Boyhood—Sent to School at Bethlehem—The Widow Ingersoll’s—Failure—A Champion—Sent to Catharine Beecher’s School in Hartford—Humorous Incidents—Religious Experience.

To remedy the marked defects in his training, noticed in the preceding chapter, something must be done, or this boy will fail not only of becoming a student but of acquiring even a decent common-school education. Mr. Brace’s select school was tried for a year, but with little benefit. After a good many family discussions and some correspondence it was decided to place him in a private school in the village of Bethlehem, seven miles distant from his home, under the care of Mr. Langdon, to begin study in earnest. Of this important era, his first going from home, we have not a syllable, as we are aware, from his own pen or lips. That there was a mingled feeling of pain at leaving home, of pleasure in the novelty, and a shrinking from the new faces and the new duties, every one who remembers this epoch in his own life can readily imagine. The ride, for a large part of the distance across a broad plateau that stretched away cold and strange like the Downs of England, was well calculated to awaken that yearning sadness which was so prominent a feature of his secret experiences from childhood, and gave in part that tone of melancholy which appears so markedly in everything that we know of him at this period.

Singularly enough, he boarded with the grandmother of the one who afterwards became his son-in-law and is now aiding to write this biography. Her name was Ingersoll, and she is well described as a “large-hearted, kindly woman, a widow, living in a great, comfortable farm-house where everything was free and unconstrained.”

He was well remembered by my mother, Mrs. Martha Ingersoll Scoville, who, being somewhat older than he, had him much under her care. She said he was always a good boy about the house, but very bashful. “I used to feel very sorry for him, he seemed so homesick. He liked to be off by himself, wandering around in the woods, and I don’t think he studied much.”

This was true. Whether it was because this first separation from home brought an increase of those gloomy yearnings of heartsickness to which he was subject at times through life, or simply because of his innate dislike to the study of mere names and forms of things, that he failed to make progress in his books, no one knows. We only know on the authority of his sister, Mrs. Stowe, that “Henry’s studies were mostly with gun on shoulder roving the depths of the forest, guiltless of hitting anything because the time was lost in dreamy contemplation. Whence returning unprepared for school, he would be driven to the expedient of writing out his Latin verb and surreptitiously reading it out of the crown of his hat—an exercise from which he reaped small profit, either mentally or morally.” This was not understood at home at the time, and Dr. Beecher writes concerning him:

“Mr. Langdon has been faithful with Henry, and I trust successful; he says in a letter: ‘His observance of my regulations relating to study has become exact and punctual. His diligence all along has gradually increased, and I think he has arrived at that full purpose which will insure his making a scholar. My method of instruction for beginners is a system of extended, minute, and reiterated drilling, and the make of his mind is such as fits him to receive benefit from the operation.”

Perhaps the method of “reiterated drilling, extended and minute,” was not so well adapted to the boy as the teacher thought. At all events we have this testimony on the other side, that “after a year spent in this way it began to be perceived by the elders of the family that as to the outward and visible signs of learning he was making no progress.”

He was therefore brought home to Litchfield, leaving but one incident of his life at Bethlehem especially worthy of note. It was this: One of the older boys, having studied Tom Paine’s “Age of Reason,” was freely advocating infidel sentiments and gaining a strong and vicious influence over his companions. Young Beecher saw it and came to the rescue. He brushed up the knowledge he had already gained at the hearth-stone and table of his home, studied “Watson’s Apology,” challenged the advocate of Tom Paine’s philosophy to a debate, and, in the judgment of the school, gained a complete victory, proving himself thus early to be a doughty champion of the faith.

The experiment at Bethlehem having proved substantially a failure, his oldest sister, Catharine, who was then teaching a young ladies’ school in Hartford, proposed to take the boy under her care to see what she could do with him.

If his nature lay in strata, as has been said—the one a dreamy, yearning melancholy lying at the bottom, which had its full exercise in his lonely wanderings around Bethlehem; and the other, the surface one, of humor and fun—it was the latter, constantly effervescing and exploding, that appeared in his life in his sister’s school of thirty or forty girls in Hartford. The story of his arranging the umbrellas on the stairs one recess, when he was supposed to be studying grammar, so that when the outside door was opened by a late comer the whole series rushed pell-mell down into the street, greatly to the dismay of the teachers and the enjoyment of the school—with whom, of course, he was a great favorite—is well known. And one of the incidents of the recitation-room is equally familiar, but, as it is very characteristic, we give it place, copied verbatim from Mrs. Stowe:

“The school-room was divided into two divisions in grammar, under leaders on either side, and the grammatical reviews were contests for superiority in which it was vitally important that every member should be perfected. Henry was generally the latest choice, and fell on his side as an unfortunate accession, being held more amusing than profitable on such occasions.

“The fair leader of one of these divisions took the boy aside to a private apartment, to put into him with female tact and insinuation those definitions and distinctions on which the honor of the class depended.

“‘Now, Henry, a is the indefinite article, you see, and must be used only with a singular noun. You can say a man, but you can’t say a men, can you?’ ‘Yes, I can say amen, too,’ was the ready rejoinder. ‘Father says it always at the end of his prayers.’

“‘Come, Henry, now don’t be joking! Now decline he.’he.’ ‘Nominative he, possessive his, objective him.’ ‘You see his is possessive. Now, you can say his book, but you can’t say him book.’ ‘Yes, I do say hymn-book, too,’ said the impracticable scholar, with a quizzical twinkle. Each one of these sallies made his young teacher laugh, which was the victory he wanted. ‘But now, Henry, seriously, just attend to the active and passive voice. Now, I strike is active, you see, because if you strike you do something. But I am struck is passive, because if you are struck you don’t do anything, do you?’

“‘Yes, I do—I strike back again!’”

A letter from the afore-mentioned teacher, sent to him with her New Year’s salutation, January 1, 1858, has lately come to hand. She says, in recalling this incident: “Memory has daguerreotyped upon my mind a boy, a small specimen of perpetual motion, perpetual prank, and perpetual desire to give wrong answers to every sober grammatical rule, thereby not only overwhelming Murray but the studious gravity of a hundred school-girls.”

“Sometimes his views of philosophical subjects were offered gratuitously. Being held of rather a frisky nature, his sister appointed his seat at her elbow when she heard classes. A class in natural philosophy, not very well prepared, was stumbling through the theory of the tides. ‘I can explain that,’ said Henry. ‘Well, you see, the sun he catches hold of the moon and pulls her, and she catches hold of the sea and pulls that, and this makes the spring tides.’ ‘But what makes the neap tides?’ ‘Oh! that’s when the sun stops to spit on his hands,’ was the brisk reply.

“After about six months Henry was returned to his parents’ hands with the reputation of being an inveterate joker and an indifferent scholar. It was the opinion of his class that there was much talent lying about loosely in him, if he could only be brought to apply himself.”

Of his religious life at this time we have a glimpse in a letter written by Dr. Beecher in November, 1825:

“Our family concert of prayer was held in the study on Thanksgiving Day—your mother, Aunt Esther, Henry, and Charles. It was a most deeply solemn, tender, and interesting time.... Henry and Charles have both been awakened, and are easily affected and seriously disposed now. But as yet it is like the wind upon the willow, which rises as soon as it is passed over. It does not grapple, but the effect is good in giving power to conscience, and moral principle producing amendment in conduct.”

This was during a revival which was then in progress in Litchfield, in which the pastor was assisted by Mr. Nettleton, the great revivalist of that period. Henry was twelve years old.

That no permanent good resulted from this work appears true, as the doctor feared, but for a reason very different from that which he gives.

Henry Ward himself tells us why it was:

“My mother—she who in the providence of God took me to her heart when my own mother had gone to see my Father in heaven, she who came after and was most faithful to the charge of the children and the household—she often took me, and prayed with me, and read me the word of God, and expounded to me the way of duty, and did all that seemed to her possible, I know, to make it easy for me to become a religious child; and yet there have been times when I think it would have been easier for me to lay my hand on a block and have it struck off than to open my thoughts to her, when I longed to open them to some one. How often have I started to go to her and tell her my feelings, when fear has caused me to sheer off and abandon my purpose! My mind would open like a rosebud, but, alas! fear would hold back the blossom. How many of my early religious pointings fell, like an over-drugged rosebud, without a blossom!”

Again, and more at length, he opens his religious experiences of the whole period:

“I remember having religious impressions, distinct and definite, as early as when I was eight or nine years of age.

“The first distinct religious feelings I had were in connection with nature. Although I was born, as far as any one can be born so, a Calvinist, and although I was conversant at a very early age with the things which pertain to Calvinism, yet, as I look back, I see that the only religious feelings or impressions I had were those which were excited in my mind through the unconscious influence of God through nature. It was not until years later that I knew it was the divine element. I yearned, I longed, for purity and nobility. I had the beginnings of the feeling of self-renunciation. I had a wistful desire that something higher, something superior to myself, should be developed out of the system of nature to help me. I had the germs of evangelical teaching; but I never spoke to anybody about them, and it seems to me a hermit could not have been more solitary, so far as that part of my life was concerned, than I was.

“The next thing I remember was a transition, under the influence of teaching, from the religious conditions and tendencies in my mind to a speculative state. I began to listen to sermons when I was eight or nine years old, and what seems strange is that the picturesque parts stopped not much with me; that they faded out of my mind; that the colors were not ‘fast’; but that I caught hold of the speculative parts, particularly those which were most insoluble, about which men knew least and taught most—the nature of God, the purposes of God, the scheme of divine government, not those parts which are transcendently important, namely, the elements of justice, truth, and morality commingled; that God from all eternity foreknew; that, foreknowing, he predestinated; that by predestination things were fixed, made certain; that so many as he fore-ordained to be saved would be saved, do what they would or come what might—my mind greedily seized on these, not merely as undoubted facts, as they were to me, but as having special reference to myself.

“I recollect being sometimes, as it were, behind the entrenchments of such a doctrine, and wishing I could get over them, and feeling that I would give everything in the world if I only knew that I was one of the elect, and praying that God would in some way let me know whether I was or not.

“At other times it would come in this shape: I had probably been reprimanded for a misdemeanor or a delinquency, or something of that sort. I used to be melancholy and to sit in judgment upon myself; and I remember thinking, ‘Well, it is no use for me to try to be a good boy’—not a saintly boy; that sort did not abound where I was born, and I was certainly no exception to the average run. I don’t think there are many of that kind outside of Sunday-school books. Judged by the ordinary standard, I was a very good boy. I had no vices, and no objectionable tendencies except those which sprang from robust health, buoyant spirits, and immense nerve resources. But I thought I was a base sinner. The pulpit represented all men as being sinners, and I accepted it absolutely and literally. I thought I was an awful transgressor; every little fault seemed to make a dreadful sin; and I would say to myself, ‘There! I am probably one of the reprobate. I have tried to be good, but I am going down. The probability is, I am not one of the elect; and what is the use of my trying? If I am not fore-ordained to be saved there is no chance for me, and I may as well go by the wholesale as by the retail.’ So sometimes on the one side and sometimes on the other these thoughts wrought upon me. Not once or twice merely, but many times, they passed through my mind. They were the sub-base, as it were, of my life. I think it was a period of fifteen or twenty years before I got relief from that undertone. It had some advantages and not a few disadvantages.

“If I had had the influence of a discreet, sympathetic Christian person to brood over and help and encourage me, I should have been a Christian child from my mother’s lap, I am persuaded; but I had no such influence. The influences of a Christian family were about me, to be sure, but they were generic; and I revolved in these speculative experiences, my strong religious habitudes taking the form of speculation all through my childhood. I recollect that from the time that I was about ten years old I began to have periods when my susceptibilities were so profoundly impressed that the outward manifestations of my nature were changed. I remember that when my brother George—who was next older than I, and who was beginning to be my helpful companion, to whom I looked up—became a Christian, being awakened and converted in college, it seemed as though a gulf had come between us, and as though he was a saint on one side of it while I was a little reprobate on the other side. It was awful to me. If there had been a total eclipse of the sun I should not have been in more profound darkness outwardly than I was inwardly. I did not know whom to go to; I did not dare to go to my father; I had no mother that I ever went to at such a time; I did not feel like going to my brother; and I did not go to anybody. I felt that I must try to wrestle out my own salvation.

“Once, on coming home, I heard the bell toll, and I learned that it was for the funeral of one of my companions with whom I had been accustomed to play, and with whom I had grown up. I did not know that he had been sick, but he had dropped into eternity; and the ringing, swinging, booming of that bell, if it had been the sound of an angel trumpet of the last day, would not have seemed to me more awful. I went into an ecstasy of anguish. At intervals, for days and weeks, I cried and prayed. There was scarcely a retired place in the garden, in the wood-house, in the carriage-house, or in the barn that was not a scene of my crying and praying. It was piteous that I should be in such a state of mind, and that there should be nobody to help me and lead me out into the light. I do not recollect that to that day one word had been said to me, or one syllable had been uttered in the pulpit, that led me to think there was any mercy in the heart of God for a sinner like me. For a sinner that had repented it was thought there was pardon; but how to repent was the very thing I did not know. A converted sinner might be saved, but for a poor, miserable, faulty boy, that pouted, and got mad at his brothers and sisters, and did a great many naughty things, there was no salvation so far as I had learned. My innumerable shortcomings and misdemeanors were to my mind so many pimples that marked my terrible depravity; and I never had the remotest idea of God except that he was a Sovereign who sat with a sceptre in his hand and had his eye on me, and said: ‘I see you, and I am after you.’ So I used to live in perpetual fear and dread, and often I wished myself dead. I tried to submit and lay down the weapons of my rebellion, I tried to surrender everything; but it did not seem to do any good, and I thought it was because I did not do it right. I tried to consecrate myself to God, but all to no purpose. I did everything, so far as I could, that others did who professed to be Christians, but I did not feel any better. I passed through two or three revivals. I remember, when Mr. Nettleton was preaching in Litchfield, going to carry a note to him from father; and for a sensitive, bashful boy like me it was a severe ordeal. I went to the room where he was speaking, with the note in my trembling hand, and had to lay it on the desk beside him. Before I got half-way across the floor I was dazed and everything seemed to swim around me; but I made out to get the note to him, and he said: ‘That’s enough; go away, boy,’ and I sort of backed and stumbled toward the door (I was always stumbling and blundering in company), and sat down. He was preaching in those whispered tones which always seem louder than thunder to the conscience, although they are only whispers in the ear. He had not uttered more than three sentences before my feelings were excited, and the more I listened the more awful I felt; and I said to myself: ‘I will stay to the inquiry meeting.’ I heard Mr. Nettleton talk about souls writhing under conviction, and I thought my soul was writhing under conviction. I had heard father say that after persons had writhed under conviction a week or two they began to come out, and I said: ‘Perhaps I will get out’; and that thought produced in me a sort of half-exhilaration of joy. I stayed to the inquiry meeting, felt better, and trotted home with the hope that I was on the way toward conversion. I went through this revival with that hope strengthened; but it did not last long.”

It is evident from this chapter that if we would understand Henry Ward Beecher and the influences that went to the formation of his character and to the success of his life, other things than parentage, home, school, or nature must be taken into the account. The vast things of the invisible realm have begun to speak to him, and his nature has proved to be peculiarly sensitive to their influence.

He is thus early groping, unresting, and unsatisfied; but it is among mountains, and not in marshes or quicksands. Some day these mountain truths, among which he now wanders in darkness, shall be radiant in his sight with the Divine Compassion and his gloom shall give place to abiding love, joy, and peace.