Chapter 58

IN THE NEW ENGLAND ATMOSPHERE--1851-1853

At Yale I found myself in the midst of New England Congregationalism; but I cannot say that it helped me much religiously. It, indeed, broadened my view, since I was associated with professors and students of various forms of Christianity, and came to respect them, not for what they professed, but for what they really were.

There also I read under an excellent professor--my dear friend the late President Porter--Butler's "Analogy"; but, though it impressed me, it left on my mind the effect of a strong piece of special pleading,--of a series of arguments equally valuable for any religion which had once "got itself established."

Here, too, a repellent influence was exercised upon me by a "revival." What was called a "religious interest" began to be shown in sundry student meetings, and soon it came in with a full tide. I was induced to go into one or two of these assemblies, and was somewhat impressed by the penitence shown and the pledges given by some of my college friends. But within a year the whole thing was dead. Several of the men who had been loudest in their expressions of penitence and determination to accept Christianity became worse than ever: they were like logs stranded high and dry after a freshet.

But this religious revival in college was infinitely better than one which ran its course in the immediate neighborhood. Just at the corner of the college grounds was a Methodist Episcopal church, the principal one in New Haven, and, a professional revivalist having begun his work there, the church was soon thronged. Blasphemy and ribaldry were the preacher's great attractions. One of the prayers attributed to him ran as follows: "Come down among us, O Lord! Come straight through the roof; I'll pay for the shingles!" Night after night the galleries were crowded with students laughing at this impious farce; and among them, one evening, came "Charley" Chotard of Mississippi. Chotard was a very handsome fellow: slender, well formed, six feet three inches tall, and in any crowd a man of mark, like King Saul. In the midst of the proceedings, at some grotesque utterance of the revivalist, the students in the galleries burst into laughter. The preacher, angrily turning his eyes upon the offenders, saw, first of all, Chotard, and called out to him: "You lightning-rod of hell, you flag-staff of damnation, come down from there!" Of course no such grotesque scenes were ever allowed in the college chapel: the services there, though simple, were always dignified; yet even in these there sometimes appeared incongruous features.

According to tradition in my time, an aged divine, greatly and justly beloved, from a neighboring city, had been asked to preach before the students. It was at the time when the whole English-speaking world had been thrilled by the story of the relief of Lucknow, and the cry of the Scotch lassie who heard the defiant slogan and heart-stirring pibroch of the Highlanders coming to the relief of the besieged had echoed across all the oceans. Toward the close of his sermon the dear old doctor became very impressive. He recited the story of Lucknow, and then spoke in substance as follows: "So to-day, my young friends, I sound in your ears the slo-o-o-broch of salvation." The alliteration evidently pleased him, and he repeated it with more and more emphasis in his peroration. When he sat down another clergyman who was with him at the sacred desk reminded him of his mistake, whereupon the good old doctor rose and addressed the students as follows: "My young friends, you doubtless noticed a mistake in my final remarks. I said 'slo-o-o-o-broch'; of course I meant 'pi-i-g-a-a-an.'"

Then, too, it must be confessed that some of the weekday prayers made by lay professors lent themselves rather too easily to parody. One of my classmates--since known as a grave and respected judge--was especially gifted in imitating these petitions, with the very intonations of their authors, and these parodies were in great demand on festive occasions. The pet phrases, the choice rhetoric, and the impressive oratory of these prayers were thus made so familiar to us in caricatures that the originals were little conducive to devotion.

The influence at Yale of men like Goodrich, Taylor, Woolsey, and Porter, whom I saw in their professors' chairs, was indeed strong upon me. I respected and admired them; but their purely religious teaching took but little hold on me; I can remember clearly but two or three sermons which I heard preached in Yale chapel. One was at the setting up of the chapel organ, when Horace Bushnell of Hartford preached upon music; and another was when President Woolsey preached a baccalaureate sermon upon "Righteous Anger." The first of these sermons was very beautiful, but the second was powerful. It has had an influence--and, I think, a good influence--on my thoughts from that day to this; and it ought to be preached in every pulpit in our country, at least once a year, as an antidote to our sickly, mawkish lenity to crime and wrong.

In those days conformity to religious ideas was carried very far at Yale. On week-days we had early prayers at about six in the morning, and evening prayers at about the same hour in the afternoon; but on Sundays we had not only morning and evening prayers in the chapel, but morning and afternoon service at church. I attended St. Paul's Episcopal church, sitting in one of the gallery pews assigned to undergraduates; but cannot say that anything that I heard during this period of my life elevated me especially. I joined in the reading of the Psalter, in the singing of the chants and hymns, and, occasionally, in reciting part of the creeds, though more and more this last exercise became peculiarly distasteful to me.

Time has but confirmed the opinion, which I then began to hold, that, of all mistaken usages in a church service, the most unfortunate is this demand which confronts a man who would gladly unite with Christians in Christian work, and, in a spirit of loyalty to the Blessed Founder of Christianity, would cheerfully become a member of the church and receive the benefit of its ministrations;--the demand that such a man stand and deliver a creed made no one knows where or by whom, and of which no human being can adjust the meanings to modern knowledge, or indeed to human comprehension.

My sympathies, tastes, and aims led me to desire to enter fully into the church in which I was born; there was no other part of the service in which I could not do my part; but to stand up and recite the creeds in all their clauses, honestly, I could not. I had come to know on what slender foundations rested, for example, the descent into hell; and, as to the virgin birth, my reading showed me so weak a basis for it in the New Testament taken as a whole, and so many similar claims made in behalf of divine founders of religions, that when I reflected upon the reasons for holding the doctrine to be an aftergrowth upon the original legend, it was impossible for me to go on loudly proclaiming my belief in it. Sometimes I have refrained from reciting any part of the creed; but often, in my reverence for what I admire in the service, in my love for those whom I have heard so devoutly take part in it in days gone by, and in my sympathy with those about me, I have been wont to do what I could,--have joined in repeating parts of it, leaving out other parts which I, at least, ought not to repeat.

Various things combined to increase my distrust for the prevailing orthodoxy. I had a passion for historical reading,--indeed, at that time had probably read more and thought more upon my reading than had most men of my age in college,--and the more I thus read and thought, the more evident it became to me that, while the simple religion of the Blessed Founder of Christianity has gone on through the ages producing the noblest growths of faith, hope, and charity, many of the beliefs insisted upon within the church as necessary to salvation were survivals of primeval superstition, or evolved in obedience to pagan environment or Jewish habits of thought or Greek metaphysics or mediaeval interpolations in our sacred books; that most of the frightful systems and events in modern history have arisen from theological dogmatism; that the long reign of hideous cruelty in the administration of the penal law, with its torture-chambers, its burnings of heretics and witches, its cruelties of every sort, its repression of so much of sane human instinct and noble human thought, arose from this source, directly or indirectly; and that even such ghastly scenes as those of the French Revolution were provoked by a natural reaction in the minds of a people whom the church, by its theory of divine retribution, had educated for ages to be cruel.

But what impressed me most directly as regards the whole orthodox part of the church was its virtual support of slavery in the crisis then rapidly approaching. Excellent divines, like Bishop Hopkins of Vermont, the Rev. Dr Parker of New Jersey, and others holding high positions in various sects throughout the country, having based elaborate defenses of slavery upon Scripture, the church as a whole had acquiesced in this view. I had become bitterly opposed, first to the encroachments of the slave power in the new Territories of the United States, and finally to slavery itself; and this alliance between it and orthodoxy deepened my distrust of what was known about me as religion. As the struggle between slavery and freedom deepened, this feeling of mine increased. During my first year at college the fugitive-slave law was passed, and this seemed to me the acme of abominations. There were, it is true, a few religious men who took high ground against slavery; but these were generally New England Unitarians or members of other bodies rejected by the orthodox, and this fact increased my distrust of the dominant religion.

Some years before this, while yet a boy preparing for college, I had met for the first time a clergyman of this sort--the Rev. Samuel Joseph May, pastor of the Unitarian church in Syracuse; and he had attracted me from the first moment that I saw him. There was about him something very genial and kindly, which won a way to all hearts. Though I knew him during many years, he never made the slightest effort to proselyte me. To every good work in the community, and especially to all who were down-trodden or oppressed, he was steadfastly devoted; the Onondaga Indians of central New York found in him a stanch ally against the encroachments of their scheming white neighbors; fugitive slaves knew him as their best friend, ready to risk his own safety in their behalf.

Although he was the son of an honored Massachusetts family, a graduate of Harvard, a disciple of Channing, a man of sincere character and elegant manners, he was evidently dreaded by the great majority of the orthodox Christians about him. I remember speaking to him once of a clergyman who had recently arrived in Syracuse, and who was an excellent scholar. Said Mr. May to me, "I should like to know him, if that were possible." I asked, "Why not call upon him?" He answered, "I would gladly do so, but do you suppose he would return my call?" "Of course he would," I replied; "he is a gentleman." "Yes," said Mr. May, "no doubt he is, and so are the other clergymen; yet I have called on them as they have come, and only two or three of them all have ever entered my house since." Orthodox fanatics came to remonstrate and pray with him, but these he generally overcame with his sweet and kindly manner. To slavery he was an uncompromising foe, being closely associated with Garrison, Phillips, and the leaders of the antislavery movement; and so I came to see that there was a side to Christianity not necessarily friendly to slavery: but I also saw that it was a side not welcomed by the churches in general, and especially distrusted in my own family. I remember taking to him once an old friend of mine, a man of most severe orthodoxy; and after we had left Mr. May's house I asked my friend what he thought of the kindly heretic. He answered, "Those of us who shall be so fortunate as to reach heaven are to be greatly surprised at some of the people we are to meet there."

As a Yale student I found an additional advantage in the fact that I could now frequently hear distinguished clergymen who were more or less outside the orthodox pale. Of these were the liberal Congregationalists of New York, Brooklyn, and Boston, and, above all, Henry Ward Beecher, Edwin Chapin, and Theodore Parker. At various times during my college course I visited Boston, and was taken by my classmate and old friend George Washburn Smalley to hear Parker. He drew immense crowds of thoughtful people. The music-hall, where he spoke, contained about four thousand seats, and at each visit of mine every seat, so far as I could see, was filled. Both Parker's prayers and sermons were inspiring. He was a deeply religious man; probably the most thorough American scholar, orthodox or unorthodox, of his time; devoted to the public good and an intense hater of slavery. His influence over my thinking was, I believe, excellent; his books, and those of Channing which I read at this time, did me great good by checking all inclination to cynicism and scoffing; more than any other person he strengthened my theistic ideas and stopped any tendency to atheism; the intense conviction with which men like Channing, Parker, and May spoke of a God in the universe gave a direction to my thinking which has never been lost.

As to Beecher, nothing could exceed his bold brilliancy. He was a man of genius; even more a poet than an orator; in sympathy with every noble cause; and utterly without fear of the pew-holders inside his church or of the mob outside. Heresy-hunters did not daunt him. Humor played over much of his sermonizing; wit coruscated through it; but there was at times a pathos which pervaded the deep places of the human heart. By virtue of his poetic insight he sounded depths of thought and feeling which no mere theological reasoning could ever reach. He was a man,--indeed, a great man,--but to the end of his life he retained the freshness of youth. General Grant, who greatly admired him, once said to me, "Beecher is a boy--a glorious boy."

Beecher's love of nature was a passion. During one of his visits to Cornell University, I was driving through the woods with him, and he was in the full tide of brilliant discourse when, suddenly, he grasped my hand which held the reins and said peremptorily, "Stop!" I obeyed, and all was still save the note of a bird in the neighboring thicket. Our stop and silence lasted perhaps five minutes, when he said, "Did you hear that bird? That is the----(giving a name I have forgotten). You are lucky to have him here; I would give a hundred dollars to have him nest as near me."

During this visit of his to my house, I remember finding, one morning, that he had been out of doors since daylight; and on my expressing surprise at his rising so early after sitting up so late, he said, "I wanted to enjoy the squirrels in your trees."

Wonderful, too, was his facility, not merely in preaching, but in thinking. When, on another visit, he stayed with me, he took no thought regarding his sermon at the university chapel, so far as one could see. Every waking moment was filled with things which apparently made preparation for preaching impossible. I became somewhat nervous over this neglect; for, so far as I could learn, he had nothing written, he never spoke from memory, and not only the students, but the people from the whole country round about, were crowding toward the chapel.

Up to the last moment before leaving my house for the morning service, he discussed the best shrubs for planting throughout our groves and woods, and the best grasses to use in getting a good turf upon the university grounds. But, on leaving the house, he became silent and walked slowly, his eyes fixed steadily on the ground; and as I took it for granted that he was collecting his thoughts for his sermon, I was careful not to disturb him. As we reached the chapel porch, a vast crowd in waiting and the organ pealing, he suddenly stopped, turned round, lifted his eyes from the ground, and said, "I have been studying your lawn all the way down here; what you need is to sow Kentucky blue-grass." Then he entered the chapel, and shortly was in the midst of a sermon evidently suggested by the occasion, his whole manuscript being a few pencilings on a sheet or two of note-paper, all the rest being extemporized in his best vein, both as to matter and manner.

Chapin, too, was brilliant and gifted, but very different in every respect from Beecher. His way was to read from manuscript, and then, from time to time, to rise out of it and soar above it, speaking always forcibly and often eloquently. His gift of presenting figures of speech so that they became vivid realities to his audience was beyond that of any other preacher I ever heard. Giving once a temperance address, and answering the argument as to the loss of property involved in the confiscation of intoxicants, he suddenly pictured a balance let down from the hand of the Almighty, in one scale all the lucre lost, in the other all the crimes, the wrecks, the miseries, the sorrows, the griefs, the widows' groans and orphans' tears,--until we absolutely seemed to have the whole vast, terrific mass swaying in mid-air before us.

On another occasion, preaching from the text, "Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face," he presented the picture of a man in his last illness, seeing dimly, through a half-transparent medium, the faint, dim outline of the Divinity whom he was so rapidly nearing; and then, suddenly, death,--the shattering of the glass,--and the man, on the instant, standing before his Maker and seeing him "face to face." It all seems poor when put upon paper; but, as he gave it, nothing could be more