Lyman Beecher, 1775-1863, a famous congregational minister of New England,
was born in New Haven, graduated from Yale College in 1797, and studied
theology with Dr. Timothy Dwight. His first settlement was at East
Hampton, L. I., at a salary of three hundred dollars per year. He was
pastor of the church in Litchfield, Ct., from 1810 till 1826, when he
removed to Boston, and took charge of the Hanover Street Church. In the
religious controversies of the time, Dr. Beecher was one of the most
prominent characters. From 1832 to 1842, he was President of Lane
Theological Seminary, in the suburbs of Cincinnati. He then returned to
Boston, where he spent most of the closing years of his long and active
life. His death occurred in Brooklyn, N. Y. As a theologian, preacher, and
advocate of education, temperance, and missions, Dr. Beecher occupied a
very prominent place for nearly half a century. He left a large family of
sons and two daughters, who are well known as among the most eminent
preachers and authors in America.
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We are called upon to cherish with high veneration and grateful
recollections, the memory of our fathers. Both the ties of nature and the
dictates of policy demand this. And surely no nation had ever less
occasion to be ashamed of its ancestry, or more occasion for gratulation
in that respect; for while most nations trace their origin to barbarians,
the foundations of our nation were laid by civilized men, by Christians.
Many of them were men of distinguished families, of powerful talents, of
great learning and of preeminent wisdom, of decision of character, and of
most inflexible integrity. And yet not unfrequently they have been treated
as if they had no virtues; while their sins and follies have been
sedulously immortalized in satirical anecdote.
The influence of such treatment of our fathers is too manifest. It creates
and lets loose upon their institutions, the vandal spirit of innovation
and overthrow; for after the memory of our father shall have been rendered
contemptible, who will appreciate and sustain their institutions? "The
memory of our fathers" should be the watchword of liberty throughout the
land; for, imperfect as they were, the world before had not seen their
like, nor will it soon, we fear, behold their like again. Such models of
moral excellence, such apostles of civil and religious liberty, such
shades of the illustrious dead looking down upon their descendants with
approbation or reproof, according as they follow or depart from the good
way, constitute a censorship inferior only to the eye of God; and to
ridicule them is national suicide.
The doctrines of our fathers have been represented as gloomy,
superstitious, severe, irrational, and of a licentious tendency. But when
other systems shall have produced a piety as devoted, a morality as pure,
a patriotism as disinterested, and a state of society as happy, as have
prevailed where their doctrines have been most prevalent, it may be in
season to seek an answer to this objection.
The persecutions instituted by our fathers have been the occasion of
ceaseless obloquy upon their fair fame. And truly, it was a fault of no
ordinary magnitude, that sometimes they did persecute. But let him whose
ancestors were not ten times more guilty, cast the first stone, and the
ashes of our fathers will no more be disturbed. Theirs was the fault of
the age, and it will be easy to show that no class of men had, at that
time, approximated so nearly to just apprehensions of religious liberty;
and that it is to them that the world is now indebted for the more just
and definite views which now prevail.
The superstition and bigotry of our fathers are themes on which some of
their descendants, themselves far enough from superstition, if not from
bigotry, have delighted to dwell. But when we look abroad, and behold the
condition of the world, compared with the condition of New England, we may
justly exclaim, "Would to God that the ancestors of all the nations had
been not only almost, but altogether such bigots as our fathers were."