A Biography of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. Scoville Samuel
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there must be a hell, and then it will appear evident that there must be a judgment.” Six pages of proof-texts and argument follow, when we come to the next question: “Who will enjoy heaven most?” When this has been answered, somewhat more briefly than the former, but apparently to his own satisfaction, he opens the next subject:
“I wish to ask you [evidently addressed to his brother], not as a question, but for my own information, what you think about the devil? Now, this of itself is quite a curious question, but what I wish to ask in this particular is, Do you think that he is at all under the divine direction as we are?”
Several pages of pithy sayings and illustrations follow, of which the first three are fair samples:
“God’s plans are like a hive of bees, for they seem to go on without any order till they are accomplished, but then you can see a great plan. Each one seems to be pursuing something for itself, but, like the bees, they at the end help to form one elegant edifice.”
“A half-way Christian has too little piety to be happy in the next world, and too much to be happy in this.”
“Religion, like fire, will go out nearly as soon if no fuel is added to it as if water is poured on it.”
These are not quotations, but original, and show thus early a habit already formed and a power already being educated of illustrating religious truth by natural objects and processes.
The last half of the book is used as a diary, written mostly with a lead-pencil, and opens with an account of his journey from Boston to Hartford on his way to enter college:
“I started from Boston Tuesday eve at ten o’clock, and, riding all night, I arrived in Hartford in time to dine. I took passage in the United States mail-stage. It can hold but six passengers inside, it being made light in order to travel fast. I think that we travelled very fast, for we went one hundred miles in about fifteen hours. After I got into Hartford I started off to find Mary. I went to her house, and sent word that I wished to see Mrs. Perkins. After waiting awhile she came down-stairs, and did not know me, and I had to tell her who I was. About five o’clock I went to see Harriet and Catharine. Catharine knew me, but Harriet did not. She could not think what to make of it when I went up and kissed her.
“I shall now begin my journal:
“Catharine wishes me to go to her levée to-night. Don’t want to much, but conclude that I will. Went before any of the company came. Went into Catharine’s room and sat till it was time to go down. The company began to come in, at first ladies, like flocks of pigeons, stringing along through the parlors; soon also the gentlemen began to come in. In the meantime I was sitting by the side of the pianoforte, alone and ‘unbefriended,’ looking at the different groups of persons talking. At length Harriet came and sat down by me, and I had quite a talk; but she wishing me to go with her into the other parlor, where a great many young ladies and no gentlemen were sitting, I refused, whereupon she kept pressing me, till at length, when she got up to go and speak with some one on the other side of the room, I seized the opportunity, and very quickly started for the door, but unluckily ran against a gentleman, knocked him half-over, made an apology, and got into the entry. Nor did my scrape end here; for, getting my hat, I perceived that they saw me from the parlors, and, getting the other side of the entry to hide myself from them, I espied six or seven young ladies seated on the stairs, watching to see what I was a-going to do. Well, I went back to the table where I had taken my hat, and from there whipped out of the door. After I had got home I sat and talked with Aunt Esther and Mary for a few moments, and then I went out to get a lamp. The stairs, I thought, were in this shape:
but instead of that they were in this way:
You know when they are moved round in that way there are four or five steps that meet in one point, a, and branch at b, so you cannot step on them except at b. Well, I stepped down at a and fell five stairs head-first—stretching my hands forward saved my cranium—and tumbled the rest of the way, to the no small annoyance of my shins and knees. So much for running away from the levée.”
“Catharine and Harriet came to tea, after which I went home with them, when Harriet put her curls on to my head and her bonnet, Catharine a cloak and neck-handkerchief, and then called the young ladies in, and they all thought that I was Harriet; and then, to cap all, Harriet put on a man’s cloak and my hat, and she looked exactly like you [Charles]!”
Such was Henry Ward Beecher at the age of seventeen, on the eve of entering college—bashful, smooth-faced, and changing rapidly in appearance, so that his own sisters did not know him. The penmanship shows as yet an unformed hand, but in its main features is like that of a later date.
He carelessly leaves out a word or a letter here and there, and markedly in places continues the old habit of his early school days—poor spelling. Nothing appears that indicates any talent superior to the majority of young men on their way to college, unless it be a certain enthusiasm, straightforwardness, and simplicity.
The college at this time was but nine years old, having been established in 1821. Rev. Heman Humphrey was president. It was small and poorly endowed, as well as young, but the chairs of instruction were ably filled; and since it had been founded by the orthodox Congregationalists as, in fact, an antidote to the Unitarianism of Harvard, and with especial reference to the education of young men for the ministry, its orthodoxy was unquestioned and its religious spirit pronounced and active.
By reason of his excellent preparation and the admirable mental training he had received, either of two courses were open to Henry Ward. He might aspire to lead his class in scholarship, become a “high-honor” man, and possibly take the valedictory, or use the time which he had at his disposal in following out those studies and readings that were to his taste.
He chose the latter, and, while giving sufficient study to the college course to preserve a respectable standing in his class, gave his greatest effort to carrying out his own plan of development and culture.
“I had acquired by the Latin and mathematics the power of study,” he says. “I knew how to study, and I turned it upon things I wanted to know.”
The beauty of the Greek and Latin classics did not attract him; it seemed cold and far away, belonging to another time and another order of mind; but our English classics, with their warmth of feeling, their lofty imagination, their delicate sentiment, their power and eloquence, seemed akin and near to him; they had to do with the present, and he gave himself to their study with a whole-hearted enthusiasm that rendered him peculiarly open to their influences.
Inspired and fed by them as to what to say, he also gave especial attention to the manner of saying it. Rhetoric and oratory were diligently pursued throughout his college course. In these departments he seems, according to the testimony of his class and college mates, to have excelled then almost as markedly as he has since.
Says Dr. Thomas P. Field: “The first thing I particularly remember about him in college was this: I went into our class prayer-meeting on Saturday evening, and young Beecher gave an exhortation. He urged us to a higher life and more constant activity in religious work. I heard him a great many times after he became a famous preacher, but I think I never was more moved by his eloquence than in that boys’ prayer-meeting. In the regular routine of our studies I always was aroused and astonished by his extemporaneous debates. He surpassed all the rest of us then in extemporaneous power of speech as much as he did in his after-life. There was where he seemed to me particularly to excel as a student. In mere recitation of mathematics or languages many of us could surpass him, but in extemporaneous debates he could beat us all. I was always greatly interested, too, in his written essays. We were in the habit of reading our essays to the professors in the class-room. Your father always had something to say that was fresh and striking and out of the beaten track of thought—something, too, that he had not gotten from books, but that was the product of his own thinking.”
Dr. John Haven, another classmate, says