In this mood of spiritual elevation she went to Litchfield for one of her early vacations. While there a sermon preached by her father made a strong appeal to her mind and heart. Dr. Beecher’s text on that Sunday was this: “I call you not servants, but friends,” and his subject was Jesus as a soul-friend offered to every human being.
Forgetting all about theology for the time, Dr. Beecher spoke that day with all simplicity of the faithful, unwearied love of Christ, how He tenderly cares for the soul’s wants through all its wanderings and sorrows, until He brings it through the darkness of earth to the perfection of Heaven.
Even a child could have understood him. Harriet sat absorbed, her eyes gathering tears as she listened; and when the doctor said, “Come, then, and trust your soul to this faithful Friend,” her heart throbbed, “I will.” For a moment she was discouraged by the thought that she had not had any “conviction of sin,” but like a flash came the thought that Jesus could give her that as well as anything else, and that she could trust Him for the whole. And so her earnest young soul went out to the wonderful Friend. She sat through the sacramental service that followed with swelling heart and tearful eyes, and walked home filled with a new joy. She went up to her father’s study in the attic room and, falling into his arms, whispered: “Father, I have given myself to Jesus and He has taken me.” The doctor held her silently to his heart a moment, and his tears dropped on her head. “Is it so?” he said. “Then has a new flower blossomed in the Kingdom this day.”
In this simple and natural way began Harriet’s distinctive religious experience. But we must not think of it as going on always like the flow of a calm river. There were many doubts and tremblings to be mastered, many puzzles to unravel as she went along, especially during the years from twelve to twenty. We may say, however, that the experience of happy trust in God became in the end so much the law of her life that it could never be torn away from her by any of the events of her mature days, whether of suffering or of prosperity.
It seems the greatest pity that the earlier stages of her religious experience should not have gone on smoothly, as that of her wonderful mother had done. Perhaps, however, others with difficulties like hers may be glad to look over the record of her struggles and may take courage from her victories.
We have seen in the last chapter that Harriet had not been many years at Hartford before a shadow seemed to be settling down upon her spirit. There were certainly good reasons for this.
In the first place she was very much overworked as pupil and teacher in the Hartford Female Seminary. Translating Ovid into English verse at thirteen years of age, teaching Virgil and Rhetoric at fourteen, studying French and Italian and drawing and painting, taking a niggardly half hour for the mid-day dinner, and snatching a bit of supper as she could, doing her share and more to keep the domestic wheels of the large household at Hartford running smoothly, and living excitedly in the midst of this company of complex personalities, having no outdoors, no rest, no play—this way of life was enough to interfere with the physical well-being of any growing girl, even with that of a robust one fresh from the Litchfield mountains!
Harriet’s father understood perfectly well the relation between our mental activity and our supply of physical energy. We know this because we so often found him relieving the overstrain by periods of devotion to the woodpile and the garden; and it is interesting to see how he accompanied a prescription for spiritual ills with one enjoining obedience to the laws of the body. None could have given better advice also than he did in regard to the steadying of religious emotionalism during revival among the students in Catherine’s school, to keep them from undue excitement and to make the revival season reasonable in its excitement and permanent in its effects. But it is one thing to advise and another to make people put the counsel into practice.
Catherine probably did not see the rocks ahead either for Harriet or for herself. She was indeed using up her own energies so fast that she was to face a breakdown later on in the very midst of a useful career. Then indeed she did have to listen to the monitors; but only after a period of ill health did she regain strength for work. During all her life thereafter she preached obedience to the laws of health, and found the truth of the old adage, “‘Had I but known!’ is very poor comfort.”
Then we must remember, too, that Harriet had also drained her own spiritual energy in watching the soul-struggles of her sister Catherine during the sensitive years of her early girlhood. Catherine’s grief colored Harriet’s thoughts and wonderings in the years when everything in her own situation looked like a question.