University of Virginia Library

29. CHAPTER XXIX.
MY GRANDMOTHER'S BLUE BOOK.

READER, this is to be a serious chapter, and I advise all
those people who want to go through the world without
giving five minutes' consecutive thought to any subject to skip it.
They will not find it entertaining, and it may perhaps lead
them to think on puzzling subjects, even for so long a time as
half an hour; and who knows what may happen to their brains,
from so unusual an exercise?

My grandmother, as I have shown, was a character in her
way, full of contradictions and inconsistencies, brave, generous,
energetic, large-hearted, and impulsive. Theoretically she was
an ardent disciple of the sharpest and severest Calvinism, and
used to repeat Michael Wigglesworth's “Day of Doom” to us in
the chimney-corner, of an evening, with a reverent acquiescence
in all its hard sayings, while practically she was the most pitiful,
easy-to-be-entreated old mortal on earth, and was ever falling
a prey to any lazy vagabond who chose to make an appeal to
her abounding charity. She could not refuse a beggar that
asked in a piteous tone; she could not send a child to bed that
wanted to sit up; she could not eat a meal in peace when there
were hungry eyes watching her; she could not, in cool, deliberate
moments, even inflict transient and necessary pain for the
greater good of a child, and resolutely shut her eyes to the necessity
of such infliction. But there lay at the bottom of all this
apparent inconsistency a deep cause that made it consistent, and
that cause was the theologic stratum in which her mind, and the
mind of all New England, was embedded.

Never, in the most intensely religious ages of the world,
did the insoluble problem of the WHENCE, the WHY, and the
WHITHER of mankind receive such earnest attention. New
England was founded by a colony who turned their backs on the

civilization of the Old World, on purpose that they might have
nothing else to think of. Their object was to form a community
that should think of nothing else.

Working on a hard soil, battling with a harsh, ungenial climate,
everywhere being treated by Nature with the most rigorous
severity, they asked no indulgence, they got none, and they gave
none. They shut out from their religious worship every poetic
drapery, every physical accessory that they feared would interfere
with the abstract contemplation of hard, naked truth, and set
themselves grimly and determinately to study the severest problems
of the unknowable and the insoluble. Just as resolutely as
they made their farms by blasting rocks and clearing land of
ledges of stone, and founded thrifty cities and thriving money-getting
communities in places which one would think might
more properly have been left to the white bears, so resolutely
they pursued their investigations amid the grim mysteries of
human existence, determined to see and touch and handle
everything for themselves, and to get at the absolute truth if
absolute truth could be got at.

They never expected to find truth agreeable. Nothing in their
experience of life had ever prepared them to think it would be
so. Their investigations were made with the courage of the
man who hopes little, but determines to know the worst of his
affairs. They wanted no smoke of incense to blind them, and no
soft opiates of pictures and music to lull them; for what they
were after was truth, and not happiness, and they valued duty
far higher than enjoyment.

The underlying foundation of life, therefore, in New England,
was one of profound, unutterable, and therefore unuttered, melancholy,
which regarded human existence itself as a ghastly
risk, and, in the case of the vast majority of human beings, an
inconceivable misfortune.

My grandmother believed in statements which made the fortunate
number who escaped the great catastrophe of mortal life as
few and far between as the shivering, half-drowned mariners, who
crawl up on to the shores of some desert island, when all else
on board have perished. In this view she regarded the birth

of an infant with a suppressed groan, and the death of one almost
with satisfaction. That more than half the human race die
in infancy, — that infanticide is the general custom in so many
heathen lands, — was to her a comforting consideration, for so
many were held to escape at once the awful ordeal, and to be
gathered into the numbers of the elect.

As I have said, she was a great reader. On the round table
that stood in her bedroom, next to the kitchen, there was an
ample supply of books. Rollin's Ancient History, Hume's History
of England, and President Edwards's Sermons, were
among these.

She was not one of those systematic, skilful housewives who
contrive with few steps and great method to do much in little
time; she took everything the hardest end first, and attacked
difficulties by sheer inconsiderate strength. For example, instead
of putting on the great family pot, filling it with water,
and afterwards putting therein the beef, pork, and vegetables of
our daily meal, she would load up the receptacle at the sink in
the back room, and then, with strong arm and cap-border erect,
would fly across the kitchen with it and swing it over the fire by
main strength. Thus inconsiderately she rushed at the daily
battle of existence. But there was one point of system in which
she never failed. There was, every day, a period, sacred and
inviolable, which she gave to reading. The noon meal came
exactly at twelve o'clock; and immediately after, when the
dishes were washed and wiped, and the kitchen reduced to
order, my grandmother changed her gown, and retired to the
sanctuary of her bedroom to read. In this way she accomplished
an amount which a modern housekeeper, with four servants,
would pronounce to be wholly incredible.

The books on her table came in time to be my reading as well
as hers; for, as I have said, reading was with me a passion, a
hunger, and I read all that came in my way.

Her favorite books had different-colored covers, thriftily put
on to preserve them from the wear of handling; and it was by
these covers they were generally designated in the family.
Hume's History of England was known as “the brown book”;

Rollin's History was “the green book”; but there was one
volume which she pondered oftener and with more intense earnestness
than any other, which received the designation of “the
blue book.” This was a volume by the Rev. Dr. Bellamy of
Connecticut, called “True Religion delineated, and distinguished
from all Counterfeits.” It was originally published by subscription,
and sent out into New England with a letter of introduction
and recommendation from the Rev. Jonathan Edwards, who
earnestly set it forth as being a condensed summary, in popular
language, of what it is vital and important for human beings to
know for their spiritual progress. It was written in a strong,
nervous, condensed, popular style, such as is fallen into by a
practical man speaking to a practical people, by a man thoroughly
in earnest to men as deeply in earnest, and lastly, by a
man who believed without the shadow of a doubt, and without
even the comprehension of the possibility of a doubt.

I cannot give a better idea of the unflinching manner in which
the deepest mysteries of religion were propounded to the common
people than by giving a specimen of some of the headings of
this book.

Page 288 considers, “Were we by the Fall brought into a
State of Being worse than Not to Be?”

The answer to this comprehensive question is sufficiently
explicit.

“Mankind were by their fall brought into a state of being
worse than not to be. The damned in hell, no doubt, are in such
a state, else their punishment would not be infinite, as justice requires
it should be. But mankind, by the fall, were brought into
a state, for substance, as bad as that which the damned are in.”

The next inquiry to this is, “How could God, consistent with
his perfections, put us into a state of being worse than not to
be? And how can we ever thank God for such a being?”

The answer to this, as it was read by thousands of reflecting
minds like mine, certainly shows that these hardy and courageous
investigators often raised spirits that they could not lay. As, for
instance, this solution of the question, which never struck me as
satisfactory.

“Inasmuch as God did virtually give being to all mankind,
when he blessed our first parents and said, `Be fruitful and
multiply'; and inasmuch as Being, under the circumstances that
man was then put in by God, was very desirable: we ought, therefore,
to thank God for our being, considered in this light, and
justify God for all the evil that has come upon us by apostasy.”

On this subject the author goes on to moralize thus: —

“Mankind, by the fall, were brought into a state of being infinitely
worse than not to be; and were they but so far awake as
to be sensible of it, they would, no doubt, all over the earth, murmur
and blaspheme the God of Heaven. But what then? there
would be no just ground for such conduct. We have no reason
to think hard of God, — to blame him or esteem him e'er the less.
What he has done was fit and right. His conduct was beautiful,
and he is worthy to be esteemed for it. For that constitution
was holy, just, and good, as has been proved. And, therefore, a
fallen world ought to ascribe to themselves all the evil, and to
justify God and say: `God gave us being under a constitution
holy, just, and good, and it was a mercy. We should have
accounted it a great mercy in case Adam had never fallen; but
God is not to blame for this, nor, therefore, is he the less worthy
of thanks.'”

After this comes another and quite practical inquiry, which is
stated as follows: —

“But if mankind are thus by nature children of wrath, in a
state of being worse than not to be, how can men have the heart
to propagate their kind?”

The answer to this inquiry it is not necessary to give at length.
I merely state it to show how unblinking was the gaze which
men in those days fixed upon the problems of life.

The objector is still further represented as saying, —

“It cannot be thought a blessing to have children, if most of
them are thought to be likely to perish.”

The answer to this is as follows: —

“The most of Abraham's posterity for these three thousand
years, no doubt, have been wicked and perished. And God knew

beforehand how it would be, and yet he promised such a numerous
posterity under the notion of a great blessing. For, considering
children as to this life, they may be a great blessing and
comfort to their parents; and we are certain that God will do
them no wrong in the life to come. All men's murmuring
thoughts about this matter arise from their not liking God's
way of governing the world.”

I will quote but one more passage, as showing the hardy vigor
of assertion on the darkest of subjects, — the origin of evil. The
author says: —

“When God first designed the world, and laid out his scheme
of government, it was easy for him to have determined that
neither angels nor men should ever sin, and that misery should
never be heard of in all his dominions; for he could easily have
prevented both sin and misery. Why did not he? Surely not
for want of goodness in his nature, for that is infinite; not from
anything like cruelty, for there is no such thing in him; not for
want of a suitable regard to the happiness of his creatures, for
that he always has: but because in his infinite wisdom he did not
think it best on the whole.

“But why was it not best? What could he have in view,
preferable to the happiness of his creatures? And, if their happiness
was to him above all things most dear, how could he bear
the thoughts of their ever any of them being miserable?

“It is certain that he had in view something else than merely
the happiness of his creatures. It was something of greater
importance. But what was that thing that was of greater worth
and importance, and to which he had the greatest regard, making
all other things give way to this? What was his great end in
creating and governing the world? Why, look what end he is at
last likely to obtain, when the whole scheme is finished, and the
Day of Judgment passed, and heaven and hell filled with all
their proper inhabitants. What will be the final result? What
will he get by all? Why, this: that he will exert and display
every one of his perfections to the life, and so by all will exhibit
a most perfect and exact image of himself.

“Now it is evident that the fall of angels and of man, together

with all those things which have and will come to pass in consequence
thereof, from the beginning of the world to the Day of
Judgment and throughout eternity, will serve to give a much
more lively and perfect representation of God than could possibly
have been given had there been no sin or misery.”

This book also led the inquirer through all the mazes of mental
philosophy, and discussed all the problems of mystical religion,
such as, —

“Can a man, merely from self-love, love God more than himself?”

“Is our impotency only moral?”

“What is the most fundamental difference between Arminians
and Calvinists?”

“How the love to our neighbor which is commanded by God
is a thing different from natural compassion, from natural affection,
from party-spirited love, from any love whatever that arises
merely from self-love, and from the love which enthusiasts and
heretics have for one another.”

I give these specimens, that the reader may reflect what kind
of population there was likely to be where such were the daily
studies of a plain country farmer's wife, and such the common
topics discussed at every kitchen fireside.

My grandmother's blue book was published and recommended
to the attention of New England, August 4, 1750, just twenty-six
years before the Declaration of Independence. How popular
it was, and how widely read in New England, appears from the
list of subscribers which stands at the end of the old copy which
my grandmother actually used. Almost every good old Massachusetts
or Connecticut family name is there represented. We
have the Emersons, the Adamses, the Brattles of Brattle Street,
the Bromfields of Bromfield Street, the Brinsmaids of Connecticut,
the Butlers, the Campbells, the Chapmans, the Cottons, the
Daggetts, the Hawleys, the Hookers, with many more names
of families yet continuing to hold influence in New England.
How they regarded this book may be inferred from the fact
that some subscribed for six books, some for twelve, some for
thirty-six, and some for fifty. Its dissemination was deemed an

act of religious ministry, and there is not the slightest doubt that
it was heedfully and earnestly read in every good family of New
England; and its propositions were discussed everywhere and by
everybody. This is one undoubted fact; the other is, that it
was this generation who fought through the Revolutionary war.
They were a set of men and women brought up to think, — to
think not merely on agreeable subjects, but to wrestle and tug
at the very severest problems. Utter self-renunciation, a sort
of grand contempt for personal happiness when weighed with
things greater and more valuable, was the fundamental principle
of life in those days. They who could calmly look in the face,
and settle themselves down to, the idea of being resigned and
thankful for an existence which was not so good as non-existence,
— who were willing to be loyal subjects of a splendid
and powerful government which was conducted on quite other
issues than a regard for their happiness, — were possessed of a
courage and a fortitude which no mere earthly mischance could
shake. They who had faced eternal ruin with an unflinching
gaze were not likely to shrink before the comparatively
trivial losses and gains of any mere earthly conflict. Being
accustomed to combats with the Devil, it was rather a recreation
to fight only British officers.

If any should ever be so curious as to read this old treatise, as
well as most of the writings of Jonathan Edwards, they will perceive
with singular plainness how inevitably monarchical and
aristocratic institutions influence theology.

That “the king can do no wrong,” — that the subject owes
everything to the king, and the king nothing to the subject, —
that it is the king's first duty to take care of himself, and keep
up state, splendor, majesty, and royalty, and that it is the people's
duty to give themselves up, body and soul, without a murmuring
thought, to keep up this state, splendor, and royalty, — were ideas
for ages so wrought into the human mind, and transmitted by
ordinary generation, — they so reflected themselves in literature
and poetry and art, and all the great customs of society, — that it
was inevitable that systematic theology should be permeated by
them.

The idea of God in which theologians delighted, and which the
popular mind accepted, was not that of the Good Shepherd that
giveth his life for the sheep, — of him that made himself of no
reputation, and took unto himself the form of a servant, — of
him who on his knees washed the feet of his disciples, and said
that in the kingdom of heaven the greatest was he who served
most humbly, — this aspect of a Divine Being had not yet been
wrought into their systematic theology; because, while the Bible
comes from God, theology is the outgrowth of the human mind,
and therefore must spring from the movement of society.

When the Puritans arrived at a perception of the political
rights of men in the state, and began to enunciate and act
upon the doctrine that a king's right to reign was founded upon
his power to promote the greatest happiness of his subjects,
and when, in pursuance of this theory, they tried, condemned,
and executed a king who had been false to the people, they took
a long step forward in human progress. Why did not immediate
anarchy follow, as when the French took such a step in regard to
their king? It was because the Puritans transferred to God all
those rights and immunities, all that unquestioning homage and
worship and loyalty, which hitherto they had given to an earthly
king.

The human mind cannot bear to relinquish more than a certain
portion of its cherished past ideas in one century. Society
falls into anarchy in too entire a change of base.

The Puritans had still a King. The French Revolutionists
had nothing; therefore, the Puritan Revolution went on stronger
and stronger. The French passed through anarchy back under
despotism.

The doctrine of Divine sovereignty was the great rest to the
human mind in those days, when the foundations of many generations
were broken up. It is always painful to honest and
loyal minds to break away from that which they have reverenced,
— to put down that which they have respected. And the
Puritans were by nature the most reverential and most loyal
portion of the community. Their passionate attachment to the
doctrine of Divine sovereignty, at this period, was the pleading

and yearning within them of a faculty robbed of its appropriate
object, and longing for support and expression.

There is something most affecting in the submissive devotion
of these old Puritans to their God. Nothing shows more completely
the indestructible nature of the filial tie which binds man
to God, of the filial yearning which throbs in the heart of a great
child of so great a Father, than the manner in which these men
loved and worshipped and trusted God as the ALL LOVELY, even
in the face of monstrous assertions of theology ascribing to him
deeds which no father could imitate without being cast out of
human society, and no governor without being handed down
to all ages as a monster.

These theologies were not formed by the Puritans; they were
their legacy from past monarchical and mediæval ages; and the
principles of true Christian democracy upon which they founded
their new state began, from the time of the American Revolution,
to act upon them with a constantly ameliorating power; so that
whosoever should read my grandmother's blue book now would
be astonished to find how completely New England theology has
changed its base.

The artist, in reproducing pictures of New England life during
this period, is often obliged to hold his hand. He could not
faithfully report the familiar conversations of the common people,
because they often allude to and discuss the most awful and tremendous
subjects. This, however, was the inevitable result of
the honest, fearless manner in which the New England ministry
of this second era discussed the Divine administration. They
argued for it with the common people in very much the tone
and with much the language in which they defended the Continental
Congress and the ruling President; and every human
being was addressed as a competent judge.

The result of such a mode of proceeding, in the long run,
changed the theology of New England, from what it was when
Jonathan Edwards recommended my grandmother's blue book,
into what it is at this present writing. But, during the process
of this investigation, every child born in New England found
himself beaten backwards and forwards, like a shuttlecock,

between the battledoors of discussion. Our kitchen used to be
shaken constantly by what my grandfather significantly called
“the battle of the Infinites,” especially when my Uncle Bill
came home from Cambridge on his vacations, fully charged with
syllogisms, which he hurled like catapults back on the syllogisms
which my grandmother had drawn from the armory of her blue
book.

My grandmother would say, for example: “Whatever sin is
committed against an infinite being is an infinite evil. Every infinite
evil deserves infinite punishment; therefore every sin of
man deserves an infinite punishment.”

Then Uncle Bill, on the other side, would say: “No act of
a finite being can be infinite. Man is a finite being; therefore
no sin of man can be infinite. No finite evil deserves infinite
punishment. Man's sins are finite evils; therefore man's sins
do not deserve infinite punishment.” When the combatants had
got thus far, they generally looked at each other in silence.

As a result, my grandmother being earnest and prayerful,
and my uncle careless and worldly, the thing generally ended in
her believing that he was wrong, though she could not answer
him; and in his believing that she, after all, might be right,
though he could answer her; for it is noticeable, in every battle
of opinion, that honest, sincere, moral earnestness has a certain
advantage over mere intellectual cleverness.

It was inevitable that a people who had just carried through
a national revolution and declared national independence on the
principle that “governments owe their just power to the consent
of the governed,” and who recognized it as an axiom that the
greatest good to the greatest number was the object to be held in
view in all just governments, should very soon come into painful
collision with forms of theological statement, in regard to God's
government, which appeared to contravene all these principles,
and which could be supported only by referring to the old notion
of the divine right and prerogative of the King Eternal.

President Edwards had constructed a marvellous piece of
logic to show that, while true virtue in man consisted in supreme
devotion to the general good of all, true virtue in God

consisted in supreme regard for himself. This “Treatise on
True Virtue” was one of the strongest attempts to back up
by reasoning the old monarchical and aristocratic ideas of the
supreme right of the king and upper classes. The whole of
it falls to dust before the one simple declaration of Jesus Christ,
that, in the eyes of Heaven, one lost sheep is more prized than
all the ninety and nine that went not astray, and before the
parable in which the father runs, forgetful of parental prerogative
and dignity, to cast himself on the neck of the far-off
prodigal.

Theology being human and a reflection of human infirmities,
nothing is more common than for it to come up point-blank in
opposition to the simplest declarations of Christ.

I must beg my readers' pardon for all this, but it is a fact that
the true tragedy of New England life, its deep, unutterable
pathos, its endurances and its sufferings, all depended upon,
and were woven into, this constant wrestling of thought with infinite
problems which could not be avoided, and which saddened
the days of almost every one who grew up under it.

Was this entire freedom of thought and discussion a bad thing,
then? Do we not see that strength of mind and strength of will,
and the courage and fortitude and endurance which founded this
great American government, grew up out of characters formed
thus to think and struggle and suffer? It seems to be the law of
this present existence, that all the changes by which the world is
made better are brought about by the struggle and suffering, and
sometimes the utter shipwreck, of individual human beings.

In regard to our own family, the deepest tragedy in it, and the
one which for a time brought the most suffering and sorrow on
us all, cannot be explained unless we take into consideration
this peculiar state of society.

In the neighboring town of Adams there lived one of the
most remarkable clergymen that New England has ever produced.
His career influenced the thinking of Massachusetts,
both in regard to those who adopted his opinions, and in the
violent reaction from those opinions which was the result of
his extreme manner of pushing them.

Dr. Moses Stern's figure is well remembered by me as I saw it
in my boyhood. Everybody knew him, and when he appeared
in the pulpit everybody trembled before him. He moved among
men, but seemed not of men. An austere, inflexible, grand indifference
to all things earthly seemed to give him the prestige and
dignity of a supernatural being. His Calvinism was of so severe
and ultra a type, and his statements were so little qualified either
by pity of human infirmity, or fear of human censure, or desire
of human approbation, that he reminded one of some ancient
prophet, freighted with a mission of woe and wrath, which he
must always speak, whether people would hear or whether they
would forbear.

The Revolutionary war had introduced into the country a
great deal of scepticism, of a type of which Paine's “Age of
Reason” was an exponent; and, to meet this, the ministry of
New England was not slow or unskilful.

Dr. Stern's mode of meeting this attitude of the popular
mind was by an unflinching, authoritative, vehement reiteration
of all the most unpopular and unpleasant points of Calvinism.
Now as Nature is, in many of her obvious aspects, notoriously
uncompromising, harsh, and severe, the Calvinist who begins to
talk to common-sense people has this advantage on his side, —
that the things which he represents the Author of Nature as doing
and being ready to do, are not very different from what the common-sense
man sees that the Author of Nature is already in the
habit of doing.

The farmer who struggles with the hard soil, and with drouth
and frost and caterpillars and fifty other insect plagues, — who
finds his most persistent and well-calculated efforts constantly
thwarted by laws whose workings he never can fully anticipate,
and which never manifest either care for his good intentions or
sympathy for his losses, is very apt to believe that the God who
created nature may be a generally benevolent, but a severe and
unsympathetic being, governing the world for some great, unknown
purpose of his own, of which man's private improvement
and happiness may or may not form a part.

Dr. Stern, with characteristic independence and fearlessness,

on his own simple authority cut loose from and repudiated the
whole traditional idea of the fall in Adam as having anything to
do with the existence of human depravity; and made up his own
theory of the universe, and began preaching it to the farmers of
Adams. It was simply this: that the Divine Being is the efficient
cause of all things, not only in matter but in mind, — that
every good and every evil volition of any being in the universe is
immediately caused by Him and tends equally well in its way
to carry on his great designs. But, in order that this might not
interfere with the doctrines of human responsibility, he taught
that all was accomplished by Omniscient skill and knowledge in
such a way as not in the slightest degree to interfere with human
free agency; so that the whole responsibility of every
human being's actions must rest upon himself.

Thus was this system calculated, like a skilful engine of torture,
to produce all the mental anguish of the most perfect sense
of helplessness with the most torturing sense of responsibility.
Alternately he worked these two great levers with an almost
supernatural power, — on one Sunday demonstrating with the
most logical clearness, and by appeals to human consciousness,
the perfect freedom of man, and, on the next, demonstrating
with no less precision and logic the perfect power which an
Omniscient Being possessed and exercised of controlling all his
thoughts and volitions and actions.

Individually, Dr. Stern, like many other teachers of severe,
uncompromising theories, was an artless, simple-hearted, gentle-mannered
man. He was a close student, and wore two holes in
the floor opposite his table in the spot where year after year
his feet were placed in study. He refused to have the smallest
thing to do with any temporal affair of this life. Like the other
clergymen, he lived on a small salary, and the support of his
family depended largely on the proceeds of a farm. But it is
recorded of him, that once, when his whole summer's crop of hay
was threatened with the bursting of a thunder-shower, and, farm-hands
being short, he was importuned to lend a hand to save
it, he resolutely declined, saying, that, if he once began to allow
himself to be called on in any emergency for temporal affairs, he
should become forgetful of his great mission.

The same inflexible, unbending perseverance he showed in
preaching, on the basis of his own terrible theory, the most fearful
doctrines of Calvinism. His sermons on Judas, on Jeroboam,
and on Pharaoh, as practical examples of the doctrine of
reprobation, were pieces of literature so startling and astounding,
that, even in those days of interrupted travel, when there
were neither railroads nor good roads of any kind, and almost
none of our modern communicative system of magazines
and newspapers, they were heard of all over New England.
So great was the revulsion which his doctrines excited, that,
when he exchanged with his brother ministers, his appearance in
the pulpit was the signal for some of the most independent of
the congregation to get up and leave the meeting-house. But, as
it was one of his maxims that the minister who does not excite
the opposition of the natural heart fails to do his work, he regarded
such demonstrations as evident signs of a faithful ministry.

The science of Biblical criticism in his day was in its infancy;
the Bible was mostly read by ministers, and proof-texts quoted
from it as if it had been a treatise written in the English language
by New-Englanders, and in which every word must bear
the exact sense of a New England metaphysical treatise. And
thus interpreting the whole wide labyrinth of poetry and history,
and Oriental allegory and hyperbole, by literal rules, Dr. Stern
found no difficulty in making it clear to those who heard him that
there was no choice between believing his hard doctrines and
giving up the Bible altogether. And it shows the deep and rooted
attachment which the human heart has for that motherly book,
that even in this dreadful dilemma the majority of his hearers
did not revolt from the Bible.

As it was, in the town where he lived his preaching formed
the strongest, most controlling of all forces. No human being
could hear his sermons unmoved. He would not preach to an
inattentive audience, and on one occasion, observing a large number
of his congregation asleep, he abruptly descended from the
pulpit and calmly walked off home, leaving the astonished
congregation to their own reflections; nor would he resume

public services until messages of contrition and assurances of
better conduct had been sent him.

Dr. Stern was in his position irresistible, simply because he
cared nothing at all for the things which men ordinarily care for,
and which therefore could be used as motives to restrain the
declarations and actions of a clergyman. He cared nothing
about worldly prosperity; he was totally indifferent to money;
he utterly despised fame and reputation; and therefore from
none of these sources could he be in the slightest degree influenced.
Such a man is generally the king of his neighborhood,
— the one whom all look up to, and all fear, and whose
word in time becomes law.

Dr. Stern never sought to put himself forward otherwise
than by the steady preaching of his system to the farming
population of Adams. And yet, so great were his influence and
his fame, that in time it became customary for young theological
students to come and settle themselves down there as his students.
This was done at first without his desire, and contrary to
his remonstrance.

“I can't engage to teach you,” he said; but still, when scholars
came and continued to come, he found himself, without seeking
it, actually at the head of a school of theology.

Let justice be done to all; it is due to truth to state that
the theological scholars of Dr. Stern, wherever they went in
the United States, were always marked men, — marked for an
unflinching adherence to principle, and especially for a great
power in supporting unpopular truths.

The Doctor himself lived to an extreme old age, always retaining
and reiterating with unflinching constancy his opinions.
He was the last of the New England ministers who preserved the
old clerical dress of the theocracy. Long after the cocked hat and
small-clothes, silk stockings and shoe-buckles, had ceased to appear
in modern life, his venerable figure, thus apparelled, walked
the ways of modern men, seeming like one of the primitive
Puritans risen from the dead.

He was the last, also, of the New England ministers to
claim for himself that peculiar position, as God's ambassador,

which was such a reality in the minds of the whole early
Puritan community. To extreme old age, his word was law in
his parish, and he calmly and positively felt that it should be
so. In time, his gray hairs, his fine, antique figure and quaint
costume came to be regarded with the sort of appreciative
veneration that every one gives to the monuments of the past.
When he was near his ninetieth year, he was invited to New
York to give the prestige of his venerable presence to the religious
anniversaries which then were in the flush of newly
organized enthusiasm, and which gladly laid hold of this striking
accessory to the religious picturesque.

Dr. Stern was invited and fêted in the most select upper
circles of New York, and treated with attentions which would
have been flattering had he not been too entirely simple-minded
and careless of such matters even to perceive what they meant.

But at this same time the Abolitionists, who were regarded as
most improper people to be recognized in the religious circles
of good society, came to New York, resolving to have their
anniversary also; and, knowing that Dr. Stern had always professed
to be an antislavery man, they invited him to sit on the
stage with them; and Dr. Stern went. Shocking to relate, and
dreadful to behold, this very cocked hat and these picturesque
gray hairs, that had been brought to New York on purpose to
ornament religious anniversaries which were all agreed in excluding
and ignoring the Abolitionists, had gone right over into
the camp of the enemy! and he was so entirely ignorant and
uninstructible on the subject, and came back, after having committed
this abomination, with a face of such innocent and serene
gravity, that nobody dared to say a word to him on the subject.

He was at this time the accepted guest in a family whose very
religion consisted in a gracious carefulness and tenderness lest
they should wake up the feelings of their Southern brethren on
the delicate subject of slavery. But then Dr. Stern was a
man that it did no good to talk to, since it was well known that,
wherever there was an unpopular truth to be defended, his cocked
hat was sure to be in the front ranks.

Let us do one more justice to Dr. Stern, and say that his

utter inflexibility toward human infirmity and human feeling
spared himself as little as it spared any other. In his early
life he records, in a most affecting autobiography, the stroke
which deprived him, within a very short space, of a beloved
wife and two charming children. In the struggle of that hour
he says, with affecting simplicity, “I felt that I should die if I
did not submit; and I did submit then, once for all.” Thenceforward
the beginning and middle and end of his whole preaching
was submission, — utter, absolute, and unconditional.

In extreme old age, trembling on the verge of the grave, and
looking back over sixty years of intense labor, he said, “After
all, it is quite possible that I may not be saved”; but he considered
himself as but one drop in the ocean, and his personal
salvation as of but secondary account. His devotion to the King
Eternal had no reference to a matter so slight. In all this, if
there is something terrible and painful, there is something also
which is grand, and in which we can take pride, as the fruit of
our human nature. Peace to his ashes! he has learned better
things ere now.

If my readers would properly understand the real depth of
sorrowful perplexity in which our friend Miss Mehitable Rossiter
was struggling, they must go back with us some years
before, to the time when little Emily Rossiter was given up to
the guardianship and entire control of her Aunt Farnsworth.

Zedekiah Farnsworth was one of those men who embody
qualities which the world could not afford to be without, and
which yet are far from being the most agreeable. Uncompromising
firmness, intense self-reliance, with great vigor in that part
of the animal nature which fits man to resist and to subdue and
to hold in subjection the forces of nature, were his prominent
characteristics. His was a bold and granite formation, — most
necessary for the stability of the earth, but without a flower.

His wife was a woman who had once been gay and beautiful,
but who, coming under the dominion of a stronger nature, was
perfectly magnetized by it, so as to assimilate and become a modified
reproduction of the same traits. A calm, intense, severe

conscientiousness, which judged alike herself and others with unflinching
severity, was her leading characteristic.

Let us now imagine a child inheriting from the mother a
sensitive, nervous organization, and from the father a predisposition
to morbid action, with a mind as sensitive to external
influence as a daguerreotype-plate, brought suddenly from the
warmth of a too-indulgent household to the arctic regularity and
frozen stillness of the Farnsworth mansion. It will be seen that
the consequences must have been many conflicts, and many struggles
of nature with nature, and that a character growing up thus
must of course grow up into unnatural and unhealthy development.

The problem of education is seriously complicated by the
peculiarities of womanhood. If we suppose two souls, exactly
alike, sent into bodies, the one of man, the other of woman, that
mere fact alone alters the whole mental and moral history of the
two.

In addition to all the other sources of peril which beset the
little Emily, she early developed a beauty so remarkable as to
draw upon her constant attention, and, as she grew older, brought
to her all the trials and the dangers which extraordinary beauty
brings to woman. It was a part of her Aunt Farnsworth's system
to pretend to be ignorant of this great fact, with a view, as
she supposed, of checking any disposition to pride or vanity
which might naturally arise therefrom. The consequence was
that the child, hearing this agreeable news from every one else
who surrounded her, soon learned the transparent nature of the
hoax, and with it acquired a certain doubt of her aunt's sincerity.

Emily had a warm, social nature, and had always on hand
during her school days a list of enthusiastic friends whose admiration
of her supplied the light and warmth which were entirely
wanting from every other source.

Mrs. Farnsworth was not insensible to the charms of her niece.
She was, in fact, quite proud of them, but was pursuing conscientiously
the course in regard to them which she felt that duty required
of her. She loved the child, too, devotedly, but her own
nature had been so thoroughly frozen by maxims of self-restraint,

that this love seldom or never came into outward forms of expression.

It is sad to be compelled to trace the ill effects produced by the
overaction and misapplication of the very noblest faculties of the
human mind.

The Farnsworth family was one in which there was the fullest
sympathy with the severest preaching of Dr. Stern. As Emily
grew older, it was exacted of her, as one of her Sabbath duties,
to take notes of his discourses at church, which were afterwards
to be read over on Sunday evening by her aunt and uncle, and
preserved in an extract-book.

The effect of such kinds of religious teaching on most of the
children and young people in the town of Adams was to make
them consider religion, and everything connected with it, as the
most disagreeable of all subjects, and to seek practically to have
as little to do with it as possible; so that there was among the
young people a great deal of youthful gayety and of young
enjoyment in life, notwithstanding the preaching from Sunday
to Sunday of assertions enough to freeze every heart with fear.
Many formed the habit of thinking of something else during
the sermon-time, and many heard without really attaching any
very definite meaning to what they heard.

The severest utterances, if constantly reiterated, lose their
power and come to be considered as nothing. But Emily Rossiter
had been gifted with a mind of far more than ordinary vigor,
and with even a Greek passion for ideas, and with capabilities
for logical thought which rendered it impossible for her to
listen to discourses so intellectual without taking in their drift
and responding to their stimulus by a corresponding intellectual
activity.

Dr. Stern set the example of a perfectly bold and independent
manner of differing from the popular theology of his day
in certain important respects; and, where he did differ, it was with
a hardihood of self-assertion, and an utter disregard of popular
opinion, and a perfect reliance on his own powers of discovering
truth, which were very apt to magnetize these same qualities in
other minds. People who thus set the example of free and

independent thinking in one or two respects, and yet hope to
constrain their disciples to think exactly as they do on all other
subjects, generally reckon without their host; and there is no
other region in Massachusetts where all sorts of hardy free-thinking
are so rife at the present day as in the region formerly controlled
by Dr. Stern.

Before Emily was fourteen years old she had passed through
two or three of those seasons of convulsed and agonized feeling
which are caused by the revolt of a strong sense of justice and
humanity against teachings which seem to accuse the great
Father of all of the most frightful cruelty and injustice. The
teachings were backed up by literal quotations from the Bible,
which in those days no common person possessed the means,
or the habits of thought, for understanding, and thus were
accepted by her at first as Divine declarations.

When these agonized conflicts occurred, they were treated by
her aunt and uncle only as active developments of the natural
opposition of the human heart to God. Some such period of
active contest with the Divine nature was on record in the lives of
some of the most eminent New England saints. President Edwards
recorded the same; and therefore they looked upon them
hopefully, just as the medical faculty of those same uninstructed
times looked upon the writhings and agonies which their administration
of poison produced in the human body.

The last and most fearful of these mental struggles came after
the death of her favorite brother Theodore; who, being supposed
to die in an unregenerate state, was forthwith judged and sentenced,
and his final condition spoken of with a grim and solemn
certainty, by her aunt and uncle.

How far the preaching of Dr. Stern did violence to the most
cherished feelings of human nature on this subject will appear
by an extract from a sermon preached about this time.

The text was from Rev. xix, 3. “And again they said Alleluia.
And her smoke rose up for ever and ever.”

The subject is thus announced: —

“The heavenly hosts will praise God for punishing the finally
impenitent forever.”

In the improvement or practical application of this text, is the
following passage: —

“Will the heavenly hosts praise God for all the displays of
his vindictive justice in the punishment of the damned? then we
may learn that there is an essential difference between saints and
sinners. Sinners often disbelieve and deny this distinction; and
it is very difficult to make them see and believe it.....
They sometimes freely say that they do not think that heaven is
such a place as has been described; or that the inhabitants of it
say `Amen, Alleuia,' while they see the smoke of the torments
of the damned ascend up for ever and ever. They desire and
hope to go to heaven, without ever being willing to speak such a
language, or to express such feelings in the view of the damned.
And is not this saying that their hearts are essentially different
from those who feel such a spirit, and are willing to adopt the
language of heaven? Good men do adopt the language of heaven
before they arrive there. And all who are conscious that they
cannot say `Amen, Alleluia,' may know that they are yet sinners,
and essentially different from saints, and altogether unprepared to
go with them to heaven and join with them in praising God for
the vindictive justice he displays in dooming all unholy creatures
to a never-ending torment.”

It was this sermon that finally broke those cords which years
of pious descent had made so near and tender between the heart
of Emily and her father's Bible.

No young person ever takes a deliberate and final leave of the
faith of the fathers without a pang; and Emily suffered so
much in the struggle, that her aunt became alarmed for her
health. She was sent to Boston to spend a winter under the
care of another sister of her mother's, who was simply a good-natured
woman of the world, who was proud of her niece's
beauty and talents, and resolved to make the most of them in a
purely worldly way.

At this time she formed the acquaintance of a very interesting
French family of high rank, who for certain family reasons were
just then exiled to America. She became fascinated with their
society, and plunged into the study of the French language and

literature with all the enthusiasm of a voyager who finds himself
among enchanted islands. And French literature at this
time was full of the life of a new era, — the era which produced
both the American and the French Revolution.

The writings of Voltaire were too cold and cynical for her
enthusiastic nature; but Rousseau was to her like a sudden translation
from the ice and snow of Massachusetts to the tropical
flowers of a February in Florida. In “La Nouvelle Héloïse,”
she found, not merely a passionate love story, but the consideration,
on the author's side, of just such problems as had been
raised by her theological education.

When she returned from this visit she was apparently quiet
and at peace. Her peace was the peace of a river which has
found an underground passage, and therefore chafes and frets no
more. Her philosophy was the philosophy of Émile, her faith
the faith of the Savoyard vicar, and she imitated Dr. Stern
only in utter self-reliance and fearlessness of consequences in
pursuit of what she believed true.

Had her aunt and uncle been able to read the French
language, they would have found her note-book of sermons
sometimes interspersed by quotations from her favorite author,
which certainly were quite in point; as, for instance, at the
foot of a severe sermon on the doctrine of reprobation was
written: —

“Quand cette dure et décourageante doctrine se déduit de
l'Écriture elle-même, mon premier devoir n'est-il pas d'honorer
Dieu? Quelque respect que je doive au texte sacré, j'en dois
plus encore à son Auteur; et j'aimerais mieux croire la Bible
falsifée ou inintelligible, que Dieu injuste ou malfaisant. St.
Paul ne veut pas que le vase dise au potier, Pourquoi m'as-tu
fait ainsi? Cela est fort bien si le potier n'exige du vase que
des services qu'il l'a mis en état de lui rendre; mais s'il s'en
prenait au vase de n' être pas propre à un usage pour lequel il
ne l'aurait pas fait, le vase aurait-il tort de lui dire, Pourquoi
m'as-tu fait ainsi?”[1]

After a period of deceitful quiet and calm, in which Emily
read and wrote and studied alone in her room, and moved about
in her daily circle like one whose heart is afar off, she suddenly
disappeared from them all. She left ostensibly to go on a visit
to Boston to her aunt, and all that was ever heard from her
after that was a letter of final farewell to Miss Mehitable, in
which she told her briefly, that, unable any longer to endure the
life she had been leading, and to seem to believe what she could
not believe, and being importuned to practise what she never
intended to do, she had chosen her lot for herself, and requested
her neither to seek her out nor to inquire after her, as all such
inquiries would be absolutely vain.

All that could be ascertained on the subject was, that about
this time the Marquis de Conté and his lady were found to have
sailed for France.

This was the sad story which Miss Mehitable poured into the
sympathetic ear of Ellery Davenport.