The year 1829, when Harriet was sixteen years old, was a period of especial despondency. Catherine, worried about her state of health, sent her to spend a summer at Nut Plains. There at the Foote homestead, the rest in the beautiful country, and we may imagine, the regular meals and the abundance of good sleep, did wonders for tired Harriet. In that year the Beecher home was moved from Litchfield to Boston, where Dr. Beecher had been called to the pastorate of the Hanover Street Church. Now the atmosphere of any house in which Lyman Beecher dwelt would perforce be stirred by theological controversy. As Harriet’s brother Henry said, “Theology was the food we ate, and the milk we drank, and the air we breathed, and the ground we trod, from our earliest years.” But the new surroundings into which Dr. Beecher now came caused him to strike out more vigorously than ever in defense of his favorite beliefs. In this atmosphere Harriet whenever she came to her home must thrive as she could. Her son, who wrote a book about her life in 1911, says that the atmosphere of mental excitement and conflict in which her father lived and preached at this time drove her already over-stimulated mind to the point of distraction. “Too much mental strain and too little exercise had,” he says, “brought her to her seventeenth year without the strength which should have been the heritage of her robust childhood.” It would not be possible in our short space to follow all the steps in her soul’s progress and the degrees by which, under the guidance of her brother Edward, she gained at last a comfortable view of her relation to God. But a glimpse here and there may be allowed to us. Above all things, Harriet could not understand how a God of infinite perfection could stand toward imperfect human beings in any but the most severe attitude. She could not see that One of infinite power and infinite wisdom must have infinite love; and toward a realization of this truth she moved but slowly. How far along she had come in 1828 is shown in the following passage from a letter to Edward. “After all,” she said, “God is a being afar off. He is so far above us that anything but the most distant reverential affection seems almost sacrilegious. It is that affection that can lead us to be familiar that the heart needs.... The language of prayer is of necessity stately and formal, and we cannot clothe all the little minutiæ of our wants and troubles in it.... I sometimes wish that the Saviour were visibly present in this world, that I might go to Him for a solution of some of my difficulties.”