developing mentally with great swiftness, and could not understand the meaning of the tumults that were sweeping through her soul. Not being able to answer certain lofty questions, she decided at once that they were unanswerable and that therefore the universe must be all a disastrous affair. Who has not sometime made the same mistake?
Little things had great power over her. If she met something that crossed her feelings she was unhappy for days. She wished she could bring herself to be perfectly indifferent to the judgments of others. She believed there never had been a person more dependent on the good and evil opinions of others than she was. This desire to be loved formed, she feared, the great motive for all her actions. Alas, she was in a parlous state!
That young mourner for the death of Byron and author of the dramatic poem, “Cleon,” found her love of literature a snare in her spiritual pathway. Of course, she could not know that those very powers that were shown by her tastes and inclinations were to be trained and used for the most important and world-influencing work.
It is unfortunate that her father did not think to say to her what he wrote in a letter some twenty years later: “Too long, quite too long, has the devil held in his exclusive possession the fine arts.” He came to the conclusion in the end that ministers would make their sermons more interesting if they would add to their “leaden prose” some of the untrammeled fire that gives charm to poetry and fiction. That Dr. Beecher had an open mind on this subject is shown by his attitude toward Byron and also toward the novels of Sir Walter Scott. It could never have been a pain to him to know that a daughter of his would become the author of a shelf full of novels, all strongly uplifting in their tendency.
But Harriet did not confide her deepest thoughts to him. If she had he might have recalled that his own early days had been checkered with despondency and shamefacedness and jealous feeling. He had imagined in his sensitive humility that everybody could see the interior of his mind and find the emptiness and vanity that he believed must be there. Yet he had a good cure for such moods, one that he could have recommended to his daughter. He resisted all this, he once said, as if it were a physical lying disease, representing things that were not as if they were, and saying to such feelings, “Get thee behind me, Satan, for thou savorest not the things that be of God!” But at the time of Harriet’s greatest despondency her father seems not to have remembered the cravings and perplexities of his own youth.
Harriet made up her mind to live a far better life. She would regulate it and improve it. She gave herself a strict set of rules, a regular system of things for every hour of the day. But she found that she could not live up to all this and the derelictions gave her sleepless nights. Her feelings were not always equable. She was absent-minded and made mistakes. Terrible faults, these! How like a page from the life of everybody! The trouble in Harriet’s case was that she took these variations of mood for a serious breakdown of her religious stability. She suffered intensely, yet for a long time she kept her suffering to herself. Her naturally buoyant spirits did much to help her, but often she was reproved for laughing so much when she was feeling worst.
It was difficult for Harriet to speak of these inner feelings to others. The reason for this was that she was too humble-minded to speak of so weighty matters at all. Besides this, she felt that she should understand them better than she did, and did not know that every human being is beset by the same questions that puzzled her. Fortunately, Harriet at the age of fourteen had a brother who had just graduated at Yale and was studying theology at Andover. This strong and tender brother to whom she opened her heart just as Catherine had opened hers to her father, unraveled many of her difficulties for her.
The year 1829, when Harriet was sixteen years old, was a period of especial despondency. Catherine, worried about her state of health, sent her to spend a summer at Nut Plains. There at the Foote homestead, the rest in the beautiful country, and we may imagine, the regular meals and the abundance of good sleep, did wonders for tired Harriet.
In that year the Beecher home was moved from Litchfield to Boston, where Dr. Beecher had been called to the pastorate of the Hanover Street Church. Now the atmosphere of any house in which Lyman Beecher dwelt would perforce be stirred by theological controversy. As Harriet’s brother Henry said, “Theology was the food we ate, and the milk we drank, and the air we breathed, and the ground we trod, from our earliest years.” But the new surroundings into which Dr. Beecher now came caused him to strike out more vigorously than ever in defense of his favorite beliefs. In this atmosphere Harriet whenever she came to her home must thrive as she could. Her son, who wrote a book about her life in 1911, says that the atmosphere of mental excitement and conflict in which her father lived and preached at this time drove her already over-stimulated mind to the point of distraction. “Too much mental strain and too little exercise had,” he says, “brought her to her seventeenth year without the strength which should have been the heritage of her robust childhood.”
It would not be possible in our short space to follow all the steps in her soul’s progress and the degrees by which, under the guidance of her brother Edward, she gained at last a comfortable view of her relation to God. But a glimpse here and there may be allowed to us.
Above all things, Harriet could not understand how a God of infinite perfection could stand toward imperfect human beings in any but the most severe attitude. She could not see that One of infinite power and infinite wisdom must have infinite love; and toward a realization of this truth she moved but slowly. How far along she had come in 1828 is shown in the following passage from a letter to Edward. “After all,” she said, “God is a being afar off. He is so far above us that anything but the most distant reverential affection seems almost sacrilegious. It is that affection that can lead us to be familiar that the heart needs.... The language of prayer is of necessity stately and formal, and we cannot clothe all the little minutiæ of our wants and troubles in it.... I sometimes wish that the Saviour were visibly present in this world, that I might go to Him for a solution of some of my difficulties.”
Later on we see that she is making great progress though she herself may not realize that she is. She says in another letter: “It matters little what service He has for me.... I do not mean to live in vain. He has given me talents, and I will lay them at His feet, well satisfied, if He will accept them. All my powers He can enlarge. He made my mind, and He can teach me to cultivate and exert its faculties.”
At last in the character of Jesus Christ she finds a revelation of God as merciful and compassionate as He is powerful—in fact, she found in Him just such a God as she needed. The next summer she writes again to the same brother and says: “I cannot express to you, my brother, I cannot tell you, how that Saviour appears to me. To bear with one so imperfect, so inconsistent as myself, implied long-suffering and patience more than words can express. I love most to look on Christ as my teacher, as one who, knowing the utmost of my sinfulness, my waywardness, my folly, can still have patience, can reform, purify, and daily make me more like himself.”
In these three selections from her letters we see the passage of her mind from the attitude of fear to the attitude of love. In fact, she has come about again to that child-like mood that was hers when she ran to her father’s study and made the beautiful confession of her earliest conscious faith.
Now she began to realize that the very best cure for a disappointing religious condition within us is to put our religion into practice in the world without us by means of a kind spirit instantly made real in kindly acts. Harriet caught this good idea, perhaps from the example of her sister Catherine who in her great sorrow had done this at last.
In a different way Harriet felt that she must come out of herself more than she had. Not that she thought her love of solitude and of going her own way wrong in itself, but that she knew that if she indulged it too much she would miss the joy of knowing that she was helping to make others happy.
She noticed one of her companions engaged in being particularly attentive to a particularly disagreeable elderly man, and as a result Harriet conceived the idea that it was a proof of grace to say something to people who were not agreeable, and to manage to say something or other even if one had nothing to say. She resolved to follow the example of the friend who could sacrifice her own taste and comfort in order to make a “forlorn old daddy” happy and comfortable.
Writing to her great friend, Georgiana May, in 1832, Harriet told her of a sun-dial inscription that her Uncle Samuel Foote, who was sitting by her side as she wrote, has just been quoting for her benefit. It ran thus: Horas non numero nisi serenas—I count the fair hours only. This she said she was taking for her own motto. She had determined, she told her friend, to come out of herself more, to cultivate a general spirit of kindliness toward everybody, to hold out her hand to the right and to the left. To what good purpose she now put this resolution into effect is shown by the fact that her pupils at Hartford remember her to this day as one who took the greatest interest in each one’s affairs, laying aside her own matters and talking over the likes and aims of others. And perhaps she did not find it so hard after all to keep from shrinking into a corner. Perhaps she found a pleasure in meeting new and strange people and in trying to be friendly with them. She seems to have found that these social contacts, though not having any great meaning in themselves, yet could form a very pretty flower border to the way of life.
A wonderful discovery for one to make whose nature, did she but know it, was one great tide of loving impulses, whose heart was vast in its all-including kindliness!