felt; and indeed with all the ideas I got of religion, whether from
Sunday-keeping or catechising, my early impressions on that subject
could not be happy or winning. I remember the time when I really feared
that if I went out into the fields to walk on Sunday, bears would come
down from the mountain and catch me. At a later day, but still in my
childhood, I recollect a book-pedler's coming to our house, and when he
opened his pack, that I selected from a pile of story-books, Bunyan's
"Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners." Religion had a sort of
horrible attraction for me, but nothing could exceed its gloominess. I
remember looking down from the gallery at church upon the celebration of
the Lord's Supper, and pitying the persons engaged in it more than any
people in the world,--I thought they were so unhappy. I had heard of
"the unpardonable sin," and well do I recollect lying in my bed a mere
child--and having thoughts and words injected into my mind, which I
[17]imagined were that sin, and shuddering, and trembling, and saying
aloud, "No, no, no; I do not,--I will not." It is the grand mystery of
Providence that what is divinest and most beautiful should be suffered
to be so painfully, and, as it must seem at first view, so injuriously
misconstrued. But what is universal, must be a law; and what is law,
must be right,--must have good reasons for it. And certainly so it is.
Varying as the ages vary, yet the experience of the individual is but a
picture of the universal mind,--of the world's mind. The steps are
the same, ignorance, fear, superstition, implicit faith; then doubt,
questioning, struggling, long and anxious reasoning; then, at the
end, light, more or less, as the case may be. Can it, in the nature
of things, be otherwise? The fear of death, for instance, which I had,
which all children have, can childhood escape it? Far onward and upward
must be the victory over that fear. And the fear of God, and, indeed,
the whole idea of religion,--must it not, in like manner, necessarily
be imperfect? And are imperfection and error peculiar to our religious
conceptions? What mistaken ideas has the child of a man, of his parent
when correcting him, or of some distinguished stranger! They are
scarcely less erroneous than his ideas of God. What mistaken notions
of life, of the world, the great, gay, garish world, all full of
cloud-castles, ships laden with gold, pleasures endless and entrancing!
What mistaken impression