CLARA BARTON’S RELIGION
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.