that she had not come home at
nightfall, and I had to go to find her, the panic I endured from the
necessity of searching around this old house no one can imagine but a
boy naturally timid and accustomed to see ghosts and evil spirits
in the dusk. But I kept my fears to myself and always made a
conscientious search.

The peculiar ideas concerning conversion and regeneration, held in
common by all the branches of the adult-Baptist churches, were in my
mother's mind an obsession. Conviction of sin, repentance, the public
confession, profession of faith, and baptism were the necessary
degrees to regeneration, and, looking back on the tortures to which
my mother was subjected by those theological problems and the daily
anxiety she endured until each of us had passed through the gates of
salvation into the narrow way, I must wonder at that divine maternal
instinct which made her rejoice at my birth, as I know she did.

The whole community in which we lived, with the exception of a small
Episcopal church, had the same ideas of conversion and regeneration,
and a prominent feature in our social existence was the frequent
recurrence of the great revival meetings in which all the rude
eloquence of celebrated and powerful preachers, Baptist, Methodist,
and of other sects, was poured out on excited congregations. There
were "protracted meetings," or campaigns of prayer and exhortation,
lasting often a fortnight, at which all the resources of popular
theology were employed to awaken and maintain their audiences in a
state of frenzy and religious delirium, during which conviction of sin
was supposed to enter the heart more effectually. The tortures of hell
alternated with the delights of heaven, in imagery calculated to
drive the timid and conscientious young folks to insanity, at these
meetings, to which, once awakened, the subject of conviction went
three times a day, until the hysteria, the prolonged excitement so
produced, came as a sign of acceptance. As each new convert rose on
the "anxious seat[1]," where he or she went when the first feeling
of conviction came, and afterwards made the declaration of salvation
found, the shouts and cries of "Glory to God," the sobbing and groans
of the congregation were redoubled, and the exhortations of the
preacher renewed, to the still unconvicted to come forward to the
anxious seat where they would become subject to the concentrated
and personal prayers of the whole assembly. These meeti