Charles E. Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe compiled from her letters and journals by her son Charles Edward Stowe

[36] under her father's advice, to seek to connect herself with the First Church of Hartford. Accordingly, accompanied by two of her school friends, she went one day to the pastor's study to consult with him concerning the contemplated step. The good man listened attentively to the child's simple and modest statement of Christian experience, and then with an awful, though kindly, solemnity of speech and manner said, “Harriet, do you feel that if the universe should be destroyed (awful pause) you could be happy with God alone?” After struggling in vain, in her mental bewilderment, to fix in her mind some definite conception of the meaning of the sounds which fell on her ear like the measured strokes of a bell, the child of fourteen stammered out, “Yes, sir.”

“You realize, I trust,” continued the doctor, “in some measure at least, the deceitfulness of your heart, and that in punishment for your sins God might justly leave you to make yourself as miserable as you have made yourself sinful?”

“ Yes, sir,” again stammered Harriet.

Having thus effectually, and to his own satisfaction, fixed the child's attention on the morbid and oversensitive workings of her own heart, the good and truly kind-hearted man dismissed her with a fatherly benediction. But where was the joyous ecstasy of that beautiful Sabbath morning of a year ago? Where was that heavenly friend? Yet was not this as it should be, and might not God leave her “to make herself as miserable as she had made herself sinful” ?

In a letter addressed to her brother Edward, about this time, she writes:

My whole life is one continued