Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2

by George Frisbie Hoar

Strike for your altars and your fires!

I wonder if any of my readers nowadays would be stirred by an appeal to strike for his furnace or his air-tight stove.

Sunday was kept with Jewish strictness. The boys were not allowed to go out-of-doors except to church. They could not play at any game or talk about matters not pertaining to religion. They were not permitted to read any books except such as were "good for Sunday." There were very few religious story-books in those days, and what we had were of a dreary kind; so the boy's time hung heavy on his hands.

"Pilgrim's Progress," with its rude prints, was, however, a great resource. We conned it over and over again, and knew it by heart. An elder brother of mine who was very precocious was extremely fond of it, especially of the picture of the fight between Apollyon and Christian, where the fiend with his head covered with stiff, sharp bristles "straddled clear across the road," to stop Christian in his way. Old Dr. Lyman Beecher, who had his stiff gray hair cropped short all over his head, made a call at our house one afternoon. While he was waiting for my mother to come down, the little fellow came into the room and took a look up at the doctor, and then trotted round to the other side and looked up at him again. He said, "I think, sir, you look like Apollyon."

The doctor was infinitely amused at being compared to the personage of whom, in his own opinion and that of a good many other good people, he was then the most distinguished living antagonist.

The church was an old-fashioned wooden building, painted yellow, of Dutch architecture, with galleries on three sides, and on the fourth a pulpit with a great sounding-board over it, into which the minister got by quite a high flight of stairs. Just below the pulpit was the deacons' seat, where the four deacons sat in a row. The pews were old-fashioned square, high pews, reaching up almost to the top of the head of a boy ten years old when he was standing up.

The seats were without cushions and with hinges. When the people stood up for prayer the seats were turned up for greater convenience of standing, and when the prayer ended they came down all over the church with a slam, like a small cannonade.

One Sunday, in the middle of the sermon, the old minister, Doctor Ripley, stood up in the pulpit and said in a loud voice, "Simeon, come here. Take your hat and come here." Simeon was a small boy who lived in the doctor's family and sat in the gallery. We boys all supposed that Simeon had been playing in church, or had committed some terrible offence for which he was to be punished in sight of the whole congregation.

Simeon came down trembling and abashed, and the doctor told him to go home as fast as he could and get the Thanksgiving Proclamation. The doctor filled up the time as well he could with an enormously long prayer, until the boy got back. Simeon confessed to some of the boys that he had been engaged in some mischief just before he was called, and he was terribly afraid the doctor had caught him.

This old church with its tower, yellow spire, old clock and weathercock, seems to me as I look back on it to have been a very attractive piece of architecture. It was that church which suggested to Emerson the leading thought in one of his most famous poems, "The Problem."