 | CHAPTER XXXV.
THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION. Oldtown folks |  |
35. CHAPTER XXXV.
THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION.
NO New England boy or girl comes to maturity without a full
understanding of what is meant by the term at the head of
this chapter.
Religion was, perhaps, never so much the governing idea in
any Commonwealth before. Nowhere has there been a people,
the mass of whom acted more uniformly on considerations drawn
from the unseen and future life; yet nowhere a people who paid
a more earnest attention to the life that is seen and temporal.
The New England colonies were, in the first instance, the outgrowth
of a religious enthusiasm. Right alongside of them, at
the same period of time, other colonies were founded from a religious
enthusiasm quite as intense and sincere. The French
missionary settlers in Canada had a grandeur of self-sacrifice, an
intensity of religious devotion, which would almost throw in the
shade that of the Pilgrim Fathers; and the sole reason why one
set of colonists proved the seed of a great nation, and the other
attained so very limited success, is the difference between the
religions taught by the two.
The one was the religion of asceticism, in view of which contempt
of the body and of material good was taught as a virtue,
and its teachers were men and women to whom marriage and its
earthly relations were forbidden. The other was the spirit of the
Old Testament, in which material prosperity is always spoken of
as the lawful reward of piety, in which marriage is an honor, and
a numerous posterity a thing to be desired. Our forefathers
were, in many essential respects, Jews in their thoughts and feelings
with regard to this life, but they superadded to this broad
physical basis the intense spiritualism of the New Testament.
Hence came a peculiar race of men, uniting the utmost extremes
of the material and the spiritual.
Dr. Franklin represents that outgrowth of the New England
mind which moves in the material alone, and scarcely ever rises
to the spiritual. President Edwards represents the mind so
risen to the spiritual as scarcely to touch the material. Put
these two together, and you have the average New England
character, — that land in which every ism of social or religious
life has had its origin, — that land whose hills and valleys are one
blaze and buzz of material and manufacturing production.
A revival of religion in New England meant a time when that
deep spiritual undercurrent of thought and emotion with regard
to the future life, which was always flowing quietly under its
intense material industries, exhaled and steamed up into an atmosphere
which pervaded all things, and made itself for a few
weeks the only thought of every person in some town or village
or city. It was the always-existing spiritual becoming visible
and tangible.
Such periods would come in the labors of ministers like Mr.
Avery. When a man of powerful mind and shrewd tact and great
natural eloquence lives among a people already thoughtfully predisposed,
for no other purpose than to stir them up to the care of
their souls, it is evident that there will come times when the results
of all his care and seeking, his public ministrations, his private
conversations with individuals, will come out in some marked
social form; and such a period in New England is called a revival
of religion.
There were three or four weeks in the autumn of the first
year that we spent in Cloudland, in which there was pervading
the town a sort of subdued hush of emotions, — a quiet sense of
something like a spiritual presence brooding through the mild
autumn air. This was accompanied by a general inclination to
attend religious services, and to converse on religious subjects.
It pervaded the school; it was to be heard at the store. Every
kind of individual talked on and about religion in his own characteristic
way, and in a small mountain town like Cloudland
everybody's characteristic way is known to every one else.
Ezekiel Scranton, the atheist of the parish, haunted the store
where the farmers tied up their wagons when they brought their
with Deacon Phineas Simons, who kept the store, — arguments
to which the academy boys sometimes listened, and of which they
brought astounding reports to the school-room.
Tina, who was so intensely sympathetic with all social influences
that she scarcely seemed to have an individuality of her
own, was now glowing like a luminous cloud with religious
zeal.
“I could convert that man,” she said; “I know I could! I
wonder Mr. Avery has n't converted him long ago!”
At this time, Mr. Avery, who had always kept a watchful eye
upon us, had a special conversation with Harry and myself, the
object of which was to place us right in our great foundation relations.
Mr. Avery stood upon the basis that most good New England
men, since Jonathan Edwards, have adopted, and regarded all
young people, as a matter of course, out of the fold of the Church,
and devoid of anything truly acceptable to God, until they had
passed through a mental process designated, in well-known language,
as conviction and conversion.
He began to address Harry, therefore, upon this supposition.
I well remember the conversation.
“My son,” he said, “is it not time for you to think seriously
of giving your heart to God?”
“I have given my heart to God,” replied Harry, calmly.
“Indeed!” said Mr. Avery, with surprise; “when did that
take place?”
“I have always done it.”
Mr. Avery looked at him with a gentle surprise.
“Do you mean to say, my son, that you have always loved
God?”
“Yes, sir,” said Harry, quietly.
Mr. Avery felt entirely incredulous, and supposed that this
must be one of those specious forms of natural piety spoken of
depreciatingly by Jonathan Edwards, who relates in his own
memoirs similar exercises of early devotion as the mere fruits
of the ungrafted natural heart. Mr. Avery, therefore, proceeded
to put many theological questions to Harry on the nature of sin
and emotions, and those excited by the supernatural movement
of a divine power on the soul, — the good man begging him to
remember the danger of self-deception, saying that nothing was
more common than for young people to mistake the transient
movements of mere natural emotions for real religion.
I observed that Harry, after a few moments, became violently
agitated. Two large blue veins upon his forehead swelled out, his
eyes had that peculiar flash and fire that they had at rare intervals,
when some thought penetrated through the usual gentle
quietude of his surface life to its deepest internal recesses. He
rose and walked up and down the room, and finally spoke in a
thick, husky voice, as one who pants with emotion. He was one
of the most reserved human beings I have ever known. There
was a region of emotion deep within him, which it was almost
like death to him to express. There is something piteous and
even fearful in the convulsions by which such natures disclose
what is nearest to their hearts.
“Mr. Avery,” he said, “I have heard your preaching ever
since I have been here, and thought of it all. It has done me
good, because it has made me think deeply. It is right and
proper that our minds should be forced to think on all these subjects;
but I have not thought, and cannot think, exactly like you,
nor exactly like any one that I know of. I must make up my
opinions for myself. I suppose I am peculiar, but I have been
brought up peculiarly. My lot in life has been very different
from that of ordinary boys. The first ten years of my life, all
that I can remember is the constant fear and pain and distress
and mortification and want through which my mother and I
passed together, — she a stranger in this strange land, — her husband
and my father worse than nothing to us, oftentimes our
greatest terror. We should both of us have died, if it had not
been for one thing: she believed that her Saviour loved her, and
loved us all. She told me that these sorrows were from him, —
that he permitted them because he loved us, — that they would be
for good in the end. She died at last alone and utterly forsaken
by everybody but her Saviour, and yet her death was blessed. I
whatever happened to me, never to doubt God's love, — in all my
life to trust him, to seek his counsel in all things, and to believe
that all that happened to me was ordered by him. This was and
is my religion; and, after all that I have heard, I can have no
other. I do love God because he is good, and because he has
been good to me. I believe that Jesus Christ is God, and I worship
God always through him, and I leave everything for myself,
for life and death are in his hands. I know that I am not very
good. I know, as you say, I am liable to make mistakes, and to
deceive myself in a thousand ways; but He knows all things,
and he can and will teach me; he will not let me lose myself, I
feel sure.”
“My son,” said Mr. Avery, “you are blessed. I thank God
with all my heart for you. Go on, and God be with you!”
It is to be seen that Mr. Avery was a man who always corrected
theory by common sense. When he perceived that a
child could be trained up a Christian, and grow into the love
of a Heavenly Father as he grows into the love of an earthly
one, by a daily and hourly experience of goodness, he yielded
to the perceptions of his mind in that particular case.
Of course our little circle of four had, at this time, deep communings.
Tina was buoyant and joyous, full of poetic images,
delighted with the news of every conversion, and taking such an
interest in Mr. Avery's preaching that she several times suggested
to him capital subjects for sermons. She walked up to
Ezekiel Scranton's, one afternoon, for no other object than to convert
him from his atheism, and succeeded so far as to exact a
promise from him that he would attend all Mr. Avery's meetings
for a fortnight. Ezekiel was one of the converts of that revival,
and Harry and I, of course, ascribed it largely to Tina's
influence.
A rough old New England farmer, living on the windy side of
a high hill, subsisting largely on codfish and hard cider, does not
often win the flattering attention of any little specimen of humanity
like Tina; and therefore it was not to be wondered at
that the results of her missionary zeal appeared to his mind something
went down at a certain season and troubled the waters.”
But, while Tina was thus buoyant and joyous, Esther seemed
to sink into the very depths of despondency. Hers, as I have
already intimated, was one of those delicate and sensitive natures,
on which the moral excitements of New England acted all the while
with too much power. The work and care of a faithful pastor are
always complicated by the fact that those truths, and modes of
presenting truths, which are only just sufficient to arouse the attention
of certain classes of hearers, and to prevent their sinking
into apathetic materialism, are altogether too stimulating and
exciting for others of a more delicate structure.
Esther Avery was one of those persons for whom the peculiar
theory of religious training which prevailed in New England
at this period, however invigorating to the intellect of the
masses, might be considered as a personal misfortune. Had she
been educated in the tender and paternal manner recommended
by the Cambridge platform, and practised among the earlier
puritans recognized from infancy as a member of Christ's
Church, and in tender covenant relations with him, her whole
being would have responded to such an appeal; her strongest
leading faculties would have engaged her to fulfil, in the most
perfect manner, the sacred duties growing out of that relation,
and her course into the full communion of the Church would have
been gentle and insensible as a flowing river.
“'T is a tyranny,” says old Dr. Cotton Mather, “to impose
upon every man a record of the precise time and way of their
conversion to God. Few that have been restrained by a religious
education can give such an one.”
Esther, however, had been trained to expect a marked and
decided period of conversion, — a change that could be described
in the same language in which Paul described the conversion of
the heathen at dissolute Corinth and Ephesus. She was told,
as early as she was capable of understanding language, that she
was by nature in a state of alienation from God, in which every
thought of her heart and action of her life was evil, and evil
only; and continually that she was entirely destitute of holiness,
immediate duty to escape from this state by an act of penitence
for sin and supreme love to God.
The effort to bring about in her heart that state of emotion
was during all her youth a failure. She was by constitution delicately,
intensely self-analytic, and her analysis was guided by
the most exacting moral ideality. Every hopeful emotion of her
higher nature, as it rose, was dissolved in this keen analysis, as
diamond and pearls disappeared in the smelting furnaces of the
old alchemists. We all know that self-scrutiny is the death of
emotion, and that the analytic, self-inspective habit is its sure
preventive. Had Esther applied to her feelings for her own
beloved father the same tests by which she tried every rising
emotion of love to the Divine Being, the result would have
been precisely the same.
Esther was now nineteen years of age; she was the idol of
her father's heart; she was the staff and stay of her family;
she was, in all the duties of life, inspired by a most faultless
conscientiousness. Her love of the absolute right was almost
painful in its excess of minuteness, and yet, in her own view, in
the view of the Church, in the view even of her admiring and
loving father, she was no Christian. Perfectly faultless in every
relation so far as human beings could observe, reverent to God,
submissive to his will, careful in all outward religious observances,
yet wanting in a certain emotional experience, she
judged herself to be, and was judged to be by the theology
which her father taught, utterly devoid of virtue or moral excellence
of any kind in the sight of God. The theology of the
times also taught her that the act of grace which should put an
end to this state, and place her in the relation of a forgiven child
with her Heavenly Father, was a voluntary one, momently in her
power, and that nothing but her own persistent refusal prevented
her performing it; yet taught at the same time that, so desperate
was the obstinacy of the human heart, no child of Adam ever
would, or ever could, perform it without a special interposition
of God, — an interposition which might or might not
come. Thus all the responsibility and the guilt rested upon her.
by a sense of unperformed duty, that sense becomes a
gnawing worm at the very root of life. Esther had in vain
striven to bring herself into the required state of emotion.
Often for weeks and months she offered daily, and many times
a day, prayers which brought no brightness and no relief, and
read conscientiously that Bible, all whose tender words and comforting
promises were like the distant vision of Eden to the fallen
exiles, guarded by a flaming sword which turned every way.
Mute and mournful she looked into the paradise of peace possessed
by the favored ones whom God had chosen to help through
the mysterious passage, and asked herself, would that helping
hand ever open the gate to her?
Esther had passed through two or three periods of revival of
religion, and seen others far less consistent gathered into the
fold of the Church, while she only sunk at each period into a state
of hopeless gloom and despondency which threatened her health.
Latterly, her mind, wounded and bruised, had begun to turn in
bitter reactions. From such experiences as hers come floods of
distracting intellectual questions. Scepticism and doubt are the
direct children of unhappiness. If she had been, as her standards
stated, born “utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite
to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil,” was not this an excuse
for sin? Was it her fault that she was born so? and, if
her Creator had brought her into being in this state, was it not
an act of simple justice to restore her mind to a normal condition?
When she addressed these questions to her father, he was
alarmed, and warned her against speculation. Mr. Avery did
not consider that the Assembly's catechism and the Cambridge
platform and a great part of his own preaching were, after all,
but human speculation, — the uninspired inferences of men from
the Bible, and not the Bible itself, — and that minds once set going
in this direction often cannot help a third question after a second,
any more than they can help breathing; and that third question
may be one for which neither God nor nature has an answer.
Such inquiries as Esther's never arose from reading the parables
children of mere human attempts at systematic theology.
How to deliver a soul that has come from excessive harassments,
introspections, self-analysis, into that morbid state of half-sceptical
despondency, was a problem over which Mr. Avery
sighed in vain. His cheerful hopefulness, his sympathetic
vitality, had drawn many others through darkness into light,
and settled them in cheerful hope. But with his own daughter
he felt no power, — his heart trembled, — his hand was weak as
the surgeon's who cannot operate when it is the life of his best
beloved that lies under his hands.
Esther's deliverance came through that greatest and holiest of
all the natural sacraments and means of grace, — Love.
An ancient gem has upon it a figure of a Psyche sitting with
bound wings and blindfolded and weeping, whose bonds are
being sundered by Love. It is an emblem of what often occurs
in woman's life.
It has sometimes been thrown out as a sneer on periods of
religious excitement, that they kindle the enthusiasm of man and
woman towards each other into earthly attachments; but the
sneer should wither as something satanic before the purity of
love as it comes to noble natures. The man who has learned
to think meanly of that, to associate it with vulgar thoughts and
low desires, — the man who has not been lifted by love to aspire
after unworldly excellence, to sigh for unworldly purity, to reverence
unworldly good, — has lost his one great chance of regeneration.
Harry and Esther had moved side by side for months, drawn
daily to each other, — showing each other their compositions,
studying out of the same book, arguing together in constant
friendly differences, — and yet neither of them exactly conscious
whither they were tending. A great social, religious excitement
has often this result, that it throws open between friends the
doors of the inner nature. How long, how long we may live in
the same house, sit at the same table, hold daily converse with
friends to whom and by whom these inner doors are closed!
We cannot even tell whether we should love them more or less
pervading, social excitement breaks like some early spring day
around us; the sun shines, the birds sing; and forthwith open
fly all the doors and windows, and let in the sunshine and the
breeze and the bird-song!
In such an hour Esther saw that she was beloved! — beloved
by a poet soul, — one of that rare order to whom the love of
woman is a religion! — a baptism! — a consecration!
Her life, hitherto so chill and colorless, so imprisoned and
bound in the chains of mere and cold intellect, awoke with a
sudden thrill of consciousness to a new and passionate life. She
was as changed as the poor and silent Jungfrau of the Swiss
mountains, when the gray and ghostly cold of the night bursts into
rosy light, as the morning sunbeams rise upon it. The most
auspicious and beautiful of all phenomena that ever diversify
this weary life is that wonderful moment in which two souls,
who hitherto have not known each other, suddenly, by the lifting
of a veil or the falling of a barrier, become in one moment
and forever after one. Henceforth each soul has in itself the
double riches of the other. Each weakness is made strong by
some corresponding strength in the other; for the truest union is
where each soul has precisely the faculty which the other needs.
Harry was by nature and habit exactly the reverse of Esther.
His conclusions were all intuitions. His religion was an emanation
from the heart, a child of personal experience, and not a formula
of the head. In him was seen the beginning of that great
reaction which took place largely in the young mind of New
England against the tyranny of mere logical methods as applied
to the ascertaining of moral truths.
The hour of full heart union that made them one placed her
mind under the control of his. His simple faith in God's love
was an antidote to her despondent fears. His mind bore hers
along on its current. His imagination awakened hers. She was
like one carried away by a winged spirit, lifted up and borne
heavenward by his faith and love. She was a transfigured being.
An atmosphere of joy brightened and breathed around her;
her eyes had a mysterious depth, her cheeks a fluttering color.
of birds had come.
Mr. Avery was in raptures. The long agony was past. He
had gained a daughter and a son, and he was too joyful, too willing
to believe, to be analytic or critical. Long had he secretly
hoped that such faultless consistency, such strict attention to
duty, might perhaps indicate a secret work of divine grace, which
would spring into joy if only recognized and believed in. But
now, when the dove that had long wandered actually bent her
white wings at the window of the ark, he stretched forth his
hand and drew her in with a trembling eagerness.
| CHAPTER XXXV.
THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION. Oldtown folks | |