Though born in a party camp and grown to manhood on a political battlefield
my earlier years were most seriously influenced by the religious spirit
of the times. We passed to and fro between Washington and the two family
homesteads in Tennessee, which had cradled respectively my father and
mother, Beech Grove in Bedford County, and Spring Hill in Maury County.
Both my grandfathers were devout churchmen of the Presbyterian faith. My
Grandfather Black, indeed, was the son of a Presbyterian clergyman, who
lived, preached and died in Madison County, Kentucky. He was descended, I
am assured, in a straight line from that David Black, of Edinburgh, who, as
Burkle tells us, having declared in a sermon that Elizabeth of England
was a harlot, and her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, little better, went to
prison for it--all honor to his memory.
My Grandfather Watterson was a man of mark in his day. He was decidedly a
constructive--the projector and in part the builder of an important railway
line--an early friend and comrade of General Jackson, who was all too
busy to take office, and, indeed, who throughout his life disdained the
ephemeral honors of public life. The Wattersons had migrated directly from
Virginia to Tennessee.
The two families were prosperous, even wealthy for those days, and my
father had entered public life with plenty of money, and General Jackson
for his sponsor. It was not, however, his ambitions or his career that
interested me--that is, not until I was well into my teens--but the camp
meetings and the revivalist preachers delivering the Word of God with more
or less of ignorant yet often of very eloquent and convincing fervor.
The wave of the great Awakening of 1800 had not yet subsided. Bascom was
still alive. I have heard him preach. The people were filled with
thoughts of heaven and hell, of the immortality of the soul and the life
everlasting, of the Redeemer and the Cross of Calvary. The camp ground
witnessed an annual muster of the adjacent countryside. The revival was
a religious hysteria lasting ten days or two weeks. The sermons were
appeals to the emotions. The songs were the outpourings of the soul in
ecstacy. There was no fanaticism of the death-dealing, proscriptive sort;
nor any conscious cant; simplicity, childlike belief in future rewards and
punishments, the orthodox Gospel the universal rule. There was a good deal
of doughty controversy between the churches, as between the parties; but
love of the Union and the Lord was the bedrock of every confession.
Inevitably an impressionable and imaginative mind opening to such sights
and sounds as it emerged from infancy must have been deeply affected. Until
I was twelve years old the enchantment of religion had complete possession
of my understanding. With the loudest, I could sing all the hymns. Being
early taught in music I began to transpose them into many sorts of rhythmic
movement for the edification of my companions. Their words, aimed directly
at the heart, sank, never to be forgotten, into my memory. To this day I
can repeat the most of them--though not without a break of voice--while too
much dwelling upon them would stir me to a pitch of feeling which a life of
activity in very different walks and ways and a certain self-control I have
been always able to command would scarcely suffice to restrain.
The truth is that I retain the spiritual essentials I learned then and
there. I never had the young man's period of disbelief. There has never
been a time when if the Angel of Death had appeared upon the scene--no
matter how festal--I would not have knelt with adoration and welcome; never
a time on the battlefield or at sea when if the elements had opened to
swallow me I would not have gone down shouting!
Sectarianism in time yielded to universalism. Theology came to seem to my
mind more and more a weapon in the hands of Satan to embroil and divide the
churches. I found in the Sermon on the Mount leading enough for my ethical
guidance, in the life and death of the Man of Galilee inspiration enough to
fulfill my heart's desire; and though I have read a great deal of modern
inquiry--from Renan and Huxley through Newman and Döllinger, embracing
debates before, during and after the English upheaval of the late fifties
and the Ecumenical Council of 1870, including the various raids upon the
Westminster Confession, especially the revision of the Bible, down to
writers like Frederic Harrison and Doctor Campbell--I have found nothing
to shake my childlike faith in the simple rescript of Christ and Him
crucified.