HENRY WARD BEECHER.
Mr. Beecher a Younger Child--Death of his Mother--His
Step-Mother's Religious Influence--Ma'am Kilbourn's School--
The Passing Bell--Unprofitable Schooling--An Inveterate School
Joker--Masters the Latin Grammar--Goes to Amherst College--
His Love of Flowers--Modes of Study; a Reformer--Mr. Beecher
and the Solemn Tutor--His Favorite Poetry--His Introduction
to Phrenology--His Mental Philosophy--Doctrine of Spiritual
Intuition--Punctuality for Joke's Sake--Old School and New
School--Doubts on Entering the Ministry--Settlement at
Lawrenceburg--His Studies; First Revival--Large Accessions to
the Church--"Tropical Style"--Ministerial Jokes--Slavery in
the Pulpit--The Transfer to Brooklyn--Plymouth Church Preaching
--Visit to England--Speeches in England--Letters from England
--Christian View of England--The Exeter Hall Speech--Preaches
an Unpopular Forgiveness.
Henry Ward Beecher was the eighth child of Lyman and Roxana Foote
Beecher, born in Litchfield, Connecticut, June 24, 1813. The first
child of a family is generally an object of high hope and anxious and
careful attention. They are observed, watched--and if the parents
are so disposed, carefully educated, and often over-watched and
over-educated. But in large families, as time rolls on and children
multiply, especially to those in straitened worldly circumstances,
all the interest of novelty dies out before the advent of younger
children, and they are apt to find their way in early life unwatched
and unheralded. Dr. Beecher's salary was eight hundred dollars a year,
not always promptly paid. This made the problem of feeding, clothing
and educating a family of ten children a dark one. The family was
constantly enlarged by boarders, young ladies attending the female
academy, and whose board helped somewhat to the support of the domestic
establishment, but added greatly to the cares of the head manager. The
younger members of the Beecher family therefore came into existence in
a great bustling household of older people, all going their separate
ways, and having their own grown-up interests to carry. The child,
growing up in this busy, active circle, had constantly impressed upon
it a sense of personal insignificance as a child, and the absolute need
of the virtue of passive obedience and non-resistance as regards all
grown-up people. To be statedly washed and dressed and catechised, got
to school at regular hours in the morning, and to bed inflexibly at the
earliest possible hour at night, comprised about all the attention that
children could receive in those days.
The mother of Henry Ward died when he was three years old; his
father was immersed in theological investigations and a wide sphere
of pastoral labors and great general ecclesiastical interests, his
grown-up brothers and sisters in their own separate life history,
and the three younger children were therefore left to their mortal
pilgrimage, within certain well-defined moral limits, much after their
own way. The step-mother, who took the station of mother, was a lady
of great personal elegance and attractiveness, of high intellectual
and moral culture, who from having been in early life the much admired
belle in general society, came at last from an impulse of moral
heroism combined with personal attachment, to undertake the austere
labors of a poor minister's family. She was a person to make a deep
impression on the minds of any children. There was a moral force about
her, a dignity of demeanor, an air of elegance and superior breeding,
which produced a constant atmosphere of unconscious awe in the minds of
little ones. Then her duties were onerous, her conscience inflexible,
and under the weight of these her stock of health and animal spirits
sunk, so that she was for the most part pensive and depressed. Her
nature and habits were too refined and exacting for the bringing up of
children of great animal force and vigor, under the strain and pressure
of straitened circumstances. The absurdities and crudenesses incident
to the early days of such children appeared to her as serious faults,
and weighed heavily on her conscience. The most intense positive
religious and moral influence the three little ones of the family
received was on Sunday night, when it was her custom to take them to
her bed-room and read and talk and pray with them. At these times, deep
though vague religious yearnings were created; but as she was much of
her time an invalid, and had little sympathy with the ordinary feelings
of childhood, she gave an impression of religion as being like herself,
calm, solemn, inflexible, mysteriously sad and rigorously exacting.
In those days none of the attentions were paid to children that are
now usual. The community did not recognize them. There was no child's
literature; there were no children's books. The Sunday school was yet
an experiment, in a fluctuating, uncertain state of trial. There were
no children's days of presents and _fêtes_--no Christmas or New Year's
festivals. The annual thanksgiving was only associated with one day's
unlimited range of pies of every sort--too much for one day, and too
soon things of the past. The childhood of Henry Ward was unmarked
by the possession of a single child's toy as a gift from any older
person, or a single _fête_. Very early, too, strict duties devolved
upon him; a daily portion of the work of the establishment, the care
of the domestic animals, the cutting and piling of wood, or tasks in
the garden strengthened his muscles and gave vigor and tone to his
nerves. From his father and mother he inherited a perfectly solid,
healthy organization of brain, muscle and nerves, and the uncaressing,
let-alone system under which he was brought up, gave him early habits
of vigor and self-reliance.
Litchfield was a mountain town, where the winter was a stern reality
for six months of the year, where there were giant winds, and drifting
snows of immeasurable depth, and ice and sleet storms of a sublime
power and magnitude. Under this rugged nursing he grew outwardly
vigorous. At nine years of age, in one of those winter droughts common
in New England towns, he harnessed the horse to a sledge with a barrel
lashed thereon, and went off alone three miles over the icy top of the
town hill, to dip up and bring home a barrel of water from a distant
spring. So far from taking this as a hardship, he undertook it with
a chivalric pride. His only trial in the case was the humiliation of
being positively commanded by his careful step-mother to wear his
overcoat; he departed obedient, but with tears of mortification
freezing on his cheeks, for he had recorded a heroic vow to go through
a whole winter without once wearing an overcoat.
For education, technically so called, there were small advantages.
His earliest essay of letters was to walk over to West street, to a
widow Kilbourn's, where he sat daily on a bench kicking his heels in
idleness, and said his letters twice in the day, and was for so long
out of the way of the grown folks, which was a main point in child
schooling. There was a tinner's shop hard by, and the big girls, some
of them, contrived to saw off some of his long golden curls with tin
shears contrived from the fragments cast out of the shop. The child
was annoyed, but dared not complain to any purpose, till the annoyance
being stated at home, it was concluded that the best way to abate it
was to cut off all the curls altogether, and with the loss of these he
considered his manhood to commence. Next, a small, unpainted, district
school-house being erected within a stone's throw of the parsonage,
he graduated from Ma'am Kilbourn's thither. The children of all the
farming population in the neighborhood gathered there. The exercises
consisted in daily readings of the Bible and the Columbian Orator, in
elementary exercises in arithmetic, and hand-writing. The ferule and a
long flexible hickory switch were the insignia of office of the school
mistress. No very striking early results were the outcome of this
teaching. Henry Ward was not marked out by the prophecies of partial
friends for any brilliant future. He had precisely the organization
which often passes for dullness in early boyhood. He had great
deficiency in verbal memory, a deficiency marked in him through life;
he was excessively sensitive to praise and blame, extremely diffident,
and with a power of yearning, undeveloped emotion, which he neither
understood nor could express. His utterance was thick and indistinct,
partly from bashfulness and partly from an enlargement of the tonsils
of the throat, so that in speaking or reading he was with difficulty
understood. In forecasting his horoscope, had any one taken the trouble
then to do it, the last success that ever would have been predicted for
him would have been that of an orator. "When Henry is sent to me with
a message," said a good aunt, "I always have to make him say it three
times. The first time I have no manner of an idea more than if he spoke
Choctaw; the second, I catch now and then a word; by the third time I
begin to understand."
Thus, while Dr. Beecher victoriously demonstrated the consistency of
decrees and accountability, and the elder brother was drawing all the
hopes of the family as the first in his college class, and his elder
sisters were writing poetry and receiving visits, and carrying on the
cheerful round of Litchfield society, this bashful, dazed-looking boy
pattered barefoot to and from the little unpainted school-house, with a
brown towel or a blue checked apron to hem during the intervals between
his spelling and reading lessons. Nobody thought much of his future,
further than to see that he was safe and healthy, or even troubled
themselves to inquire what might be going on in his life.
But the child most let alone, is nevertheless being educated
gradually and insensibly. The calm, inflexible, elegant breeding of
the step-mother, her intense solemnity of religious responsibility,
indicating itself in every chance look or motion, fell on the sensitive
child-nature like a constant moral stimulant. When a little fellow,
whose small feet could not touch the bottom of the old family chaise,
he was once driving with her on an errand. The bell tolled for a
death, as was then the custom in rural places. "Henry, what do you
think of when you hear a bell tolling like that?" she said. Astonished
and awe-struck at having his thoughts inquired into, the child only
flushed, and colored and looked abashed, and she went on as in a
quiet soliloquy, "_I_ think, was that soul prepared? It has gone into
_eternity_!" The effect on the child's mind was a shiver of dread, like
the being turned out without clothing among the icy winds of Litchfield
hills. The vague sense of infinite, inevitable doom underlying all
the footsteps of life, added to a natural disposition to yearning and
melancholy. The scenery around the parsonage fed the yearning--Chestnut
Hill on one side, with its lovely, softly wooded slopes, and waving
grain-fields; on the other, Mount Tom, with steel-blue pines and a
gleaming lake mirror at its feet. Then there was the piano always
going, and the Scotch airs, Roslin Castle, Mary's Dream, and Bonnie
Doon, sounding out from the parlor windows, and to which the boy
listened in a sort of troublous and dreamy mixture of sadness and joy,
and walked humming to himself with tears in his eyes.
The greatest trial of those days was the catechism. Sunday lessons were
considered by the mother-in-law as inflexible duty, and the catechism
as the _sine qua non_. The other children memorized readily and were
brilliant reciters, but Henry, blushing, stammering, confused and
hopelessly miserable, stuck fast on some sand-bank of what is required
or forbidden by this or that commandment, his mouth choking up with
the long words which he hopelessly miscalled; was sure to be accused
of idleness or inattention, and to be solemnly talked to, which made
him look more stolid and miserable than ever, but appeared to have no
effect in quickening his dormant faculties.
When he was ten years old, he was a stocky, strong, well-grown boy,
loyal in duty, trained in unquestioning obedience, inured to patient
hard work, inured also to the hearing and discussing of all the great
theological problems of Calvinism, which were always reverberating in
his hearing; but as to any mechanical culture, in an extremely backward
state--a poor writer, a miserable speller, with a thick utterance, and
a bashful reticence which seemed like stolid stupidity. He was now
placed at a private school in the neighboring town of Bethlehem, under
the care of the Rev. Mr. Langdon, to commence a somewhat more careful
course of study. Here an incident occurred which showed that the boy
even at that early age felt a mission to defend opinions. A forward
school-boy, among the elder scholars, had got hold of Paine's Age of
Reason, and was flourishing largely among the boys with objections to
the Bible, drawn therefrom. Henry privately looked up Watson's Apology,
studied up the subject, and challenged a debate with the big boy, in
which he came off victorious by the acclamation of his school-fellows.
His progress in book-learning, however, was slow, though his year at
the place was one of great happiness. One trait of the boy, as it
has been with the man, was a peculiar passion for natural scenery,
which he found full liberty to indulge in his present surroundings.
He boarded with a large-hearted, kindly, motherly woman, in a great
comfortable farm-house, where everything was free and unconstrained.
The house was backed by a generous old orchard, full of fruits and
blossoms in spring and summer, and where the partridges drummed and
whirred in winter. Beyond that were dreamy depths of woodland, and
Henry's studies were mostly with gun on shoulder, roving the depths
of those forests, guiltless of hitting anything, because the time was
lost in dreamy contemplation. Thence returning unprepared for school,
he would be driven to the expedient of writing out his Latin verb and
surreptitiously reading it out of the crown of his hat, an exercise
from whence he reaped small profit, either mentally or morally. In
short, after a year spent in this way, it began to be perceived by
the elders of the family, that as to the outward and visible signs
of learning, he was making no progress. His eldest sister was then
teaching a young lady's school in Hartford, and it was proposed to take
the boy under her care to see what could be made of him.
One boy of eleven in a school of thirty or forty girls has not much
chance of making a durable impression, but we question if any of
Henry's school mates easily forgot him. If the under stratum of his
nature was a dreamy yearning melancholy, its upper manifestation was in
constant bubbling, restless effervescence of fun and practical joking.
The school room was up a long flight of stairs, and one wet day Henry
spent a recess when he was supposed to be studying grammar, in opening
every umbrella brought to school, and so disposing them on the stairs
that the luckless person who opened the outside door would witness a
precipitate rush of the whole series into the street--which feat was
successfully accomplished to the dismay of the late comer, and the
tittering of the whole school, who had been somewhat prepared for the
catastrophe.
The school room was divided into two divisions in grammar, under
leaders on either side, and the grammatical reviews were contests for
superiority in which it was vitally important that every member should
be perfected. Henry was generally the latest choice, and fell on his
side as an unlucky accession--being held more amusing than profitable
on such occasions.
The fair leader on one of these divisions took the boy aside to a
private apartment, to put into him with female tact and insinuation
those definitions and distinctions on which the honor of the class
depended.
"Now Henry, A is the indefinite article, you see--and must be used only
with a singular noun. You can say _a man_--but you can't say _a men_,
can you?" "Yes, I can say _Amen_ too," was the ready rejoinder. "Father
says it always at the end of his prayers."
"Come Henry, now don't be joking; now decline He." "Nominative he,
possessive his, objective him." "You see, His is possessive. Now you
can say, His book--but you can't say 'Him book.'" "Yes I do say Hymn
book too," said the impracticable scholar with a quizzical twinkle.
Each one of these sallies made his young teacher laugh, which was the
victory he wanted.
"But now Henry, seriously, just attend to the active and passive
voice. Now 'I strike' is active, you see, because if you strike you do
something. But 'I am struck,' is passive, because if you are struck you
don't do any thing do you?"
"Yes I do--I strike back again!"
Sometimes his views of philosophical subjects were offered
gratuitously. Being held rather of a frisky nature, his sister
appointed his seat at her elbow, when she heard her classes. A class in
Natural Philosophy, not very well prepared, was stumbling through the
theory of the tides. "I can explain that," said Henry. "Well, you see,
the sun, he catches hold of the moon and pulls her, and she catches
hold of the sea and pulls that, and this makes the spring tides.
"But what makes the neap tides?"
"Oh, that's when the sun stops to spit on his hands," was the brisk
rejoinder.
After about six months, Henry was returned on his parents' hands
with the reputation of being an inveterate joker, and an indifferent
scholar. It was the opinion of his class that there was much talent
lying about loosely in him if he could only be brought to apply himself.
When he was twelve years of age his father moved to Boston. It was a
great change to the two younger boys, from the beautiful rural freedom
of a picturesque mountain town to the close, strait limits of a narrow
street in Boston.
There was a pure and vigorous atmosphere of moral innocence about the
mountain towns of Connecticut in those days, which made the breeding
up of children on the let-alone system quite feasible. There was no
temptation to vice or immorality. The only associate of doubtful
character forbidden to Henry, for whose society he craved, was Ulysses
Freeman, a poor, merry, softly giggling negro boy, who inhabited a
hut not far off, and who, it was feared, might indiscreetly teach him
something that he ought not to know--but otherwise it was safe to let
him run unwatched, in the wholesome companionship of bob-o'links and
squirrels and birch woods and huckleberry bushes. There was not in all
Litchfield in those days any thing to harm a growing boy, or lead him
into evil.
But in Boston, the streets, the wharves, the ship yards, were full of
temptation--the house, narrow and strait. The boy was put into the
Boston Latin School, where the whole educational process was a solid
square attempt to smite the Latin grammar into minds of all sorts
and sizes, by a pressure like that by which coin is stamped in the
mint. Educated in loyal obedience as a religion and a habit, pushed
up to make the effort by the entreaties of his father, by appeals
to his gallantry in overcoming difficulties, his sense of family
honor, and the solemn appeals to conscience of his mother, Henry set
himself doggedly to learn lists of prepositions and terminations, and
bead-rolls of nouns that found their accusatives or genitives in this
way or that, except in the case of two dozen exceptions, when they
formed them in some other way, with all the other dry prickly facts
of language with which it is deemed expedient to choke the efforts of
beginners.
It was to him a grim Sinaitic desert, a land of darkness without order,
where he wandered, seeing neither tree or flower; a wilderness of
meaningless forms and sounds. His life was a desolation, a blind push
to do what was most contrary to his natural faculties, repulsive to his
tastes, and in which with utmost stress and strain of effort he could
never hope to rise above mediocrity. One year passed in this way, and
with the fear of disgrace in the rear and conscience and affection
goading him on, Henry had actually mastered the Latin grammar, and
could give any form or inflection, rule or exception therein, but at
an expense of brain and nerve that began to tell even on his vigorous
organization.
The era of fermentation and development was upon him, and the
melancholy that had brooded over his childhood waxed more turbulent
and formidable. He grew gloomy and moody, restless and irritable.
His father, noticing the change, got him on a course of biographical
reading, hoping to divert his thoughts. He began to read naval
histories, the lives of great sailors and commanders--the voyages of
Captain Cook, the biography of Nelson; and immediately, like lightning
flashing out of rolling clouds, came the determination not to rest any
longer in Boston, learning terminations and prepositions, but to go
forth to a life of enterprise. He made up his little bundle, walked
the wharf and talked with sailors and captains, hovered irresolute
on the verge of voyages, never quite able to grieve his father by a
sudden departure. At last he wrote a letter announcing to a brother
that he could and would no longer remain at school--that he had made
up his mind for the sea; that if not permitted to go, he should go
without permission. This letter was designedly dropped where his father
picked it up. Dr. Beecher put it in his pocket and said nothing for
the moment, but the next day asked Henry to help him saw wood. Now the
wood-pile was the Doctor's favorite debating ground, and Henry felt
complimented by the invitation, as implying manly companionship.
"Let us see," says the Doctor, "Henry, how old are you?"
"Almost fourteen!"
"Bless me! how boys do grow!--Why it's almost time to be thinking what
you are going to do. Have you ever thought?"
"Yes--I want to go to sea."
"To sea! Of all things! Well, well! After all, why not?--Of course you
don't want to be a common sailor. You want to get into the navy?"
"Yes sir, that's what I want."
"But not merely as a common sailor, I suppose?"
"No sir, I want to be midshipman, and after that commodore."
"I see," said the Doctor, cheerfully, "Well, Henry, in order for that,
you know, you must begin a course of mathematics, and study navigation
and all that."
"Yes sir, I am ready."
"Well then, I'll send you up to Amherst next week, to Mount Pleasant,
and then you'll begin your preparatory studies, and if you are well
prepared, I presume I can make interest to get you an appointment."
And so he went to Mount Pleasant, in Amherst, Mass., and Dr. Beecher
said shrewdly, "I shall have that boy in the ministry yet."
The transfer from the confined limits of a city to the congenial
atmosphere of a beautiful mountain town brought an immediate favorable
change. Here he came under the care of a mathematical teacher,
educated at West Point, a bright attractive young man of the name of
Fitzgerald, with whom he roomed. Between this young man and the boy,
there arose a romantic friendship. Henry had no natural talent or
taste for mathematics, but inspired by a desire to please his friend,
and high ambition for his future profession, he went into them with
energy, and soon did credit to his teacher at the blackboard, laboring
perseveringly with his face towards the navy, and Nelson as his beau
ideal.
Here also he was put through a strict drill in elocution by Professor
John E. Lovell, now residing in New Haven, Conn. Of him, Mr. Beecher
cherishes a grateful recollection, and never fails to send him a New
Year's token of remembrance. He says of him, that "a better teacher
in his department never was made." Mr. Beecher had many natural
disabilities for the line of oratory; and their removal so far as to
make him an acceptable speaker he holds due to the persevering drill
of Mr. Lovell. His voice, naturally thick and husky, was developed by
most persevering, systematic training. His gestures and the management
of his body went through a drill corresponding to that which the
military youth goes through at West Point, to make his body supple to
the exigencies of military evolution. As an orator, this early training
was of vital importance to him. He could never have attained success
without it.
At the close of the first year, a revival of religion passed through
the school, and Henry Ward and many others were powerfully impressed.
It was in fact, on the part of the boy, the mere flashing out into
visible form of that deep undercurrent of religious sensibility which
had been the habit of his life, and the result of his whole home
education. His father sent for him home to unite with the church on a
great communion season; and the boy, trembling, agitated, awe-struck,
full of vague purposes and good resolutions and imperfectly developed
ideas, stood up and took on him irrevocable vows, henceforth in his
future life to be actively and openly on the side of Christ, in the
great life battle.
Of course the naval scheme vanished, and the pulpit opened before him
as his natural sphere. With any other father or education, this would
not have been an "of course;" but Dr. Beecher was an enthusiast in his
profession. Every word of his life, every action or mode of speaking,
had held it up before his boys as the goal of all his hopes, that they
should preach the gospel, and the boy therefore felt that to be the
necessary obligation which came upon him in joining the church. He
returned to Amherst, where his classical education was continued for
two years longer, with a view to fit him for college.
The love of flowers, which has always formed so marked a branch of
his general enthusiasm for nature, developed itself at this time in a
friendship with a rather rough man who kept a garden. He was so pleased
with the boy's enthusiasm that he set apart a scrap of ground for him
which he filled with roses, geraniums and other blooming wonders, and
these Henry tended under his instructions.
At that time the love of nature was little cultivated among the
community. By very many good people, nature was little spoken of except
as the antithesis to grace. It was the tempter, the syren that drew the
soul from higher duties. The chaplain of Mount Pleasant Institute, a
grave and formal divine, found Henry on his knees in his little flower
patch, lost in rapturous contemplations of buds and blossoms. He gave
him an indulgent smile, but felt it his duty to improve the occasion.
"Ah, Henry," he said condescendingly, as one who makes a fair
admission, "these things are pretty, very pretty, but my boy, do you
think that such things are worthy to occupy the attention of a man who
has an immortal soul?" Henry answered only by that abashed and stolid
look which covered from the eyes of his superiors, so much of what was
going on within him, and went on with attentions to his flowers. "I
wanted to tell him," he said afterwards, "that since Almighty God has
found leisure to make those trifles, it could not be amiss for us to
find time to look at them." By the time that Henry had been three years
in Amherst he was prepared to enter Sophomore in College. Thanks to his
friend and teacher Fitzgerald, his mathematical training had given
him the entire mastery of La Croix's Algebra, so that he was prepared
to demonstrate at random any proposition as chance selected--not only
without aid or prompting from the teacher, but controversially as
against the teacher, who would sometimes publicly attack the pupil's
method of demonstration, disputing him step by step, when the scholar
was expected to know with such positive clearness as to put down and
overthrow the teacher. "You must not only know, but you must know that
you know," was Fitzgerald's maxim; and Henry Ward attributes much of
his subsequent habit of steady antagonistic defence of his own opinions
to this early mathematical training.
Though prepared for the Sophomore class, his father however, deemed it
best on the whole, that he should enter as freshman, and the advanced
state of his preparation therefore gave him leisure the first year
to mark out and commence a course of self-education by means of the
college libraries, which he afterwards systematically pursued through
college life. In fact he gave no more attention to the college course
than was absolutely essential to keep his standing, but turned all
the power of study and concentrated attention he had acquired in his
previous years, upon his own plan of culture. As he himself remarks, "I
had acquired by the Latin and mathematics, the power of study. I knew
how to study, and I turned it upon things I wanted to know." The Latin
and Greek classics did not attract him. The want of social warmth in
the remove at which they stood from the living present, alienated them
from the sympathies of one who felt his mission to be among the men of
to-day, and by its living literature. Oratory and rhetoric he regarded
as his appointed weapons, and he began to prepare himself in the
department of how to say--meanwhile contemplating with uncertain awe,
the great future problem of WHAT TO SAY.
For the formation of style he began a course of English classical
study; Milton's prose works, Bacon, Shakspeare, and the writers of the
Elizabethan period were his classics, read and re-read, and deeply
pondered. In common with most of the young men of his period, he was a
warm admirer of the writings of Robert Hall, and added him to his list
of favorite authors. His habits of study were somewhat peculiar. He
had made for himself at the carpenter's, a circular table, with a hole
in the middle, where was fixed a seat. Enthroned in this seat with his
English classics all around him, he read and pondered, and with never
ceasing delight.
The stand he took in college, was from the first that of a reformer.
He was always on the side of law and order, and being one of the
most popular fellows in his class, threw the whole weight of his
popularity in favor of the faculty, rather than against them. He and
his associates formed a union of merry good fellows, who were to have
glorious fun, but to have it only by honorable and permissible means.
They voted down scraping in the lecture rooms, and hazing of students;
they voted down gambling and drinking, and every form of secret vice,
and made the class rigidly temperate and pure. Mr. Beecher had received
from family descent what might be called a strictly temperance
organization. In no part of his life did he ever use, or was he ever
tempted to use tobacco or ardent spirits in any shape. All his public
labors, like those of his father before him, have been performed by the
strict legal income of ordinary nervous investment; they have not been
those deep ruinous drafts on the reserved principal of vital force,
which are drawn by the excitements of extra stimulants.
He also maintained the character of a Christian student, by
conscientious attention to the class prayer meetings, in which he
took his part, as well as by outside religious and temperance labors
in the rural population in the neighborhood. He very early formed an
attachment to a beneficiary in the college, a man, as he says, of the
Isaiah type, large-souled, and full of devotion, who took the boy round
with him on his tour of religious exhortation, insisting with paternal
earnestness that it was his immediate duty to begin to practice for
the work of the Christian ministry. Having brought him once or twice
to read and pray, in a little rural meeting, held in a school-house in
the outskirts of the village, he solemnly committed the future care of
the meeting to the young disciple, and went himself to look up another
fold. This meeting Henry religiously kept up among his others, with
varying success, during his college career.
The only thing which prevented him from taking the first rank as a
religious young man, was the want of that sobriety and solemnity which
was looked upon as essential to the Christian character. Mr. Beecher
was like a converted bob-o'link, who should be brought to judgment for
short quirks and undignified twitters and tweedles, among the daisy
heads, instead of flying in dignified paternal sweeps, like a good
swallow of the sanctuary, or sitting in solemnized meditation in the
depths of pine trees like the owl.
His commendation from the stricter brethren generally came with the
sort of qualification which Shakspeare makes,--
"For the man doth fear God, howbeit it doth not always appear, by
reason of some large jests which he will make."
In fact, Mr. Beecher was generally the center of a circle of
tempestuous merriment, ever eddying round him in one droll form or
another. He was quick in repartee, an excellent mimic, and his stories
would set the gravest in a roar. He had the art, when admonished by
graver people, of somehow entrapping them into more uproarious laughing
than he himself practiced, and then looking innocently surprised. Mr.
Beecher on one occasion was informed that the head tutor of the class
was about to make him a grave exhortatory visit. The tutor was almost
seven feet high, and solemn as an Alpine forest, but Mr. Beecher knew
that like most solemn Yankees, he was at heart a deplorable wag, a mere
whited sepulchre of conscientious gravity, with measureless depths of
unrenewed chuckle hid away in the depths of his heart. When apprised of
his approach, he suddenly whisked into the wood-closet the chairs of
his room, leaving only a low one which had been sawed off at the second
joint, so that it stood about a foot from the floor. Then he crawled
through the hole in his table, and seated meekly among his books,
awaited the visit.
A grave rap, is heard:--"Come in."
Far up in the air, the solemn dark face appears. Mr. Beecher rose
ingenuously, and offered to come out. "No, never mind," says the
visitor, "I just came to have a little conversation with you. Don't
move."
"Oh," says Beecher innocently, "pray sit down sir," indicating the only
chair.
The tutor looked apprehensively, but began the process of sitting down.
He went down, down, down, but still no solid ground being gained,
straightened himself and looked uneasy.
"I don't know but that chair is too low for you," said Beecher meekly;
"do let me get you another."
"Oh no, no, my young friend, don't rise, don't trouble yourself, it
is perfectly agreeable to me, in fact I like a low seat," and with
these words, the tall man doubled up like a jack-knife, and was seen
sitting with his grave face between his knees, like a grass-hopper
drawn up for a spring. He heaved a deep sigh, and his eyes met the eyes
of Mr. Beecher; the hidden spark of native depravity within him was
exploded by one glance at those merry eyes, and he burst into a loud
roar of merriment, which the two continued for some time, greatly to
the amusement of the boys, who were watching to hear how Beecher would
come out with his lecture. The chair was known in college afterwards,
by the surname of the "Tutor's Delight." This overflow of the faculty
of mirthfulness, has all his life deceived those who had only a shallow
acquaintance with him, and men ignorant of the depth of yearning
earnestness and profound strength of purpose on which they rippled and
sparkled.
But at the time that he passed for the first humorist of college, the
marks along his well worn volumes of the old English poets show only
appreciation of what is earnest, deep and pathetic. He particularly
loved an obscure old poet of whom we scarcely hear in modern days,
Daniel, who succeeded Edmund Spenser as poet laureate, and was a friend
of Shakspeare.
Some lines addressed by him to the Earl of Southampton, are marked by
reiterated lines in Mr. Beecher's copy of the old English poets, which
showed enthusiastic reading. He says, "This was about the only piece of
poetry I ever committed to memory, but I read it so much I could not
help at last knowing it by heart:"
"TO THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON.
"He who hath never warred with misery,
Nor ever tugged with fortune in distress,
Hath no occasion and no field to try
The strength and forces of his worthiness.
Those parts of judgment which felicity
Keeps as concealed, affliction must express,
And only men show their abilities
And what they are, in their extremities.
"Mutius the fire, the tortures Regulus,
Did make the miracles of faith and zeal;
Exile renowned and graced Rutilius.
Imprisonment and poison did reveal
The worth of Socrates, Fabricius'
Poverty did grace that common weal
More than all Sylla's riches got with strife,
And Cato's death did vie with Cæsar's life.
"He that endures for what his conscience knows
Not to be ill, doth from a patience high
Look on the only cause whereto he owes
Those sufferings, not on his misery;
The more he endures the more his glory grows,
Which never grows from imbecility;
Only the best composed and worthiest hearts
God sets to act the hardest and constant'st parts."
Such an enthusiasm shows clearly on what a key the young man had set
his life purposes, and what he was looking for in his life battle.
Another poem which bears reiterated marks and dates, is to Lady
Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, of which these lines are a sample:
"He that of such a height hath built his mind,
And reared the dwelling of his thoughts so strong
As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame
Of his resolved powers; nor all the wind
Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong
His settled peace, or to disturb the same;
What a fair seat hath he! from whence he may
The boundless wastes and wilds of man survey!
"And while distraught ambition compasses
And is compassed; whilst as craft deceives
And is deceived; while man doth ransack man,
And builds on blood, and rises by distress;
And the inheritance of desolation leaves
To great expecting hopes; he looks thereon,
As from the shore of peace, with unwet eye,
And bears no venture in impiety."
These verses are so marked with Mr. Beecher's life habits of thought,
with his modes of expression, that they show strongly the influence
which these old poets had in forming both his habits of thought and
expression. His mind naturally aspired after heroism, and from the
time that he gave up his youthful naval enthusiasm he turned the
direction of the heroic faculties into moral things.
In the course of the sophomore year, Mr. Beecher was led, as a mere
jovial frolic, to begin a course of investigation which colored his
whole after life. A tall, grave, sober fellow had been reading some
articles on Phrenology, on which Spurzheim was then lecturing in
Boston, and avowed himself a convert. Quick as thought, the wits of
college saw in this an occasion for glorious fun. They proposed to him
with great apparent earnestness that he should deliver a course of
lectures on the subject in Beecher's room.
With all simplicity and solemnity he complied, while the ingenuous
young inquirers began busily arming themselves with objections to and
puzzles for him, by reading the scoffing articles in Blackwood and the
Edinburgh. The fun waxed hearty, and many saw nothing in it but a new
pasture ground to be ploughed and seeded down for an endless harvest
of college jokes. But one day, one of the clearest headed and most
powerful thinkers in the class said to Beecher, "What is your estimate
of the real logical validity of these objections to Phrenology?" "Why,"
said Beecher, "I was thinking that if these objections were all that
could be alleged, I could knock them to pieces." "So I think," said
the other. In fact, the inanity of the crusade against the theory
brought forth converts faster than its direct defence. Mr. Beecher and
his associates formed immediately a club for physiological research.
He himself commenced reading right and left, in all the works of
anatomy and physiology which he could lay hands on, either in the
college or village libraries. He sent and bought for his own private
use, Magendie's Physiology, Combe's Phrenology, and the works of Gall
and Spurzheim. A phrenological union was formed to purchase together
charts, models and dissecting tools, for the study of comparative
anatomy. It was even planned, in the enthusiasm of young discipleship,
to establish a private dissecting room for the club, but the
difficulties attending the procuring of proper subjects prevented its
being carried into effect. By correspondence with his brother Charles,
however, who was then in Bowdoin College, an affiliated phrenological
club was formed in that institution, and his letters of this period
were all on and about phrenological subjects, and in full phrenological
dialect. Mr. Beecher delivered three lectures on the subject in the
village lyceum, and did an infinity of private writing and study.
He read the old English dramatists, particularly Ben Jonson, Massinger,
Webster, Ford and Shakspeare, and wrote out analyses of their principal
characters on phrenological principles. The college text-book of mental
philosophy was Browne, and Mr. Beecher's copy of Browne is marked
through and through, and interlined with comparative statements of
the ideas derived from his physiological investigation. With these
also he carefully read and analyzed Locke, Stuart, Reid, and the other
writers of the Scotch school. As a writer and debater, Mr. Beecher
was acknowledged the first of the class, and was made first president
of the Athenian Society, notwithstanding it had been a time-honored
precedent that that distinction should belong only to the presumptive
valedictorian. The classics and mathematics he had abandoned because
of his interest in other things, but that abandonment settled the fact
that he could never aspire to high college honors. He however, wrote
for one of his papers in a college newspaper a vigorous defence of
mathematical studies, which won the approbation and surprise of his
teachers. It was a compliment paid by rhetoric to her silent sister.
The phrenological and physiological course thus begun in college was
pursued by few of the phrenological club in after life. With many it
died out as a boyish enthusiasm; with one or two, as Messrs. Fowler
of New York, it became a continuous source of interest and profit.
With Mr. Beecher it led to a broad course of physiological study and
enquiry, which, collated with metaphysics and theology, has formed
his system of thought through life. From that day he has continued
the reading and study of all the physiological writers in the English
language. In fact, he may be said during his college life to have
constructed for himself a physiological mental philosophy out of
the writings of the Scotch metaphysical school and that of Combe,
Spurzheim, and the other physiologists. Mr. Beecher is far from looking
on phrenology as a perfected science. He regards it in relation to real
truth as an artist's study towards a completed landscape; a study on
right principles and in a right direction, but not as a completed work.
In his view, the phrenologists, physiologists and mental philosophers
of past days have all been partialists, giving a limited view of the
great subject. The true mental philosophy, as he thinks, is yet to
arise from a consideration of all the facts and principles evolved by
all of them.
Thus much is due for the understanding of Mr. Beecher's style, in which
to a great extent he uses the phrenological terminology, a terminology
so neat and descriptive, and definite in respect to human beings as
they really exist, that it gives a great advantage to any speaker. The
terms of phrenology have in fact become accepted as conveniences in
treating of human nature, as much as the algebraic signs in numbers.
The depth of Mr. Beecher's religious nature prevented this enthusiasm
for material science from degenerating into dry materialism. He was
a Calvinist in the earnestness of his intense need of the highest
and deepest in religion. In his sophomore year there was a revival
of religion in college, in which his mind was powerfully excited. He
reviewed the almost childish experiences under which he had joined the
church, as possibly deceptive, and tried and disciplined himself by
those profound tests with which the Edwardean theology had filled the
minds of New England. A blank despair was the result. He applied to Dr.
Humphrey, who simply told him that his present feelings were a work of
the spirit, and with which he dared not interfere. After days of almost
hopeless prayer, there came suddenly into his mind an ineffable and
overpowering perception of the Divine love, which seemed to him like
a revelation. It dispelled all doubts, all fears; he became buoyant
and triumphant, and that buoyancy has been marked in his religious
teachings ever since.
Mr. Beecher's doctrine upon the subject is that the truths of the
Divine nature are undiscoverable by the mere logical faculties, that
they are the province of a still higher class of faculties which
belong to human nature, the faculties of _spiritual intuition_; that
it is through these _spiritual intuitions_ that the Holy Spirit of God
communes with man, and directs through them the movements of the lower
faculties. In full faith in the dependence of man on the Holy Spirit
for these spiritual intuitions, he holds substantially the same ground
with Jonathan Edwards, though he believes that Divine influence to be
far more widely, constantly and fully given to the children of men than
did that old divine.
During his two last college years, Mr. Beecher, like other members of
his class, taught rural schools during the long winter vacations. In
this way he raised funds of his own to buy that peculiar library which
his tastes and studies caused him to accumulate about him. In both
these places he performed the work of a religious teacher, preaching
and exhorting regularly in stated meetings, giving temperance lectures,
or doing any reformatory work that came to hand. In the controversy
then arising through the land in relation to slavery, Mr. Beecher
from the first took the ground and was willing to bear the name of an
abolitionist. It was a part of the heroic element of his nature always
to stand for the weak, and he naturally inclined to take that stand in
a battle where the few were at odds against the many.
In 1832 Dr. Lyman Beecher moved to Cincinnati, two years before the
completion of Henry's college course.
He graduated in 1834, and went out to Cincinnati. The abolition
excitement at Lane Seminary had just ended, by the departure of a whole
class of some thirty students, with Theodore Weld at their head.
Dr. Beecher was now the central point of a great theological battle.
It was a sort of spiritual Armageddon, being the confluence of the
forces of the Scotch-Irish Presbyterian Calvinistic fatalism, meeting
in battle with the advancing rationalism of New England new school
theology. On one side was hard literal interpretation of Bible
declarations and the Presbyterian standards, asserting man's utter and
absolute natural and moral inability to obey God's commands, and on
the other side, the doctrine of man's free agency, and bringing to the
rendering of the declarations of the scriptures and of the standards,
the lights of modern modes of interpretation.
Dr. Wilson, who headed the attacking party, was a man in many points
marvellously resembling General Jackson, both in person and character,
and he fought the battle with the same gallant, headlong vigor and
sincere unflinching constancy. His habits of thought were those of
a western pioneer, accustomed from childhood to battle with Indians
and wild beasts, in the frontier life of an early state. His views of
mental philosophy, and of the modes of influencing the human mind, were
like those of the Emperor Constantine when he commanded a whole synod
of bishops to think alike without a day's delay, or those of the Duke
of Wellington, when he told the doubting inquirers at Oxford, that "the
thing to be done was to sign the thirty-nine articles, and believe
them." The party he headed, were vigorous, powerful and with all that
immense advantage which positive certainty and a literal, positively
expressed belief always gives. With such an army and such a general,
the fight of course was a warm one, and Dr. Beecher's sons found
themselves at once his armor bearers in the thickest of the battle. The
great number of ascending judicatories in the Presbyterian Church gave
infinite scope for protracting a contest where every point of doctrine
could first be discussed and voted on in Presbytery, then adjourned
to Synod, then carried to General Assembly, and in each had to be
discussed and decided by majorities. What scope for activity in those
times! What racing and chasing along muddy western roads, to obscure
towns, each party hoping that the length of the way and the depth of
the mud would discourage their opponents, keep them away and so give
their own side the majority. Dr. Beecher and his sons, it was soon
found could race and chase and ride like born Kentuckians, and that
"free agency" on horse-back, would go through mud and fire, and water,
as gallantly as ever "natural inability" could. There was something
grimly ludicrous in the dismay with which Dr. Wilson, inured from his
boyhood to bear-fights, and to days and nights spent in cane-brakes,
and dens of wolves, found on his stopping at an obscure log hut in the
depth of the wilderness, Dr. Beecher with his sons and his new school
delegates, ahead of him, on their way to Synod.
The study of theology at Lane Seminary, under these circumstances,
was very largely from the controversial and dialectic point of view.
It was, to a great extent, the science of defence of new school as
against old school.
Mr. Beecher was enthusiastically devoted to his father, and of course
felt interested in his success as a personal matter, but in regard to
the whole wide controversy, his interest was more that of a spectator
than of a partizan on either side. He had already begun his study of
mental and moral philosophy on a broad eclectic basis, taking great
account of facts and phenomena which he saw to be wholly ignored by the
combatants on both sides. The mental philosophy of Reid and the Scotch
school, on which Dr. Beecher based his definitions, he regarded as only
partially true, and had set down in his own mind at a definite value.
The intense zeal and perfect undoubting faith with which both sides
fought their battle, impressed him as only a strange and interesting
and curious study in his favorite science of anthropology.
He gave his attention to the system, understood it thoroughly, was
master of all its modes of attack, fence and defence, but he did it
much as a person now-a days might put on a suit of mediæval armor, and
study mediæval tactics.
Mr. Beecher had inherited from his father what has been called a genius
for friendship. He was never without the anchor of an enthusiastic
personal attachment for somebody, and at Lane Seminary, he formed
such an intimacy with Professor C. E. Stowe, whose room-mate for some
length of time he was, and in whose society he took great delight.
Professor Stowe, a man devoted to scholarly learning and Biblical
criticism, was equally with young Beecher standing as a spectator
in the great theological contest which was raging around him, and
which he surveyed from still another stand-point, of ecclesiastical
history and biblical criticism. It was some considerable inconvenience
to the scholarly professor, to be pulled up from his darling books,
and his interjections were not always strictly edifying when he was
raced through muddy lanes, and rattled over corduroy roads, under
the vigorous generalship of Dr. Beecher, all that he might give his
vote for or against some point of doctrine, which, in his opinion,
common sense had decided ages ago. He was also, somewhat of a strict
disciplinarian and disposed to be severe on the discursive habits
of his young friend, who was quite too apt to neglect or transcend
conventional rule. The morning prayers at Lane were at conventual
hours, and Henry's devotional propensities, of a dark cold winter
morning, were almost impossible to be aroused, while his friend, who
was punctuality itself, was always up and away in the gloaming. One
morning, when the Professor had indignantly rebuked the lazy young
Christian, whom he left tucked in bed, and, shaking the dust from his
feet, had departed to his morning duties, Henry took advantage of his
own habits of alert motion, sprang from the bed, dressed himself in a
twinkling, and taking a cross-lot passage, was found decorously sitting
directly under the Professor's desk, waiting for him, when he entered
to conduct prayers. The stare of almost frightened amazement with which
the Professor met him, was the ample reward of his exertions.
Though Professor Stowe never succeeded in making him an exact linguist,
or shaping him into a biblical scholar, yet he was of great service
to him in starting his mind in a right general direction in the study
of the Bible. The old and the new school were both too much agreed in
using the Bible as a carpenter does his nail-box, going to it only to
find screws and nails to hold together the framework of a theological
system. Professor Stowe inspired him with the idea of surveying the
books of the Bible as divinely inspired compositions, yet truly and
warmly human, and to be rendered and interpreted by the same rules of
reason and common sense which pertain to all human documents.
As the time drew near in which Mr. Beecher was to assume the work of
the ministry, he was oppressed by a deep melancholy. He had the most
exalted ideas of what ought to be done by a Christian minister. He had
transferred to that profession all those ideals of courage, enterprise,
zeal and knightly daring which were the dreams of his boyhood, and
which he first hoped to realize in the naval profession. He felt that
the holy calling stood high above all others, that to enter it from
any unholy motive, or to enter and not do a worthy work in it, was a
treason to all honor.
His view of the great object of the ministry was sincerely and heartily
the same with that of his father; to secure the regeneration of the
individual heart by the Divine spirit, and thereby to effect the
regeneration of human society. The problem that oppressed him was,
how to do this. His father had used certain moral and intellectual
weapons, and used them strongly and effectively, because employing them
with undoubting faith. So many other considerations had come into his
mind to qualify and limit that faith, so many new modes of thought and
inquiry, that were partially inconsistent with the received statements
of his party, that he felt he could never grasp and wield them with the
force which would make them efficient. It was no comfort to him that
he could wield the weapons of his theological party, so as to dazzle
and confound objectors, while all the time conscious in his own soul
of objections more profound and perplexities more bewildering. Like
the shepherd boy of old, he saw the giant of sin stalking through the
world, defying the armies of the living God, and longed to attack him,
but the armor in which he had been equipped for the battle was no help,
but only an incumbrance!
His brother, who studied with him, had already become an unbeliever,
and thrown up the design of preaching, and he could not bear to think
of adding to his father's trials by deserting the standard. Yet his
distress and perplexity were so great that at times he seriously
contemplated going into some other profession.
What to say to make men Christians,--how to raise man to God really and
truly,--was to him an awful question. Nothing short of success in this
appeared to him success in the Christian ministry.
Pending these mental conflicts, he performed some public labors. He was
for four or five months editor of the Cincinnati Journal, the organ
of the N. S. Presbyterian Church, during the absence of Mr. Brainard.
While he was holding this post, the pro-slavery riot which destroyed
Birney's press occurred, and the editorials of the young editor at
this time were copied with high approval by Charles Hammond, of the
Cincinnati Gazette, undoubtedly the ablest editor of the West, and the
only other editor who dared to utter a word condemnatory of the action
of the rioters. Mr. Beecher entered on the defence of the persecuted
negroes with all the enthusiasm of his nature. He had always a latent
martial enthusiasm, and though his whole life had been a peaceful one,
yet a facility in the use of carnal weapons seemed a second nature,
and at this time, he, with a number of other young men went to the
mayor and were sworn in as a special body of police, who patroled the
streets, well armed. Mr. Beecher wore his pistol, and was determined,
should occasion arise, to use it. But as usual in such cases, a
resolute front once shown dissolved the mob entirely.
In his last theological term he took a Bible class in the city of
Cincinnati, and began studying and teaching the evangelists. With
the course of this study and teaching came a period of spiritual
clairvoyance. His mental perplexities were relieved, and the great
question of "what to preach," was solved. The shepherd boy laid aside
his cumbrous armor, and found in a clear brook a simple stone that
smote down the giant, and so from the clear waters of the gospel
narrative, Mr. Beecher drew forth that "white stone with a new name,"
which was to be the talisman of his ministry. To present Jesus Christ,
personally, as the Friend and Helper of Humanity, Christ as God
impersonate, eternally and by a necessity of his nature helpful and
remedial and restorative; the friend of each individual soul, and thus
the friend of all society; this was the one thing which his soul rested
on as a worthy object in entering the ministry. He afterward said, in
speaking of his feelings at this time: "I was like the man in the story
to whom a fairy gave a purse with a single piece of money in it, which
he found always came again as soon as he had spent it. I thought I knew
at last one thing to preach, I found it included everything."
Immediately on finishing his theological course, Mr. Beecher married
and was settled in Lawrenceburg. He made short work of the question
of settlement, accepting the very first offer that was made him. It
was work that he wanted, and one place he thought about as good as
another. His parish was a little town on the Ohio river, not far from
Cincinnati. Here he preached in a small church, and did all the work
of the parish sexton, making his fires, trimming his lamps, sweeping
his house, and ringing his bell. "I did all," he said whimsically, "but
come to hear myself preach--that they had to do." The little western
villages of those days had none of the attractions of New England rural
life. They were more like the back suburbs of a great city, a street of
houses without yards or gardens, run up for the most part in a cheap
and flimsy manner, and the whole air of society marked with the impress
of a population who have no local attachments, and are making a mere
temporary sojourn for money-getting purposes. Mr. Beecher was soon
invited from Lawrenceburg to Indianapolis, the capital of the State,
where he labored for eight years.
His life here was of an Arcadian simplicity. He inhabited a cottage on
the outskirts of the town, where he cultivated a garden, and gathered
around him horse, cow and pig; all that wholesome suite of domestic
animals which he had been accustomed to care for in early life. He
was an enthusiast on all these matters, fastidious about breeds and
blood, and each domestic animal was a pet and received his own personal
attentions. In the note-books of this period, amid hints for sermons,
come memoranda respecting his favorite Berkshire pig, or Durham cow. He
read on gardening, farming, and stock-raising, all that he could lay
hands on; he imported from eastern cultivators all sorts of roses and
all sorts of pear trees and grape vines, and edited a horticultural
paper, which had quite a circulation.
All this was mainly the amusement of his leisure hours, as he preached
always twice on Sunday, and held at an average five other meetings a
week in different districts of the city. For three months of every
year, by consent of his people, he devoted himself to missionary
duty through the State, riding from point to point on horseback, and
preaching every day of the week.
In his theological studies he had but just two volumes--the Bible and
human nature, which he held to be indispensable to the understanding
each of the other. He said to himself, "The Apostles who first preached
Christ, made converts who were willing to dare or do anything for
him. How did they do this?" He studied all the recorded discourses of
the Apostles in the book of Acts, in his analytical method, asking,
to what principles of human nature did they appeal? What were their
methods of statement? He endeavored to compose sermons on similar
principles, and test them by their effects on men. He noticed that
the Apostles always based their appeals to men on some common truth,
admitted by both parties alike; that they struck at the great facts of
moral consciousness, and he imitated them in this. He was an intense
observer and student of men as they are. His large social talent, his
predominating play of humor and drollery, were the shields under which
he was constantly carrying on his inquiries into what man is, and how
he can be reached. Seated in the places where men congregate to loaf
and talk, he read his newspaper with his eyes and ears open to more
than its pages. His preaching began to draw listeners as a new style
of thing. Its studies into human nature, its searching analysis of
men and their ways, drew constant listeners. His fame spread through
the country, and multitudes, wherever he went, flocked to hear him.
Still, Mr. Beecher did not satisfy himself. To be a popular preacher,
to be well spoken of, to fill up his church, did not after all satisfy
his ideal. It was necessary that the signs of an Apostle should be
wrought in him by his having the power given to work the great, deep
and permanent change which unites the soul to God. It was not till
about the third year of his ministry that he found this satisfaction
in a great revival of religion in Terre Haute, which was followed by
a series of such revivals through the State, in which he was for many
months unceasingly active. When he began to see whole communities
moving together under a spiritual impulse, the grog-shops abandoned,
the votaries of drunkenness, gambling and dissipation reclaimed,
reformed, and sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in their right
mind, he felt that at last he had attained what his soul thirsted for,
and that he could enter into the joy of the Apostles when they returned
to Jesus, saying, "Lord, by thy name even the devils were made subject
unto us."
His preaching of Christ at this time was spoken of as something very
striking in its ceaseless iteration of one theme, made constantly new
and various by new applications to human want and sin and sorrow.
A member of his church in Indianapolis, recently, in writing the
history of the church with which he was connected, thus gives his
recollections of him:
"In the early spring of 1842, a revival began, more noticeable,
perhaps, than any that this church or this community has seen. The
whole town was pervaded by the influences of religion. For many
weeks the work continued with unabated power, and at three communion
seasons, held successively in February, March and April, 1842, nearly
one hundred persons were added to the church on profession of their
faith. This was God's work. It is not improper, however, to speak
of the pastor in that revival, as he is remembered by some of the
congregation, plunging through the wet streets, his trousers stuffed
in his muddy bootlegs, earnest, untiring, swift; with a merry heart, a
glowing face, and a helpful word for every one; the whole day preaching
Christ to the people where he could find them, and at night preaching
still where the people were sure to find him. It is true that in this
revival some wood and hay and stubble were gathered with the gold
and silver and precious stones. As in all new communities, there was
special danger of unhealthy excitement. But in general the results
were most happy for the church and for the town. Some of those who have
been pillars since, found the Saviour in that memorable time. Nor was
the awakening succeeded by an immediate relapse.
"Early in the following year, at the March and April communions, the
church had large accessions, and it had also in 1845. There was,
indeed, a wholesome and nearly continuous growth up to the time
when the first pastor resigned, to accept a call to the Plymouth
Congregational church, in Brooklyn, New York. This occurred August
24th, 1847, and on the nineteenth of the following month Mr. Beecher's
labors for the congregation ceased.