This "divine call" I had, whether or not it answers to what is commonly meant by that phrase, and I am glad that I obeyed it. But now, how was I to prosecute this design? how carry on the preparatory studies, when my eyes did not permit me to read more than half an hour a day? I hesitated and turned aside, first to teach a school in Sheffield for a year, and next, for another year, to try a life of business in New York. At length, however, my desire for my chosen profession became so irrepressible, that I determined to enter the Theological Seminary at Andover, and to pursue my studies as well as I could without my eyes, expecting afterwards to preach without notes. [41] At Andover I passed three years, attending to the course of studies as well as I was able. I gave to Hebrew the half-hour a day that I was able to study; with the Greek Testament I was familiar enough to go on with my room-mate, Cyrus Byington, {3} who since has spent his life as a missionary among the Choctaws; and for reading I was indebted to his unvarying kindness and that of my classmates and friends. Still, I was left, some hours of every day, to my own meditations. But the being obliged to think for myself upon the theological questions that daily came before [42] the class, instead of reading what others had said about them, seemed to me not without its advantages. {FN 3: Byington was a young lawyer, here in Sheffield, of good abilities and prospects, but under a strong religious impression he determined to quit the law and study theology. He was a man of ardent temperament, whose thoughts were all feelings as well, which, though less reliable as thought, were strong impulses, always directed, consecrated to good ends. A being more unselfish, more ready to sacrifice himself for others, could not easily be found. This spirit made him a missionary. When our class was about leaving Andover, the question was solemnly propounded to us by our teachers, who of us would go to the heathen--I well remember the pain and distress with which Byington examined it,--for no person could be more fondly attached to his friends and kindred,--his final decision to go, and the perfect joy he had in it after his mind was made up. He went to the Choctaw and Cherokee Indians in Florida, and, on their removal to the Arkansas reservation, accompanied them, and spent his life among them. He left, as the fruit of one part of his work, a Choctaw grammar and dictionary, and a yet better result in the improved condition of those people. Late in life, on a visit here, he told me that the converted Indians in Arkansas owned farms around him, laboring, and living as respectably as white people do. Here was that very civilization said to be impossible to the Indian.}