The Spirit of the Woods
A Confession
By Ernest Thompson Seton, Author of “Wild Animals I have Known.” etc.
Drawings by The Author
The sum of my early religious training was that everything human is bad, and born of the devil. The favorite text was, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked”, and the total depravity of human nature was the logical and accepted conclusion.
It was on Sundays that these doctrines were most effectively dramatized. The Sunday routine of my early boyhood, when we lived in Toronto, was to rise as late as we dared, about seven forty-five; read a chapter of the Bible and a psalm, then say private prayers, each of us in his bedroom, before coming down. A long grace before breakfast came next, with solemn remarks on the wickedness of everybody. After breakfast, came family worship. Father would read a chapter or two from the Bible and a psalm of David, and then all would kneel while he read a long prayer, finishing with the Lord’s Prayer, in which all joined.
“Now, children, to Sunday school”, mother would then say, and we were hurried off to Cooke’s Church Mission Sunday School, on Elizabeth Street. It opened at nine-thirty, but we were always ready ahead of time; mother saw to that. Returning from this, we were hustled off to the – Street Presbyterian Church to hear the Rev. Mr. Blank dilate on the hot horrors of the world into which we were all likely to land. He began at eleven and was supposed to end at half past twelve, but he never did; he always ran over, and it was nearly one o’clock before we escaped. I can see him yet, a hard creature of irreproachable personal life. In his eyes was a gleam of madness. His followers called it inspiration, as he dilated on the immortal glory of the great Calvin who burned Servetus at the stake and set up a devil in place of a wise and gracious Creator.
Arrived at home, we had our mid-day dinner after a long grace; then mother would say, “Now be sure you are ready for Sunday school”. “Being ready” meant learning some hideous garble of doctrine out of what we later called “John Calvin’s joke-book”, then better known as the “Shorter Catechism”. Shorter! Was that shorter?
At three o’clock we had Sunday school in the basement of the old – Street Church, and there supposedly for one hour, though really for an hour and a half, we were overwhelmed with the stern doctrines of the time.
At five we would get home. Father, having had a nap, now took a walk, always over mother’s protest. She maintained, with a host of texts from the Old Testament, that it was ungodly to ..text pokračuje
