. . . . I have to rise in the morning at half-past five o'clock, and
after various little duties, such as fixing of room, washing, etc.,
which occupies about an hour, we proceed to breakfast, from thence to
chapel, after which we have about ten minutes to prepare for school.
Then we attend school from eight to twelve. An hour at noon is allowed
for diversions of various sorts. Then dinner. After that school from
half-past one to half-past four. At night we have about an hour and a
half; then tea. After tea we have about ten minutes; then we are
called to our rooms till nine.
Now I will tell you how I occupy my spare time in reading, writing, and
playing the flute. We are forming a band here. I shall play either
the flute or hautboy. I enjoy myself _pretty_ well. In Latin I am
studying Sallust. As to ease, all I have to do is study straight
ahead. It comes _pretty_ easy. My Greek is rather hard. I am as yet
studying the grammar and Jacob's Greek Reader. In elocution, we read
and speak alternately every other day.
. . . . I find it hard to keep as a Christian ought to. To be sure, I
find delight in prayer, but I cannot find time to be alone
sufficiently. We have in our room only two, one besides myself, but he
is most of my play-hours practising on some instrument or other. I
have some time, to be sure, but it is very irregular, and I never know
when I shall have an opportunity for private devotions until the time
comes. I do not like to read the Bible as well as to pray, but I
suppose it is the same as it is with a lover, who loves to talk with
his mistress in person better than to write when she is afar off. . . .
Your affectionate brother,
HENRY.
His religious experience, of which we have heard nothing, since he left
Litchfield, the life in Boston apparently not being very favorable to
it, again attracts our attention at this point. He says:
"When I was fourteen years of age, I left Boston and went to Mount
Pleasant. There broke out while I was there one of those infectious
religious revivals which have no basis of judicious instruction, but
spring from inexperienced zeal. It resulted in many mushroom hopes,
and I had one of them; but I do not know how or why I was converted. I
only know I was in a sort of day-dream, in which I hoped I had given
myself to Christ.
"I wrote to father expressing this hope; he was overjoyed, and sent me
a long, kind letter on the subject. But in the course of three or four
weeks I was nearly over it; and I never shall forget how I felt, not
long afterward, when a letter from father was handed me in which he
said I must anticipate my vacation a week or two and come home and join
the Church on the next Communion Sabbath. The serious feelings I had
were well-nigh gone, and I was beginning to feel quite jolly again, and
I did not know what to do. I went home, however, and let them take me
into the Church. A kind of pride and shamefacedness kept me from
saying I did not think I was a Christian, and so I was made a Church
member."
In an editorial in the _Independent_, written in 1862, upon the
disbanding of this old church, the Bowdoin Street--originally Hanover
Street--Church, Boston, he describes this event:
"If somebody will look in the old records of Hanover Street Church
about 1829 they will find a name there of a boy about fifteen years old
who was brought into the Church on a sympathetic wave, and who well
remembers how cold and almost paralyzed he felt while the committee
questioned him about his 'hope' and 'evidences,' which, upon review,
amounted to this: that the son of such a father ought to be a good and
pious boy. Being tender-hearted and quick to respond to moral
sympathy, he had been caught and inflamed in a school excitement, but
was just getting over it when summoned to Boston to join the Church!
On the morning of the day he went to Church without seeing anything he
looked at. He heard his name called from the pulpit among many others,
and trembled; rose up with every emotion petrified; counted the spots
on the carpet; looked piteously up at the cornice; heard the fans creak
in the pews near him; felt thankful to a fly that lit on his face, as
if something familiar at last had come to break an awful trance; heard
faintly a reading of the Articles of Faith; wondered whether he should
be struck dead for not feeling more--whether he should go to hell for
touching the bread and wine that he did not dare to take nor to refuse;
spent the morning service uncertain whether dreaming, or out of the
body, or in a trance; and at last walked home crying, and wishing he
knew what, now that he was a Christian, he should do, and how he was to
do it. Ah! well, there is a world of things in children's minds that
grown-up people do not imagine, though they, too, once were young."
Unsatisfactory in many respects as was his religious experience, it
seems to have been powerful enough to change his whole ideal of life.
We hear no more of his becoming a sailor. He appears to have yielded
to the inevitable, and henceforth studies with the ministry in view.
That he became a minister, as did his brothers, by reason of the
unswerving faith and prayer of the parents, is already well known.
"Out of six sons not one escaped from the pulpit. My mother dedicated
me to the work of the foreign missionary; she laid her hands upon me,
wept over me, and set me apart to preach the Gospel among the heathen,
and I have been doing it all my life long, for it so happens one does
not need to go far from his own country to find his audience before
him."
Ushered into the preparation for the ministry by the parental faith,
stumbling and discouraged and ready to give up the work, another hand
was not wanting to open still more clearly the way, draw back the
curtains, and let in the light:
"I beheld Him as a helper, as the soul's mid-wife, as the soul's
physician, and I felt because I was weak I could come to Him; because I
did not know how, and, if I did know, I had not the strength, to do the
things that were right--that was the invitation that He gave to me out
of my conscious weakness and want. I will not repeat the scene of that
morning when light broke fairly on my mind; how one might have thought
that I was a lunatic escaped from confinement; how I ran up and down
through the primeval forest of Ohio, shouting, 'Glory, glory!'
sometimes in loud tones and at other times whispered in an ecstasy of
joy and surprise. All the old troubles gone, and light breaking in on
my mind, I cried: 'I have found my God; I have found my God!' From
that hour I consecrated myself to the work of the ministry anew, for
before that I had about made up my mind to go into some other
profession."
His early training school for effective preaching was well selected.
It was, as is well known, one of the little villages on the banks of
the Ohio River, where the wants of river bargemen and frontiersmen
demanded his attention. It was there he decided what his life work
should be.
"My business shall be to save men, and to bring to bear upon them those
views that are my comfort, that are the bread of life to me; and I went
out among them almost entirely cut loose from the ordinary church
institutions and agencies, knowing nothing but 'Christ, and Him
crucified,' the sufferer for mankind. Did not the men round me need
such a Saviour? Was there ever such a field as I found? Every
sympathy of my being was continually solicited for the ignorance, for
the rudeness, for the aberrations, for the avarice, for the
quarrelsomeness of the men among whom I was, and I was trying every
form and presenting Christ as a medicine to men. I went through the
woods and through camp-meetings and over prairies. Everywhere my
vacations were all missionary tours, preaching Christ for the hope of
salvation. I am not saying this to show you how I came to the
knowledge of Christ, but to show you how I came to the habits and forms
of my ministry. I tried everything on to folks."
Added to the forces of experience and surroundings was always that of
his own personal, natural endowment. This he found fault with and
tried to change, as most people do at some period of their lives, but
finally accepted and concluded to use as best he could, without
murmuring, but always conscious of its limitations.
"I have my own peculiar temperament, I have my own method of preaching,
and my method and temperament necessitate errors. I am not worthy to
be related in the hundred-thousandth degree to those more happy men who
never make a mistake in the pulpit. I make a great many. I am
impetuous. I am intense at times on subjects that deeply move me. I
feel as though all the ocean were not strong enough to be the power
beyond my words, nor all the thunders that were in the heavens, and it
is of necessity that such a nature as that should give such intensity
at times to parts of doctrine as to exaggerate them when you come to
bring them into connection with a more rounded-out and balanced view.
I know it--I know it as well as you do. I would not do it if I could
help it; but there are times when it is not I that is talking, when I
am caught up and carried away so that I know not whether I am in the
body or out of the body, when I think things in the pulpit that I never
could think in the study, and when I have feelings that are so far
different from any that belong to the lower or normal condition that I
neither can regulate them nor understand them. I see things and I hear
sounds, and seem, if not in the seventh heaven, yet in a condition that
leads me to understand what Paul said--that he heard things which it
was not possible for a man to utter. I am acting under such a
temperament as that. I have got to use it, or not preach at all. I
know very well I do not give crystalline views nor thoroughly guarded
views; there is often an error on this side and an error on that, and I
cannot stop to correct them. A man might run around, like a kitten
after its tail, all his life, if he were going around explaining all
his expressions and all the things he had written. Let them go. They
will correct themselves. The average and general influence of a man's
teaching will be more mighty than any single misconception, or
misapprehension through misconception.
"There is a deep enjoyment in having devoted yourself, soul and body,
to the welfare of your fellowmen, so that you have no thought and no
care but for them. There is a pleasure in that which is never touched
by any ordinary experiences in human life. It is the highest. I look
back to my missionary days as being transcendently the happiest period
of my life. The sweetest pleasures I have ever known are not those
that I have now, but those that I remember, when I was unknown, in an
unknown land, among a scattered people, mostly poor, and to whom I had
to go and preach the Gospel, man by man, house by house, gathering them
on Sundays, a few--twenty, fifty, or a hundred as the case might
be--and preaching the Gospel more formally to them as they were able to
bear it."