er ways of speaking and
moving very graceful, and she took us up in her lap and let us play
with her beautiful hands which seemed wonderful things, made of pearl
and ornamented with strange rings." It appears she was a faithful
mother, though a little severe and repressive. Henry Ward Beecher said
of her: "She did the office-work of a mother if ever a mother did";
she "performed to the uttermost her duties, according to her ability";
she "was a woman of profound veneration rather than of a warm loving
nature. Therefore her prayer was invariably a prayer of deep yearning
reverence. I remember well the impression which it made on me. There
was a mystic influence about it. A sort of sympathetic hold it had on
me, but still I always felt when I went to prayer, as though I were
going into a crypt, where the sun was not allowed to come; and I
shrunk from it." To complete the portrait of this conscientious lady
who was to have the supervision of Harriet from her sixth year, the
following from a letter of one of the Beecher children is worth
quoting: "Mamma is well and don't laugh any more than she did."
Evidently a rather stern and sobering influence had come into the
Beecher family.

"In her religion," says Mrs. Stowe, "she was distinguished by a most
unfaltering Christ-worship.... Had it not been that Dr. Payson had
set up and kept before her a tender, human, loving Christ, she would
have been only a conscientious bigot. This image, however, gave
softness and warmth to her religious life, and I have since noticed
how her Christ-enthusiasm has sprung up in the hearts of all her
children." This passage is of peculiar interest as it shows the source
of what Mrs. Stowe loves to call the "Christ-worship" which
characterized the religion of the younger Beechers. Writing at the age
of seventeen, when her soul was tossing between Scylla and Charybdis,
Harriet says: "I feel that I love God,--that is, that I love Christ";
and in 1876, writing of her brother Henry, she says, "He and I are
Christ-worshippers, adoring him as the Image of the Invisible
God." Her son refers us to the twenty-fourth chapter of the
Minister's Wooing for a complete presentation of this subject "of
Christ-worship." Mrs. Stowe speaks of this belief as a plain departure
from ordinary Trinitarianism, as a kind of heresy which it has
required some courage to hold. The heresy seems to have consisted in
practically dropping the first and third persons in the Godhead