A Biography of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. Scoville Samuel

the catechism was the sine qua non. “The other children memorized readily and were brilliant reciters, but Henry, blushing, stammering, confused, and hopelessly miserable, stuck fast on some sand-bank of what is required or forbidden by this or that commandment, his mouth choking up with the long words which he hopelessly miscalled, was sure to be accused of idleness or inattention, and to be solemnly talked to, which made him look more stolid and miserable than ever, but appeared to have no effect in quickening his dormant faculties.”

      Such were the influences that were exerted upon Henry Ward Beecher during these early and formative years. Various as they were, they preserved a general character of healthful simplicity; and numerous as they appear, they can yet be readily generalized. The first were those that were addressed to conscience, and that went to make this the strong, influential factor which it became in all well-trained New England youth of that period, and in none more markedly than in him. The stepmother led in this work. She was the conscience of the family, training to the strict observance of duty with a thoroughness which the father, with his more impulsive nature, could never have equalled, although he was in sympathy with the process. Home duties carefully exacted, regular attendance upon school, the strict keeping the Sabbath, even the hated lesson in the catechism, were some of the instruments employed. Open to criticism, they may be, in method and extent, yet they did their work, and strong conscientiousness was developed that made him tremble at the thought of wrong-doing, and kept him so free from viciousness that he was able to say: “I never was sullied in act, nor in thought, nor in feeling when I was young. I grew up as pure as a woman.”

      And although in after-years he gave more stress to heart than conscience, and preached the Gospel rather than the law, it was but the carrying out the natural process of soil-making and forest culture: the granite ridges of conscience formed the foundation, clothed and hidden by the growth, but not destroyed.

      With all her admirable qualities his step-mother failed to satisfy his longing for affection.

      “It pleased God to give me a second mother, a very eminent Christian woman. Now, my nature was enthusiastic and outgushing; I was like the convolvulus—I wanted to be running on somebody all the time. But my second mother was stately and not easy to approach. She was a beautiful person, serene and ladylike. She never lacked self-possession in speech, gesture, or posture. She was polished; but to my young thoughts she was cold. As I look back I do not recollect ever to have had from her one breath of summer. Although I was longing to love somebody, she did not call forth my affection; and my father was too busy to be loved. Therefore I had to expend my love on Aunt Chandler, a kind soul that was connected with our family, and the black woman that cooked, who were very kind to me. My mother that brought me up I never thought of loving. It never occurred to me. I was afraid of her. I revered her, but I was not attracted to her. I felt that she was ready to die, and that I was not. I knew that at about twilight she prayed; and I had a great shrinking from going past her door at that time. I had not the slightest doubt that she had set her affection on things above, and not on things beneath. I had the strongest conviction of her saintliness. It stamped itself upon my youth.”

      Another division of influences comes under the head of spiritual:

      “I can look back upon my own early life, and see how one and another took me, and how one prepared me for another. I can see how the largest natures did not always get access to me. It was late in life before my father influenced me very much. I think it was a humble woman who was in our family that first gained any considerable control over me. I feel the effect of her influence to this day.

      “I next came under the influence of a very humble serving-man. He opened up new directions to me and gave me new impulses. He was a colored man; and I am not ashamed to say that my whole life, my whole career respecting the colored race in the conflict which was so long carried on in this country, was largely influenced by the effect produced on my mind, when I was between eight and ten years of age, by a poor old colored man who worked on my father’s farm, named Charles Smith. He did not set out to influence me; he did not know that he did it; I did not know it until a great while afterwards; but he gave me impulses, and impulses which were in the right direction; for he was a godly and hymn-singing man, who made wine fresh every night from the cluster. He used to lie upon his humble bed (I slept in the same room with him) and read his Testament, unconscious, apparently, that I was in the room; and he would laugh and talk about what he read, and chuckle over it with that peculiarly unctuous throat-tone which belongs to his race. I never had heard the Bible really read before; but there, in my presence, he read it, and talked about it to himself and to God. He turned the New Testament into living forms right before me. It was a revelation and an impulse to me.

      “He talked to me about my soul more than any member of my father’s family. These things impressed me with the conviction that he was a Christian; and I never saw anything in him that led me to think otherwise. The feeling that I was sinful, that I needed to be born again, that there was such a thing as a regenerate life produced by the Spirit of God in the soul—these feelings came to me by observing the actual example of persons that I lived with more than from all other sources put together.”

      But above all others for diffusive and permanent impression affecting his whole nature, bringing him into sympathy with God in all his works as in all his words, and increasing to the day of his death, was the influence of his own mother.

      “The memory of my mother as one sainted has exerted a singular influence on me. After I came to be about fourteen or fifteen years of age I began to be distinctly conscious that there was a silent, secret, and, if you please to call it so, romantic influence which was affecting me. It grew and it grows, so that in some parts of my nature I think I have more communion with my mother, whom I never saw except as a child three years old, than with any living being. I am conscious that all my life long there has been a moral power in my memory of her. It is evident to me that while in education and in other material respects her death was a deprivation, it was also an inspiration, a communion—one of those invisible blessings which faith comprehends, but which we are not apt to weigh and to estimate.

      “Do you know,” he says, “why so often I speak what must seem to some of you rhapsody of woman? It is because I had a mother, and if I were to live a thousand years I could not express what seems to me to be the least that I owe to her. Three years old was I when singing she left me and sung on to heaven, where she sings evermore. I have only such a remembrance of her as you have of the clouds of ten years ago—faint, evanescent; and yet, caught by imagination, and fed by that which I have heard of her and by what my father’s thought and feeling of her were, it has come to be so much to me that no devout Catholic ever saw so much in the Virgin Mary as I have seen in my mother, who has been a presence to me ever since I can remember; and I can never say enough for woman for my sisters’ sake, for the sake of them that have gathered in the days of my infancy around about me, in return for what they have interpreted to me of the beauty of holiness, of the fulness of love, and of the heavenliness of those elements from which we are to interpret heaven itself.”

      In those influences that went to move the intellect, to awaken interest and thought, while the family life and the school and nature were all doing something, the dear old Aunt Esther with her Bible-readings and her innumerable stories and incidents of animal life stood pre-eminent and unapproachable at this period. It was but a few years before his death that he spoke of her early influence upon him, and read to us the story of Joseph as she used to read it to him, with the tears rolling down his cheeks. He told us that he had never yet been able to read that story or hear it read without crying.

      But in those practical influences that had to do with life, that gave him the impression that things could be done and must be done, that gave him inspiration to labor, his father took the lead.

      “What I was going to speak of was the effect upon my young mind of observing my father’s conduct under trying circumstances. I never once saw him flinch before the cold, or look as though anything was hard, or as if there was a reason for not pitching in and holding on when things were difficult. I have seen the time when we had to cut a twenty-five-foot tunnel outward from the kitchen-door, carrying the snow through the house; and such tunnels would sometimes remain a month before they would break down. I have seen the children around the house crying with cold, and slapping