Waiting
the religious beliefs which his parents fiercely held and which they had labored to impress upon him. Perhaps the real truth is that, as the years passed, he gradually grew up to it.
John Burroughs’s people were all what were commonly known as Hardshell Baptists—though they preferred to call themselves by the more dignified title of Primitive Baptists. Their principal dogma seems to have been that the Methodists, or Arminians as the Baptists loved to designate them, were headed straight for hell because they believed that everybody had a chance to get to heaven: faith and repentance being the only things necessary. Whereas the Hardshell Baptists were firm believers in predestination. If a man was meant to be saved, he would be saved no matter how bad he was; if he was meant to be damned, he would be damned no matter how good he was; and it was not only useless but unfair, once the Lord had settled these matters to His own satisfaction, to annoy Him with prayers and petitions in an effort to warp His will. This has always been the creed of good old fighting Christians such as the Calvinists and the Covenanters and the Puritans, and the Hardshell Baptists were also a militant people.
Burroughs had started his career as a wage earner at the age of seventeen. After a frag-
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