Autobiographies
by J. C. Philpot
What is called autobiography, that is, the life of
a man written by himself, has always in it a peculiar charm, especially if
the incidents recorded are striking, and the writer has the faculty, given
to few, of presenting them in a clear, graphic, and vivid form. A heavy,
dull, confused style may make the most remarkable incidents in action,
wearisome in narration; and as we often see in our private communion with
Christian people, the best experiences may be spoiled by the badness of
telling them. No author has ever survived his own day who has not been
gifted with a vivid, original, and life-like style, for what is wearisome to
read is soon not read at all. Here Mr. Huntington peculiarly shines. He is
never dull, never prosy, never commonplace, never confused, never
unintelligible. The buoyancy of his style is remarkable, and bears his books
and letters up so that they never become wearisome. Seasoned with heavenly
salt, and enlivened with the most sprightly and original sallies of wit and
humour, they possess a peculiar freshness, so that they become neither dry
nor moldy.
But there is another reason why autobiography to most men
has a peculiar charm. As God has fashioned our hearts alike, and as in water
face answers to face, so the heart of man to man, every reader seems to read
more or less of his own history in the narrative of another. If we have not
been in precisely the same, we have been in similar circumstances, and, what
he felt in such or such particular crises of his life, we have felt, if not
with the same intensity, at like periods of our own history. There are few
readers also in whose real life, or in whose waking dreams, if their actual
history has been but commonplace, there has not been a tinge more or less
marked of what, for lack of a better word, we may call romance.
There has been some blighted youthful love, or early
bereavement of an almost adored object, or some deep-seated, unrequited
affection, or some cruel desertion, or some violated trust. As the
grey-headed and the middle-aged appear to our young folk, it never strikes
their mind that these grave old fogies were once young, and that under their
cold, as they think, bosom the fires of their youth still sleep under the
ashes. It is these sleeping fires which autobiography stirs, and thus
interests as deeply the old as the young.
Have you, aged reader, no secrets under that grave
exterior which you carry? Had you no struggling childhood, or oppressed
youth; no incidents never to be forgotten, in which you were a great sinner
or a great sufferer? Now these passages in your past life, as they at the
time stirred up the secret depths of your heart, have they not left behind
indelible impressions which again and again recur, sometimes in your dreams
when the buried past becomes a risen present, and sometimes in the
thoughtful meditations of your waking mind, when, in a melancholy mood, you
brood over the days that are forever gone!
How many things have we in times past said or done which
we have kept buried in the silence of our own bosom! There are secrets which
husband never tells to wife, nor wife to husband, daughter to mother, or
sister to sister, brother to brother, or friend to friend. And as in many
cases it would not be right or expedient to confess them, so would it be
little else than treason against friendship and confidence to seek to
extract them. And yet our inward consciousness that we have a history of our
own makes the self-narrated history of another so interesting as
often meeting us in those very points in which, concerning ourselves, we
preserve a prudent silence.
If then, autobiography is interesting to all, how much
more is the pleasure and interest of it increased to that heart where grace
has set up its throne; and if our life history has been especially marked by
providential interposition, how strengthening to faith it is to read of the
providential dealings of God in a still more marked manner with others of
his living family. The lines, too, of providence and grace are usually so
blended together, or rather so closely interwoven, that, like a compact web,
they mutually strengthen each other. The same God, who is a God of
providence, is also a God of grace, and usually appears most conspicuously
in the former as he deals more clearly in the latter. When faith is low, or
when trials and afflictions do not abound, his providential hand is little
seen; but as afflictions are sent, and faith is given with them, then once
more the out-stretched hand of the Lord is seen and recognized.
Nor let any one either misunderstand or quarrel with our
expression "romantic," even as applicable to religious biography. Look at
the history of Jacob, or the history of Joseph, or the history of David. The
love of Jacob for Rachel, the meeting of Joseph and his brethren in Egypt,
the parting of David and Jonathan, when "they kissed one another and wept
one with another—with David weeping especially hard." Cold must be the heart
which does not respond even naturally to the life-like touches of these
romantic incidents.
By romantic we do not mean anything connected with novels
and romances—but those incidents of life which are distinct from mere
commonplace events and stir up the deep feelings of the human heart. In this
sense much, Huntington's "Bank of Faith" is truly romantic, and owes to it
much of its beauty as well as its popularity and charm. Something peculiar
was stamped upon its author from the very first. His very birth—offspring,
as he was of a double adultery, his starving childhood, his early yet, in
its consequences, miserable and disgraceful love, his wanderings when he
fled from the strong arm of justice in hunger and almost nakedness, his call
by grace and his call to the ministry, with his persecutions and sufferings
at the coal barge and the cobbler's stall—have not all these incidents, told
by himself in his own inimitable style, thrown around him a peculiar halo
which, if we call it romantic—we merely mean striking and removed from
commonplace?