Clara Barton was a religious woman. Her diaries, her home letters, her intimate confidences, all breathe a deeply religious spirit. But she was reserved concerning her personal religious feelings and convictions. Once, when she was abruptly asked by a stranger in a group of strangers what were her religious opinions, she answered that she could not undertake to answer so large a question in so short a time. She recorded this in her diary, with some resentment that she should have been called upon thus to stand and deliver at sight.
But sitting beside a dying soldier, she had no hesitation in praying with him, nor of telling him unreservedly her own faith in God and immortality.
She was reared a Universalist. In that faith she lived the greater part of her life. She did not, however, join the Universalist Church in her home town, and she went away quite early and never established personal relations with a church.
Her satisfaction in church-going was almost wholly in the sermon. For music she did not care, and there was nothing in ritual that appealed to her. But a well-reasoned sermon she enjoyed. Henry Ward Beecher was her favorite preacher, and she did not miss an opportunity of hearing him if she could help it. A truly great sermon or great address of any kind made a strong impression upon her; nor was it wholly intellectual. She was remarkably receptive and open to spiritual impressions. A woman of intellect and will, she was also a woman of unusually sensitive feelings and of deep, though controlled, emotions. She was ever eager to learn and had to the end of her life unshaken faith in the discovery and application of new truth.
It was reported in 1908 that Clara Barton had gone over to Christian Science. The report was not wholly correct. She became interested in Christian Science, but she never adopted it. The minister of the Universalist Church in Oxford, the Reverend Mr. Schoppe, became a Christian Science practitioner and reader, and she was much interested through him and his wife in this change on his part.
She was interested in Mrs. Eddy. It seemed to her a notable thing for a woman, alone and against great opposition, to have accomplished what she did.
She once witnessed the wreck of a sight-seeing automobile filled with Christian Science visitors to Boston, and she was impressed by the fortitude with which they bore pain.
Moreover, she had good reason to know that there is much reckless use of medicine and much needless surgery. She had memories of years in which she suffered many things of many physicians and was nothing better, but rather worse. She saw, in war and in peace, much use of the knife that seemed to her bloody and cruel. She saw women hurrying to the operating-table, sometimes, as she believed, for no better reason than to escape the risk of motherhood, and she scorned them. She expressed herself to me in terms anything but gentle concerning married women who willingly deprive themselves of the perilous privilege of motherhood by resort to surgery. She believed that people who take medicine usually take too much; and that cheerful and wholesome living is better than medicine.
Moreover, she was always ready for a thing that was new. Her delight in the discovery of something hidden and now revealed was intense.
For all these reasons she was disposed to give Christian Science a fair hearing.
In Dr. Epler’s excellent biography, free use is made of Miss Barton’s correspondence with Mr. and Mrs. Schoppe, in which she expressed her interest in their new faith. My own conviction is, that while Clara Barton was thus deeply interested, those letters tend to enlarge the degree of her permanent interest. I am confident that she was less near to being a Christian Scientist than the letters themselves would indicate if taken alone. Indeed, Mr. Schoppe himself gives what I think is a wholly truthful statement, as recorded by Mr. Epler, under date of December 17, 1914:
Clara Barton’s connecting point with Christian Science was on the positives it accented—not from its negative philosophy. She welcomed its doctrine of the Divine presence of God working with us and in us and working upon her own life—present to help. She was exceedingly grateful to Christian Science for bringing out this point of the Divine absoluteness.
Further than that she could not understand it; she could not go. She did not deny, but she believed (unlike the Christian Science negativism) in a perfectly vast realm of material and human progress. She traced it in the wonders of geological ages and historical evolution. She saw God’s handiwork in a colossal complex material creation. She never could bring herself to believe the material or human creation a mortal error!
I regard this as wholly correct. She read “Science and Health” and endeavored to use the “absent treatment” of the Schoppes. The first night it seemed to do good, and the next night the effect was gone. Her effort to obtain whatever was good in Christian Science was sincere; but her experiments did not make her a Christian Scientist.
She employed physicians till the day of her death, and took medicine. But she believed that spiritual things are the real things, and that man is more than body.
The two ministers whom she selected to have charge of her funeral in the old home in Oxford were both Congregationalists. The Reverend Percy H. Epler was chosen for his long friendship, and the Reverend William E. Barton for that and for his kinship. She did not choose, but would have been happy to have chosen, had her plans been worked out in detail, the Reverend Doctor Tyler, an aged minister of the Universalist faith, to have a share in the services. Happily, he was present, and did participate. He had baptized and buried whole generations of the Oxford Bartons, and it was a benediction to have him standing, like a patriarch, above her coffin, and speaking words of comfort and hope.
Her choice of Congregational ministers to perform this service did not imply a lack of honor for the church of her childhood. Yet, in some respects, her associations in later years were more intimate with Congregationalists than with Universalists.
I have no reason to suppose that she talked with any one more freely than she talked with me about her religion, or about her relations to the Universalist Church. I think I can represent her views essentially as they were.
She continued to believe all that was essential in the faith which she had been taught in the church of Hosea Ballou. She trusted in a God whom she believed too great and good to make an eternal hell necessary to his government. If God was infinite and also desired the salvation of all men, if He was not willing that any should perish, but that all should come unto Him and live; if Christ tasted death for every man; then, as it seemed to her, ultimately, sin must be eliminated from the moral universe and with sin must go punishment. She believed, not only with Ballou, but with Beecher, that God will not punish after punishment ceases to do good. That sin brings punishment she believed and knew, but that sin and punishment must go on eternally seemed to her to imply either that God was not wholly good or not wholly Sovereign.
Her Universalism was essentially Calvinistic; it was based on the sovereignty of God. She believed that God was great enough to
“treasure up his bright designs,
And work his sovereign will.”
She believed in the divinity of Christ. She was not a Unitarian. But she held to Christ’s divinity as a divinity of preëminence and not of exclusion. She believed that Jesus became the Son of God by moral processes which are essentially within the reach of men, “that He might be the first-born among many brethren.”
I think I can give a truthful impression about her feeling with regard to Universalism as an independent ecclesiastical organization. She talked freely with me about this, and expressed the definite wish that the Universalist Church and the Congregational Church might everywhere be reunited. She had something of the same feeling with regard to the Unitarian churches. She loved the memory of Theodore Parker, whom she sometimes felt she recognized as guiding her long years after his death. She honored him, and other of the Unitarian men of his generation. She felt that both Unitarianism and Universalism had been necessary protests against the immoral orthodoxy of the time of their origin.
But she felt that that protest was no longer needed, at least to the same extent. She felt the waste of competing religious organizations. The Universalist Church was the church of her father, but the Congregational Church was the church of his fathers. She had more friends in the latter than in the former. She told me she would be glad to see the liberty of thought which Universalism had stood for sacredly preserved in a union of those denominations.
She said, “What I see in Oxford I see everywhere, a need that churches shall forget old and past disputes, and come into more compact organization, merging denominations, and preserving religious liberty.”
It is a hazardous thing to repeat, after years have gone by, the impressions left by oral conversations. Yet I am confident that in this meager outline I give her essential faith.
She did not talk glibly about her faith. But it was very real, and very definite, and it remained with her to the end.
Concerning revivals of religion she wrote to a niece who, in the widespread religious interest awakened by Mr. Moody in the seventies, had been asked by an evangelist to take a step which, as she looked back upon it, implied more than she had intended:
Thursday night
If one acts with good intentions, believing they are doing rightly, and later, concludes it was unwise or wrong—there is a mistake somewhere, or has been. It may have been in the act, or it may be in the later conclusion, but it is only a mistake, not a sin, you poor little chick.
Another time when you are requested in prayer meeting to act on a double question, the putter of it mixing up your desire or willingness to stand up before an audience and be made a subject for public prayers with an act of personal courtesy or discourtesy to himself as to whether you want to hear him or not, once leaves you free to vote as you like, and then comes and questions your decision, and asks your reason,—if you feel like answering him at all,—tell him to divide his questions, put one at a time and you will act on each separately. He put two questions together, as a dodge to get all up to be prayed for, thinking and knowing it put every one in a hard place, as all would see that it was a little impolite not to hasten to accept his offer to come and preach. Oh, how tricky.
You have done rightly in it all, my dear little girl. When he asked why you did not side with the Lord you answered that you did. That was right and all he could ask for. When he added, “Then why did you not rise and kneel,” you might tell him you did not understand that request as coming from the Lord, or you should certainly have done so.
I send you a “Banner of Light” to-day. You will find two articles bearing on your subject—the one a lecture by a good sturdy Briton on Mr. Moody’s sermon on “Hell.” I think you will read it with interest just now, and every time you get assaulted in public prayer meeting, and followed by men, I should advise you to run home and calm your hysterical nerves by re-reading that lecture from end to end.
The other longer marked article on “Revivalism” is a fine sermon by a sound Unitarian clergyman who does not believe in special revivals of religion, as gotten up for the occasion, and to fill churches, but thinks religion, as being the best part of man’s nature, will revive itself like all else in nature, and feels that God does not need to be implored to save from endless pain and loss the poor creatures He has made, but believes that if we do our best to enlighten and elevate those around us we do all we are called upon to do in the way of their salvation.
But read it well and carefully for yourself, or read it again with Ida and “reason together” about it and see if you can find in your own convictions some justification for the course you are taking with the S.S. There is much to be read, before you decide, much to learn and consider; take time and do it and don’t either fall into a trap nor be driven into one.—Selah!
She retained to the end of her life a high regard for the church of her fathers, the Universalist Church. Of it she wrote to Mrs. Jennie S. M. Vinton at Oxford:
I am glad to learn by your valued letter of September 5th that the old church of our fathers is about to be refitted and I thank you for the information. It is thoughtful of you to name the facts of the early history of the church which I am happy to corroborate, both by tradition and recollection. My father was present at the ordination sermon of Hosea Ballou (a white-headed boy he seemed). He was one of the pillars of the church. His family came over the hills of extreme North Oxford, five miles every Sunday, to sit in its high pews. When I was a grown young woman it was decided to build the present church, and no body of church people ever worked harder than we. We held fairs, public and home, begged, and gave all but the clothes we wore; we cleaned windows and scrubbed paint after workmen, bought and nailed down carpets, fitted up the parsonage, and received the bride of the Reverend Albert Barnes, our first settled pastor. And I carried their first baby to the christening.
There are few people there who have memories of harder church work and better church love than I.
Think this over, dear sister, and remember that I have never lost my love for the old church of my fathers, my family, and my childhood.
She believed whole-heartedly in immortality. Not only so, but she believed that her friends were near. She never recovered from the impression that came to her, after the death of her brother Stephen, that he was an influence, a living influence, for good in her life. That influence was exerted directly. As she woke in the morning while it was yet dark, and faced the duties of the day, she was able to think and plan with such clarity of vision that she felt that she was helped by the presence of those whom she had loved and who had counseled her in life. Through Stephen she felt the influence of her mother, as she believed, and, less directly, that of her father. She said, “I do not believe I am a Spiritualist,” but she could not shake off, and did not desire to shake off, the conviction that those whom she had loved were near her.
The latest, and in some respects the most satisfactory, statement of her faith, was written a year before her death, to Judge A. W. Terrell, of Austin, Texas:
I suppose I am not what the world denominates a church woman. I lay no claim to it. I was born to liberal views, and have lived a liberal creed. I firmly believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Jesus of Nazareth; in His life and death of suffering to save the world from sin, so far as in His power to do. But it would be difficult for me to stop there and believe that this spark of divinity was accorded to none other of God’s creation, who, like the Master, took on the living form, and, like him, lived the human life.