Men of Our Times. Or, Leading Patriots of the Day

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.

"The pastorate, thus terminated, had extended through more than eight years. During this time much had been accomplished. The society had built a pleasant house of worship. The membership had advanced from thirty-two to two hundred and seventy-five. What was considered a doubtful enterprise, inaugurated as it had been amidst many prophecies of failure, had risen to an enviable position, not only in the capital but in the State. The attachment between pastor and people had become peculiarly strong. Mutual toils and sufferings and successes had bound them fast together. Only the demands of a wider field, making duty plain, divided them, and a recent letter proves that the pastor's early charge still keeps its hold upon his heart. It is not to be wondered at that the few of his flock who yet remain among us always speak of 'Henry' with beaming eyes and mellowed voices."

One expression in this extract will show a peculiarity which strongly recalls the artless, unconventional freshness of Western life in those days. The young pastor, though deeply and truly respected by all his elders and church members, was always addressed as "Henry," by them with a sort of family intimacy and familiarity. It was partly due to the simple, half woodland habits of the people, and partly to that quality in the pastor that made every elderly man love him as a son and every younger one as a brother.

Henry's tastes, enthusiasms, and fancies, his darling garden, with its prize vegetables and choice roses, whence came bouquets for the æsthetic, and more solid presents of prize onions or squashes for the more literal – all these seemed to be part and parcel of the family stock of his church. His brother Charles, who from intellectual difficulties had abandoned the ministry, and devoted himself to a musical life as a profession, inhabited, with his wife and young family, a little cottage in the same grounds with his own, and shared his garden labors, and led the music of his church. "Henry and Charles" were as familiarly spoken of and known in Indianapolis circles as Castor and Pollux among the astronomers. In one of the revivals in Indianapolis, Charles, like his brother before him, found in an uplift of his moral faculties a tide to carry him over the sunken rocks of his logic. By his brother's advice, he took a Bible class, and began the story of the life of Christ, and the result was that after a while he saw his way clear to offer himself for ordination, and was settled in the ministry in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Thus that simple narrative had power to allay the speculative doubts of both brothers, and to give them an opening into the ministry.

Mr. Beecher has always looked back with peculiar tenderness to that Western life, in the glow of his youthful days, and in that glorious, rich, abundant, unworn Western country. The West, with its wide, rich, exuberant spaces of land, its rolling prairies, garlanded with rainbows of ever-springing flowers, teeming with abundance of food for man, and opening in every direction avenues for youthful enterprise and hope, was to him a morning land. To carry Christ's spotless banner in high triumph through such a land, was a thing worth living for, and as he rode on horseback alone, from day to day, along the rolling prairie lands, sometimes up to his horse's head in grass and waving flowers, he felt himself kindled with a sort of ecstacy. The prairies rolled and blossomed in his sermons, and his style at this time had a tangled luxuriance of poetic imagery, a rush and abundance of words, a sort of rich and heavy involution, that resembled the growth of a tropical forest.

"What sort of a style am I forming?" he said to a critical friend, who had come to hear him preach.

"Well, I should call it the 'tropical style,'" was the reply.

The Western people, simple and strong, shrewd as Yankees, and excitable and fervent as Southerners, full of quaint images and peculiar turns of expression derived from a recent experience of back-woods life, were an open page in his great book of human nature, where character revealed itself with an artless freshness. All the habits of society had an unconventional simplicity. People met with the salutation, "How are ye, stranger?" and had no thought of any formal law of society, why one human being might not address another on equal terms, and speak out his mind on all subjects fully. When invited to supper at a thrifty farmer's, the supper board was spread in the best bed-room, the master and mistress stood behind the chairs of their guests and waited on them during the meal, and the table groaned with such an abundance of provision as an eastern imagination fails to conceive of. Every kind of fowl, choicely cooked, noble hams, sausages, cheese, bread, butter, biscuit, corn cakes in every variety, sweet cakes and confections, preserved fruits of every name, with steaming tea and coffee, were all indispensable to a good supper.

Of poverty, properly so called, there was very little. There were none of those distressing, unsolvable social problems which perplex the mind and burden the heart of a pastor in older states of society.

Mr. Beecher's ecclesiastical brethren were companions of whom he never fails to speak with tender respect and enthusiastic regard. Some of them, like Father Dickey, were men who approached as near the apostolic ideal, in poverty, simplicity, childlike sincerity, and unconquerable, persevering labor, as it is possible to do. They were all strong, fearless anti-slavery men, and the resolutions of the Indiana Synod were always a loud, unsparing and never-failing testimony against any complicity with slavery in the Presbyterian church.

As to the great theological controversy that divided the old and new school church, Mr. Beecher dropped it at once and forthwith, being in his whole nature essentially uncontroversial. It came to pass that some of his warmest personal friends were members of the Old School church in Indianapolis, and offspring of the very fiercest combatants who had fought his father in Cincinnati.

Mr. Beecher was on terms of good fellowship with all denominations. There were in Indianapolis, Baptists, Methodists, and an Episcopal minister, but he stood on kindly social terms with all. The spirit of Western society was liberal, and it was deemed edifying by the common sense masses that the clergy of different denominations should meet as equals and brothers. Mr. Beecher's humorous faculty gave to him a sort of universal coin which passed current in all sorts of circles, making every one at ease with him. Human nature longs to laugh, and a laugh, as Shakspeare says, "done in the testimony of a good conscience," will often do more to bring together wrangling theologians than a controversy.

There was a store in Indianapolis, where the ministers of all denominations often dropped in to hear the news, and where the free western nature made it always in rule to try each others metal with a joke. No matter how sharp the joke, it was considered to be all fair and friendly.

On one occasion, Mr. Beecher, riding to one of the stations of his mission, was thrown over his horse's head in crossing the Miami, pitched into the water, and crept out thoroughly immersed. The incident of course furnished occasion for talk in the circles the next day, and his good friend the Baptist minister proceeded to attack him the moment he made his appearance.

"Oh, ho, Beecher, glad to see you! I thought you'd have to come into our ways at last! You've been immersed at last; you are as good as any of us now." A general laugh followed this sally.

"Poh, poh," was the ready response, "my immersion was a different thing from that of your converts. You see, I was immersed by a horse, not by an ass."

A chorus of laughter proclaimed that Beecher had got the better of the joke for this time.

A Methodist brother once said to him, "Well now, really, Brother Beecher, what have you against Methodist doctrines?"

"Nothing, only that your converts will practice them."

"Practice them?"

"Yes, you preach falling from grace, and your converts practice it with a vengeance."

One morning as he was sitting at table, word was brought in that his friend, the Episcopal minister, was at the gate, wanting to borrow his horse.

"Stop, stop," said he, with a face of great gravity, "there's something to be attended to first," and rising from table, he ran out to him and took his arm with the air of a man who is about to make a serious proposition.

"Now brother G – , you want my horse for a day? Well, you see, it lies on my mind greatly that you don't admit my ordination. I don't think it's fair. Now if you'll admit that I'm a genuinely ordained minister, you shall have my horse, but if not, I don't know about it."

Mr. Beecher took ground from the first that the pulpit is the place not only for the presentation of those views which tend to unite man's spiritual nature directly with God, but also for the consideration of all those specific reforms which grow out of the doctrine of Christ in society. He preached openly and boldly on specific sins prevailing in society, and dangerous practices which he thought would corrupt or injure.

There was a strong feeling in Indianapolis against introducing slavery into the discussions of the pulpit. Some of his principal men had made vehement declarations that the subject never should be named in the pulpit of any church with which they were connected. Mr. Beecher, among his earliest motions in Synod, however, introduced a resolution that every minister should preach a thorough exposition and condemnation of slavery. He fulfilled his part very characteristically, by preaching three sermons on the life of Moses, the bondage of the children of Israel under Pharaoh and their deliverance. Under this cover he gained the ear of the people, for it has always been held both orthodox and edifying to bombard the vices and crimes of old Testament sinners, and to show no mercy to their iniquities. Before they were aware of it however, his hearers found themselves listening to a hot and heavy attack on the existing system of American slavery, which he exposed in a most thorough, searching manner, and although the oppressor was called Pharaoh and the scene was Egypt, and so nobody could find fault with the matter of the discourse, the end and aim was very manifest.

Nobody was offended, but many were convinced, and from that time, Mr. Beecher preached Anti-Slavery sermons in his church just as often as he thought best, and his church became an efficient bulwark of the cause.

The Western states at this time were the scenes of much open vice. Gambling, drinking, licentiousness were all rife in the community, and against each of these, Mr. Beecher lifted up his testimony. A course of sermons on those subjects preached in Indianapolis and afterwards published under the title of "Lectures to Young Men," excited in the day of their delivery a great sensation. The style is that of fervid, almost tropical fullness, which characterized his Western life. It differs from the sermons of most clergymen to young men, in that free and perfect knowledge it shows of all the details of the evil ways which he names. Mr. Beecher's peculiar social talent, his convivial powers, and his habits of close Shaksperian observation, gave him the key of human nature. Many a gambler or drunkard, in their better hours were attracted towards a man who met them as a brother, and seemed to value and aim for the better parts of their nature. When Mr. Beecher left Indianapolis some of his most touching interviews and parting gifts were from men of this class, whom he had followed in their wanderings and tried to save. Some he could save and some were too far in the whirlpool for his arm to pull them out. One of them said when he heard of his leaving, "Before any thing or any body on earth, I do love Beecher. I know he would have saved me if he could."

Mr. Beecher was so devoted to the West, and so identified with it, that he never would have left what he was wont to call his bishopric of Indiana, for the older and more set and conventional circles of New York, had not the health of his family made a removal indispensable.

He was invited to Brooklyn to take charge of a new enterprise. Plymouth Church was founded by some fifteen or twenty gentlemen as a new Congregational Church.

Mr. Beecher was to be installed there and had to pass an examination before Eastern theologians. He had been, as has been shown, not a bit of a controversialist, and he had been so busy preaching Christ, and trying to save sinners, that he was rather rusty in all the little ins and outs of New England theology. On many points he was forced to answer "I do not know," and sometimes his answer had a whimsical turn that drew a smile.

"Do you believe in the Perseverance of the Saints?" said good Dr. Humphrey, his college father, who thought his son was not doing himself much credit in the theological line, and hoped to put a question where he could not fail to answer right.

"I was brought up to believe that doctrine," said Mr. Beecher, "and I did believe it till I went out West and saw how Eastern Christians lived when they went out there. I confess since then I have had my doubts."