CHAPTER III

BOSTON AND THE HARTFORD SCHOOL

FOR several years Dr. Beecher had seen himself running aground in Litchfield financially. Therefore when an invitation came from Boston, urging his presence in that city as a last and saving hope for orthodoxy, he made up his mind to leave the pleasant places which had become dear to him and turn to other fields. His letter of "request for dismission" gives a wonderfully frank description of his household affairs. He read it in full to his congregation. He begins: "When I gave myself to God in the Gospel of his Son, it was done with the following views: That all expectation of accumulating property for myself and family be relinquished, leaving it to God in his own way to take care of me when sickness or age should supersede active labor. . . . I never expected or desired to give my children anything but their own minds and faculties, properly cultivated and prepared for active usefulness. With these views I gave myself to the ministry, first at East Hampton, on Long Island, with a salary of three hundred dollars and my firewood, which, after five years, was raised to four hundred dollars; and then, as my family increased, proving incompetent, at the end of another five years I obtained a dismission, and settled in this place, May 29, 1810, upon a salary of eight hundred dollars, with an understanding that I might calculate upon a voluntary supply of wood. Early after my settlement, my wife (of beloved memory) informed me from year to year that my income did not meet the unavoidable expenses of the family, and advised me to communicate the fact to the society."

Dr. Beecher continues: "I replied that I had come

hither with the determination of removing no more, and that in my judgment the condition of the society forbade a request for the increase of my salary." He then gives in detail the efforts made by his wife, who used all her little fortune in the attempt to take boarders. This venture was a total loss. The two elder children were then teaching, and were able to turn their earnings into the family coffer, but the sons were all to be educated for the ministry, as they showed no talent for anything but study. The utmost economy was of no avail, and after much suffering, when they were at the lowest ebb of their fortunes, a letter came from Boston, urging Dr. Beecher to become the pastor of the Hanover Street Church.

"For several days and nights, while agitated by this subject, I endured what I shall not attempt to describe.

I hope you will do me the justice to believe that I have endeavored to conduct uprightly, and in the fear of God, and that the friendship between us, which has been confirmed by the joys and the sorrows of fifteen years, may not all in a moment be sacrificed, but that you will extend to me in this heart-breaking moment the consolation of believing that I have not forfeited your confidence, your affection, and an interest in your prayers."

In after life, Mrs. Stowe said of this Boston era: "It was the high noon of my father's manhood, the flood-tide of his powers; and a combination of circumstances in the history of Massachusetts brought him in to labor there just as a whole generation were on the return-wave of a great moral reaction. The strict theocracy founded by the Puritans in the State of Massachusetts had striven by all the ingenuity of legislation and institution to impress the Calvinistic seal indelibly on all the future generations of Massachusetts, so that no man of other opinions should minister in the church, or bear office in the State. As in Connecticut, so in Massachusetts, a reaction had come in and forced open the doors of the State, and rent the sole

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con

power from the clergy; but the revolution had gone deeper and farther and extended to ideas and theologies. . . The party, called for convenience Unitarian, .. sisted of persons of the most diverse and opposite shades of opinion, united only in the profession of not believing Calvinism as taught by the original founders of Massachusetts. . .

"Calvinism or Orthodoxy was the despised and persecuted form of faith. It was the dethroned royal family V wandering like a permitted mendicant in the city where it once had held court, and Unitarianism reigned in its stead. "All the literary men of Massachusetts were Unitarian. All the trustees and professors of Harvard College were Unitarians. All the élite of wealth and fashion crowded Unitarian churches. The judges on the bench were Unitarian, giving decisions by which the peculiar features of church organization, so carefully ordained by the Pilgrim Fathers, had been nullified. The church, as consisting, according to their belief, in regenerate people, had been ignored, and all the power had passed into the hands of the congregation. This power had been used by the majorities to settle ministers of the fashionable and reigning type in many of the towns of Eastern Massachusetts. The dominant majority entered at once into possession of churches and church property, leaving the orthodox minority to go out into schoolhouses or town halls, and build their churches as best they could. Old foundations established by the Pilgrim Fathers for the perpetuation and teaching of their own views in theology were seized upon and appropriated to the support of opposing views. A fund given for preaching an annual lecture on the Trinity was employed for preaching an annual attack upon it, and the Hollis professorship of divinity at Cambridge was employed for the furnishing of a class of ministers whose sole distinctive idea was declared warfare with the ideas and intentions of the donor.

"So bitter and so strong had been the reaction of a whole generation against the too stringent bands of their fathers, such the impulse with which they broke from the cords with which their ancestors sought to bind them forever. But in every such surge of society, however confident and overbearing, there lies the element of a counter reaction, and when Dr. Beecher came to Boston this element had already begun to assert itself.

"He had not been in Boston many weeks before every leisure hour was beset by people who came with earnest intention to express to him those various phases of weary, restless, wandering desire and aspiration proper to an earnest people whose traditional faith has been broken up, but who have not outlived the necessity of definite and settled belief. From minds of every class, in every circle of society, the most fashionable and the most obscure, these inquirers were constantly coming with every imaginable theological problem, from the inspiration of the Bible out through all the minutest ramifications of doctrinal opinion or personal religious experience. . . .

"The effect of all this on my father's mind was to keep him at a white heat of enthusiasm. Within a stone's throw of our door was the old Copp's Hill burying-ground, where rested the bones of the Puritan founders; and, though not a man ordinarily given to sentiment or to visiting of graves, we were never left to forget in any prayer of his that the bones of our fathers were before our door.

"His family prayers at this period, departing from the customary forms of unexcited hours, became often upheavings of passionate emotion such as I shall never forget. Come, Lord Jesus,' he would say, 'here where the bones of the fathers rest, here where the crown has been torn from thy brow, come and recall thy wandering children. Behold thy flock scattered on the mountain— these sheep,

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what have they done? Gather them, gather them, O good Shepherd, for their feet stumble upon the dark mountains.'

"Dr. Beecher kept a load of sand in his cellar, to which he would run at odd intervals and shovel vigorously, throwing it from one side the cellar to the other, on his favorite theory of working off nervous excitement through the muscles, and his woodpile and woodsaw were inestimable means to the same end. He had, also, in the back yard, parallel bars, a single bar, ladder, and other simple gymnastic apparatus, where he would sometimes astonish his ministerial visitors by climbing ropes hand over hand, whirling over on the single bar.

"The time that he spent in actual preparation for a public effort was generally not long. If he was to preach in the evening he was to be seen all day talking with whoever would talk, accessible to all, full of everybody's affairs, business, and burdens, till an hour or two before the time, when he would rush up into his study (which he always preferred should be the topmost room of the house), and, throwing off his coat, after a swing or two with the dumb-bells to settle the balance of his muscles, he would sit down and dash ahead, making quantities of hieroglyphic notes on small, stubbed bits of paper, about as big as the palm of his hand. The bells would begin to ring and still he would write. They would toll loud and long, and his wife would say, 'He will certainly be late,' and then would be running up and down stairs of messengers to see that he was finished, till, just as the last stroke of the bell was dying away, he would emerge from the study with his coat very much awry, come down the stairs like a hurricane, stand impatiently protesting while female hands that ever lay in wait adjusted his cravat and settled his coat collar, calling loudly the while for a pin to fasten together the