Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Meanwhile, this literature of the Bible, strange, weird, sibylline, and full of unfulfilled needs and requirements of study, is being assailed in detail through all the courses of a boy’s college life. The objections to it as a divine revelation relate to critical questions in languages of which he is ignorant, and yet they are everywhere; they are in the air he breathes, they permeate all literature, they enter into modern science, they disintegrate and wear away, bit by bit, his reverence and his confidence.

  This work had been going on insensibly in my head during my college life, notwithstanding the loyalty of my heart. During those years I had learned to associate the Bible with the most sacred memories of home, with the dearest loves of home life. It was woven with remembrances of daily gatherings around the family altar, with scenes of deepest emotion when I had seen my father and mother fly to its shelter and rest upon its promises. There were passages that never recurred to me except with the sound of my father’s vibrating voice, penetrating their words with a never dying power. The Bible was to me like a father and a mother, and the doubts, and queries, the respectful suggestions of incredulity, the mildly suggestive abatements of its authority, which met me, now here and now there, in all the course of my readings and studies, were as painful to me as reflections cast on my father’s probity or my mother’s honor.

  I would not listen to them, I would not give them voice, I smothered them in the deepest recesses of my heart, while meantime the daily pressure that came on me in the studies and requirements of college life left me neither leisure nor inclination to pursue the researches that should clear them up.

  To be sure, nothing is so important as the soul — nothing is of so much moment as religion, and the question “Is this God’s book or is it not?” is the question of questions. It underlies all things, and he who is wise would drop all other things and undergo any toil and make any studies that should fit him to judge understandingly on this point. But I speak from experience when I say that the course of study in Christian America is so arranged that a boy, from the grammar school upward till he graduates, is so fully pressed and overladen with all other studies that there is no probability that he will find the time or the inclination for such investigation. In most cases he will do just what I did, throw himself upon the studies proposed to him, work enough to meet the demands of the hour, and put off the acquisition of that more important knowledge to an indefinite future, and sigh, and go backward in his faith.

  But without faith or with a faith trembling and uncertain, how is a man to turn his back on the world that is before him — the world that he can see, hear, touch, and taste — to work for the world that is unseen and eternal?

  I will not repeat the flattering words that often fell on my ear and said to me, “You can make your way anywhere; you can he anything you please.” And then there were voices that said in my heart, “I may have wealth, and with it means of power, of culture, of taste, of luxury. If I only set out for that, I may get it.” And then, in contrast, came that life I had seen my father live, in its grand simplicity, in its enthusiastic sincerity, in its exulting sense of joy in what he was doing, down to the last mortal moment, and I wished, oh, how fervently! that I could believe as he did. But to be a minister merely from a sense of duty — to bear the burden of poverty with no perception of the unspeakable riches which Christ hath placed therein — who would not shrink from a life so grating and so cold? To choose the ministry as a pedestal for oratory and self-display and poetic religious sentiment, and thus to attain distinction and easy position, and the command of fashionable luxury, seemed to me a temptation to desecration still more terrible, and I dreaded the hour which should close my college life and make a decision inevitable.

  It was with a sober and sad heart that I closed my college course and parted from classmates — jolly fellows with whom had rolled away the four best years of my life —— years that as one goes on afterwards in age look brighter and brighter in the distance. It was a lonesome and pokerish operation to dismantle the room that had long been my home, to bargain away my furniture, pack my books, and bid a final farewell to all the old quiddities and oddities that I had grown attached to in the quaint little village. The parting from Alma Mater is a second leaving of home — and this time for the great world. There is no staving off the battle of life now — the tents are struck, the camp-fires put out, and one must be on the march.

  CHAPTER VIII. AN OUTLOOK INTO LIFE

  MY coining back to my native town was an event of public notoriety. I had won laurels, and as I was the village property, my laurels were duly commented on and properly appreciated. Highland was one of those thrifty Yankee settlements where every house seems to speak the people so well-to-do, and so careful, and progressive in all the means of material comfort. There was not a house in it that was not in a sort of healthy, growing state, receiving, from time to time, some accession that showed that the Yankee aspiration was busy, stretching and enlarging. This had a new bay-window, and that had a new veranda; the other, new, tight, white picket fences all round the yard. Others rejoiced in a fresh coat of paint. But all were alive, and apparently self-repairing. There was to every house the thrifty wood-pile, seasoning for winter; the clean garden, with its wealth of fruit and its gay borders of flowers; and every new kind of flower, and every choice new fruit, found somewhere a patron who was trying a hand at it.

  Highland was a place worth living in just for its scenery. It was at that precise point of the country where the hills are inspiriting, vivacious, reminding one of the Psalm,—”The little hills rejoice on every side!” Mountains are grand, but they also are dreary. For a near prospect they overpower too much, they shut out the sun, they have savage propensities, untamable by man, shown once in a while in landslides and freshets; but these half-grown hills uplift one like waves of the sea. In summer they are wonderful in all possible shades of greenness; in autumn they are like a mystical rainbow — an ocean of waves, flamboyant with every wonderful device of color; and even when the leaves are gone, in November, and nothing left but the bristling steel-blue outlines of trees, there is a wonderful purple haze, a veil of dreamy softness, around them, that makes you think you never saw them so beautiful.

  So I said to myself, as I came rambling over hill and dale back to the old homestead, and met my mother’s bright face of welcome at the door. I was the hero of the hour at home, and everything had been prepared to make me welcome. My brother, who kept the homestead, had relinquished the prospect of a college life, and devoted himself to farming, but looked on me as the most favored of mortals in the attainments I had made. His young wife and growing family of children clustered around my mother and leaned on her experience; and as every one in the little village knew and loved her, there was a general felicitation and congratulation on the event of my return and my honors.

  “See him in his father’s pulpit afore long,” said Deacon Manning, who called the first evening to pay his respects; “better try his hand at the weekly prayer meeting, and stir us up a bit.”

  “I think, Deacon,” said I, “I shall have to be one of those that learn in silence, awhile longer. I may come to be taught, but I certainly cannot teach.”

  “Well, now, that’s modest for a young fellow that’s just been through college! They commonly are as feathery and highflying as a this year’s rooster, and ready to crow whether their voice breaks or not,” said the deacon. “‘Learn in silence!’ Well, that ‘ere beats all for a young man!”

  I thought to myself that the good deacon little knew the lack of faith that was covered by my humility.

  Since my father’s death my mother had made her home with my Uncle Jacob. Her health was delicate, and she preferred to enjoy the honors of a grandmother at a little distance. My Uncle Jacob had no children. Aunt Polly, his wife, was just the softest, sleekest, most domestic dove of a woman whose wings were ever covered with silver. I always think of her in some soft, pearly silk, with a filmy cap, and a half-handkerchief cross
ed over a gentle, motherly bosom, soft moving, soft speaking, but with a pair of bright, hazel eyes, keen as arrows to send their glances into every place in her dominions. Let anybody try sending in a false account to Aunt Polly, and they will see that the brightness of her eyes was not merely for ornament. Yet everything she put her hand to went so exactly, so easily, you would have said those eyes were made for nothing but reading, for which Aunt Polly had a great taste, and for which she found abundance of leisure.

  My mother and she were enjoying together a long and quiet Saturday afternoon of life, reading to each other, and quietly and leisurely discussing all that they read, — not merely the last novel, as the fashion of women in towns and cities is apt to be, but all the solid works of philosophy and literature that marked the times. My uncle’s house was like a bookseller’s stall, — it was overrunning with books. The cases covered the walls; they crowded the corners and angles; and still every noteworthy book was ordered, to swell the stock.

  My mother and aunt had read together Lecky, and Buckle, and Herbert Spencer, with the keen critical interest of fresh minds. Had it troubled their faith? Not in the least; no more than it would that of Mary on the morning after the resurrection! There is a certain moral altitude where faith becomes knowledge, and the bat-wings of doubt cannot fly so high. My mother was dwelling in that land of Beulah, where the sun always shineth, and the bells of the heavenly city are heard, and the shining ones walk. All was clear to her, all bright, all real, in “the beyond;” but that kind of evidence is above the realm of heavy-footed reason. The “joy unspeakable,” the “peace that passeth understanding,” are things that cannot be passed from hand to hand. Else I am quite sure my mother would have taken the crown of joy from her head and the peace from her bosom, and given them to me. But the “white stone with the new name” is Christ’s gift to each for himself, and “no man knoweth it save he that receiveth it.”

  But these witnesses who stand gazing into heaven are not without their power on us who stand lower. It steadied my moral nerves, so to speak, that my mother had read and weighed the words that were making so much doubt and shaking; that she fully comprehended them, and that she smiled without fear. She listened without distress, without anxiety, to all my doubts and falterings. “You must pass through this; you will be led; it will all come right,” she said; “and then perhaps you will be the guide of others.”

  I had feared to tell her that I had abandoned the purpose of the ministry, but I found it easy.

  “I would not have you embrace the ministry for anything but a true love,” she said, “any more than I would that you should marry a wife for any other reason. If ever the time comes that you feel you must be that, it will be your call; but you can be God’s minister otherwise than through the pulpit.”

  “Talk over your plans with your uncle,” she said; “he is in your father’s place now.”

  In fact, my uncle, having no children of his own, had set his heart on me, and was disposed to make me heir, not only to his very modest personal estate, but also to his harvest of ideas and opinions, — all that backwater of thoughts and ideas that accumulate on the mind of a man who thinks and reads a great deal in a lonely neighborhood. So he took me up as a companion in his daily rides over the country.

  “Well, Harry, where next?” he said to me the day after my return, as we were driving together. “What are you about? Going to try the ministry?”

  “I dare not; I am not fit. I know father wanted it, and prayed for it, and nothing would be such a joy to mother, but” —

  My uncle gave a shrewd, sidelong glance on me.

  “I suppose you are like a good many fellows; an education gives them a general shaking up, and all their beliefs break from their lashings and go rolling and tumbling about like spars and oil-casks in a storm on shipboard.”

  “I can’t say that is true of all my beliefs; but yet a great many things that I tried to regard as certain are untied. I have too many doubts for a teacher.”

  “Who hasn’t? I don’t know anything in heaven or earth that forty unanswerable questions can’t be asked about.”

  “You know,” answered I, “Tennyson says, —

  ‘There lives more faith in honest doubt,

  Believe me, than in half the creeds.’”

  “H’m! that depends. Doubt is very well as a sort of constitutional crisis in the beginning of one’s life; but if it runs on and gets to be chronic, it breaks a fellow up, and makes him morally spindling and sickly. Men that do anything in the world must be men of strong convictions; it won’t do to go through life like a hen, craw-crawing and lifting up one foot, and not knowing where to set it down next.”

  “But,” said I, “while I am passing through the constitutional crisis, as you call it, is the very time I must make up my mind to teach others on the most awful of all subjects. I cannot and dare not. I must be a learner for some years to come, and I must be a learner without any pledges, expressed or implied, to find the truth this way or that.”

  “Well,” said my uncle, “I’m not so greatly concerned about that — the Lord needs other ministers besides those in the pulpit. Why, man, the sermons on the evidences of Christianity that have come home to me most have been preached by lay preachers in poor houses and lonely churches, by ignorant men and women, and little children. There ‘s old Aunt Sarah there,” he said, pointing with his whip to a brown house in the distance: “that woman is dying of a cancer, that slowly eats away her life in lingering agony, and all her dependence is the work of a sickly, consumptive daughter, and yet she is more than resigned to her lot; she is so cheerful, so thankful, so hopeful, there is such a blessed calm, peace and rest and sweetness in that house, that I love to go there. The influence of that woman is felt all through the village — she preaches to some purpose.”

  “Because she knows what she believes,” I said.

  “It was the same with your father, Harry. Now, my boy,” he added, turning to me with the old controversial twinkle in his eye, and speaking in a confidential tone, “the fact is, I never agreed with your father doctrinally; there were weak spots in his system all along, and I always told him so. I could trip him and floor him in an argument, and have done it a hundred times,” he said, giving a touch to his horse.

  I thought to myself that it was well enough that my father wasn’t there to hear that statement, otherwise there would have been an immediate tilting match, and the whole ground to be gone over. —

  “Yes,” he said; “it wasn’t mainly in your father’s theology that his strength lay — it was the Christ in him —— the great warm heart — his crystal purity and simplicity —— his unworldly earnestness and honesty. He was a godly man and a manly man both, and he sowed seed all over this State that came up good men and good women. Yes, there are hundreds and hundreds in this State to-day that are good men and good women mainly because he lived. That’s what I call success in life, Harry, when a man carries himself so that he turns into seed-corn and makes a harvest of good people. You may upset a man’s reasonings, and his theology may go to the dogs, but a brave Christian life you can’t upset, it will tell. Now, Harry, are you going to try for that?”

  “God helping me, I will,” I said.

  “You see, as to the theologies,” he added, “I think it has been well said that the Christian world just now is like a ship that’s tacking; it has lost the wind on one side and not quite got it on the other. The growth of society, the development of new physical laws, and this modern scientific rush of the human mind are going to modify the man-made theologies and creeds; some of them will drop away just as the blossom does when the fruit forms, but Christ’s religion will be just the same as ever — his words will not pass away.”

  “But then,” I said, “there is a whole labyrinth of perplexing questions about this Bible. What is inspiration? What ground does it cover? How much of all these books is inspired? What is their history? How came we by them? What evidence have we that the record gives us
Christ’s words uncorrupted?”

  “If you had been brought up in Justin Martyr’s time or the days of the primitive Christians you would have been put to study all these things first and foremost in your education, but we modern Christians teach young men everything else except what we profess to think the most important; and so you come out of college ignorant, just where knowledge is most vital.”

  “Well, that is past praying for now,” said I.

  “Yes; but even now there is a way out — just as going through a bog you plant your foot hard on what land there is, and then take your bearings — so you must do here. The way to get rid of doubts in religion is to go to work with all our might and practice what we don’t doubt, and that you can do whatever your calling or profession.”

  “I shall certainly try,” said I.

  “For example,” said my uncle, “there’s the Sermon on the Mount. Nobody has any doubt about that, there it lies — plain enough, and enough of it — not a bit of what’s called theology in it. Not a word of information to settle the mooted questions men wrangle over, but with a direct answer to just the questions any thoughtful man must want to have answered when he looks at life. Is there a Father in the heavens? Will he help us if we ask? May the troubles of life be our discipline? Is there a better life beyond? And how are we to get that? There is Christ’s philosophy of life in that sermon, and Christ’s mode of dealing with actual existing society; and he who undertakes in good faith to square his heart and life by it will have his hands full. The world has been traveling eighteen hundred years and not come fully into the light of its meaning. There has never been a Christian state or a Christian nation, according to that. That document is in modern society just like a lump of soda in a tumbler of vinegar, it keeps up a constant commotion, and will do so till every particle of life is adjusted on its principles. The man who works out Christ’s teachings into a palpable life-form preaches Christianity, no matter what his trade or calling. He may be a coal-heaver, or he may be a merchant, or a lawyer, or an editor — he preaches all the same. Men always know it when they meet a bit of Christ’s sermons walking out bodily in good deeds; they ‘re not like worldly wisdom, and have a smack of something a good deal higher than common sense, but when people see it they say, ‘ Yes — that’s the true thing.’ Now one of our Presidents, General Harrison, found out on a certain day that through a flaw in the title-deeds he was owner to half the city of Cincinnati. What does he do? Why, simply he says to himself, ‘These people have paid their money in good faith, and I’ll do by them as I’d be done by,’ and he goes to a lawyer and has fresh deeds drawn out for the whole of ‘em, and lived and died a poor, honest man. That action was a preaching of Christ’s doctrine as I take it, and if you’ll do as much whenever you get a chance, it’s no matter what calling you take for a pulpit. So now tell me, what are you thinking of setting yourself about?”