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 storm-tossed 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.
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