FullReads

Chapin was a graduate of Bennington Seminary, the school that also graduated the father of Robert Ingersoll. On Chapin’s request Theodore Parker, himself a Harvard man, sent Starr King over to Cambridge to preach. Boston was a college town–filled with college traditions, and when one thinks of sending out this untaught stripling to address college men, we can not but admire the temerity of both Chapin and Parker. “He has never attended a Divinity School,” writes Chapin to Deacon Obadiah B. Queer of Quincy, “but he is educated just the same. He speaks Greek, Hebrew, French, German, and fairly good English, as you will see. He knows natural history and he knows humanity; and if one knows man and Nature, he comes pretty close to knowing God.”

Where did this drygoods-clerk get his education? Ah, I’ll tell you–he got his education as the lion’s whelp gets his. The lioness does not send her cub away to a lioness that has no cubs in order that he may be taught. The lion nature gets what it needs with its mother’s milk and by doing.

Schools and colleges are cumbrous makeshifts, often forcing truth on pupils out of season, and thus making lessons grievous. “The soul knows all things,” says Emerson, “and knowledge is only a remembering.” “When the time is ripe, men know,” wrote Hegel. At the last we can not teach anything–nothing is imparted. We can not make the plants and flowers grow–all we can do is to supply the conditions, and God does the rest. In education we can only supply the conditions for growth–we can not impart, nor force the germs to unfold.

Starr King’s mother was his teacher. Together they read good books, and discussed great themes. She read for him and he studied for her. She did not treat him as a child–things that interested her she told to him. The sunshine of her soul was reflected upon his, and thus did he grow. I know a woman whose children will be learned, even though they never enter a schoolroom. This woman is a companion to her children and her mind vitalizes theirs. This does not mean that we should at once do away with schools and colleges, but it does reveal the possible. To read and then discuss with a strong and sympathetic intellect what you read is to make the thought your own–it is a form of exercise that brings growth.

Starr King’s mother was not a wonderful nor a famous person–I find no mention of her in Society’s Doings of the day–nothing of her dress or equipage. If she was “superbly gowned,” we do not know it; if she was ever one of the “unbonneted,” history is silent. All we know is, that together they read Bulfinch’s “Mythology,” Grote’s “History of Greece,” Plutarch, Dante and Shakespeare. We know that she placed a light in the window for him to make his home-coming cheerful, that together they sipped their midnight tea, that together they laughed, and sometimes wept–but not for long.

* * * * *

In Eighteen Hundred Forty-six Chapin was thirty-two years old. Starr King was twenty-two. A call had reached Chapin to come up higher; but he refused to leave the old church at Charlestown unless Starr King was to succeed him. To place a young man in the position of pastor where he has sat in the pews, his feet not reaching the floor, is most trying. Starr King knew every individual man, woman and child in the church, and they had known him since babyhood. In appearance he was but a boy, and the dignity that is supposed to send conviction home was entirely wanting.

But Chapin had his way and the boy was duly ordained and installed as pastor of the First Universalist Church of Charlestown.