management of the church in its various departments. The problem of a
city church located as Plymouth is must be to-day very different from
that which faced its founders. Brooklyn has gone 'way beyond the
Heights, and while strangers still find it easy to reach, the permanent
membership extends over a wide territory and must of necessity be more
or less transitory. This uncertainty brings to view the necessity of
permanence of financial basis. They are wise, strong men who are in
charge, as is shown by the fact that notwithstanding the changes that
are inevitable, the church is free from debt and is accumulating
permanent funds which will be of great value. Running expenses of all
kinds, pastors' salaries, music, etc., are met from current income from
pew rents, leaving the church free to put additional sums into permanent
form. Then there is a Beecher endowment fund of almost fifty thousand
dollars, and a Beecher memorial fund of the same amount. Constantly sums
of money are coming into the church treasury from legacies or special
gifts, and these are either invested or applied to improvements such as
it is judged will increase the effectiveness of the church work. Among
these is a Beecher memorial building soon to be erected adjoining the
church. The alteration of the front entrance is contemplated, and other
work which will prove advantageous to the society. Memorial stained
glass windows are to be put in, contributed by members.
[Illustration: CHAIR USED BY HENRY WARD BEECHER IN PLYMOUTH CHURCH]
Perhaps still more important is the development of the church
activities. In Mr. Beecher's time the great feature of church life was
the sermon. To-day it is church organisation. Some seem to think that
the preaching of to-day is inferior to that of a generation ago. While
it may be true that no single man stands out as did Mr. Beecher, Dr. R.
S. Storrs, or Dr. William M. Taylor, it seems to me that the average of
preaching is higher. Dr. Hillis is not Mr. Beecher, but he is Dr.
Hillis, and Plymouth people never go from Plymouth Church without the
thought of a good and great presentation of truth. However that may be,
one thing is very noticeable: the growth in Plymouth, as elsewhere, of
church societies. The women have their societies for Home and Foreign
Missions, there is a Young Woman's Guild, and a Henry Ward Beecher
Missionary Circle, a Young Men's Club, and an organisation of older men
known as Plymouth Men. The year that Mr. Beecher died The Plymouth
League was formed and had a successful career until a few years ago,
when it was dropped.
So Plymouth has kept abreast of the times, using any means that seemed
to promise usefulness, ever ready to change where change was adjudged
wise, ready to drop anything that in the shifting conditions had
outlived its usefulness, loyal to its past, yet realising that the
highest loyalty is to a future ideal rather than a past achievement. Mr.
Beecher was no iconoclast, and at the same time, the past, however great
and grand, as such, had no attraction for him. His eye was set on the
future, a future that included the individual life and the corporate
life. Present-day socialism had scarcely dawned during his day, but were
he living now he would be found in line with the broadest and the
freest conceptions of society, and true to his belief that the church
should lead. This not because it is an organisation, including wise men,
or divinely ordered, but because it expresses in the fullest and best
way the divine principles that must govern society. That this idea of
his so dominated the church in its early life and has continued to
control it to the present day is the true basis for confidence as to its
future.
Plymouth Church will stand just so long as it represents this ideal, and
applies it to all classes and conditions of men, without regard to race
or creed. To-day, as of old, men of every form of belief or no belief
find a welcome and find help, and many go forth with old ideas changed,
new ambitions stirred, a clearer vision of what it means to live a
Christian life. If the time ever comes when that is not true, then
Plymouth Church will be a relic of the past, a curiosity, to be visited
by strangers as Plymouth Rock or Westminster Abbey. That that time will
ever come I do not believe. However much the centres of population may
change, the needs of men never change, and even if other churches should
follow their constituencies to other sections, Plymouth will remain, a
living monument to the truth and the life that has been from its origin
its power.
* * * * *
THE END