"God's vengeance feeds the flame
With piles of wood and brimstone flood,
That none can quench the same"—
represented to most people of the decade just preceding the Civil War all they said. Both old men and young children dreamed of the awful retribution which awaited them in the other world.
And there was a fiery zeal in the work of saving men's souls from the wrath to come which showed that it was no figurative faith which moved the preachers and their co-workers. A song sung by all ran in one of its favorite stanzas:—
“Must I be carried to the skies
On flow'ry beds of ease,
While others fought to win the prize
And sailed through bloody seas?”
Excitement naturally overcame many, and they rushed forward to the mourner's benches in front of the altar and cried out for mercy, or silently prayed for days and weeks till the light “broke upon them” and they went forth shouting for joy. These then became exhorters, and moved among their friends in the congregation, begging them to yield their “proud and haughty spirits” ere it should be too late. At times scores of penitents would be on their knees in the spaces about the altar, others would be “laboring” with the sinners not yet stricken, and still others thanking God in loud voices for their delivery from sin and Satan, whom all regarded as an active demon always seeking whom he might destroy.
In the South the deism which had influenced the generation led by Washington and Jefferson had given way to the stern faith of the Calvinists, for whether one were Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, or Campbellite, the essentials of his religion were the same. Wealthy planters, small farmers, and negro slaves sought the salvation of their souls in the same churches and under the same preachers. In fact it was common for men to be told by their pastors that unless they were willing to sit down in heaven by the side of the “poor slave” they could not be saved, and the slave often begged his master to accept the terms of salvation. A few great planters who were not touched by the religious fervor of the time held aloof, and the poorer whites and the slaves came to accept the view that these were the rich men who could not be saved, and commonly said hell was their unavoidable portion.
In the East, save in the Unitarian and Episcopalian churches, there was the same religious realism. In the great revivals of 1857 earnest men and great congregations prayed aloud that God might convert the heretical Theodore Parker, or that, if he were not a subject of grace, as many believed he was not, he might be taken from this world, where he was doing infinite mischief. Of course he was to be consigned immediately to the “fiery furnace below.” And the greatest of American preachers, Henry Ward Beecher, in the same revival, gathered about him the hard-headed business men of New York City and together they prayed that wicked playwrights and worldly-minded theater-goers might be brought to a realizing sense of the shame of their conduct, and that the houses of their frivolous vice might be converted into temples of Christian worship. Again, those who would not heed the solemn warnings of the pulpit were “given up,” and the Heavenly Father was asked to remove them “hence.”
The influence of this sense of the awfulness of the after life to those who might not be saved was far-reaching. The farmer, driven by the hard necessity of making a living for himself and family to remain away from church, meditated sorrowfully as he followed his plow, and often at the end of his furrow fell upon his knees and besought the Creator to save his undying soul and spare him the everlasting torture of the damned. A popular little gift book, published by the American Tract Society of New York, was entitled Passing Over Jordan, and on an early page we find the following typical lines:—
“My thoughts on awful subjects roll,
Damnation and the dead:
What horrors seize my guilty soul
Upon a dying bed.”
And a young woman who received this as a New Year's present was a perfectly normal girl of Cincinnati and the daughter of a prominent family there.