Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. | Page 4

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 impressions [18]about nature; about the material world upon which childhood has alighted, and of which it must necessarily be ignorant; about clouds and storms and tempests; and of the heavens above, sun and moon and stars! I remember well when the fable of the Happy Valley in Rasselas was a reality to me; when I thought the sun rose and set for us alone, and how I pitied the glorious orb, as it sunk behind the western mountain, to think that it must pass through a sort of Hades, through a dark underworld, to come up in the east again. It is a curious fact, that the Egyptians in the morning of the world had the same ideas. Shall I blame Providence for this? Could it be otherwise? If earthly things are so mistaken, is it strange that heavenly things are? And especially shall I call in question this order of things,--this order, whether of men's or of the world's progress, when I see that it is not only inevitable, the necessary allotment for an experimenting and improving nature, which is human nature, but when I see too that each stage of progress has its own special advantages; that "everything is beautiful in its time;" that fears, superstitions, errors, quicken imagination and restrain passion as truly as doubts, reasonings, strugglings, strengthen the judgment, mature the moral nature, and lead to light?
I am dilating upon all this too much, perhaps. I let my pen run. Sitting down here in the blessed [19]country home, with nothing else in particular just now to do, at the age of sixty-three, I have time and am disposed to look back into my early life and to reason upon it; and although I have nothing uncommon to relate, yet what pertains to me has its own interest and significance, just as if no other being had ever existed, and therefore I set down my experience and my reflections simply as they present themselves to me.
In casting back my eyes upon this earliest period of my life, there are some things which I recall, which may amuse my grandchildren, if they should ever be inclined to look over these pages, and some of which they may find curious, as things of a bygone time.
Children now know nothing of what "'Lection" was in those days, the annual period, that is, when the newly elected State government came in. It was in the last week in May. How eager were we boys to have the corn planted before that time! The playing could not be had till the work was done. The sports and the entertainments were very simple. Running about the village street, hither and thither, without much aim; stands erected for the sale of gingerbread and beer,--home-made beer, concocted of sassafras roots and wintergreen leaves, etc.; games of ball, not base-ball, as now is the fashion, yet with wickets,--this was about all, except that at the end there was always horse-racing.
Having witnessed this exciting sport in my [20] boyhood, without any suspicion of its being wrong, and seen it abroad in later days, in respectable company, I was led, very innocently, when I was a clergyman in New York, into what was thought a great misdemeanor. I was invited by some gentlemen, and went with them, to the races on Long Island. I met on the boat, as we were returning, a parishioner of mine, who expressed great surprise, and even a kind of horror, when I told him what