The Girlhood of Harriet Beecher Stowe Read online

  Without ever having heard of pragmatism, she became a kind of pragmatist. She continues: "After two or three years I commenced giving instruction in mental philosophy, and at the same time began a regular course of lectures and instructions from the Bible, and was much occupied with plans for governing my school and in devising means to lead my pupils to become obedient, amiable, and pious." These "means" resulted in a code of principles for the government of her school which were nothing more nor less than systematically formulated common sense, with plenty of the "milk of human kindness" thrown in. These principles she carefully compared with the government of God, and came to the conclusion that He, in His infinitely mighty and complex task of governing the universe, was applying the same fundamental principles as she in the relatively infinitesimal and simple task of governing her school. This was her solution, and this the view of the divine nature that was for so many years preached by her brother, Henry Ward, and set forth in the writings of her sister Harriet.

  Harriet's Desire for Love

  In the winter of 1829 Harriet was in Hartford again, this time assisting her sister Catherine in the school. She was now eighteen, but still morbidly introspective, sensitive, and overwrought. She apparently lived largely in her emotions. In closing one of her letters, she said: "This desire to be loved forms, I fear, the great motive for all my actions." Again, she writes to her brother Edward:

  "I have been carefully reading the Book of Job, and I do not find in it the views of God you have presented to me. God seems to have stripped a dependent creature of all that renders life desirable, and then to have answered his complaints from the whirlwind; and, instead of showing mercy and pity, to have overwhelmed him by a display of his justice. From the view of God that I received from you, I should have expected that a being that sympathizes with his guilty, afflicted creatures would not have spoken thus. Yet, after all, I do believe that God is such a being as you represent him to be, and in the New Testament I find in the character of Jesus Christ a revelation of God as merciful and compassionate, in fact, just such a God as I need!"

  This was the vision of God that came to her at the time of her conversion. It was the confusing and perturbing influence of her father's Calvinistic theology that had dimmed that gracious vision. Out of the prison-house of Giant Despair she had been delivered by the teachings of her sister Catherine and her brother Edward.

  Religious Doubts and Fears

  But, again, in the same letter we have a passage that shows that her feet are still enmeshed in the net of Calvinistic theology. She writes:

  "My mind is often perplexed, and such thoughts arise in it that I cannot pray, and I become bewildered. The wonder to me is, how all ministers and all Christians can feel themselves so inexcusably sinful, when it seems to me that we all come into the world in such a way that it would be miraculous if we did not sin! Mr. Hawes always says in his prayers, 'We have nothing to offer in extenuation of any of our sins'; and I always think, when he says it, that we have every thing to offer in extenuation.

  "The case seems to me exactly as if I had been brought into the world with such a thirst for ardent spirits that there was just a possibility but no hope that I should resist, and then my eternal happiness made to depend on my being temperate. Sometimes, when I try to confess my sins, I feel that I am more to be pitied than blamed, for I have never known the time when I have not had a temptation within me so strong that it was certain that I should not overcome it. This thought shocks me, but it comes with such force, and so appealingly, to all my consciousness, that it stifles all sense of sin."

  It was such reflections and arguments as these that had aroused Dr. Beecher to despair over his daughter Catherine's spiritual condition. The fact was, he belonged to one age and his children to another. Yet the brave old man lived to sympathize with them.

  Harriet Breaks with Calvinism

  Harriet at last learned to give up her introspection and morbid sensitiveness, and to live more healthily and humanly. At the age of twenty-one she was able to write thus to her friend, Georgiana May:

  "The amount of the matter has been, as this inner world of mine has become worn out and untenable, I have at last concluded to come out of it and live in the eternal one, and, as F. S. once advised me, give up the pernicious habit of meditation to the first Methodist minister who would take it, and try to mix in society somewhat as other persons would.

  "'Horas non numero non nisi serenas.' Uncle Sam, who sits by me, has just been reading the above motto, the inscription on a sun-dial in Venice. It strikes me as having a distant relationship to what I was going to say. I have come to a firm resolution to count no hours but unclouded ones, and let all others slip out of my memory and reckoning as quickly as possible." In this new life she was able to write to her brother Edward:

  "I have never been so happy as this summer. I began it in more suffering than I ever before have felt; but there is One whom I daily thank for all that suffering, since I hope that it has brought me at last to rest entirely in Him." So she learned to suffer and to love. To suffer and to love, and at last to rest. After five years of struggling, she returned to where she started when converted as a child of thirteen. Love became her gospel, the alpha and omega of her existence--love for her God, for her friends, and, finally, for humanity. The three words "God is love" summed up her theology.