A religious atmosphere pervaded the place. It left the deepest impress upon my mind. The only paper we took was Zion's Herald, a religious weekly published by Stevens, of Boston. The difference between this calm, religious life of the Methodists and the turbulent, rough, and swearing life of the fo'cas'le was very marked. But it took me a long time to get away from the atmosphere of the fo'cas'le and into that of the Methodists. Even the bath and the clean clothes did not seem to change me very much. I discovered that cleanliness is not so very near to godliness, after all.
Of course the old Methodists had prayers in the morning and at night, and they had grace at every meal. Every one knelt at prayers. But they could not make me kneel. I would not bow the knee. I had not got over the sailors' ways, and the monkeys, and the throwing down sugar from the plantation in the sails--the Santa Claus part of it. I always remembered it.
Of course I was taken to the little church, a mile off up in the woods, where my grandfather preached. It was in his "circuit." As we were coming home one day, and I was driving, the chaise struck a stone, and the old gentleman was jostled considerably. He impatiently seized the reins from me and gave the horse a severe flip with them, and drove the rest of the way himself. The little incident made a deep impression on my mind. I said to myself: "If this is the way Christians act, I do not want to have anything to do with them."
The Pickerings were an ancient Southern--and before that, an English--family. Some of the members lived in South Carolina, some in Virginia, others in Maryland. One of them sat in Washington's first cabinet. Like my grandfather, they were all slave-owners. Judge Gilbert Pickering was chairman of Cromwell's committee that cut off King Charles's head. Grandfather Pickering was a liberal man in many ways. I have spoken already of his freeing his own slaves. He chose the calling of an itinerant Methodist preacher, when to do so meant tremendous financial sacrifice and the loss of social rank. He almost starved at it, but he stuck to it with great nobleness of mind. It gave him a sort of religious freedom.
Once he could have been a bishop in the New England branch of Methodism; but he refused the ambitious title. He did not believe in bishops for their church. And so, setting aside every offer of preferment, every opportunity of rising or getting on in the world, he chose to labor at his simple calling, like a martyr. And he would shortly have found martyrdom in starvation, had it not been for my lovely grandmother, with her thrift and care.