Читать книгу Russell H. Conwell, Founder of the Institutional Church in America - Agnes Rush Burr - Страница 10

The Family Circle. An Unusual Mother. What She Read Her Children. A

Preacher at Three Years of Age.

Such was the heritage and the home into which Russell H. Conwell was born February 15, 1843. Think what a world his eyes opened upon—"fair, searching eyes of youth"—steadfast hills holding mystery and fascination in green depths and purple distances, streams rushing with noisy joy over stony beds, sweet violet gloom of night with brilliant stars moving silently across infinite space; tender moss, delicate fern, creeping vine, covering the brown earth with living beauty—a fascinating world of loveliness for boyish eyes to look upon and wonder about.

The home inside was as unpretentious as its exterior suggested. The tiny hall admitted on one side to a bedroom, on the other to a living room, from which opened a room used as a store. Above was an attic. The living room was the bright, cheery heart of the house. The morning sun poured in through two windows which faced the east; a window and door on the south claimed the same cheery rays as the sun journeyed westward. The big open fireplace made a glowing spot of brightness. The floor was uncarpeted, the walls unpapered, the furnishing of the simplest, yet cheerfulness and homely comfort pervaded the room as with an almost tangible spirit.

A brother three years older and a sister three years younger made a trio of bright, childish faces about the hearth on winter evenings as the years went by, while the mother read to them such tales as childish minds could grasp. It was a loving little circle, one that riveted sure and fast the ties of family affection and which helped one boy at her knee in after life to enter with such sure sympathy into the plain, simple lives of the humblest people he met. He had lived that same life, he knew the family affection that grows with such strength around simple firesides, and those of like circumstances felt this knowledge and opened their hearts to him.

That Miranda Conwell was an unusual woman for those times and circumstances is shown in those readings to her children. Not only did she read and explain to them the beautiful stories of the Bible, implanting its truths in their impressionable natures to blossom forth later in beautiful deeds; but she read them the best literature of the ancient days as well as current literature. Into this poor New England home came the "New York Tribune" and the "National Era." The letters of foreign correspondents opened to their childish eyes another world and roused ambitions to see it. Henry Ward Beecher's sermons, and "Uncle Tom's Cabin," when it came out as a serial, all such good and helpful literature, she poured into the eager childish ears. These readings went on, all through the happy days of childhood.

Interesting things were happening in the world then; things that were to mould the future of one of the boys at her knee in a way she little dreamed. A war was being waged in Mexico to train soldiers for a greater war coming. Out in Illinois, a plain rail-splitter, farmer and lawyer was beginning to be heard in the cause of freedom and justice for all men, black or white. These rumors and discussions drifted into the little home and arguments rose high around the crackling woodfire as neighbors dropped in. Martin Conwell was not a man to watch passively the trend of events. He took sides openly, vigorously, and though the small, blue-eyed boy listening so attentively did not comprehend all that it was about, Martin Conwell's views later took shape in action that had a marked bearing on Russell's later life.

But the mother's reading bore more immediate, if less useful, fruit. Hearing rather unusual sounds from the back yard one day, she went to the door to listen. The evening before she had been reading the children one of the sermons of Henry Ward Beecher and telling them something of this great man and his work. Mounted upon one of the largest gray rocks in the yard, stood Russell, solemnly preaching to a collection of wondering, round-eyed chickens. It was a serious, impressive discourse he gave them, much of it, no doubt, a transcript of Henry Ward Beecher's. What led his boyish fancy to do it, no one knew, though many another child has done the same, as children dramatize in play the things they have heard or read. But a chance remark stamped that childish action upon the boyish imagination, making it the corner stone of many a childish castle in Spain. Telling her husband of it in the evening, Miranda Conwell said, half jokingly, "our boy will some day be a great preacher." It was a fertile seed dropped in a fertile mind, tilled assiduously for a brief space by vivid childish imagination; but not ripened till sad experiences of later years brought it to a glorious fruition.

Another result of the fireside readings might have been serious. A short distance from the house a mountain stream leaps and foams over the stones, seeming to choose, as Ruskin says, "the steepest places to come down for the sake of the leaps, scattering its handfuls of crystal this way and that as the wind takes them." The walls of the gorge rise sheer and steep; the path of the stream is strewn with huge boulders, over which it foams snow white, pausing in quiet little pools for breath before the next leap and scramble. Here and there at the sides, stray tiny little waterfalls, very Thoreaus of streamlets, content to wander off by themselves, away from the noisy rush of the others, making little silvery rills of beauty in unobtrusive ways. Over this gorge was a fallen log. Russell determined to enact the part of Eliza in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," fleeing over the ice. It was a feat to make a mother's heart stand still. Three separate times she whipped him severely and forbade him to do it. He took the punishment cheerfully, and went back to the log. He never gave up until he had crossed it.

The vein of perseverance in his character was already setting into firm, unyielding mould—the one trait to which Russell H. Conwell, the preacher, the lecturer, writer, founder of college and hospital, may attribute the success he has gained. This childish escapade was the first to strike fire from its flint.