THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
When the church services were ended, we children stayed for
Sunday-school. There was never anything especially alluring in
Sunday-school; still it was far better than the church. At least ten or
twelve of us boys could sit together in a great high pew, and no one
could keep us from whispering and laughing and telling jokes. Even the
teachers seemed to realize what we had been through, and were disposed
to allow us a fair amount of liberty in Sunday-school.
The superintendent was a young man named Henry Pitkin. He was a few
years older than the boys. I cannot now remember what he did on
week-days; we never thought of him as working, or wearing old clothes,
or doing anything except being superintendent of the Sunday-school. I
presume he is dead, poor fellow, for I know he was always sickly,—at
least, that is what we boys thought. I believe he was threatened with
consumption, and I heard people speak of him with pity and say what a
nice young man he was. I never knew him to take part in our games, or to
go swimming or fishing, or anything of that kind. I cannot remember that
he was cross or unkind, or what we boys called mean; but still I know we
never talked so loud, and were always a little more particular, and
sometimes stopped our games, when he came along the road. I am sure we
felt sorry for him, and thought he never had any fun. He was always
dressed up, even when it was not Sunday; and he never went barefooted,
or shouted, or made any kind of jokes. I know that I often saw him go up
to the church, to the Thursday evening prayer-meetings, in the
summer-time. He would walk past us while we were playing ball on the
square in the long twilight. None of us could understand why he went to
prayer-meeting on Thursday night. None of us really knew what
prayer-meeting was. We never had to go to church any day but Sunday, and
although our curiosity was strong it never led us to go to the Thursday
evening prayer-meeting. Everybody who went seemed awfully old, except
Henry, and we never understood how he could go. Sometimes we met him
going to the preacher’s for an evening visit, and this seemed still
stranger. None of us boys ever went for an evening visit anywhere; and
if we had gone we never would have thought of going to the
preacher’s,—he was so old and solemn, and we were sure that if we ever
went there he would talk to us about religion.
Our fathers and mothers and the grown-up people were always telling us
what a good boy Henry was, and asking us why we didn’t do things the way
he did. Of course, we couldn’t do as he did, no matter how hard we
tried.
In the Sunday-school Henry always told us what to sing; he would talk to
us softly and quietly, and he never scolded the least bit. He always
asked us to be good, and told us how much happier we would be if we
learned lots of verses, and never called bad names, or fought, and
always tried to do right. Henry told us all about the lesson papers, and
seemed to know everything there was in the Bible, and all about Damascus
and Jericho and those foreign cities that are in the Bible. Then he used
to give out the Sunday-school books. We usually took one of these home
with us, but we never cared much about them. The stories were all rather
silly, and didn’t amount to much.
We boys used to argue about what a superintendent was, and just how high
an office Henry had. We all knew that it was not so high as the
preacher’s, but we thought it was next to his, and some said it was
below a deacon. Some of us thought that Henry was elected by the
Sunday-school teachers, and some thought his office was higher than
theirs and that he could turn them off whenever he had a mind to.
When the Sunday-school began, Henry would make us a little speech,
telling us something about the lesson-papers, and sometimes telling us a
story that he said came out of the Bible; and then he would have one of
the boys pass around the singing-books, and tell us what piece to sing.
The boys and girls rather liked the singing. With the boys the singing
partook largely of the nature of physical exercise.
We used to stand up and sing together in a chorus, or as nearly in
harmony as the superintendent and the organ could possibly keep us.
True, the songs were not of a humorous or even cheerful nature; but then
we really had no idea of what they meant, if indeed the teachers or the
authors had, and we sang them with the same zest and vigor that we would
have given to any other words. I especially remember one song that we
sang pretty well, and very loud and earnestly; not with the least bit of
sadness or even solemnity, but with great energy and zeal. It began with
the lines, “I want to be an angel, and with the angels stand.” Now, of
course, there was not a boy or girl in the school who wanted to be an
angel; neither did the teachers or the superintendent, or even the
parson. In fact, this was the last thing that any of us wanted; but we
fairly shouted our desire to be an angel in a strong chorus of anything
but angelic voices. I presume children sing that same song to-day in
Sunday-school, and sing it without any more thought of its meaning than
the little freckle-faced boys and girls who used to gather each Sunday
in the old white church and fidget and fuss over their new stiff clothes
and their hard and pinching boots.
Besides the singing, the chief work of the Sunday-school teachers was to
have us learn verses from the Testament. Of course, none of us had any
idea what these verses meant, or why we were to learn them, or what we
were to do with them after they were learned. In a general way, we all
knew that the Testament was a sacred volume, and not to be read or
studied or looked at like any other book; and certainly the lives and
characters of which it told were in no way human, but seemed hazy,
nebulous, and far away.
I cannot recall all the means that were taken to make us learn those
verses. Of course there was no whipping in the Sunday-school as there
was in the district school, and the inducements given us were of a
somewhat higher kind. I especially remember that for every certain
number of dozen verses we learned we were given a red card; this card
had a picture of a dove on the top and some verses below it, and a red
border around the edges; then I know that for a certain number of red
cards we were given a blue card similar to the red, except that the dove
had been changed to a little spring lamb. I cannot recall what we got
for the blue card; probably nothing at all. It was no doubt the
ultimate. There must be somewhere an ultimate with children as with men.
I remember that at Christmas time we had a tree, and the two churches
used sometimes to get up a rivalry as to the value of the presents, and
there were little desertions back and forth on this account. I know we
all thought that the number and value of the presents would be in some
way related to the number of verses we had learned; and I am sure that
the number of scholars and the regularity of attendance always increased
toward Christmas time. I must have learned a great many million verses
first and last, but none of them seem to have made any impression on my
mind, and I can now recall only a few about John the Baptist, who came
preaching in the wilderness of Judæa, and had a leather girdle around
his waist, and whose food was locusts and wild honey, and who called on
all the people in the wilderness to repent, for the kingdom of heaven
was at hand. Now, I am certain that John the Baptist did not seem a real
man to me, and that I had no idea of what the wilderness of Judæa was
like or what sort of people lived there. All this was only so many
verses to be learned, for which I would get so many cards. I believe I
thought that John the Baptist had some sort of relation to the Baptist
church, and I wondered how he could live on locusts and wild honey; for
I had seen locusts, and they were only a sort of flying bug, and no more
fit to eat than a grasshopper or a horse-fly. I am sure that I thought
this a very slim diet for a man,—even for a preacher, who we thought
cared little about what he ate. I have grown older now, and wiser, and
have heard many John the Baptists preaching in the wilderness and
calling unwilling sinners to repentance; and now I do not so much wonder
about the locusts, but I can scarcely understand how he was so fortunate
as to get the wild honey.
But the one thing that most impresses me as I look back on the
day-school and the Sunday-school where we spent so many of our childhood
hours is the unreality of it all. Surely none of the lessons seemed in
any way related to our lives. None of them impressed our minds, or gave
us a thought or feeling about the problems we were soon to face.
Often on Sunday evening my father gathered us about the family table in
the dining-room and read a sermon from Channing or Theodore Parker or
James Martineau. I cannot recall to-day a single word or thought or
impression that lingered from the sermons Channing preached, but I am
sure that the force and power and courage of Parker left an impression
on my life; and that even in my youth the kindly, gentle, loving words
and thoughts of James Martineau were not entirely thrown away on me.
The old preacher, as he stood before us on Sunday morning, never seemed
quite like a man,—we felt that he was a holy being, and we looked on him
with fear and reverence and awe. I remember meeting him in the field one
day, and I tried to avoid him and get away; but he came to me and talked
in the kindest and most entertaining way. He said nothing whatever about
religion, and his voice and the expression of his face were not at all
as they seemed when I sat in front of him in the hard pew during the
terrible “long prayer.”
But my father never feared him in the least, and often these two old men
met for an evening to read their musty books, although I could not
understand the reason why. After I had gone to bed at night I often
heard them working away at their Greek, with more pains than any of the
scholars at the school. I wondered why they did these tasks, when they
had no parents to keep them at their work. I was too young to know that
as these old men dug out the hard Greek roots, they felt the long stems
reaching back through the toilsome years and bringing to their failing
lives a feeling of hope and vigor from their departed youth.