A Preacher—His Place—His Training—His Estimate of the Work—Defects—Effectual Call—Upon Drawing an Audience—His Theory—Preparation—Results—A Theologian—His Orthodoxy—Evolution—Ordinances—Christian Unity—Sectarianism—Peacemaker.

It now belongs to us, among the closing chapters of this biography, to speak of Henry Ward Beecher, or rather to allow him, for the most part, to speak for himself, as a preacher, a theologian, and an administrator of ordinances—three spheres of activity so blended that it is of advantage to treat them together. His doctrines necessarily shaped his preaching, his preaching colored and emphasized his theology, and both together determined his estimate of the Church as an organized body, and the value of its rites and ceremonies.

Among them, the preacher stood pre-eminent. He himself regarded preaching as especially his vocation, and in his judgment it ranked highest of all earthly pursuits. Nowhere else was he so happy as in this his chosen work. As a preacher he was most widely known, and for his labors in this sphere, we doubt not, he will be the longest remembered.

His field was broader than was ever before given to any preacher, and no man that ever lived preached continuously to so large and influential audiences. During his forty years in Plymouth pulpit men from every part of the civilized world came to hear him, and to every part of the civilized world did his published sermons find their way, bringing instruction, inspiration, and comfort to multitudes.

Of his rank as a preacher, it is not for us to speak dogmatically. We stood too near him—perhaps all men of the present time stand too near him—to be impartial judges. Many letters and reports of sermons have come to us in which he is given the first place among the preachers of this age, and a few, among them some from men who themselves hold the first rank, place him before all preachers since the Apostle Paul. Which of these, or whether either, is the true estimate or not, it does not belong to us nor to any man living to decide; but we believe that the latter judgment will in time largely prevail.

The open heart that receives inspiration of God; the prophetic insight of the true preacher that sees into the heart of things, and sees God there, and believes, with an intense conviction born of experience, that God’s nature is love; that this love is not for the Jew only, for those of favored lineage, of excellent position, of high moral standard and attainment, or of right belief, but is for the Gentile, for the wandering, the erring, the lost, outside the Church, outside even the sympathies and hope of religious men, the only power that can save, but able to save to the uttermost; the ability to see this love incarnated in Jesus Christ and feel it as sunshine upon the soul, continually dispelling the darkness; to love Him, as He is so manifested, with an all-absorbing passion of personal affection, before which all things pass away from their old adjustments and become new; to see Him not only head of the Church, but head over all things; to find in Him the centre of unity which the world needs, middle walls of partition between Jew and Gentile, between learned and unlearned, between ranks and classes, between science and religion, broken down; the power to rejoice in sufferings for His sake, to bear without faltering, to love without failing, although “the more we love the less we be loved”; the ability to open this Gospel to others, in speech that moved all hearts, as the winds move the tree-tops, that never touched an object, however common, but to leave it exalted, set in some new and higher relation; the ability to move men to think, to act, to love—all this, we believe, has never been possessed to an equal degree with Mr. Beecher by any preacher since Saint Paul preached to the Athenians, taking the altar of the unknown god for his text; since he described charity to the Corinthians, told the Colossians that all the creation consists, stands in harmony, in Jesus Christ, and wrote the Epistle to the Ephesians. Nor do we believe that to any one but to him has there been given a work that so nearly resembled that of the great Apostle to the Gentiles, whose part it was to bridge over by a living faith, or rather by faith in a living One, the vast differences that kept classes and orders and nationalities separate; to give expression to the new and broader hope; to reconcile the old to the new and more vital faith, and show the relation of a risen Lord to a material universe. But in this we may be unduly prejudiced by our affection. We will let the sifting processes of the years decide.

That he became a minister, as did his brothers, by reason of the unswerving faith and prayer of the parents, is already well known. “Out of six sons not one escaped from the pulpit.” “My mother dedicated me to the work of the foreign missionary; she laid her hands upon me, wept over me, and set me apart to preach the Gospel among the heathen, and I have been doing it all my life long, for it so happens one does not need to go far from his own country to find his audience before him.”

Ushered into the preparation for the ministry by the parental faith, stumbling and discouraged and ready to give up the work, another hand was not wanting to open still more clearly the way, draw back the curtains, and let in the light:

“I beheld Him as a helper, as the soul’s midwife, as the soul’s physician, and I felt because I was weak I could come to Him; because I did not know how, and, if I did know, I had not the strength, to do the things that were right—that was the invitation that He gave to me out of my conscious weakness and want. I will not repeat the scene of that morning when light broke fairly on my mind; how one might have thought that I was a lunatic escaped from confinement; how I ran up and down through the primeval forest of Ohio, shouting, ‘Glory, glory!’ sometimes in loud tones and at other times whispered in an ecstasy of joy and surprise. All the old troubles gone, and light breaking in on my mind, I cried: ‘I have found my God; I have found my God!’ From that hour I consecrated myself to the work of the ministry anew, for before that I had about made up my mind to go into some other profession.”

His early training-school for effective preaching was well selected. It was, as is well known, one of the little villages on the banks of the Ohio River, where the wants of river barge-men and frontiermen demanded his attention. It was there he decided what his life-work should be.

“‘My business shall be to save men, and to bring to bear upon them those views that are my comfort, that are the bread of life to me’; and I went out among them almost entirely cut loose from the ordinary church institutions and agencies, knowing nothing but ‘Christ, and Him crucified,’ the sufferer for mankind. Did not the men round me need such a Saviour? Was there ever such a field as I found? Every sympathy of my being was continually solicited for the ignorance, for the rudeness, for the aberrations, for the avarice, for the quarrelsomeness of the men among whom I was, and I was trying every form and presenting Christ as a medicine to men. I went through the woods and through camp-meetings and over prairies. Everywhere my vacations were all missionary tours, preaching Christ for the hope of salvation. I am not saying this to show you how I came to the knowledge of Christ, but to show you how I came to the habit and forms of my ministry. I tried everything on to folks.”

Added to the forces of experience and surroundings was always that of his own personal, natural endowment. This he found fault with and tried to change, as most people do at some period of their lives, but finally accepted and concluded to use as best he could, without murmuring, but always conscious of its limitations.

“I have my own peculiar temperament, I have my own method of preaching, and my method and temperament necessitate errors. I am not worthy to be related in the hundred-thousandth degree to those more happy men who never make a mistake in the pulpit. I make a great many. I am impetuous. I am intense at times on subjects that deeply move me. I feel as though all the ocean were not strong enough to be the power behind my words, nor all the thunders that were in the heavens, and it is of necessity that such a nature as that should give such intensity at times to parts of doctrine as to exaggerate them when you come to bring them into connection with a more rounded-out and balanced view. I know it—I know it as well as you do. I would not do it if I could help it; but there are times when it is not I that is talking, when I am caught up and carried away so that I know not whether I am in the body or out of the body, when I think things in the pulpit that I never could think in the study, and when I have feelings that are so far different from any that belong to the lower or normal condition that I neither can regulate them nor understand them. I see things and I hear sounds, and seem, if not in the seventh heaven, yet in a condition that leads me to understand what Paul said—that he heard things which it was not possible for a man to utter. I am acting under such a temperament as that. I have got to use it, or not preach at all. I know very well I do not give crystalline views nor thoroughly guarded views; there is often an error on this side and an error on that, and I cannot stop to correct them. A man might run around, like a kitten after its tail, all his life, if he were going around explaining all his expressions and all the things he had written. Let them go. They will correct themselves. The average and general influence of a man’s teaching will be more mighty than any single misconception, or misapprehension through misconception.”

Successful as he was, he yet had none of the self-conceit that would lead him to believe that he had reached perfection; on the contrary, his language was always that of one who had not yet attained, but was continually reaching out unto it. “Young gentlemen, I want to tell you true preaching is yet to come. Of all professions for young men to look forward to, I do not know another one that seems to me to have such scope before it, in the future, as preaching.

“And as my years increase I want to bear a testimony. I suppose I have had as many opportunities as any man here, or any living man, of what are called honors and influence and wealth. The doors have been opened, the golden doors, for years. I want to bear witness that the humblest labor which a minister of God can do for a soul for Christ’s sake is grander and nobler than all learning, than all influence and power, than all riches. And, knowing so much as I do of society, I have this declaration to make: that if I were called to live my life over again, and I were to have a chance of the vocations which men seek, I would again choose, and with an impetus arising from the experience of this long life, the ministry of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, for honor, for cleanliness, for work that never ends, having the promise of the life that now is as well as of that which is to come—I would choose the preaching of the Gospel: to them that perish, foolishness; to them that believe and accept it, life everlasting.”

And that not because of great success: “There is a deep enjoyment in having devoted yourself, soul and body, to the welfare of your fellow-men, so that you have no thought and no care but for them. There is a pleasure in that which is never touched by any ordinary experiences in human life. It is the highest. I look back to my missionary days as being transcendently the happiest period of my life. The sweetest pleasures I have ever known are not those that I have now, but those that I remember, when I was unknown, in an unknown land, among a scattered people, mostly poor, and to whom I had to go and preach the Gospel, man by man, house by house, gathering them on Sundays, a few—twenty, fifty, or a hundred, as the case might be—and preaching the Gospel more formally to them as they were able to bear it.”

In his whole course we believe that he was as little moved by personal ambition as any man could possibly be. Upon his graduation he took the first church that asked for his services—as undesirable a church at that time probably, in position, character, and strength, as could well have been found. And the two removes he made were the result of necessity rather than of choice. He had no large and stock sermons with which to awaken the admiration of men. Large subjects he had in plenty, but the sermon was such as grew at the time.

From our knowledge of him we believe he spoke with absolute truthfulness when he says:

“I have had no ambitions; I have sought no laurels; I have deliberately rejected many things that would have been consonant to my taste. It would have been for me a great delight to be a scholar; I should have relished exceedingly to have perfected my thought in the study, and to have given it such qualities as that it should stand as classics stand. But when the work was pressed upon me, and my relations to my own country and to mankind became urgent, I remember, as if it were but yesterday, when I laid my literary ambition and my scholarly desires upon the altar and said: ‘If I can do more for my Master and for men by my style of thinking and working, I am willing to work in a second-rate way; I am willing to leave writing behind my back; I am willing not to carve statues of beauty, but simply to do the things that would please God in the salvation of men.’”

He had not only no ambitions for himself, but he had no patience in that seeking for place which, sometimes with the best of intentions, ministers adopt. We well remember how, early in our ministry, hearing that a larger church was offered to us, and fearing lest, in our inexperienced zeal, we might accept, he telegraphed us not to decide until we had seen him, but to come on to Brooklyn, that he might urge upon us the importance of a young man’s staying in his first parish until “he had done something,” by which he meant doing the work he had gone there to undertake.

Two things he considered essential to an effectual call to the minister to change his parish: one was “an open door in front, and the other was a kick from behind.” It was not enough that there was an open door; some pressure of health or dissatisfaction was needed to make a perfect call. What a man was to do when he got the kick, and there was no open door in front, we do not remember.

Again he writes me:

His theory of preaching, which came to be formed out of his experience of the grace of God and his labors for men, he himself has given:

“To preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ; to have Christ so melted and dissolved in you that when you preach your own self you preach Him as Paul did; to have every part of you living and luminous with Christ, and then to make use of everything that is in you, your analogical reasoning, your logical reasoning, your imagination, your mirthfulness, your humor, your indignation, your wrath; to take everything that is in you all steeped in Jesus Christ, and to throw yourself with all your power upon a congregation—that has been my theory of preaching the Gospel. A good many folks have laughed at the idea of my being a fit preacher because I laughed, and because I made somebody else laugh. I never went out of my way to do it in my life; but if some sudden turn of a sentence, like the crack of a whip, sets men off, I do not think any worse of it for that—not a bit. I have felt that man should consecrate every gift that he has got in him that has any relation to the persuasion of men and to the melting of men—that he should put them all on the altar, kindle them all, and let them burn for Christ’s sake. I have never sought singularity, and I have never avoided singularity. When they wanted some other sort of teaching I have always said, ‘Get it. If you want my kind, here I am ready to serve you; if you do not, serve yourself better.’”

For this preaching there was always going on a certain preparation, almost involuntarily. It consisted in a constant study of the processes of nature around him, examining them and digesting them, until he saw the relations in which they stood to other facts, and a principle was discovered or an illustration of some deeper moral and spiritual truth was gained. This action of his mind, we believe, became almost automatic. He had an insatiable curiosity to learn facts. But he wanted them for the same reason that a miller wants grain, to grind and make bread. So he worked them over until he had got something from them that fed his mind or heart, and this was the only way he could remember them.

For this preaching there had been carried on for years a study of the Bible. The evidences, found in note-books and books of analysis, of his broad and painstaking study of the Gospels have astonished us. People seeing him always on the wing, finding him never in his study—in fact, having in his house no study-room, as such—got the impression that he worked but little; but they made a great mistake. He worked, but it was in his own way. The winter that I saw him most he had Stanley’s “Commentary upon the Epistles to the Corinthians,” which he carried for weeks in his carpet-bag, studied, and annotated from beginning to end. Mr. Pond, who has travelled with him thousands of miles, says that Bible reading and study was a part of his daily work while on the train.

The results of such reading and study appear in scores of little note-books that he used, some of which lie before us, containing subjects, heads of sermons jotted down at moments of inspiration, in the family circle, on the railroad, in the street-car, after a talk with some friend, written for the most part in that strong, full hand that is so well known, sometimes plainly, at other times so obscurely as to make it doubtful if he himself could read it after it had become cold.

This was his method of getting subjects. These were the acorn thoughts, out of which grew up in time strong, wide-spreading oak-tree sermons.

With eyes wide open to see things, he kept his active sympathy and hearty fellow-feeling for men in exercise by constant intercourse with those about him. Some have a regard for mankind in general, but only criticism and coldness for the concrete specimen before them. This was not the case with him; he liked the common men of the present, and made it an object to get acquainted with them and to be with them. Very seldom did he cross the river on the ferry-boat but he made his way up into the pilot-house, to which a key had been given him, to have a talk with the pilot.

We have been often asked, “How does Mr. Beecher prepare his sermons?” His general preparation we have already given. The more special preparation for preaching on the Sabbath began on Saturday and consisted in doing as little work as possible—doing what pleased him, making it a kind of active rest-day. Perhaps, if the weather permitted, he ran up to Peekskill to look over the place, and get rid of all friction and rasp by giving attention to its common and homely details, or to feed his imagination by looking out upon its beautiful landscape. Perhaps he spent it in the city. If so, he has probably been over to New York, looking into shop-windows, dropping into Appleton’s to look at books, or into Tiffany’s to look at gems, having a little chat in each place with some of the clerks. You may be sure he did not forget his afternoon nap of from one to two hours; wherever he was he aimed to secure that. He has fed well to-day, but has been careful not to eat anything that does not agree with him. He will have the body in perfect order for the great work of the morrow. The evening he spent quietly at home, or, possibly, ran into one or two of the homes where he was most familiar, where he could have his own way and be not bored by anybody’s trying to draw him out into some excited discussion. If you had followed him there you would very likely have found him taking his ease upon the sofa, while the family life went on around him, in which he took part by humorous sallies or quiet suggestions, as the fancy prompted him; home and a few games of backgammon with Mrs. Beecher, and to bed by eleven o’clock. Up to this time he has not decided upon the subject or text that he will handle on the morrow; to have chosen it so early as this, especially to have written any part of it down, would have killed his sermon the next day. He could not have kindled up to it and made it a living thing, if it had been for so long a time buried on parchment. Even upon so important a matter as his first lecture of the Lyman Beecher lectureship in Yale College—a new enterprise, with the faculty of the college as well as the clergymen of the city present, and his lecture to be reported in the religious press—he did not touch pen to paper until after he had reached New Haven, taken dinner, had his nap, and was within an hour of its delivery, although of course the subject-matter had been for a long time a-brewing. Then while shaving the outline came clear to his mind, and he slashed his face with his razor in his eagerness, but his lecture secured the hearty and grateful commendation of Dr. Leonard Bacon, who said: “If I had heard such talk as that before I began to preach, it would have made a better preacher of me.”

The decision was made in a general way when he awoke in the morning—that is, the kind of sermon he would preach that day. If he was heavy and a little cloudy in the higher faculties, he would select a subject that was in harmony with that state of mind. If he was stirred in spirit and imagination, a subject that drew upon those higher elements, and that ministered to the same in others, would be decided upon. There was no approach to a sanctimonious expression on his face as he came down to the breakfast-table, and he did not refuse to take part in the conversation, whatever it might be; and very likely there would some humorous remark drop from his lips, or he would steal the bread from the plate of one of the children as usual. Yet it was all done with the air of a man that had something that engaged his attention apart from us. Family prayers were likely to be short that morning, and if there were any of those delays that sometimes occur in the best-regulated families, he would depute some one else to conduct them. And then he locked himself in his own room, and for an hour and a half must be left undisturbed, except in the case of some imperative necessity, and then to be approached by no one but his wife. No noise in the halls. The hour of the whole week had come to him, and he must have it without interruption. Of course none of us, and no one but God, ever saw him in that hour, but we know that then he made his final and definite selection of a subject, perhaps taking it from one of those little note-books; that he wrote with his goose-quill pen, upon large sheets of paper, his introduction; that he put down head after head, with such opening as the time permitted, and gave a word of illustration here and there. The vision stood before him, and as hastily as possible he sketched the outline. As the bell began to ring for the last time, some fifteen minutes before the opening of the service, he would come out with his papers hastily thrown together and held in his hand, or thrust into his coat-pocket, and, with scarcely a word to any one, put on his hat, take Mrs. Beecher on his arm, and start for the church.

This hour may be shortened. It may be spent in some other place than in his study, but as a rule it was had, this time of supreme choice and arrangement, and jotting down the heads of his sermon. As an extreme illustration of his powers of making all places available, and to seize the most outwardly unpropitious surroundings for this final preparation, I can say from personal knowledge that the notes of the sermon which he preached in Charleston in 1865 to the thousands in Zion Church, and which was one of great scope and power, was outlined in the outhouse of the home where we were stopping, on scraps of envelopes which he happened to have with him. From thence we went directly to the church and to the delivery of that grand sermon. When I spoke to him afterwards about the sermon and its power, he said: “The vision came to me there, and if I could only have brought it out as I saw it, it would have been worth hearing; but I could not.”

When he preached upon the occasion of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Congregational Church in Stamford, he came into my house hastily, stopping only long enough to kiss his daughter as he hurried upstairs. In about fifteen minutes he came down, putting away some notes in his side-pocket, and said to her: “Well, I have got my sermon ready for the evening.” This was in the forenoon. Being prepared so long beforehand, it got cold before the time for its delivery, and when he went into the pulpit he felt barren and dry. Neither the singing by the choir nor the prayer by a brother minister, of which he spoke afterwards very highly, gave him the desired relief, and he sat with the fixed, settled expression of a man who is bound to do his duty as well as he can; but to those who knew him well there was a lack of the light in the eye and the deep, full, restful look of countenance which was marked in him when he was all prepared. It happened that we had at that time a solo-singer of great richness and sweetness of voice, and she sang for an offertory just before preaching. “The Three Kings of the Orient.” The sympathetic rendering of the words of that beautiful solo smote the rock; the waters gushed out and suffused soul and intellect, and the sermon was one of great power and beauty.

Because of its adaptation to awaken devotion in his own heart and in the hearts of his audience he valued organ music, but it must be rendered by one who himself felt its power and could express this feeling through the instrument. If the organist failed in this, no brilliancy of execution nor facility in rendering popular tunes could atone for the fundamental lack. By reason of John Zundel’s ability to express and interpret religious emotion he valued him above all players that ever officiated at the organ in Plymouth Church. As with the organ, so with the choir. No efficiency in the leader of the choir, in the machinery, could atone for the lack of appreciation of the devotional element in the music.

In the Scripture-reading he was himself, feeding upon the word which he read, drinking in and appropriating its truths; and in the prayer he came to the fountain-head, to Christ Himself, for refreshing and life power.

And now for the sermon itself. For the first few moments his eyes followed the manuscript closely. He seemed to be reading; perhaps he was, and perhaps there were only catch sentences upon the page which he was scanning so carefully. He was gathering his forces, getting under headway, making preparatory explanations, divisions, and definitions. He will get into the full, rushing current of thought and feeling and speech presently.

We can liken the whole process to nothing better than the descent of some of our Western rivers under the care of a skilful guide. You get into the boat in some sheltered cove. He takes the oar and pushes out gently but strongly, points out the rocks on either side and avoids them, and makes his way around some tree-top that has fallen in from the shore. Like to this was often Mr. Beecher’s opening. The current now is felt and begins to bear you along on its bosom, and in that hour all your life-experiences are gone over or pointed out to you. You are in the shallows where life seems poor and worthless, and he shows you how to find the deeper channels. He points out the pleasant places on the shore, and shows you where living springs burst out; takes you under the shadow of the lofty trees whose branches sweep down within your reach, and anon out under the clear, sun-lighted heaven. Swirls of temptation are before you, and he shows you how to steer straight through or how to avoid them. You are now in the very rapids, in the rush of the life that for six days in the week is roaring around you, and all things seem to be rushing to destruction; but this man is not disturbed. He is no still-water pilot. He has thoroughly studied that river and knows all its dangers. Through the fiercest rapids that ever boat was called upon to pass he will guide you safely; over the deepest fall that ever boats must venture he will stand by you. He goes with you until he has brought you into some quiet spot of God’s great and present mercy, or perhaps to the mouth of the river and in sight of the islands of the blest. What a hand was that, so gentle, skilful, strong! What a voice, so clear, tender, inspiring, confident! What a heart, that knew all the ways of sorrow! What a guide and helper he was! “O my father! my father! the chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof!”

In the largeness of his audience, in his power over them for the time being, there can be no question; but how about the permanent results in growth and strength of Christian character, in making men and women Christlike?—for this, as he would be first to claim, is the only true success. Our first witness here, of course, must be Plymouth Church, the body that received most impress from the word he preached and the life he lived. One of the largest churches in the land, it has been called a drag-net “which has been cast into the sea and has gathered of every kind.” And undoubtedly it has its proportion of human weakness and imperfections, but, after making all deductions of this nature, it nevertheless remains true that, tried by all the tests that can apply to a church, it will answer as well as any that can be found. It has been singularly harmonious and free from quarrels and contention, and that under trials the like of which few churches have ever been called to endure. Its failures in Christian character have been as few; its works have been as broad and beneficent; its weekly care to provide for strangers that visited it as hospitable; its benevolent contributions as generous, we believe, as those of any other church. But, deeper than all this, and better than all, the spirit that has pervaded the church has been unusually kind, helpful, Christlike.

It was said that it had no life separate from Mr. Beecher. But the bearing of that body since the death of its pastor has given an emphatic denial to that statement. From the day that his body lay in state, and its members gathered like a stricken household around the coffin, the church, to all outward appearances, has been growing more earnest in developing its powers, more loving in its spirit. The seed so long planted is bearing fruit, the benediction so long resting upon it is showing its beauty, and is proving that indeed it is the fruit of but one thing, and that is the Gospel of God’s dear Son, of Jesus the Christ.

But other witnesses rise up to testify—troubled, weary, heartbroken souls the world over, who have read the sermons as they have come to them from Plymouth pulpit; and they bear witness that this one spake as he was moved of the Holy Ghost, that his message was of Him who came to heal the sick, to raise the dead, to set at liberty the captive.

We call to the witness-stand all ministers and all denominations of every name who have ever read his sermons or heard him preach, and they will testify that his message was of God.

Yea, we will go beyond this circle and ask those of other pursuits—laborers, workers, soldiers, actors—if there has not shone upon them something of the light that our Saviour shed upon all classes and conditions of men, and their answer will be unanimously in the affirmative. We go beyond the personality of men and come into the realm of beliefs and relationships, and affirm, without fear of denial, that theology is to-day more truthful, science more devout, religion more attractive, sectarianism less bitter, churches more loving, politics purer, property more humane, labor more faithful, social ranks more tolerant, and nations brought nearer together, by reason of the preaching of the Gospel by Henry Ward Beecher.

To speak of Mr. Beecher as a theologian will awaken, we are well aware, a smile of incredulity with many. It will be said that theology was not his forte; that he seldom made use of the term except to make fun of it, or of those who were its exponents and teachers. Now, we acknowledge that we might give a definition of this science in which he would appear to very poor advantage. But if theology can be considered as the knowledge of God in His relations to living men and to this present world, then was Mr. Beecher a theologian excelled by few now living or that ever have lived. He had this knowledge of God. It was as real to him as his own existence. He had the nature and order of God’s attributes very clearly settled in his own mind. He had His relations with the whole universe in which He dwelt very thoroughly outlined in his thought. He had his own system, upon which he worked from day to day, which included all existences and orders, and all times, and all worlds; that, as he believed, had a place for all truth that had ever been lived or revealed, and for all that ever should be lived or revealed, here, or in Saturn, or Sirius, in this present time or in the ages of ages. He made a great deal of fun of theologians, sometimes because of the one-sidedness of their views, sometimes because of their dryness, at others because of their pretensions, and partly because all classes of men were, in his view, at times objects of legitimate mirth-making. Yet nevertheless he greatly valued them and their work.

“Now, young gentlemen,” he said in his “Lectures to Yale Students,” “I have often indulged myself in words that would seem to undervalue theologians; but you know I do not mean it. I profess to be a theologian myself; my father was a theologian; my brothers are all theologians, and so are many men whom I revere, and who are the brightest lights of genius, I think, that have ever shone in the world. I believe in theologians, and yet I think it is perfectly fair to make game of them! I do not think there is anything in this world, whether it be man or that which is beneath a man, that is not legitimate food for innocent, innocuous fun; and if it should cast a ray of light on the truth and alleviate the tediousness of a lecture now and then to have a slant at theologians, why, I think they can stand it! It will not hurt them and it may amuse us. So let me speak freely—the more so because I affirm that it is indispensable for every man who is to do a considerable religious work during a long period, or with any degree of self-consistency, to be a theologian. He must have method; there must be a sequence of ideas in his thoughts. And if the work runs long enough and far enough, and embraces many things, there must be a system of applying means to ends, there must be a knowledge of instruments. These things are theology in a sense—a part of it, at any rate.”

Equally indispensable, in his view, was it that a man have a theology that would change by growth:

“As summer makes the tree so much larger that the bark has to let out a seam, because the old bark will not do for the new growth, and as the same thing takes place from season to season, so mental philosophy—for all theology is mental philosophy—changes from age to age through both obvious and latent causes.”

His bearing towards theological questions was largely decided, as he tells us, by his own religious experience, and by the controversies which in his early life were raging around him:

“In the first place, let me say that my early religious experience has colored all my life. I was sympathetic by nature, I was loving, I was mercurial, I was versatile, I was imaginative. I was not a poet executively, but sympathetically I was in union with the whole universal life and beauty of God’s world and with all human life. My earliest religious training was at home. My father’s public teaching may be called alleviated Calvinism. Even under that the iron entered my soul. There were days and weeks in which the pall of death over the universe could not have made it darker to my eyes than those in which I thought: ‘If you are elected you will be saved, and if you are not elected you will be damned, and there is no hope for you.’ I wanted to be a Christian. I went about longing for God as a lamb bleating longs for its mother’s udder, and I stood imprisoned behind those iron bars: ‘It is all decreed. It is all fixed. If you are elected you will be saved anyhow; if you are not elected you will perish.’ While in that state, and growing constantly and warmly in sympathy with my father, in taking sides with orthodoxy that was in battle in Boston with Unitarianism, I learned of him all the theology that was current at that time. In the quarrels also between Andover and East Windsor and New Haven and Princeton—I was at home in all these distinctions. I got the doctrines just like a row of pins on a paper of pins. I knew them as a soldier knows his weapons. I could get them in battle array. I went from my college life immediately to the West, and there I fell into another fuliginous Christian atmosphere when the Old School and the New School Presbyterians were wrangling, and the Church was split, and split on the rock of slavery, and my father was tried for believing that a man could obey the commandments of God, and Dr. Wilson was contending against him in church courts that men had no ability, either moral or physical, to obey God; and the line of division ran all through the State, and there was that tremendous whirl of Old School theology, old Calvinism and new Calvinism, and by the time I got away from the theological seminary I was so sick—no tongue can tell how sick I was of the whole medley. How I despised and hated this abyss of whirling controversies that seemed to me to be filled with all manner of evil things, of everything, indeed, but Christ! And then on one memorable day, whose almost every cloud I remember, whose high sun and glowing firmament and waving trees are vivid yet, there arose before me, as if an angel had descended, a revelation of Christ as being God, because He knew how to love a sinner; not that He would love me when I was true and perfect, but because I was so wicked that I should die if He did not give Himself to me, and so inconstant that I never should be steadfast—as if He were saying to me: ‘Because you are sinful I am yours.’ Before that thought of a God who sat in the centre and seat of power, that He might bring glory and restoration to everything that needed Him, I bowed down in my soul, and from that hour to this it has been my very life to love and to serve the all-helping and pitiful God.” This was addressed to the association of which he was a member.

One who was present wrote that while he was saying this “he seemed to lose consciousness of his audience; his voice, although clear and distinct, became low and gentle; he was carried away by one of those very inspirations which he was describing; and when he spoke of the revelation of Christ to himself, as one who loved men because they needed love, his face underwent a marvellous change: it seemed transparent with a radiant light, like a sunset glow on the Alps, while rapid and instantaneous changes of expression passed over it, such as can only be compared to heat-lightning silently playing over the golden clouds of a summer evening.”

From this living experience there came into existence an order of truths. “As I went on, and more and more tried to preach Christ, the clouds broke away and I began to have a distinct system in my own mind.” There grew up also a very decided dislike and oppugnance to much of the theology that was then in vogue, for it seemed to stand in the way of men instead of helping them:

“I dedicated myself, not to be a fisher of ideas, nor of books, nor of sermons, but a fisher of men, and in this work I very soon came to the point in which I felt dissatisfied with the views of God that had been before given. I felt dissatisfied with that whole realm of theology which I now call the machinery of religion, which has in it some truth, and I would it had more. But I came to have this feeling, that it stood in the way of sinful men. I found men in distress, in peril of soul, on account of views which I did not believe were true, or, if true, not in any such proportion. If you want to know why I have been fierce against theology, that is it: because I thought with Mary, and I said time and again, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him.’ It seemed to me that men could not believe in such a God as I heard preached about, that men could not believe such a schedule of truth as I had seen crystallized and promoted among men. I do not care the turn of my hand about a man’s philosophy; I do not care about one system or another; any system that will bring a man from darkness to faith and love I will tolerate; and any system that lets down the curtain between God and men, whether it is canonical priest or church service or church methods, whether it is the philosophical or theological—anything that blurs the presence of God, anything that makes the heavens black and the heart hopeless, I will fight it to the death.”

But how about his orthodoxy? He says: “I hold there is but one orthodoxy, and that all others are bastard orthodoxies. The orthodoxy of the heart, that loves God, and loves man to such an extent that it is willing to suffer for him, and to endure hardship for the sake of the love it bears to men—that is the true orthodoxy, and there is none other.”

He said in an address given at a meeting of Congregational ministers in London in September, 1886:

“I think I am as orthodox a man as there is in this world. Well, what are the tests of orthodoxy? Man universally is a sinner; man universally needs to be born again; there is in the nature of God that power and influence that can convert a man and redeem him from his animal life; and it is possible for man so to bring to bear this divine influence in the ministration of the Gospel as that men shall be awakened, and convicted, and converted, and built up in the faith of Jesus Christ. There is my orthodoxy. But how about the Trinity? I do not understand it, but I accept it. If anybody else understands it I have not met him yet; but it seems to me that that is the easiest way of rendering the different testimonies or words of truth in the New Testament, neither do I see any philosophical objection to it at all, and I accept it without questioning. What about original sin? There has been so much actual transgression that I have not had time to go back on to that. On what grounds may a man hope? On the atonement of Christ? Yes, if you want to interpose that word, atonement, on that ground, unquestionably, I am accustomed to say Christ saves men. But how? That is His look-out, not mine. I think that because the nature of God is sanative, God is love. ‘If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good gifts to them which ask Him?’ If you choose to fix it in this way, and say that Christ saw it possible to do thus and so, and that was the atonement He made—if you take any comfort in it, I shall not quarrel with you. But it is enough for me to know this, that Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, has proclaimed, to whosoever will, health, life, new life—‘born again.’ He has offered these, and therefore I no more want to question how he does it than a sick man questions the doctor before he takes a pill. If he says, ‘Doctor, what is in it?’ the doctor says, ‘Take it and you will find out what is in it.’ If men think I am heterodox because I do not believe this, that, and the other explanation of the atonement of Jesus Christ, it is enough for me to say I believe in Christ, and I believe Christ is atonement. Now, if you ask me whether I believe in the divinity of Christ, I do not believe in anything else. Let a man stand and look at the sun, then ask him what he sees beside. Nothing: it blinds him. There is nothing else to me when I am thinking of God: it fills the whole sphere, the heaven of heavens, and the whole earth and all time; and out of that boundlessness of love and that infiniteness of divine faculty and capacity it seems to me that He is, to my thought, what summer is when I see it marching on after the cold winter is over. I know where the light comes from and where the warmth comes from. When I see anything going on for good and for the staying of evil I know it is the Sun of Righteousness, and the name to me is Jesus—every time Jesus. For Him I live, for Him I love, for Him I labor, for Him I rejoice in my remaining strength, for Him I thank God that I have yet so much in me that can spend and be spent for the only one great cause, which should lift itself above every other cause in this whole world.”

Concerning one other doctrine, future punishment, he states his belief as follows:

“I have my own philosophical theories about the future life; but what is revealed to my mind is simply this: The results of a man’s conduct reach over into the other world on those that are persistently and inexcusably wicked, and man’s punishment in the life to come is of such a nature and of such dimensions as ought to alarm any man and put him off from the dangerous ground and turn him toward safety. I do not think we are authorized by the Scriptures to say that it is endless in the sense in which we ordinarily employ that term. So much for that, and that is the extent of my authoritative teaching on that subject.”

From his life-long interest in material science it may well be supposed that he watched the development of the theory of evolution with the greatest eagerness. It was not, in substance, unknown to him:

“Slowly, and through a whole fifty years, I have been under the influence, first obscurely, imperfectly, of the great doctrine of evolution. In my earliest preaching I discerned that the kingdom of heaven is a leaven, not only in the individual soul but in the world; the kingdom is as a grain of mustard-seed. I was accustomed to call my crude notion a seminal theory of the kingdom of God in this world. Later I began to feel that science had struck a larger view, and that this unfolding of seed and blade and ear in spiritual things was but one application of a great cosmic doctrine which underlay God’s methods in universal creation, and was notably to be seen in the whole development of human society and human thought. That great truth—through patient accumulations of fact, and marvellous intuitions of reason, and luminous expositions of philosophic relation, by men trained in observation, in thinking, and in expression—has now become accepted throughout the scientific world. Certain parts of it yet are in dispute, but substantially it is the doctrine of the scientific world. And that it will furnish—nay, is already bringing—to the aid of religious truth as set forth in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ a new and powerful aid, fully in line with other marked developments of God’s providence in this His world, I fervently believe.”

He had great hope from the influence he felt certain it would exert:

“The theology that is rising upon the horizon will still rise. I cannot hope that it will be the perfect theology, but it will be a regenerated one, and I think far more powerful than the old—a theology of hope, and of love, which shall cast out fear. Nay, more, it is to be a theology that will run nearer to the spirit and form of Christ’s own teachings, He who found the tenderness of Divine Providence in the opening lilies of the field, and the mighty power of God’s kingdom in the unfolding of germ and leaf and fruit.”

Mr. Beecher’s view of ordinances was in harmony with his practical view of preaching and of theology. To his mind the ordinance was appointed by God because it helped men, and was to be continued on that same ground, and the form best suited to that end was the one he adopted. The form of church government and of administration of ordinances was left uncertain, because it was to be adapted to the peculiar conditions of the times or the circumstances of people. It was of principle rather than of rule. It was the expression of the new life rather than of any artificial arrangement. Hence he believed that different forms of church government and different methods of administering ordinances were equally Scriptural, and to be adopted without controversy if they secured the end in view—the bringing into and training up of men in Christ Jesus—and equally antagonistic to the New Testament view when they were a mere form.

But of this he himself has spoken somewhat at length:

“Now, there is one more thing that I want to say something about—that is, church economy, ordination, and ordinance. I regard it as true that there is laid down in the New Testament no form of church government whatever nor of church ordinance—none. Paul did not see the outlines of the Church; they grew, they developed out of the nature of things. And so I say, in regard to all church worship, that is the best form of church economy that in the long run helps men to be the best Christians. Whatever thing is found when applied to human nature to do good, that is God’s ordinance. If there are any men that worship God through the Roman Catholic Church—and there are—I say this in regard to them: ‘I cannot, but you can; God bless you!’ In that great, venerable church there is Gospel enough to save any man, no man need perish for want of light and truth in that system; and yet what an economy it is, what an organization, what burdens, and how many lurking mischiefs that temptation will bring out! I could never be a Roman Catholic, but I could be a Christian in a Roman Catholic Church; I could serve God there. I believe in the Episcopacy—for those that want it. Let my tongue forget its cunning if I ever speak a word adverse to that church that brooded my mother, and now broods some of the nearest blood kindred I have on earth. It is a man’s own fault if he do not find salvation in the teachings and worship of the great Episcopal body of the world. I was for ten years a member of the Presbyterian Church, for I swore to the Confession of Faith; but at that time my beard had not grown. The rest of the Book of Worship has great wisdom in it, and, rather than not have any brotherhood, I would be a Presbyterian again if they would not oblige me to swear to the Confession of Faith. On the other hand, my birthright is in the Congregational Church. I was born in it, it exactly agreed with my temperament and my ideas; and it does yet, for although it is in many respects slow-moulded, although in many respects it has not the fascinations in its worship that belong to the high ecclesiastical organizations, though it makes less for the eye and less for the ear, and more for the reason and the emotions, though it has therefore slender advantages, it has this: that it does not take men because they are weak and crutch them up upon its worship, and then just leave them as weak after forty years as they were when it found them. A part of its very idea is so to meet the weakness of men as that they shall grow stronger; to preach the truth and then wait till they are able to seize that truth and live by it. It works slowly, but I tell you that when it has finished its work it makes men in the community.”

“I immerse, I sprinkle, and I have in some instances poured, and I never saw there was any difference in the Christianity that was made. They have all, for that matter, come out so that I should not know which was immersed or which was sprinkled.

“The unity of Christians does not depend upon similarity of ordinance or methods of worship. It is a hard business. I do not believe the millennium will see one sect, one denomination, any more than the perfection of civilization will see only one great phalanstery, one family. The man on this side of the street keeps house in one way, and the man over on the other side keeps house in another. They do not quarrel; each lets the other alone. So I hold about churches. The unity of the Church is to be the unity of the hearts of men—spiritual unity in the love of Christ and in the love of each other. Do not, then, meddle with the details of the way in which different persons choose to conduct their service. Let them alone; behave at least as decently in the church of Christ as you would do in your neighborhood and in each other’s families. I do not know why they should not concurrently work in all the great causes of God among mankind. I am not, therefore, to teach Congregationalism, I am not to teach the Baptist doctrine, I am not to teach Presbyterianism; I am to preach ‘O ye that are lost by reason of your sins, Jesus Christ has found a ransom for you; come, come, and ye shall live.’ That is my message, and in that I have enthusiasm. It is not to build up one church or another church, or to cry down one church or another. Brethren, we have been trying conscience for a great while; what have we got by it? About one hundred and fifty denominations. There is nothing so unmanageable as a conceited conscience. Now, suppose we should try another thing; suppose we should try love a little while; suppose we should try sympathy, trust, fellowship, brotherhood, without inquisitorial power; suppose we should let men’s theologies take care of themselves, and bring this test to bear upon them: What is the fruit of their personal living, and what is the fruit of their personal teaching? ‘By their fruits shall ye know them’ did not exhaust itself in personal thought alone. It is a good test for denominationalism, and whenever I find a denomination that puts emphasis upon holiness, where there is no envy, nor detraction, nor backbiting, nor suspicion, nor holding each man to philosophical schedules, when I find a denomination in which they are full of love and gentleness and kindness, I am going to join that denomination. But I do not expect to change for some time.”

His estimate of sectarianism was very low:

“The selfishness that inheres in the very elements of sectarianism is radically opposed to the spirit of the Gospel. Love works from within outward. Selfishness or sectarianism works from without inward. One is centrifugal, the other is centripetal. The only difference between a pious denominational spirit and sectarianism is the difference between a cub and a full-grown wolf. You may baptize your wolf every year with what soft names you please; it is a wolf still, that will never cease to make havoc on the flock. As for ourselves, in all this tumult of men running up and down throughout the vast and misty realm of ecclesiasticism, we will none of it. There is a fairer realm, there are brighter skies, distilling selecter influences. We are well satisfied that this world will never behold any earthly force so great as the heart of man irradiated by the fire of Christ, and turned in all its warmth upon men; hence our prayer for our brethren shall not be for esprit de corps but for esprit de Christ.”

And so, wherever he was, we find him bearing one character. In the matter of rituals he grasped the reality, as he thought, and, looking at men on either side of him, asking, not surrender of principle, but charity. And all sects found that they had something in common with him.

In doctrines, while accused of heresy, yet, when making a full statement of his belief before the New York and Brooklyn Association, or the meeting of Congregational ministers in England, his views received the heartiest commendation from men of all shades of opinion; while as a preacher what multitudes of every class and of all sects have been brought together in Plymouth Church!

Among parties, except when in the very onset, it was the same. When the battle had been fought, not a blow more than was necessary to secure the victory, not an act for revenge. In the very midst of the war of the Rebellion, in 1862, as we have already mentioned, he said, “I think I never pray for the loyal States without praying, at least in thought, if not in utterance, for those misguided men in the South that wage this rebellion; and, let me tell you, I have a tender place in my heart for them.” And when the war had ceased he stood up for what he deemed best for their prosperity, at the loss, for the moment, of a great deal of his popularity at the North. In England he plead, with no tones of fear but with manly words, for peace between the mother and daughter. In this age of spiritual growth on one side and materialistic tendencies on the other, Mr. Beecher, born with an intense love for nature, given a surpassingly deep and rich Christian experience, and reconciling them both in himself, and feeling that each interprets and enriches the other, and both are unified in Him who is the head over all, became—he was raised up for that purpose—a mediator between the deepest spiritual experience and the most advanced stage of real science.

One scene illustrates his true position—the place he has held between many diversities, and the one that we are sure will be more and more recognized as his as the years go by. It was when the delegates from England were presenting their credentials to the National Council of Congregationalists in Boston, at about the close of the war. There was a very sore feeling in the hearts of many of the loyal people of the North at the position of antagonism that their brethren in England and Wales had taken in the great Rebellion, and it happened that the delegates present had belonged very decidedly to the obnoxious side. The question was upon receiving them, and several speeches had been made, and it seemed that a very unpleasant result would be reached. At last Mr. Beecher was recognized and called to the platform. In a few words he described the situation, represented the failure of each side in the great matter of Christian charity, showed how grand an opportunity was given to illustrate this highest of Christian virtues, and closed by reaching down and clasping a hand of each delegate, while the whole audience of venerable ministers and delegates arose and showed their delight by cheers and waving of handkerchiefs. It was his rightful place, won by years of patient charity. Other names have been given him. He has been called Reformer, War Trumpet, Popular Lecturer, Preacher. They are all good, but we lift a name that we never remember to have seen applied to him, but which is his by right, which represents the resultant of all his life of toil and battle—the name which belongs to him as to but few men that ever lived—and place it lovingly upon his brow, while our eyes long for the look which he used to give: the name “Peacemaker”; and the familiar words come with a new significance as if spoken for him, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.”