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nature merely, but the sufferings of the divine nature in Him. In
Christ we see the only revelation of God, and that is the revelation of one that suffers.
This is the fundamental idea in
The minister's Wooing, and it is the idea of God in which the stormtossed soul of the older sister at last found rest.
All this was directly opposed to that fundamental principle of theologians that God, being the infinitely perfect Being, cannot suffer, because suffering indicates imperfection.
To
Miss Beecher's mind the lack of ability to suffer with his suffering creatures was a more serious imperfection.
Let the reader turn to the twenty-fourth chapter of
The minister's Wooing for a complete presentation of this subject, especially the passage that begins, “Sorrow is divine: sorrow is reigning on the throne of the universe.”
In the fall of the year 1824, while her sister Catherine was passing through the soul crisis which we have been describing, Harriet came to the school that she had recently established.
In a letter to her son written in 1886, speaking of this period of her life, Mrs. Stowe says:
Somewhere between my twelfth and thirteenth year I was placed under the care of my elder sister Catherine, in the school that she had just started in Hartford, Connecticut.
When I entered the school there were not more than twenty-five scholars in it, but it afterwards numbered its pupils by the hundreds.
The school-room was on Main Street, nearly opposite Christ Church, over Sheldon & Colton's harness store, at the sign of the two white horses.
I never shall forget the pleasure and surprise which these two white horses produced in my
