A Biography of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. Scoville Samuel
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His diligence all along has gradually increased, and I think he has arrived at that full purpose which will insure his making a scholar. My method of instruction for beginners is a system of extended, minute, and reiterated drilling, and the make of his mind is such as fits him to receive benefit from the operation.”
Perhaps the method of “reiterated drilling, extended and minute,” was not so well adapted to the boy as the teacher thought. At all events we have this testimony on the other side, that “after a year spent in this way it began to be perceived by the elders of the family that as to the outward and visible signs of learning he was making no progress.”
He was therefore brought home to Litchfield, leaving but one incident of his life at Bethlehem especially worthy of note. It was this: One of the older boys, having studied Tom Paine’s “Age of Reason,” was freely advocating infidel sentiments and gaining a strong and vicious influence over his companions. Young Beecher saw it and came to the rescue. He brushed up the knowledge he had already gained at the hearth-stone and table of his home, studied “Watson’s Apology,” challenged the advocate of Tom Paine’s philosophy to a debate, and, in the judgment of the school, gained a complete victory, proving himself thus early to be a doughty champion of the faith.
The experiment at Bethlehem having proved substantially a failure, his oldest sister, Catharine, who was then teaching a young ladies’ school in Hartford, proposed to take the boy under her care to see what she could do with him.
If his nature lay in strata, as has been said—the one a dreamy, yearning melancholy lying at the bottom, which had its full exercise in his lonely wanderings around Bethlehem; and the other, the surface one, of humor and fun—it was the latter, constantly effervescing and exploding, that appeared in his life in his sister’s school of thirty or forty girls in Hartford. The story of his arranging the umbrellas on the stairs one recess, when he was supposed to be studying grammar, so that when the outside door was opened by a late comer the whole series rushed pell-mell down into the street, greatly to the dismay of the teachers and the enjoyment of the school—with whom, of course, he was a great favorite—is well known. And one of the incidents of the recitation-room is equally familiar, but, as it is very characteristic, we give it place, copied verbatim from Mrs. Stowe:
“The school-room was divided into two divisions in grammar, under leaders on either side, and the grammatical reviews were contests for superiority in which it was vitally important that every member should be perfected. Henry was generally the latest choice, and fell on his side as an unfortunate accession, being held more amusing than profitable on such occasions.
“The fair leader of one of these divisions took the boy aside to a private apartment, to put into him with female tact and insinuation those definitions and distinctions on which the honor of the class depended.
“ ‘Now, Henry, a is the indefinite article, you see, and must be used only with a singular noun. You can say a man, but you can’t say a men, can you?’ ‘Yes, I can say amen, too,’ was the ready rejoinder. ‘Father says it always at the end of his prayers.’
“ ‘Come, Henry, now don’t be joking! Now decline he.’he.’ ‘Nominative he, possessive his, objective him.’ ‘You see his is possessive. Now, you can say his book, but you can’t say him book.’ ‘Yes, I do say hymn-book, too,’ said the impracticable scholar, with a quizzical twinkle. Each one of these sallies made his young teacher laugh, which was the victory he wanted. ‘But now, Henry, seriously, just attend to the active and passive voice. Now, I strike is active, you see, because if you strike you do something. But I am struck is passive, because if you are struck you don’t do anything, do you?’
“ ‘Yes, I do—I strike back again!’ ”
A letter from the afore-mentioned teacher, sent to him with her New Year’s salutation, January 1, 1858, has lately come to hand. She says, in recalling this incident: “Memory has daguerreotyped upon my mind a boy, a small specimen of perpetual motion, perpetual prank, and perpetual desire to give wrong answers to every sober grammatical rule, thereby not only overwhelming Murray but the studious gravity of a hundred school-girls.”
“Sometimes his views of philosophical subjects were offered gratuitously. Being held of rather a frisky nature, his sister appointed his seat at her elbow when she heard classes. A class in natural philosophy, not very well prepared, was stumbling through the theory of the tides. ‘I can explain that,’ said Henry. ‘Well, you see, the sun he catches hold of the moon and pulls her, and she catches hold of the sea and pulls that, and this makes the spring tides.’ ‘But what makes the neap tides?’ ‘Oh! that’s when the sun stops to spit on his hands,’ was the brisk reply.
“After about six months Henry was returned to his parents’ hands with the reputation of being an inveterate joker and an indifferent scholar. It was the opinion of his class that there was much talent lying about loosely in him, if he could only be brought to apply himself.”
Of his religious life at this time we have a glimpse in a letter written by Dr. Beecher in November, 1825:
“Our family concert of prayer was held in the study on Thanksgiving Day—your mother, Aunt Esther, Henry, and Charles. It was a most deeply solemn, tender, and interesting time. … Henry and Charles have both been awakened, and are easily affected and seriously disposed now. But as yet it is like the wind upon the willow, which rises as soon as it is passed over. It does not grapple, but the effect is good in giving power to conscience, and moral principle producing amendment in conduct.”
This was during a revival which was then in progress in Litchfield, in which the pastor was assisted by Mr. Nettleton, the great revivalist of that period. Henry was twelve years old.
That no permanent good resulted from this work appears true, as the doctor feared, but for a reason very different from that which he gives.
Henry Ward himself tells us why it was:
“My mother—she who in the providence of God took me to her heart when my own mother had gone to see my Father in heaven, she who came after and was most faithful to the charge of the children and the household—she often took me, and prayed with me, and read me the word of God, and expounded to me the way of duty, and did all that seemed to her possible, I know, to make it easy for me to become a religious child; and yet there have been times when I think it would have been easier for me to lay my hand on a block and have it struck off than to open my thoughts to her, when I longed to open them to some one. How often have I started to go to her and tell her my feelings, when fear has caused me to sheer off and abandon my purpose! My mind would open like a rosebud, but, alas! fear would hold back the blossom. How many of my early religious pointings fell, like an over-drugged rosebud, without a blossom!”
Again, and more at length, he opens his religious experiences of the whole period:
“I remember having religious impressions, distinct and definite, as early as when I was eight or nine years of age.
“The first distinct religious feelings I had were in connection with nature. Although I was born, as far as any one can be born so, a Calvinist, and although I was conversant at a very early age with the things which pertain to Calvinism, yet, as I look back, I see that the only religious feelings or impressions I had were those which were excited in my mind through the unconscious influence of God through nature. It was not until years later that I knew it was the divine element. I yearned, I longed, for purity and nobility. I had the beginnings of the feeling of self-renunciation. I had a wistful desire that something higher, something superior to myself, should be developed out of the system of nature to help me. I had the germs of evangelical teaching; but I never spoke to anybody about them, and it seems to me a hermit could not have been more solitary, so far as that part of my life was concerned, than I was.
“The next thing I remember was a transition, under the influence of teaching, from the religious conditions and tendencies in my mind to a speculative state. I began to listen to sermons when I was eight or nine years old, and what seems strange is that the picturesque parts stopped not much with me; that they faded out of my mind; that the colors were not ‘fast’; but that I caught hold of the speculative