RELIGIOUS CHANGES.
1881-1884.

The true poetic temperament has in it an element of religion; for religion and poetry both deal with the spiritual interpretation of life, and one who possesses the temperament for either is conscious of the vastness overshadowing common things, and sees the infinite meaning of the apparent finiteness of the visible world. The delicate perception of truth which is a distinctive quality of the poet often leads to the deep appreciation of the spirit in and through nature, and enables one to feel and know God.

Lucy Larcom possessed the poetic temperament, with this strong element of religion. She was pre-eminently religious, in the sense of possessing a spiritual power, dealing continually with spiritual things. She began early to interpret life in the light of divine truth; and truth made real in human character she considered the one thing worth striving for.

Her relations to organized Christianity are particularly interesting. Doubtless the history of her connection with the churches is a type of that of other lives numerous in our generation that have become dissatisfied with the communions in which they have been trained, and after a period of uncertainty and unrest have found a home in the Episcopal Church.

Her religious life began in a Puritan home, and in a Congregational meeting-house. The strong ethical teaching of her fathers made a lasting impression on her, and the dogmatic preaching of Calvinism influenced her young life. From both she gained a love for the simplicity of living which characterized her career, and that dearness of conscience which she always displayed. There was also a joy to her under the austerity of the worship, and the sternness of the theology. The sermons suggested new thoughts, which forced themselves between the sentences of the minister, and in this way she preached to herself another sermon than that spoken from the pulpit.

Her religious enthusiasm bore fruit at thirteen years of age, in church membership, in Lowell. Not many years after this she was sorry for the step she had taken, for the natural broadening of her mind and the deepening of her consciousness of truth led her far away from the doctrines she had accepted. The sermons that she heard did not seem to satisfy her needs; she longed for spiritual nourishment, for help on the daily path, for thoughts that had some connection with actual temptations and doubts. Most of the discourses dealt ingeniously with exegetical questions, or were massive arguments used to crush the objector, or efforts to prove some metaphysical doctrine. Relating one Sunday’s experience, which has been referred to before in her diary, she said, “I went to meeting, expecting and needing spiritual food, and received only burning coals and ashes. There was a sermon to prove that Satan will be tormented for ever and ever; and the stress of the argument was to prove the endlessness of his punishment.”

Not only did she find a failing sympathy with the preaching and worship, but there were doctrines she could not continue to hold. Among these doctrines were, verbal inspiration of the Bible, which she thought mechanical and destructive of the Spirit’s influence through a distinctive human personality; the Atonement, as the purchase blood of God’s favor for a fallen race; predestination, which seemed to eliminate man’s freedom; and endless punishment, adjudged for acts in this life, without any probation in a future state, which seemed to her contrary to the idea of the Sonship of man. Neither did she care for the emphasis placed on doctrine, as distinguished from life. The central point in her theology was the truth of God’s love, and from this, by logical sequence, came her ideas of His revelation through nature, through human life as His gift, and through character as a manifestation of His glory. She was a student of Maurice, who led her along congenial paths of thought. On Sundays when she remained away from church, she generally read a sermon of Robertson’s; and in his powerful analyses of truth, and in his burning love for the Master, she found continued inspiration. Her love for the person of Jesus increased each year. She felt herself a member of the Invisible Church, being contented with the thought that the visible churches had no claim upon her, because of their errors.

TO J. G. WHITTIER.

627 Tremont Street,
Boston, December 25, 1881.

My dear Friend,—Alone in my room this evening, I feel just like writing a Christmas letter to you, and I follow the impulse.

This day always brings back old times and old friends to memory, but never with sadness to me, because the one idea of the day is hope and joy for all souls, the possibilities of infinite help, unending progress. Whenever I enter deeply into the thought of Christ, whenever I feel Him the one Reality inseparable from my own being, then I feel that I have my friends safe, and that they are to be my friends forever. To me, He is the one Divine Friend in whom human friendships can alone be real and permanent, because He draws us into sympathy with what is best, with what is eternal, the love of goodness, the consciousness of God in us and around us, and the solemn gladness of a human life into which God has entered, and where He still is.

God with us still, the Spiritual Presence of One who is more real than any other person can be to us, through whom indeed we receive our personality,—this idea, so grand as at times to seem almost impossible, grows more definite and clear to me. It is the “So I am with you alway” of Christ. And with this idea, that of those whom we love unseen, our friends who have disappeared from sight, becomes more definite also.

Sometimes I can say undoubtingly, “I know I shall find them again, where He is.” But though the light flickers and dims sometimes, what if it does? There the light is, and every year a larger space is redeemed from darkness.

Oh, my dear friend! life is a gift blessed as it is awful. To think how close we are to one another for good or evil, do what we will! We cannot be apart from our fellow-beings; the pulses of this life we have in common throb, upward or downward, through us forever. Death is not to me half so solemn as life: but then death is no reality—a circumstance of our external life only....

---

TO THE SAME.

627 Tremont Street,
Boston, June 6, 1881.

... I am steadily gaining in strength I think, and I am glad to keep on learning to live and to work, with such limitations as years necessarily bring. I find my life taking deeper hold of all other human lives; I feel myself more closely and warmly one of the great human family, every year of my life. And I feel through this the assurance of immortality—because we are in our deepest instincts children of the living God—because we, as sons and daughters, are united through the Son with the Father; we share His eternity; we cannot lose Him nor one another, nor the least spark of truth or love kindled within us from His being.

I am glad that I live, and that I shall die; that I shall fall asleep to awake with all I love, with all that is permanent here, in Him.

The forward outlook is full of good cheer; for is not He the Eternally Good?...

---

TO FRANKLIN CARTER.

Beverly, Mass., July 18, 1881.

Dear Frank,—I want to write a word of congratulation to you, in your new position. C—— told me you thought of going to Williamstown, but I did not know it was fully decided, until I saw your address in a Boston paper.

It was an excellent inaugural. I felt my sympathy go out to you as I read. I felt sure, and feel sure, that you will do good in your new position, which surely is a most responsible one, in a time like this. I wonder if it is really a time of greater unbelief than hitherto. Doubt is not an unhealthy symptom; it argues the possibility of belief. Indifference to high truth seems to me worst of all, the indifference that comes of too much world, which everybody seems to get suffocated in.It is a great privilege to be able to influence young men to the best things, as you will be able to,—to make low aims seem, as they are, unworthy of manhood. God bless you and help you!

I have lived on, doing the little I could, during these last few years. I have gained in health, and am always hoping to return to some steady work; but it may not be best to do so at all. I like my freedom, and if I can afford to keep it, I shall. I am sure it is not good for me to live in a school. I sometimes wish I had earned or inherited money enough not to have to think of the future, but doubtless the Lord knows just what I need. It is not best for us all to have life made easy for us, in that way.

As I look back on my life, I see much reason for humility. I ought to have done so much more and so much better. Nevertheless the future is bright, for God is good. Sometimes it seems to me as if I were just learning what His forgiveness means, what it is to begin every day anew, as if there had been no unworthy past, as if there were only His love and my desire to please Him left. But I only meant to write a line. I go from here to spend the “hay-fever” season among the mountains very soon.

Always and truly yours,

Lucy Larcom.

The change in Miss Larcom’s religious life came when she began to attend the services of Trinity Church, Boston, in 1879. The preaching of Phillips Brooks was the realization, in living words, of her own thought. He gave utterance for her to all her broader and freer conceptions of Christianity. She had known little of the Episcopal Church before going to Trinity, and she had the same inherited prejudices that many, bred like her, have, though she remembered with pleasure St. Ann’s in Lowell, during her days of wage earning; but the simplicity of the worship at Trinity, and the earnestness of the preacher, touched the deepest chords in her life, and she realized that she could be helped by them. Writing to one of her friends, who urged upon her the claims of the Episcopal Church, she said:—

... I have been very much interested in the services at Trinity Church. Just think! two prayer-books came to me in one week! one from a friend in New York, from whom I had not heard for a year. I do not know what special suggestion I am to get from the fact, except that I am to know more of the Episcopal Church. Truly I am ashamed of my ignorance regarding it. I enjoy the services, but I think I still strongly prefer Congregational ways. If only there were a little more sharing of the worship on the part of the people! I don’t like to think that the minister is doing it all up for me; but that is the way of one, and not of the other, decidedly. I am going to be able to worship with Episcopalians as intelligently as with others....

At another time she wrote about her church connections as follows:—

... I wish I could feel as you do, about the Church. I should like to be there, but I have to look upon it from the outside as an institution. The real church, to which I hope I belong, seems to me to be so much broader than any one form, so inclusive of all denominations, that I hardly think I have the right to identify myself with any; for, by so doing, I should exclude myself absolutely from the rest. Now I seem to myself to belong everywhere. Yet it is sometimes lonely to feel that spiritually I have not where to lay my head. We women crave home, a home of our own; but we must not deceive ourselves by shutting our eyes, and making believe we are at home, when we are not.

However, I mean to go regularly to Trinity if I can, for the feeling of having free seats is more comfortable than that of intruding into people’s pews, and I go as if I had a right to the service....

Her diary for 1881 and 1882 indicates the deepening of her religious thought, and the way in which the Episcopal Church was becoming known to her.

Boston, November 28, 1881. Waked by distant bells of Advent Sunday. As a Puritan, I have known little of the Christian year, in its Church history. It is worth while to try to enter into the spirit of all methods of true Christian worship. I read a sermon by F. D. Maurice, one by F. W. Robertson, and one by Phillips Brooks, all bearing upon the idea of these Advent days. In the “Christian Year” (Keble), an allusion is made to one of the skeptical centuries, which seems to fit this, in its over-scientific tendencies:—

“An age of light,

Light without love, glares on the aching sight.”

But under all true science,—if science is indeed knowledge,—we shall find Christ, since Christ is the revelation of the deepest love of God.

December 4. Have been writing Christmas verses, by request, the past week. Thanksgiving and Christmas would blend themselves in my thoughts as one festival. “For my body liveth by my soul, and my soul by me” (St. Augustine). “Too little doth he love Thee, who loves anything with thee, which he loveth not for Thee” (Ibid.).

December 5. Two distinct thoughts impressed by the two successive evening services at Trinity Church:—

A week since,—That the controversy between skepticism and Christianity, as carried on quite recently among us, does not touch the real point in question, which is whether Christ, the Son of God, has come into the world, and has changed it, and is changing it for the better: not whether certain statements of the Hebrew Scriptures can be verified as facts, but whether there is a living Christ.And last evening,—That the motive of the Christian life, the true reason why we should become Christians, and live as Christians, is that other men may receive the blessing; that it may widen on, through us, into unknown ages. It was a carrying out of St. Paul’s thought, spoken to the Ephesians, about the Gentile world and the “ages to come.” It is the grandeur of Christianity that it will not permit us to shut ourselves up in our own personal or local interests,—that it belongs to the whole race, and unites us to every human heart.

A note from Mrs. Garfield this morning. Though so nearly a stranger, she lets me in, a little way, to the sacred seclusion of her sorrow,—“this valley and this shadow,” as she calls it. She cannot see why the blow had to fall upon her,—nor can we see why the country needed it. The blasphemous conceit of the assassin, who claims to have been inspired by the Deity, makes it all the more perplexing.

One good thing ought to come of this trial,—that we should all of us try to know clearly what we mean, when we claim close relations with the Divine Being. Too many, perhaps all of us, sometimes, use His name insanely, and therefore irreverently, in our thoughts, and to cloak our errors to ourselves.

Begin this morning Max MÜller’s “Science of Religion,” which I have never yet thoroughly read.January 1, 1882. Heard the midnight toll of the passing Old Year at Trinity Church last night. It was good to be there, and to come out into the clear starlight and moonlight of the New Year, with the great company that had reverently gathered in the church to watch the coming in of 1882,—another Year of Our Lord. Rev. Mr. ——’s sermon was appropriate, but that old, sad, haunting thought seemed to me to be too painfully impressed,—that, whatever we do, the scars of our past sins eternally remain,—that the losses caused by our wrong-doing can never be made up. Is it the true reading of God’s forgiveness in Christ? Is not the uplifting power of the new love with which His Spirit floods our life, something nobler than we should have known, except for the pain, and the wounding, and the loss that came of sin? For the evil that has come to others through us, may not a flood of good out of the heart of our loving Christ overflow all, and lift them, with us, to a higher stratum of life?—I must believe it—that righteousness in human souls will obliterate the past evil. If it is to be remembered no more, it must not be there,—or some better thing must have come in its place. We cannot tell how far God’s love may extend, what miracles it works. The chapter about the New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven, was read as the year was passing, and Mr. Brooks made that the point of his remarks,—that the coming year might be the New Jerusalem to us. In that light all darkness may surely be forgotten.

January 6, Epiphany. Went to the Church service. The thought that Christ truly came to us, to all the world, through His birth at Bethlehem, and the joy of His coming, is a blessing that everybody may share, and that it is more truly a blessing because it is to be shared, was chiefly dwelt upon. It struck me as a new thought, that the Wise Men from the East represented all the science, all the intellectual treasure of all time, which are truly given to humanity only when laid at the feet of Christ. The preacher did not express that idea, but it passed through my mind as I listened. Every gift we have, every work we do, only becomes a real, living, worthy thing, when given to Christ to be inspired with His life. If the scientific research of this age could but see the star hanging over the place where the Young Child lies, and find its true illumination in Him!

January 7. Miss H—— called, full of enthusiasm over what she believes herself to have done by healing the sick, through the power of prayer. I must believe that what she says is true,—and yet I question. Can this be God’s way? Not impossible—but I have never been able to see that any prayer for definite physical results was so good as that which asks to be brought into harmony with the will of God, so that we shall accept any condition which He sees best for us. Yet—what does the “gift of healing” mean—if not that He permits health to flow through one life into another? My little crippled friend, E——, does not feel sure that she ought to ask God to make her well and strong, like other girls. I wish she might be, though.

January 8. Miss E. H. called. Our talk always gets back to the one subject,—Christ in human life. She cannot see that He is more than the best of all human helpers, and yet she has flashes of higher truth sometimes. I think she wishes for a definite intellectual idea of the Christ, for she said to me, “You make it wholly spiritual,”—and so the conception of him, in the human soul, must be, it seems to me. She said, “I think of what He was,” and I think of Him, that He is, and there we parted.

It is to me like the sunlight: clear, penetrating, inspiring, the idea of Christ who is, was, and is to be, the Eternal Son of the Father, the presence of God in humanity, as the friend of every soul,—the uniting link between the human and the divine. I feel my own personal immortality in following this truth whithersoever it may lead,—deeper, ever deeper, into the Heart of God, as I earnestly believe.

At church the subject was the power behind all human efforts, which makes them worth anything. The planter and the waterer are nothing, except as means bringing the seed to growth, which must first be alive, a force in itself, which he who tends cannot produce or understand. The power of God behind all worthy human efforts, that we are tools in the Master’s hand, and must refer every good result to Him, were the inferences.

Who can explain moods? A strange depression has been over me to-day, as of some impending danger to some life near to mine. I shook it off in going out, but I found myself imagining the saddest thing that could possibly happen to me or my friends, or the country, or the world. I do not think I dread any one thing for myself, yet the removal of some of my friends would leave life very lonely.

January 16. Yesterday I was much instructed and helped by reading one or two of Maurice’s sermons. The thought that forgiveness means the putting away of sins is not often emphasized as he does it,—“Power on earth to forgive sins;” that here one can lay down the burden, and go on fighting the enemy with a sure hope of conquest, because of that divine life and strength that comes through a present Christ;—this is release indeed. Not that we shall be forgiven, but that we are forgiven, if we turn to the truth in the love of it.

And the thought of the Communion service as a marriage-supper, a token that our lives are reunited to the divine life, came to me with new force.

Mr. Brooks preached about heaven, in the afternoon; that it must be the continuance of life,—of the highest and deepest we know here. There always will be for us, God, and the “charity” which means love. He spoke from chapter xiii., I. Corinthians: “For now we see through a glass darkly,”—carrying out the image of life blurred and distorted often to us here, made clear there, where only true things can remain. Keble says, for yesterday, that we may—

“Through the world’s sad day of strife

Still chant his morning song.”

And why should not the music of heaven be the continuing of what is the true harmony of earth? It must be. The sermon yesterday referred especially to the death of two ministers in the Church the past week, Dr. Stone and John Cotton Smith.

January 23. Remarks at table, where surely people talk very freely. One lady says that she has never for an hour been glad that she was born. I can scarcely think of such a thing as possible, because it is God’s world, and if we have any real glimpse of Him we must know that there is a divine purpose in our being here, even if we do not have the “good time” in life that we think we deserve. But it may be an inherited morbid feeling, it may be an affectation,—it may be several things.

Another lady states her Unitarian position that “Christ was human, we know,—he must also have been more than human, else he could not help us, therefore he was divine; but he could not have been wholly divine, else he could not have been an example for us.” The last assertion is to me untrue. He must be able to help us more, because He is one with the Father, nor is He less our example, but more. He never gave a lower standard than this,—“Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” He surely made God our only example of goodness, to learn and to follow. And we know that we are made in the image of God, because we cannot in our best moments accept any standard but this,—of perfection to be sought after through eternity; the grandeur of our being is that there will always be something beyond for us to seek.

Reading “Ecce Homo” for the first time, with a view to studying the “Life of Christ” with a friend.

February 6. Reading Renan’s “Life of Jesus.” In the introduction, his objections to the fourth Gospel seem to me to arise from some lack of perception in himself. I cannot find in it the “pretentious, heavy, badly written tirades” to which he alludes. Nor does it seem to me anything against the book that it was written from memory, long after the death of Christ. To apply to so close a friendship as that between Jesus and John the passage, “Our memories are transformed with all the rest; the idea of a person whom we have known changes with us,” seems to me a wholly unsatisfactory and unappreciative way of putting it. If friends, and such friends, do not remember each other as they really are, we lose the idea of personal identity altogether. Yet Renan seems to think that John did write the fourth Gospel, and from the same close kind of intimacy as that which existed between Socrates and Plato. We surely reach the heart of Christ most closely through the words of the beloved disciple,—the stories clustering around the birth of Christ, which Renan dismisses as “legendary,” seem to be so simply on his assertion. Were they so, the character of Jesus, Son of God and Son of Man, remains itself divinely alone in the world’s history. But I cannot see more miracle in the beginning than all the way through. Nor does it seem to me that it would have been more sacrilegious for Him to say “I am God,” which he never did in words affirm, Renan says, than to say, as He did, “I and my Father are one;” “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” He spoke as the Son of Man, referring also always to His Father, claiming to be, in the closest sense, the Son of God. As a man, He must refer to the God beyond Him, else He could not have made Himself understood by men. For myself, I cannot think of God at all, except as having eternally this human side, by which we human beings, His children, may know Him. There is no unity in the idea of Him without this complexity, which shows Him as Father, Son, and Spirit.

Yet Christ’s human life was perfectly human, wholly so; and the picturesque beauty of that life, the lovely scenery of Nazareth, and his wayfaring company of disciples, plain countrymen, group themselves very attractively on Renan’s page. The book fascinates; it seems always based upon a beautiful, yet most inadequate, conception.

February 20. Many things to remember these last weeks: Mr. Whittier’s visit, and my almost daily glimpses of him, and talks with him,—a friendship that grows more satisfactory as the years deepen life. Separateness of life makes communion of thought almost truer and more inspiring than when people live near each other, and frequently meet. I have more admiration and reverence for such a man, from having found a higher standard in life for myself from which to look across and up to him. I think everybody who has largeness of character like his needs perspective; juxtaposition is not acquaintance.

April 27. The weeks pass too busily for record; also I have not been well. Read with Miss H—— Maurice’s “Gospel of the Kingdom,” Fairbairn’s “Studies in the Life of Christ,” Neander, “Life of Christ;” and came to Maurice’s “Lectures on the Gospel of St. John,” which is left for future study.... A clearer light has come, and yet the sadness of not living wholly in the light: the bitterness of error and failure!

I will not be morbid; I know that there is always a better self than myself, waiting to be set free. But the riddles of life are perplexing. Who are we? What are we struggling for?

I think Maurice one of the most illuminating writers I ever knew. He looks into a truth, and you see what he sees, if you see anything.This stirring up of theological questions at Andover is a phenomenon of the time; a movement towards a simpler holding of truth, and let us trust a greater honesty in us all in our statements of belief. Opinions change, but faith lives in the heart of the truth, not in its outward expression. I wish some formulas could be laid aside, and that we could come into a real unity of faith.

May 26. Closing days of a lovely visit at Melrose, at the house of two of the most delightful people,—a true home.

The woods close the house in around my window, and the birds sing close by. A squirrel has fearlessly come in to visit me once or twice; a flying squirrel, they say it is. The people I am with show me how beautiful it is to live truth, justice, and sympathy. They belong to no Church, but their lives are most beautifully harmonized with the spirit of Him who was, and is, the expression of God’s love to man. When with them I almost feel as if it were better not to profess religion in churches,—this living testimony is so far beyond what most Christians can show; but then I remember that it is because God in Christ is in the world, because the divinity has revealed itself in humanity, that they are what they are. How else have truth, honor, tenderness, and unselfishness, been kept alive in the human hearts, but by that revelation of the one life as the divine standard? And if the churches were all forsaken now, we should see a sad falling off from among us of such people as these, for most of us need constant reminders that we are the children of God. We need the Word, the coming together, the loving, uniting memories of Him who is our life.

Longfellow and Emerson gone from us before the opening of spring! It is strange to think of New England without them. But they are part of its life, forever....

Though Miss Larcom was progressing in her knowledge of the Episcopal Church, she felt no nearer an entrance into that body. She was willing to enjoy the services at Trinity Church, but she did not want Mr. Brooks to think, because of her constant attendance, she had any thoughts of confirmation. So in 1884 she wrote him a letter, stating her position, which he most cordially accepted, writing her in reply what he considered the advantages of her attitude.

233 Clarendon Street, Boston, March 20, 1884.

My dear Miss Larcom,—My delay in answering your letter does not mean that I was not deeply interested in it, and very glad to get it. It only means that I have been too busy to write calmly about anything, and even now I write mainly to say how glad I shall be if some time or other we can quietly talk over what you have written. For the present, however, let me only say, that I accept most cordially the position which you describe for yourself. I am content that our Church should be a helpful friend to one who has been living among quite different associations, and who does not think it best to come into closer personal connection with her. If God means that there should ever be a closer association of life between you and the Episcopal Church, He will make it plain in due time. It is not bad, perhaps, that among the special connections with particular bodies of Christians which come in our lives, there should be one period in which, from the very breaking of our associations with the bodies of Christians, we are able to realize more directly our relation to the body of Christ. Perhaps this is such a time for you. If it is, and whether it is or not, may you find more and more of His light and help, and if anything that I can do, or that Trinity Church can do, is ever a source of happiness or strength to you, I know that you will be sure that I am very glad. With kindest wishes, always,

I am yours most sincerely,

Phillips Brooks.