New England used to be full of traditions of the odd sayings of Dr. Bellamy, one of the most powerful theologians and preachers of his time. His humor, however, seems to have been wholly a social quality, requiring to be struck out by the collision of conversation; for nothing of the peculiar quaintness and wit ascribed to him appears in his writings, which are in singularly simple, clear English. One or two of his sayings circulated about us in our childhood. For example, when one had built a fire of green wood, he exclaimed, "Warm me here! I'd as soon try to warm me by star-light on the north side of a tombstone!" Speaking of the chapel-bell of Yale College, he said, "It was about as good a bell as a fur cap with a sheep's tail in it."
A young minister, who had made himself conspicuous for a severe and denunciatory style of preaching, came to him one day to inquire why he did not have more success. "Why, man," said the Doctor, "can't you take a lesson of the fisherman? How do you go to work, if you want to catch a trout? You get a little hook and a fine line, you bait it carefully and throw it in as gently as possible, and then you sit and wait and humor your fish till you can get him ashore. Now you get a great cod-hook and rope-line, and thrash it into the water, and bawl out, 'Bite or be damned!'"
The Doctor himself gained such a reputation as an expert spiritual fisherman, that some of his parishioners, like experienced old trout, played shy of his hook, though never so skilfully baited.
"Why, Mr. A.," he said to an old farmer in his neighborhood, "they tell me you are an Atheist. Don't you believe in the being of a God?"
"No!" said the man.
"But, Mr. A., let's look into this. You believe that the world around us exists from some cause?"
"No, I don't!"
"Well, then, at any rate, you believe in your own existence?"
"No, I don't!"
"What! not believe that you exist yourself?"