The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss | Page 4

than half a century the name of her father has been a household word among the churches not of New England only, but throughout the land and even beyond the sea. It is among the most beloved and honored in the annals of American piety. [1] He belonged to a very old Puritan stock, and to a family noted during two centuries for the number of ministers of the Gospel who have sprung from it. The first in the line of his ancestry in this country was Edward, who came over in the brig Hopewell, William Burdeck, Master, in 1635-6, and settled in the town of Roxbury. He was a native of Nasing, Essex Co., England. Among his fellow-passengers in the Hopewell was Mary Eliot, then a young girl, sister of John Eliot, the illustrious "Apostle to the Indians." Some years later she became his wife. Their youngest son, Samuel, was father of the Rev. Phillips Payson, who was born at Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1705, and settled at Walpole, in the same State, in 1730. He had four sons in the ministry, all, like himself, graduates of Harvard College. The youngest of these, the Rev. Seth Payson, D.D., Mrs. Prentiss' grandfather, was born September 30, 1758, was ordained and settled at Rindge, New Hampshire, December 4, 1782, and died there, after a pastorate of thirty-seven years, February 26, 1820. His wife was Grata Payson, of Pomfret, Conn. He was a man widely known in his day and of much weight in the community, not only in his own profession but in civil life, also, having several times filled the office of State senator. When in 1819 a plan was formed to remove Williams College to a more central location, and several towns competed for the honor, Dr. Payson was associated with Chancellor Kent of New York, and Governor John Cotton Smith of Connecticut, as a committee to decide upon the rival claims. He is described as possessing a sharp, vigorous intellect, a lively imagination, a very retentive memory, and was universally esteemed as an able and faithful minister of Christ. [2]
Edward, the eldest son of Seth and Grata Payson, was born at Rindge, July 25, 1783. His mother was noted for her piety, her womanly discretion, and her personal and mental graces. Edward was her first-born, and from his infancy to the last year of his life she lavished upon him her love and her prayers. The relation between them was very beautiful. His letters to her are models of filial devotion, and her letters to him are full of tenderness, good sense, and pious wisdom. He inherited some of her most striking traits, and through him they passed on to his youngest daughter, who often said that she owed her passion for the use of the pen and her fondness for rhyming to her grandmother Grata. [3]
Edward Payson was in all respects a highly-gifted man. His genius was as marked as his piety. There is a charm about his name and the story of his life, that is not likely soon to pass away. He belonged to a class of men who seem to be chosen of Heaven to illustrate the sublime possibilities of Christian attainment--men of seraphic fervor of devotion, and whose one overmastering passion is to win souls for Christ and to become wholly like Him themselves. Into this goodly fellowship he was early initiated. There is something startling in the depth and intensity of his religious emotions, as recorded in his journal and letters. Nor is it to be denied that they are often marred by a very morbid element. Like David Brainerd, the missionary saint of New England, to whom in certain features of his character he bore no little resemblance, Edward Payson was of a melancholy temperament and subject, therefore, to sudden and sharp alternations of feeling. While he had great capacity for enjoyment, his capacity for suffering was equally great. Nor were these native traits suppressed, or always overruled, by his religious faith; on the contrary, they affected and modified his whole Christian life. In its earlier stages, he was apt to lay too much stress by far upon fugitive "frames," and to mistake mere weariness, torpor, and even diseased action of body or mind, for coldness toward his Saviour. And almost to the end of his days he was, occasionally, visited by seasons of spiritual gloom and depression, which, no doubt, were chiefly, if not solely, the result of physical causes. It was an error that grew readily out of the brooding introspection and self-anatomy which marked the religious habit of the times. The close connection between physical causes and morbid or abnormal conditions of the spiritual life, was not as well understood then as it is now. Many things were ascribed to