New York, June 26,1887.
HENRY WARD BEECHER was born in a Puritan penitentiary, of which his father was one of the wardens—a prison with very narrow and closely-grated windows. Under its walls were the rayless, hopeless and measureless dungeons of the damned, and on its roof fell the shadow of God's eternal frown. In this prison the creed and catechism were primers for children, and from a pure sense of duty their loving hearts were stained and scarred with the religion of John Calvin.
In those days the home of an orthodox minister was an inquisition in which babes were tortured for the good of their souls. Children then, as now, rebelled against the infamous absurdities and cruelties of the creed. No Calvinist was ever able, unless with blows, to answer the questions of his child. Children were raised in what was called "the nurture and admonition of the Lord"—that is to say, their wills were broken or subdued, their natures were deformed and dwarfed, their desires defeated or destroyed, and their development arrested or perverted. Life was robbed of its Spring, its Summer and its Autumn. Children stepped from the cradle into the snow. No laughter, no sunshine, no joyous, free, unburdened days. God, an infinite detective, watched them from above, and Satan, with malicious leer, was waiting for their souls below. Between these monsters life was passed. Infinite consequences were predicated of the smallest action, and a burden greater than a God could bear was placed upon the heart and brain of every child. To think, to ask questions, to doubt, to investigate, were acts of rebellion. To express pity for the lost, writhing in the dungeons below, was simply to give evidence that the enemy of souls had been at work within their hearts.
Among all the religions of this world—from the creed of cannibals who devoured flesh, to that of Calvinists who polluted souls—there is none, there has been none, there will be none, more utterly heartless and inhuman than was the orthodox Congregationalism of New England in the year of grace 1813. It despised every natural joy, hated pictures, abhorred statues as lewd and lustful things, execrated music, regarded nature as fallen and corrupt, man as totally depraved and woman as somewhat worse. The theatre was the vestibule of perdition, actors the servants of Satan, and Shakespeare a trifling wretch whose words were seeds of death. And yet the virtues found a welcome, cordial and sincere; duty was done as understood; obligations were discharged; truth was told; self-denial was practiced for the sake of others, and many hearts were good and true in spite of book and creed.
In this atmosphere of theological miasma, in this hideous dream of superstition, in this penitentiary, moral and austere, this babe first saw the imprisoned gloom. The natural desires ungratified, the laughter suppressed, the logic brow-beaten by authority, the humor frozen by fear—of many generations—were in this child, a child destined to rend and wreck the prison's walls.
Through the grated windows of his cell, this child, this boy, this man, caught glimpses of the outer world, of fields and skies. New thoughts were in his brain, new hopes within his heart. Another heaven bent above his life. There came a revelation of the beautiful and real.
Theology grew mean and small. Nature wooed and won and saved this mighty soul.
Her countless hands were sowing seeds within his tropic brain. All sights and sounds—all colors, forms and fragments—were stored within the treasury of his mind. His thoughts were moulded by the graceful curves of streams, by winding paths in woods, the charm of quiet country roads, and lanes grown indistinct with weeds and grass—by vines that cling and hide with leaf and flower the crumbling wall's decay—by cattle standing in the summer pools like statues of content.
There was within his words the subtle spirit of the season's change—of everything that is, of everything that lies between the slumbering seeds that, half awakened by the April rain, have dreams of heaven's blue, and feel the amorous kisses of the sun, and that strange tomb wherein the alchemist doth give to death's cold dust the throb and thrill of life again. He saw with loving eyes the willows of the meadow-streams grow red beneath the glance of Spring—the grass along the marsh's edge—the stir of life beneath the withered leaves—the moss below the drip of snow—the flowers that give their bosoms to the first south wind that wooes—the sad and timid violets that only bear the gaze of love from eyes half closed—the ferns, where fancy gives a thousand forms with but a single plan—the green and sunny slopes enriched with daisy's silver and the cowslip's gold.
As in the leafless woods some tree, aflame with life, stands like a rapt poet in the heedless crowd, so stood this man among his fellow-men.