Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography | Page 2

geography by tallow candles; for
no gas lamps had been dreamed of and the wood fires were covered, in
most houses, by nine o'clock on a winter evening. There was plain
living then, but not a little high thinking. If books were not so
superabundant as in these days, they were more thoroughly appreciated
and digested.
My father, who was just winning a brilliant position at the Cayuga

County Bar, died in June, 1826, at the early age of twenty-eight, when I
was but four and one-half years old. The only distinct recollections that
I have of him are his leading me to school in the morning, and that he
once punished me for using a profane word that I had heard from some
rough boys. That wholesome bit of discipline kept me from ever
breaking the Third Commandment again. After his death, I passed
entirely into the care of one of the best mothers that God ever gave to
an only son. She was more to me than school, pastor or church, or all
combined. God made mothers before He made ministers; the progress
of Christ's kingdom depends more upon the influence of faithful, wise,
and pious mothers than upon any other human agency.
As I was an only child, my widowed mother gave up her house and
took me to the pleasant home of her father, Mr. Charles Horton Morrell,
on the banks of the lake, a few miles south of Aurora. How thankful I
have always been that the next seven or eight years of my happy
childhood were spent on the beautiful farm of my grandfather! I had the
free pure air of the country, and the simple pleasures of the farmhouse;
my grandfather was a cultured gentleman with a good library, and at his
fireside was plenty of profitable conversation. Out of school hours I did
some work on the farm that suited a boy; I drove the cows to the
pasture, and rode the horses sometimes in the hay-field, and carried in
the stock of firewood on winter afternoons. My intimate friends were
the house-dog, the chickens, the kittens and a few pet sheep in my
grandfather's flocks. That early work on the farm did much toward
providing a stock of physical health that has enabled me to preach for
fifty-six years without ever having spent a single Sabbath on a
sick-bed!
My Sabbaths in that rural home were like the good old Puritan
Sabbaths, serene and sacred, with neither work nor play. Our church
(Presbyterian) was three miles away, and in the winter our family often
fought our way through deep mud, or through snow-drifts piled as high
as the fences. I was the only child among grown-up uncles and aunts,
and the first Sunday-school that I ever attended had only one scholar,
and my good mother was the superintendent. She gave me several
verses of the Bible to commit thoroughly to memory and explained

them to me; I also studied the Westminster Catechism. I was expected
to study God's Book for myself, and not to sit and be crammed by a
teacher, after the fashion of too many Sunday-schools in these days,
where the scholars swallow down what the teacher brings to them, as
young birds open their mouths and swallow what the old bird brings to
the nest. There is a lamentable ignorance of the language of Scripture
among the rising generation of America, and too often among the
children of professedly Christian families.
The books that I had to feast on in the long winter evenings were
"Robinson Crusoe," "Sanford and Merton," "The Pilgrim's Progress,"
and the few volumes in my grandfather's library that were within the
comprehension of a child of eight or ten years old. I wept over "Paul
and Virginia," and laughed over "John Gilpin," the scene of whose
memorable ride I have since visited at the "Bell of Edmonton," During
the first quarter of the nineteenth century drunkenness was fearfully
prevalent in America; and the drinking customs wrought their sad
havoc in every circle of society. My grandfather was one of the first
agriculturists to banish intoxicants from his farm, and I signed a pledge
of total abstinence when I was only ten or eleven years old. Previously
to that, I had got a taste of "prohibition" that made a profound
impression on me. One day I discovered some "cherrybounce" in a
wine-glass on my grandfather's sideboard, and I ventured to swallow
the tempting liquor. When my vigilant mother discovered what I had
done, she administered a dose of Solomon's regimen in a way that
made me "bounce" most merrily. That wholesome chastisement for an
act of disobedience, and in the direction of tippling, made me a
teetotaller for life; and, let me add, that the first public