SOME STEPS FORWARD
The spirit of obedience was one of Harriet Beecher’s characteristic
traits. So she resolutely devoted herself at Catherine’s command to the
critical analysis of Butler’s “Analogy,” a book on the works of God
as shown both in nature and in the spiritual realm. It sounds rather
profound for a girl in the early teens; but when we recall the titles
she chose for the essays she wrote at the school in Litchfield, we
are not surprised that she found interest in such a book. Indeed, she
discovered a real pleasure in subjects of this kind. At the time when
she was improving her mind with the “Analogy,” she was reading also
another famous book of spiritual import, Baxter’s “Saints’ Rest.” No
other book she ever read moved her so profoundly. It filled her with a
sort of exaltation that made her wish as she walked the street that the
pavements might sink beneath her if only she might thus find herself in
Heaven.
In this mood of spiritual elevation she went to Litchfield for one of
her early vacations. While there a sermon preached by her father made a
strong appeal to her mind and heart. Dr. Beecher’s text on that Sunday
was this: “I call you not servants, but friends,” and his subject was
Jesus as a soul-friend offered to every human being.
Forgetting all about theology for the time, Dr. Beecher spoke that
day with all simplicity of the faithful, unwearied love of Christ,
how He tenderly cares for the soul’s wants through all its wanderings
and sorrows, until He brings it through the darkness of earth to the
perfection of Heaven.
Even a child could have understood him. Harriet sat absorbed, her eyes
gathering tears as she listened; and when the doctor said, “Come, then,
and trust your soul to this faithful Friend,” her heart throbbed, “I
will.” For a moment she was discouraged by the thought that she had not
had any “conviction of sin,” but like a flash came the thought that
Jesus could give her that as well as anything else, and that she could
trust Him for the whole. And so her earnest young soul went out to the
wonderful Friend. She sat through the sacramental service that followed
with swelling heart and tearful eyes, and walked home filled with a new
joy. She went up to her father’s study in the attic room and, falling
into his arms, whispered: “Father, I have given myself to Jesus and He
has taken me.” The doctor held her silently to his heart a moment, and
his tears dropped on her head. “Is it so?” he said. “Then has a new
flower blossomed in the Kingdom this day.”
In this simple and natural way began Harriet’s distinctive religious
experience. But we must not think of it as going on always like
the flow of a calm river. There were many doubts and tremblings to
be mastered, many puzzles to unravel as she went along, especially
during the years from twelve to twenty. We may say, however, that the
experience of happy trust in God became in the end so much the law of
her life that it could never be torn away from her by any of the events
of her mature days, whether of suffering or of prosperity.
It seems the greatest pity that the earlier stages of her religious
experience should not have gone on smoothly, as that of her wonderful
mother had done. Perhaps, however, others with difficulties like hers
may be glad to look over the record of her struggles and may take
courage from her victories.
We have seen in the last chapter that Harriet had not been many years
at Hartford before a shadow seemed to be settling down upon her spirit.
There were certainly good reasons for this.
In the first place she was very much overworked as pupil and teacher
in the Hartford Female Seminary. Translating Ovid into English verse
at thirteen years of age, teaching Virgil and Rhetoric at fourteen,
studying French and Italian and drawing and painting, taking a
niggardly half hour for the mid-day dinner, and snatching a bit of
supper as she could, doing her share and more to keep the domestic
wheels of the large household at Hartford running smoothly, and living
excitedly in the midst of this company of complex personalities, having
no outdoors, no rest, no play--this way of life was enough to interfere
with the physical well-being of any growing girl, even with that of a
robust one fresh from the Litchfield mountains!
Harriet’s father understood perfectly well the relation between our
mental activity and our supply of physical energy. We know this because
we so often found him relieving the overstrain by periods of devotion
to the woodpile and the garden; and it is interesting to see how he
accompanied a prescription for spiritual ills with one enjoining
obedience to the laws of the body. None could have given better advice
also than he did in regard to the steadying of religious emotionalism
during revival among the students in Catherine’s school, to keep them
from undue excitement and to make the revival season reasonable in its
excitement and permanent in its effects. But it is one thing to advise
and another to make people put the counsel into practice.
Catherine probably did not see the rocks ahead either for Harriet or
for herself. She was indeed using up her own energies so fast that she
was to face a breakdown later on in the very midst of a useful career.
Then indeed she did have to listen to the monitors; but only after a
period of ill health did she regain strength for work. During all her
life thereafter she preached obedience to the laws of health, and found
the truth of the old adage, “‘Had I but known!’ is very poor comfort.”
Then we must remember, too, that Harriet had also drained her own
spiritual energy in watching the soul-struggles of her sister Catherine
during the sensitive years of her early girlhood. Catherine’s grief
colored Harriet’s thoughts and wonderings in the years when everything
in her own situation looked like a question.
So poor little Harriet fell into a disconsolate mood. She thought that
she did nothing right, that she yielded to temptation almost as soon as
it assailed her. What most commonly beset her, she believed, was pride;
she could trace all her sins back to that fault. She thought she was
not fit for anything, and she wanted to die young.
What young growing soul has not been assailed by moods like this?
This half child, half grown woman was developing mentally with great
swiftness, and could not understand the meaning of the tumults that
were sweeping through her soul. Not being able to answer certain lofty
questions, she decided at once that they were unanswerable and that
therefore the universe must be all a disastrous affair. Who has not
sometime made the same mistake?
Little things had great power over her. If she met something that
crossed her feelings she was unhappy for days. She wished she could
bring herself to be perfectly indifferent to the judgments of others.
She believed there never had been a person more dependent on the good
and evil opinions of others than she was. This desire to be loved
formed, she feared, the great motive for all her actions. Alas, she was
in a parlous state!
That young mourner for the death of Byron and author of the dramatic
poem, “Cleon,” found her love of literature a snare in her spiritual
pathway. Of course, she could not know that those very powers that were
shown by her tastes and inclinations were to be trained and used for
the most important and world-influencing work.
It is unfortunate that her father did not think to say to her what
he wrote in a letter some twenty years later: “Too long, quite too
long, has the devil held in his exclusive possession the fine arts.”
He came to the conclusion in the end that ministers would make their
sermons more interesting if they would add to their “leaden prose” some
of the untrammeled fire that gives charm to poetry and fiction. That
Dr. Beecher had an open mind on this subject is shown by his attitude
toward Byron and also toward the novels of Sir Walter Scott. It could
never have been a pain to him to know that a daughter of his would
become the author of a shelf full of novels, all strongly uplifting in
their tendency.
But Harriet did not confide her deepest thoughts to him. If she had he
might have recalled that his own early days had been checkered with
despondency and shamefacedness and jealous feeling. He had imagined
in his sensitive humility that everybody could see the interior of
his mind and find the emptiness and vanity that he believed must be
there. Yet he had a good cure for such moods, one that he could have
recommended to his daughter. He resisted all this, he once said, as if
it were a physical lying disease, representing things that were not as
if they were, and saying to such feelings, “Get thee behind me, Satan,
for thou savorest not the things that be of God!” But at the time of
Harriet’s greatest despondency her father seems not to have remembered
the cravings and perplexities of his own youth.
Harriet made up her mind to live a far better life. She would regulate
it and improve it. She gave herself a strict set of rules, a regular
system of things for every hour of the day. But she found that she
could not live up to all this and the derelictions gave her sleepless
nights. Her feelings were not always equable. She was absent-minded and
made mistakes. Terrible faults, these! How like a page from the life
of everybody! The trouble in Harriet’s case was that she took these
variations of mood for a serious breakdown of her religious stability.
She suffered intensely, yet for a long time she kept her suffering to
herself. Her naturally buoyant spirits did much to help her, but often
she was reproved for laughing so much when she was feeling worst.
It was difficult for Harriet to speak of these inner feelings to
others. The reason for this was that she was too humble-minded to speak
of so weighty matters at all. Besides this, she felt that she should
understand them better than she did, and did not know that every human
being is beset by the same questions that puzzled her. Fortunately,
Harriet at the age of fourteen had a brother who had just graduated
at Yale and was studying theology at Andover. This strong and tender
brother to whom she opened her heart just as Catherine had opened hers
to her father, unraveled many of her difficulties for her.
The year 1829, when Harriet was sixteen years old, was a period of
especial despondency. Catherine, worried about her state of health,
sent her to spend a summer at Nut Plains. There at the Foote homestead,
the rest in the beautiful country, and we may imagine, the regular
meals and the abundance of good sleep, did wonders for tired Harriet.
In that year the Beecher home was moved from Litchfield to Boston,
where Dr. Beecher had been called to the pastorate of the Hanover
Street Church. Now the atmosphere of any house in which Lyman Beecher
dwelt would perforce be stirred by theological controversy. As
Harriet’s brother Henry said, “Theology was the food we ate, and the
milk we drank, and the air we breathed, and the ground we trod, from
our earliest years.” But the new surroundings into which Dr. Beecher
now came caused him to strike out more vigorously than ever in defense
of his favorite beliefs. In this atmosphere Harriet whenever she came
to her home must thrive as she could. Her son, who wrote a book about
her life in 1911, says that the atmosphere of mental excitement and
conflict in which her father lived and preached at this time drove her
already over-stimulated mind to the point of distraction. “Too much
mental strain and too little exercise had,” he says, “brought her to
her seventeenth year without the strength which should have been the
heritage of her robust childhood.”
It would not be possible in our short space to follow all the steps in
her soul’s progress and the degrees by which, under the guidance of her
brother Edward, she gained at last a comfortable view of her relation
to God. But a glimpse here and there may be allowed to us.
Above all things, Harriet could not understand how a God of infinite
perfection could stand toward imperfect human beings in any but the
most severe attitude. She could not see that One of infinite power and
infinite wisdom must have infinite love; and toward a realization of
this truth she moved but slowly. How far along she had come in 1828
is shown in the following passage from a letter to Edward. “After
all,” she said, “God is a being afar off. He is so far above us that
anything but the most distant reverential affection seems almost
sacrilegious. It is that affection that can lead us to be familiar that
the heart needs.... The language of prayer is of necessity stately
and formal, and we cannot clothe all the little minutiæ of our wants
and troubles in it.... I sometimes wish that the Saviour were visibly
present in this world, that I might go to Him for a solution of some of
my difficulties.”
Later on we see that she is making great progress though she herself
may not realize that she is. She says in another letter: “It matters
little what service He has for me.... I do not mean to live in vain. He
has given me talents, and I will lay them at His feet, well satisfied,
if He will accept them. All my powers He can enlarge. He made my mind,
and He can teach me to cultivate and exert its faculties.”
At last in the character of Jesus Christ she finds a revelation of God
as merciful and compassionate as He is powerful--in fact, she found in
Him just such a God as she needed. The next summer she writes again
to the same brother and says: “I cannot express to you, my brother,
I cannot tell you, how that Saviour appears to me. To bear with one
so imperfect, so inconsistent as myself, implied long-suffering and
patience more than words can express. I love most to look on Christ
as my teacher, as one who, knowing the utmost of my sinfulness, my
waywardness, my folly, can still have patience, can reform, purify, and
daily make me more like himself.”
In these three selections from her letters we see the passage of her
mind from the attitude of fear to the attitude of love. In fact, she
has come about again to that child-like mood that was hers when she ran
to her father’s study and made the beautiful confession of her earliest
conscious faith.
Now she began to realize that the very best cure for a disappointing
religious condition within us is to put our religion into practice in
the world without us by means of a kind spirit instantly made real in
kindly acts. Harriet caught this good idea, perhaps from the example of
her sister Catherine who in her great sorrow had done this at last.
In a different way Harriet felt that she must come out of herself more
than she had. Not that she thought her love of solitude and of going
her own way wrong in itself, but that she knew that if she indulged it
too much she would miss the joy of knowing that she was helping to make
others happy.
She noticed one of her companions engaged in being particularly
attentive to a particularly disagreeable elderly man, and as a
result Harriet conceived the idea that it was a proof of grace to
say something to people who were not agreeable, and to manage to say
something or other even if one had nothing to say. She resolved to
follow the example of the friend who could sacrifice her own taste and
comfort in order to make a “forlorn old daddy” happy and comfortable.
Writing to her great friend, Georgiana May, in 1832, Harriet told her
of a sun-dial inscription that her Uncle Samuel Foote, who was sitting
by her side as she wrote, has just been quoting for her benefit. It ran
thus: _Horas non numero nisi serenas_--I count the fair hours only.
This she said she was taking for her own motto. She had determined, she
told her friend, to come out of herself more, to cultivate a general
spirit of kindliness toward everybody, to hold out her hand to the
right and to the left. To what good purpose she now put this resolution
into effect is shown by the fact that her pupils at Hartford remember
her to this day as one who took the greatest interest in each one’s
affairs, laying aside her own matters and talking over the likes and
aims of others. And perhaps she did not find it so hard after all to
keep from shrinking into a corner. Perhaps she found a pleasure in
meeting new and strange people and in trying to be friendly with them.
She seems to have found that these social contacts, though not having
any great meaning in themselves, yet could form a very pretty flower
border to the way of life.
A wonderful discovery for one to make whose nature, did she but know
it, was one great tide of loving impulses, whose heart was vast in its
all-including kindliness!