Memoirs of John Adams Dix; comp. by his son, Morgan Dix.

16

MEMOIRS OF JOHN ADAMS DIX.

a stove. To this arctic temperature we were exposed two
hours in the morning and two in the afternoon.* The sermon was almost always an hour long; and the prayers and
psalms, and reading of the Scriptures, occupied about the
same time. In my whole life I have never suffered so much
from cold. My mother always took a foot-stove with her,
and it was more frequently under my feet than hers. In the
sleigh on our way to meeting we were always comfortable, for
we were enveloped in buffalo-skins. But we could not take
them with us into the meeting-house. When the wind was
high the cold was nearly insupportable. The window-sashes
vibrated and rattled in their loose frames, and the cold air
poured upon us through numberless inlets. My feelings were
anything but devotional; and I pray God to forgive me the
many secret irreverences of which I was guilty. The preacher was a learned and a conscientious man;t but I hated his
long discourses (drawn out, as it seemed to me, with a malicious
perverseness) when I was perishing with cold. The strangest
speculations took possession of my mind. I had read in some
book in my father's library that certain holy men had voluntarily submitted to the severest inflictions. One, whose name
does not occur to me, lived on the top of a column for a number of years, exposed to all the vicissitudes of the seasons.
Supposing him to have lived in a good climate, I wondered
whether he suffered as much as our preacher, holding forth by
the hour in an atmosphere fifty degrees below freezing-point.
I wondered whether the latter, like the holy father, was acting
on a principle of self-infliction, or whether he was punishing
his congregation for their stubbornness in sin. If his motive
was merely personal, then I wondered why he could not dismiss the congregation and perform the penance by himself,
* It appears that in 1827 a stove was purchased, the following item appearing on the society records: " Voted to purchase at auction one cord
hard pine-wood, two feet long, split for stove, to be cut in the spring;
which was struck off to Lieut. Nathan H. Holt, at $1 50."
t The Rev. Samuel Wood.