Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. | Page 3

affected
me like that spectacle. I do not certainly know whether I heard the
sermon on the occasion by the pastor, the Rev. Ephraim Judson; but at
any rate it was so represented to me that it always seems as if I had
heard it, especially the apostrophe to the remains that rested beneath
that dark pall in the aisle. "General Ashley!" he said, and repeated,
"General Ashley!--he hears not."
To the recollections of my childhood this old pastor presents a very
distinct, and I may say somewhat portentous, figure, tall, large-limbed,
pale, ghostly almost, with slow movement and hollow tone, with eyes
dreamy, and kindly, I believe, but spectral to me, coming into the house
with a heavy, deliberate, and solemn step, making me feel as if the very
chairs and tables were conscious of his presence and did him reverence;
and when he stretched out his long, bony arm and said, "Come here,

child!" I felt something as if a spiritualized ogre had invited me.
Nevertheless, he was a man, I believe, of a very affectionate and tender
nature; indeed, I afterwards came to think so; but at that time, and up to
the age of twelve, it is a strict truth that I did not regard Mr. Judson as
properly a human being,--as a man at all. If he had descended from the
planet Jupiter, he could not have been a bit more preternatural and
strange to me. Indeed, I well remember the occasion when the idea of
his proper humanity first flashed upon [15] my mind. It was when I saw
him, one day, beat the old black horse he always rode, apparently in a
passion like any other man. The old black horse--large, fat, heavy,
lazy--figures in my mind almost as distinctly as its master; and if, as it
came down the street, its head were turned aside towards the
school-house, as indicating the rider's intent to visit us, I remember that
the school was thrown into as much commotion as if an armed spectre
were coming down the road. Our awe of him was extreme; yet he loved
to be pleasant with us. He would say,--examining the school was
always a part of his object, "How much is five times seven?"
"Thirty-five," was the ready answer. "Well," replied the old man,
"saying so don't make it so"; a very significant challenge, which we
were ill able to meet. At the close of his visit he always gave an exact
and minute account of the Crucifixion,--I think always, and in the same
terms. It was a mere appeal to physical sympathy, awful, but not
winning. When he stood before us, and, lifting his hands almost to the
ceiling, said, "And so they reared him up!" it seemed as if he described
the catastrophe of the world, not its redemption. Indeed, Mr. Judson
appeared to think that anything drawn from the Bible was good,
whether he made any moral application of it or not. I have heard him
preach a whole sermon, giving the most precise and detailed
description of the building of the Tabernacle, without one word of
comment, [16] inference, or instruction. But he was a good and kindly
man; and when, as I was going to college at the age of eighteen, he laid
his hand upon my head, and gave me, with solemn form and tender
accent, his blessing, I felt awed and impressed, as I imagine the Hebrew
youth may have felt under a patriarch's benediction.
With such an example and teacher of religion before me, whose
goodness I did not know, and whose strangeness and preternatural

character only I 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