[Footnote 23: "Personal Reminiscences of the Life and Times of Gardiner Spring, Pastor of the Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York." 2 vols. 12mo. New York: Charles Scribner & Company.]
Few persons who have lived much in New York during the last quarter of a century are not familiar with the dignified, resolute, yet kindly countenance of the pastor of the Brick Presbyterian church. Fewer still are ignorant of his reputation as a leading and representative man in his denomination; a keen polemic; a great promoter of missionary, tract, and Bible societies; and, we may add, a very determined enemy of the Pope of Rome and all his aiders and abettors. For more than fifty-five years he has preached to the same congregation which gave him a call when he was first licensed as a minister. During his career thirteen Presidents of the United States, from Washington to Lincoln, have died; three Kings of England have been laid in their graves; the horrors of the Reign of Terror, the execution of Louis XVI., the rise and fall of the first Napoleon, the shifting scenes of the Restoration, the Orleans rule, the second Republic and the second Empire, have hurried each other across the stage of French history. He has long passed the scriptural term of the life of man; and now, at the almost patriarchal age of eighty-one, he gives us a collection of reminiscences of what he has seen and done during this protracted and eventful career.
It would be natural to suppose that such a book by such a man must be full of interest. As one of the recognized leaders of a rich and influential religious denomination, and one of the oldest and most respectable citizens of the first city of America, how many historical characters must he have met! to how many important events must he have been a witness! But any one who takes up these volumes in the hope of obtaining through them a clearer view of persons and times gone by, will be disappointed. They are interesting, it is true, but not, we will venture to say, in the way their author meant them to be. They cause us to wonder that the doctor should have seen so much and remembered so little. Yet as a picture of the life of a representative Presbyterian preacher and a complete exposure of the utter emptiness of the Presbyterian religion, these garrulous and random "Reminiscences" are the most entertaining pages we have read for many a month. We propose to cull for our readers a few of the most interesting passages.
Dr. Spring was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, Feb. 24, 1785. His father was a minister, of whom the son says that "he would not shave his face on the Lord's day, nor allow his wife to sew a button on her son's vest; and on one occasion, when his nephew, the late Adolphus Spring, Esq., arrived in haste on a Saturday evening with the message that his father was on his bed of death, he would not mount his horse for the journey of seventy miles until the Sabbath sun had gone down." Though young Gardiner used to wonder, when a boy, why he was not allowed to participate in the customary sports of children, he seems to have preserved a warm affection for both his parents, of whom he speaks in a loving and reverential tone which we cannot too carefully respect. The thought that most affected him on their death was [{130}] "hat he had lost their prayers." Gardiner was sent to Yale College at the age of fifteen, and during "a remarkable outpouring of the Spirit" upon that rather unregenerate institution, in the year 1803, he became, for a season, "hopefully pious." He had been uneasy for some time about the state of his soul, and one afternoon he resolved to pray, several hours, if necessary, until his sins were forgiven. "There," he says, "in the south entry of the old college, back side, middle room, third story, I wrestled with God as I had never wrestled before." The result of this spiritual struggle we do not profess to understand. He says that he rose from his knees without any hope that he had found mercy, yet feeling considerably relieved. For several weeks he went about, peaceful and happy, when, unluckily, the Fourth of July came, with its speeches and fireworks, and his "religious hopes and impressions all vanished as a morning cloud, and as the early dew." It was five or six years before they came back again.
When he graduated his father came to hear him speak, and at the close of the exercises gave him his blessing and told him to shift for himself. So, there he was, twenty years old, with four dollars in his pocket and a profession yet to be acquired. He borrowed two hundred and fifty dollars from a generous friend, obtained a situation as precentor in a church, opened a singing school, and applied himself zealously to the study of law. Before long he married a young lady as poor as himself, and went with her in 1806 to Bermuda, where he taught school for some time very successfully; but rumors of war between this country and Great Britain drove him back to the United States, and in his twenty-fourth year he entered upon the practice of the law at New Haven.
In the meanwhile those uneasy feelings of the soul, which he seems unable to analyze (though we warrant a good confessor would quickly have solved his perplexities) had not left him at peace. He writes to his father from Bermuda upon the state of his interior man:
"I should wish to go to heaven, because I should be pleased, with its employment. Were all my sins mortified and I rendered perfectly holy, I think I should the happy. . . . . Sometimes I can say, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. .... I am avaricious; and in the present state of my family, make money my god. I strain honesty as far as I can to gain a little."
This was certainly not a satisfactory condition of things. The lust for mammon seems strong enough, but the aspirations for heaven might well have been rather more ardent. He goes to church and sings and weeps, and the minister and elders crowd around him to see what is the matter. He goes to prayer-meeting at last in New Haven, and there the conversion--such as it is--is effected: "As the exercises closed and the crowded worshippers rose to sing the doxology, I felt that I could 'praise God from whom all blessings flow.' Praise! praise! It was delightful to praise him! On the 24th of April following, I united with the visible church under Mr. Stuart's pastorate, and began to be an active Christian."
We must say that this seems to be a very simple and easy process of getting out of the power of the devil. Conversion, according to Dr. Spring's idea, is simply an emotion of the mind, a spasm of sentiment. It includes neither satisfaction for the past, nor the performance of any definite religious duty in the present or the future. Any one who can excite himself into the belief that he is regenerate, or tickle his mind into the pleasant state indicated by the man who, when asked, "How it felt to get religion?" replied that "it was just like having warm water poured down your back"--any such one, we say, may rest assured of his eternal safety. Dr. Spring is no more exacting with other candidates for conversion than he was with himself. To a sick man who inquires "what he shall do?" he answers: "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved."