Clouds (1789 - 1792)

C H A P T E R I I

Clouds

[ 1739—1792 ]

HE infant Adoniram remained serenely unconscious of the trials his father was having with the First Church of Malden. He slept and waked, cried and smiled, or merely lay in his cradle surveying with round eyes his baby world. He fed and grew. He busied himself with the primary distinctions of babyhood: what was himself, and what was not; what was person, and what was thing. Sometimes there stirred in him a fleeting feeling that something was eXpected of him, but this was no more than a brief, shadowy intimation. He was occupied with other more important matters.

A cold fall gave way to a bitter winter—the twenty winters between 1779 and 1799 were remembered for their unusual severity. On Sundays, while the congregation shivered in spite of their footwarmers, the baby’s father persevered at the task of propounding to his shrunken congregation the H0pkinsian God —— a God Whose vindictiveness was part of His justice, to Whom holiness was universal benevolence or friendly affection to all intelligent beings. This God was a God Whose motive in making man was to provide a being who should glorify Him, no other. Yet the world God made, with all its apparent imperfections, was the best of all possible worlds: for God in the beginning was the only Being; He was perfeCt; He had an infinity of choices as to what kind of world He would create; He created this one; this must be the best world possible. Q.E.D.

When February’s blasts tore with strong fingers at the creaking steeple and the driving snow tumbled in white drifts over the frozen churchyard, the members of the congregation must have listened uneasily to the tumult outside and wondered, their breaths floating in frosty plumes, whether winter itself were not proof enough of Samuel Hopkins’s vindictive justice of God.

But on warm summer Sundays, when the sweet grass-scented air stole gently through the open windows, and the men sank drowsily back in their pews, lulled into lethargy, after a week’s hard labor on farm or at bench, by the faint humming of bees and the distant bells of grazing cattle and the pastor’s measured words, they must have been inclined to reject a theology so dismal, so sourly flavored with infant damnation, and so thinly sweetened with “universal benevolence.”

Certain it was that, as the winter wore on to spring and the snow melted and the buds appeared and the songbirds returned, the contending elements within Malden’s church felt less and less universal benevolence toward each other, and still less toward their pastor, Mr. Judson.

But of what went on in the church a few hundred yards away, the baby Adoniram knew nothing. Within the parsonage, however, he was learning all the time. He sat on his striped blanket on the kitchen floor—not dreaming it would be preserved a century and a half later—watching the flames roaring bright in the fireplace. The fire was pleasantly warm from where he sat, but when he crawled too close he found that it could hurt.

Good came from this fire. Huge joints were roasted in front of it. Occasionally he was allowed a delicious taste of the roasting meat. More often, when he was old enough, he was given a mouthful of vegetables pulped after being ladled from the huge iron kettle that swung from a hook at the corner of the hearth. There were other things to see and smell: the corn his mother pounded in the wooden mortar; the apples sputtering in a row before the glowing coals. Sometimes his mother sprinkled sand on the floor. He tasted it and found it gritty and unpleasant to the tongue. There was a difference in texture and tastes, he realized. Some were undesirable. His mother had even more decided ideas about what was undesirable. He found out early that dirty things were bad, clean things good. And the word “dirty” meant far more than the simple soil of earth.

Very early, much earlier than most babies, he became aware of sounds. There was a pattern in the sounds made by humans. It had

C L O U D S

a meaning, but what it was he did not know as yet. He listened carefully for some clue. His first attempt to reproduce the sounds had instant results. He was praised and smiled upon, picked up and petted. The results encouraged him to try harder; but he suspected there was more to sounds than that they brought forth approval.

He crawled into his second summer and toddled out of it. His world was expanding. From the sloping ground in front of the parsonage he saw, that summer, the traffic on the dusty road through Malden — people walking, people in carriages, boys driving cows, slow spans of oxen so massive that even the heavy wooden yokes seemed to rest lightly on their necks. He saw other animals on the road and on the parsonage groundsmdogs, chickens, but no pigs, for in the summer of 1788 the Selectmen had decreed that swine were not to run loose any more, but must be shut up during the months of August, September, and October. Still, he must have been carried in his father’s arms to see the pigs in the sty behind the house; for Mr. Judson, like other ministers, kept cows and pigs and cultivated his own crops. Ministers were still partly farmers, and farm work in no way detracted from the dignity of their profession.

At this age, his mother was the center of his life. She fed him, warmed him, soothed him, cared for him. Second to her came the black-clad person called variously “your father,” “Sir,” “Mr. Judson,” and—rarely—“Adoniram.” This last was baffling, for he had learned to associate the word “Adoniram” with himself. There was something strange about this person. He was friendly, yet remote. He was to be loved, yet there was something about him that called forth fear.

When his third winter was nearly over and he had become familiar with snow, another person came to live in the house besides his father and mother and the three women who were “the help.” This was a smaller person than he, who lay in a cradle most of the day. She received a great deal of attention—sometimes too much, he thought, since to that degree he himself received less. But on the whole he felt a kinship with her because her size was more like his own. Later, when she had learned to walk, she followed him around like an adoring puppy.

She was born March 21, 1791. Her full name was Abigail Brown Judson, after her mother and grandmother; but Adoniram used for her the names he heard more often: “sister,” or “Abby,” or “Nabby.”

By now Adoniram must have attended a number of church services. There were some interesting things about going to meeting, although the whole business took an awfully long time.

The church was very much in his mind, because he could see it looming in the distance on the other side of the road, not far from craggy Bell Rock. From the outside it looked rather like a big square box. It was boxlike on the inside, too. Inside, the worshipers took their places in other boxes—“pews.” In the pew, Adoniram sat on a stool like the other children; the walls of the pew were higher than his head—to see out he had to stand on the stool on tiptoe, but this was usually forbidden. Surely he did have opportunities, though, to see that the men in each pew sat in the back, the women in front. Ahead of the pews were rows of seats for the singers, and in the very front of the church a few seats for old people who could not see or hear well. The seats for the singers were hinged. When the singers stood up for prayers, they raised the seats. At the final “Amen,” when they sat down, the seats fell down too with a delicious thundering clatter.

But the most important thing about church was Adoniram’s father. He was more important than anybody. He stood all by himself in the pulpit up front and talked to the people, very loudly. Adoniram took a good deal of satisfaction in his father’s importance. It seemed to 'him that his father was master of all the people, because they had to come to his church every week and listen to what he said.

Sometimes, though, Adoniram’s father did not talk to people but to Somebody Else Adoniram could not see, Who seemed to be up on the roof, or even higher, out of sight. This Person had a good many names. He was called “Our Heavenly Father,” “God,” and “Jehovah.” Adoniram had never seen Him, but when he asked he was told he would see Him someday, in a delightful place called “heaven.”

Meanwhile, Adoniram’s father could, evidently, see Our Heavenly Father—because he talked to Him often, at home as well as in church. The Heavenly Father was obviously someone to be feared.

The consequences of disobeying Him were even more frightful than the cold disapproval Adoniram’s disobedience brought from his own father. For, although He liked most people, people He did not like or who had offended Him He put in a hot fire, even bigger and hotter than the hottest fires in the parsonage fireplaces.

Much of the importance of Adoniram’s father resided in books, particularly one Book which he used in church, and into which he would look for hours in the parsonage. This was the Bible, and Adoniram’s mother and father read parts of it aloud to him nearly every evening. Some of the stories were interesting. Others he could not quite understand, but he liked to hear them anyway. At still other times, his father would sit at a table and cover page after page with black marks that flowed from a sharpened goose quill. When his father had finished a page he would sprinkle sand over it, and shake it back and forth and then pour the sand back into its container. This was called “preparing the sermon.” It had something to do with his father’s power, and was very important. In fact, it was so important that Adoniram’s father usually closed the door and Adoniram seldom had a chance to see him use the goose quill. Sometimes Our Heavenly Father would be in there behind the closed door, helping. At least, Adoniram thought so, because once in a while he could hear his father talking to Someone of that name.

Unfortunately, nothing could have been further from the truth than the boy’s conception of his father’s power. His opponents had never stOpped trying to oust him, and at last they were beginning to succeed. By the Spring of 1790 William Bentley, pastor of the East Church in SOphisticated Salem, was able to note with satisfaction that Mr. Judson, one of the Hopkinsian “schemers,” had “become uncomfortable at Malden.”

In another year Mr. Judson’s position became untenable. In early April of 1791, less than two weeks after the birth of little Abigail, he received his “Dismission.” In the tactful words of the official resolution voted by the church: As it is proposed for Mr. Judson to leave us, we think it to be our Duty, d? we feel disposed to be explicit upon the occasion to declare to the world that Mr. Judson has during his ministry among us, conducted agreeably to his profession as a christian, «’9 as a minister of Jesus Christ d9 as such we do recommend him to the world of our fellow christians at large.

He was not to rear his family inothat comfortable parsonage after all. But a minister could not be turned off on a moment’s notice like a farm laborer—particularly not a man like Mr. Judson, who had a keen sense of what was due him in honor and justice, and who, with a wife and two small children dependent upon him, was disposed to insist on his rights.

Certainly even his bitterest opponents could not blame him for standing true to the principles that had brought him a call in the first place. He had not changed; the congregation had changed. And in any case, the controversy had been caused fully as much by parish geography as by anything else.

Armed thus, he was able to make an agreement with the church which provided that although he should cease to be pastor at the end of September, he should have the sole 2’9 uninterrupted use, 69 improvement of the sd. parsonage, without any reserve, one whole Year from the day of his sd. dismission.

This agreement was confirmed and ratified in August, when Adoniram had reached the age of three, by an ecclesiastical council consisting of the Third Church of Salem, the Brattle Street Church of Boston and the Stoneham Church. At least the Judsons would have a roof over their heads for more than a year, while Mr. Judson looked for another pulpit.

The search was a long one. Often during the next year the father was away for days at a time supplying pulpits, undergoing interviews with church committees, calling on his ministerial brethren. Again and again he returned home, tired and anxious, having to admit no success.

It must have been while he was away on one of these expeditions that Abigail prepared for. him the one surprise that she knew would encourage him m05t. For on his return, most likely when he had Stabled the horse, refreshed himself and eaten a little and settled down in a chair by the fire, she opened the Bible and handed it to three-year-old Adoniram. And while the father’s jaw fell slack in amazement, the little boy read aloud a whole chapter. His mother had taught him to read in a week — at the age of three!

Tenderly, perhaps almost tearfully, the Reverend Mr. Judson took his son in his lap and with pride and assurance in his voice told him that surely he would be a great man someday. Anyone who could learn to read at three could not fail to accomplish great things and become a man of note.

The event was to live long in family tradition. Once again it reinforced the father’s ambition for his son. He himself might remain obscure. But his son would make a brilliant name for himself. Adoniram the younger would someday have the world at his feet.

As for the little boy seated on his father’s lap, he listened earnestly and pridefully to his father’s praise. Many of the words he did not understand. But he did understand, somehow, that great efforts were expected of him. Great efforts would win him more praise. He understood that he too was to lead the people, and with greater success than his father. He began, perhaps — for sometimes these things are sensed early —to understand that a way might Open by which he could surpass his father and win his praise, and his mother’s praise, in the doing. The foundations of a powerful determination were building in him.

But none of this found a new church for the Judsons.