"No One Who Ever Came Under My Shadow Prospered"
with Thomas Shepard in his family life he was wont to say that for his part he thought the Papists had the right way of it with their ministers. At any rate, for myself, I wish I had remained a celibate minister all my days, Shepard was wont to say to himself when anything went wrong with him in his family life. Other men, he was wont to say, might not always manage their family life very successfully, but a minister’s breakdown at home was to Shepard a very tragical and a very disastrous thing. He had known many ministers, both in Old England and in New England, whose family life was a great success in every way. But that was because those ministers were such wise and good men themselves, and because they were so wise and good at managing themselves and their families. But as for himself, neither wife, nor child, nor servant, nor guest prospered, spiritually, under his shadow. So he says, again and again, in his
Qv secret journal to himself and written against himself. Nobody but himself thought that about Shepard. Many a New England minister secretly envied Shepard for his so honourable and his so happy family life. And many an unhappy wife and mother in New England dwelt in her heart on the extraordinary happiness of Thomas Shepard’s manse. All the same, never was there more sincerity or more poignancy in any heart-broken confession than when Shepard entered it again and again in his most private papers — that under the blighting shadow of his presence neither old nor young ever really prospered. Thales was so fond of children that nothing would persuade him to become a father. And though Thomas Shepard became the father of more children than one, he loved and pitied his children so much that he often wished they had never been born: at any rate to him.
1. As I go over and over Thomas Shepard’s Meditations and Spiritual Experiences I find these four faults of his filling Shepard’s heart and conscience with a great remorse. First, his too great love for his books and his too much time spent in his study. Had Shepard been a celibate priest instead of a Protestant and Puritan pastor, his love for his books and his long hours in his study would all have been to be commended. But with his family neglected, his pulpit and his class studies became his besetting sin. He laments in one place his ‘ ragged style’ in writing, as well he may. But far better write a ragged style than bring up and send out ragged children into the world. Shepard lived among his books before he was married, and he continued to live too much among them after he was a married man and a father of a family. And that bad habit of his was very near being the ruin of his household life. Ministers, says Samuel Rutherford, of all men are made up of extremes. Some ministers ruin themselves and their families and their people, and all beyond redemption, by their sinful neglect of their sacred studies. And then there is one minister here and another there like Thomas Shepard, who imperil their own and their children’s souls by their intemperate and untimeous devotion to their books and to their desks. But the beauty of Thomas Shepard was that he discovered his mistake and set himself to rectify his mistake before it was too late. He continued to love his books and to labour at his sermons, but he gave more and more time and thought to make his children living epistles to be known and read of all men. You are not ministers and you do not have the peculiar temptations of ministers. But you are bankers, and lawyers, and merchants, and schoolmasters and so on; and, withal, many of you are great lovers of good books. Now Thomas Shepard, though he has been over two centuries dead, comes back to-night to warn you that no bank, and no office, and no shop, and no book, must steal away your time and your thought and your affection from your wife and your children. And if that has been your temptation in the past, take this of the remorseful Psalmist for your prayer and for your vow henceforth: ‘O when wilt thou come to me? And I will behave myself in a perfect way. I will walk within my house with a perfect heart.’
2. Shepard was not an ordinary man in anything, and least of all in his family worship. Now though you would not expect it of such a man his family worship caused Shepard many a remorseful moment. Never was that Prophetic and Puritan ordinance observed better than by the New England fathers, and every one would have said never better than in Thomas Shepard’s New England manse. But he did not think so himself. Like all thinking men who take that first of family duties aright to heart, as his family grew up, Shepard keenly felt the ever-increasing difficulty of performing that family duty as it ought to be performed. That is to say, he felt the ever-increasing difficulty of his being able to interest, and to instruct, and to impress, and to carry along with him all his household, rightly dividing the word of truth to each several one of them, from the youngest to the oldest, and from the stable-boy to the student. We know how well Thomas Halyburton succeeded in family worship in spite of all his difficulties. ‘ Most willingly I engaged in that duty, and when I was engaged in it my soul often made me like the chariots of Amminadib. I was not easily stopped. I failed sometimes in the just bounds. But with all my mistakes, as far as I reckon, it was about this time that the Lord first began to commend Himself and His worship to Lady Anne Elcho, which made her at her death to bless the Lord for my family worship.’ And Shepard’s three sons all blessed the Lord at their death for their father’s family worship also, though their irregularity at it, and their irreverence during it, had often given their father a sore heart. But he never blamed any of them for that so much as he blamed himself. No! he often said to himself as he went back to his books after another unsuccessful effort at family worship: No! no one prospers, either in family worship or in anything else, under my all-blighting shadow!
3. Another thing that filled poor Shepard’s heart and conscience with an ever-running sore was his life-long failure to speak in time and to speak aright to his children about their own personal religion. He often tried to come round upon that matter in his family readings of the Word, and in his family prayers, but wholly without result. Not one of his children seemed to him to be one atom the better of all his expositions and all his exhortations and all his prayers. His servants often acknowledged what they owed to the family worship of the New Cambridge manse, and his guests would often write back to tell him the same thing, but never wife nor child to the day of his death. Was it any wonder that he wrote that terrible sentence about his baleful shadow again and again and with secret tears! Because, as I have told you, in all this he blamed nobody but himself. ‘I wanted wisdom to speak to them aright, and I put it off till it was too late. I could not find the right time in which to do it, nor the right way in which to do it, till time went on and it was not done at all.’ At their latest and best I do not find in Shepard’s extant Experiences anything so happy as was the experience of a minister friend of mine in the Highlands to whom his son explained and said: ‘It was your own family worship, father, that did it to me!” ‘I saw,’ wrote Shepard, ‘ what a blessing it would be if my son’s salvation came to him through me.’ And his eldest son’s salvation did at last come to him. And I shall continue to believe that it came to him, somehow, through his father, though the family papers that are extant do not say whether it was through his father’s soawakening pulpit work or through his so well-studied family worship, or most likely through his father’s so heart-chastened walk and conversation both at home and abroad. Enough that his salvation came in time, both to Shepard’s eldest son and to his two brothers. Before they were born Shepard had set his whole heart on having all his three sons to be New England ministers. And after many appearances the other way he at last got his whole heart’s desire. And that because, as he so boldly said, he would not let God off from one of His promises concerning his sons. ‘I will not let Thee go in this matter of my sons!’ so Shepard would sometimes wrestle about this one thing till the daybreak. There had been a long time during which there was not the slightest prospect of his importunate and concentrated prayer ever being answered. But though he does not himself say so in any of his papers that I have found, I have reason to believe that it was on the very night on which he first wrote this about his all-blighting shadow, and that with an ink of sweat and tears, that the tide began to turn in respect of his three sons. As he saw his three sons setting out, one after another, to the Harvard Hall, I hear their enraptured father taking back all his hard speeches about God, and indeed all his hard speeches about himself and his sons, and substituting in place of those hard speeches such a psalm as this: ‘Gracious is the Lord and righteous: Yea, our God is merciful. The Lord preserveth the simple: I was brought low, and He helped me. O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself, but in Me is thy help.’
4. Yet another thing that caused Shepard great sadness of heart was his constitutional gloom of mind and his too melancholy temperament taken along with his so easily crossed temper. Altogether, substitute Thomas Shepard the New England Puritan, for Santa Teresa the Spanish Superior, and you will have his exact case, as he saw and felt it to be, in his home life. Thomas Shepard could not express himself so well as Santa Teresa could, but in substance and essence they both say the same thing. ‘ My children, she said on her death-bed, ‘ you must pardon me much. You must pardon me most of all the bad example I have given you. Do not imitate me. Do not live as I have lived. I have been the greatest sinner in all Spain. I have not kept the laws that I have made for other people. I beseech you, my daughters, for the love of God, that you keep the rules of your holy house as I have never kept them. But, then, the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart Thou, O God, wilt not despise.’ Thomas Shepard and Teresa of Jesus would not have spoken to one another on earth. But they are now praising God together in glory, and are continually saying: ‘ By Thy great grace to us here are we ourselves, and all the spiritual children that Thou didst give us.’