Chapter XVI…

Chapter XVI

War Begun—Firing upon Fort Sumter—“The American Eagle as you want it”—Death of Col. Ellsworth—Equips his Sons—Personal Feeling yields to Patriotism—His House a Store-House of Military Supplies—Sends a Regiment as his Substitute—Our National Flag—The Camp, its Dangers and Duties—Bull Run—Becomes Editor of the Independent—Salutatory—The Trent Affair—Fight, Tax—Soldiers or Ferrets—Characteristics as an Editor—One Nation, one Constitution, one Starry Banner—McClellan Safe, and Richmond too—Mildly Carrying on War—The Root of the Matter—The only Ground—A Queer Pulpit—President’s Proclamation of Emancipation—Let come what will—Close of the Third Era.

For five months the daily papers had borne for their prominent headlines, “The National Crisis,” “Pro-Slavery Rebellion,” “Pro-Slavery Revolution,” “The War-Cloud.” At length the issue of April 12, 1861, was headed, “The War Commenced: The first Gun fired by Fort Moultrie against Fort Sumter”; the next day, “Fort Sumter Fallen.”

Mr. Beecher was lecturing in Cincinnati when the tidings came North of the bombardment of Fort Sumter. The committee who had charge of the lecture were alarmed, and, remembering the old pro-slavery riots of thirty years before, declared that it would be unsafe for him to deliver his lecture. He told them that to give that lecture was his object in coming to Cincinnati, and do it he should; if not in a hall, then on the public street. With many misgivings on their part, he was permitted to go ahead, but so great was the fear of a riot that few attended. That night he turned his steps homeward. Eager to learn his opinion of the matter, we met him on the doorsteps. His oldest son, having left his position up the river, had stopped at a recruiting station on Broadway, already opened, and enlisted, and had then come home. Fearing something of the kind, the mother gave strict commands that he should not leave the house until his father’s return—a command which he was the more ready to obey since the business had already been attended to. Naturally he felt some little solicitude as to what his father should say, and his first words were: “Father, may I enlist?” and was answered: “If you don’t I’ll disown you.”

The next day was Sunday. The report of his sermon was headed thus: “Henry Ward Beecher on the Crisis: ‘What will you do, stand still or go forward?’

“The good people of Brooklyn have shared with us all the fears and anxiety of the past weeks. Yesterday there was, if possible, a more dense mass of human beings than usual packed within the walls of Plymouth Church, and a more than ordinary curiosity on the part of strangers, and a more than customary solemnity pervading the congregation. It was manifestly the belief of all there that the pastor would not fail to improve the occasion by preaching to the people of this age upon the duties of the present trying hour, and that he would deal with so grand a subject in a manner befitting its character, its importance, and its universal occupation of the American mind. Nor were they disappointed. Mr. Beecher delivered a sermon from the text, ‘Speak to the children of Israel that they go forward.’”

The above appeared in one of the daily papers. We have not time to give the synopsis of the reporter. The sermon was a careful review of the present condition of affairs and a sober counting the cost of both advance and retreat.

“Peace can be had by two-thirds of the nation yielding to the one-third; by legalizing the right of any discontented community to rebel; by changing our charter of universal freedom into a charter of deliberate oppression; by becoming partners in slavery and ratifying this gigantic evil; by surrendering all right of discussion, of debate or criticism. On these terms,” he said, “we may have peace.

“You can have your American eagle as you want it. If, with the South, you will strike out his eyes, then you shall stand well with Mr. Davis and Mr. Stephens, of the Confederate States; if, with the Christians of the South, you will pluck off his wings, you shall stand well with the Southern churches; and if, with the new peacemakers that have risen up in the North, you will pull out his tail-feathers, you shall stand well with the Society for the Promotion of National Unity! But when you have stricken out his eyes, so that he can no longer see; when you have plucked off his wings, so that he can no longer fly; and when you have pulled out his guiding tail-feathers, so that he can no longer steer himself, but rolls in the dirt, a mere buzzard—then will he be worth preserving? Such an eagle it is that they mean to depict upon the banner of America.

”... So far as I myself am concerned, I utterly abhor peace on any such grounds. Give me war redder than blood and fiercer than fire, if this terrific infliction is necessary that I may maintain my faith in God, in human liberty, my faith of the fathers in the instruments of liberty, my faith in this land as the appointed abode and chosen refuge of liberty for all the earth! War is terrible, but that abyss of ignominy is yet more terrible!“

He then pointed out the steps that must be taken in the going forward. They were, deepening and cleansing our convictions, making them more earnest and religious; drawing the lines; cherishing feelings of benevolence, and aiming at a peace built on foundations of God’s immutable truth, so solid that nothing can reach to unsettle it.

To show the spirit which he cherished in those days, we cannot do better than give one of the familiar lecture-room discussions which were so frequent between him and his people. It was immediately after the death of Colonel Ellsworth, which took place May 21, 1861:

”Ques. Will you please explain one point? I am so much a natural man as not to be able to obey the injunction which calls upon me to love my enemies; and when I stand on Broadway in New York, and see men in regiments which are bound for the field of battle, having been taken from their homes, their wives, their children, and all that is dear to them on earth, by the conduct of miscreants, I cannot understand how you can have such feelings as you express. I wish you would speak on that subject.”

“I have no doubt that the brother feels just as he says he does, and I have no doubt that I do not feel a bit so. When I consider the interests of God’s advancing kingdom of justice, and judgment, and mercy, and purity, and truth, and liberty, I think that all the things in the earth are of no value at all in the comparison, and that the earth might melt with fervent heat, the elements dissolve, and the globe vanish away rather than that this kingdom should not prevail. ‘Let God be true, but every man a liar.’ Let the nations perish, let everything go, but let the eternal treasures of God—truth, liberty, mercy, judgment, and purity—be preserved. I feel lifted up to a sovereign height of inspiration when I conceive of the majesty of these treasures, effluent from the heart of God, which He is seeking to embody in our time, in our earth, in this nation. Therefore, when I see justice put down I feel like a lion. When I see a great moral principle overborne there are no bounds to my indignation. When I see a great humanity trodden under foot I long to be a champion for it. And when I look on the face of an ignorant, erring, wicked multitude, I think of a great many things besides....

“For the sake of these great principles I would give my life as quick as I would pour out a glass of water; or I will do what is harder than that—I will keep it and use it for forty years, if God spares it, increasing its toil every year. I will make any sacrifice or perform any labor for the sake of a moral principle. But when I look at the South, other feelings besides those of vengeance are excited in me. Every one of those traitors is as wicked as you think, and more. The Floyds, the Davises, the Toombses, the Rhetts, and all such as they, are more wicked than we know; and yet the Lord Jesus Christ is the Saviour held up for every such one. They are all immortal, they are all, like myself, pilgrims toward the bourne of the eternal. And when I think how many ignorant creatures are led by those base men to do wicked things, half of the wickedness of which they do not know, I feel compassion for them and am sorry for them. If they array themselves against justice it is necessary that they should be overborne; but not one blow more than is necessary for the defence of the principle assailed should be struck. We are not authorized to inflict vengeance. ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore, if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink; for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.’ About the use of every single sword and spear and ball needful to assert a divine principle there should be no squeamishness. I am for war just so far as it is necessary to vindicate a great moral truth. But one particle of violence beyond that is a flagrant treason against the law of love. And I can say to-night that I would go to war with every State in the Southern Confederacy, if called of God to join the army, and would hold them to the conflict till the cause of right was vindicated; and that I could, at the same time, pray for those misguided men as easily as to-night I can pray for my own babes. I am as sorry for them as for any set of men in the world. I do not think I utter a prayer on any morning that I do not pray for them, and that God does not see my feeling of tenderness and sorrow toward them. And that is not all. I regard them as citizens yet. I love this whole country. I love its past and its prospective history. God do so to me, and more also, if I ever cease to feel for them all, misguided though they be, as anxiously as for my own kin and brethren. We cannot afford to be very critical with wickedness.

“However, there are some difficulties involved in this question. Colonel Ellsworth, who has just been murdered by one of these ‘miscreants’ of whom you speak, I knew well. I was thinking of my own sensations when I walked over from New York after hearing the sad news. Why, I was forty feet high! I was scared, I grew so fast. I walked so lordly that every step seemed to have the weight of a mountain; yet I did not feel the touch of the earth. For one hour I think I had enough volume of feeling to have swept away a continent. I was almost frightened at the turbulent and swelling tide within me, and I said: ‘Suppose my Master should come and say: My child, what are you doing with such feelings? Where is My teaching? What are you taking on yourself My supreme attribute for? “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.”’ Is it not charming how these texts will exorcise the devil? I put that passage on my head as a crown, and I have felt as peaceful as a lamb ever since. And although it was very base and wicked for that man to murder Colonel Ellsworth as he did, I can say that had he not expiated his crime, and had the victim been my brother, I could still have forgiven him and prayed for him.

“Now, my brethren, I am going to fight this battle right straight through from beginning to end, and not lose my Christian feelings either. I am going to stick close to my Saviour. And, with regard to the past, I am not sorry for one sermon that I have preached among you, or that I have preached during the last twenty years of my life. If the question were put to me to-night, ‘When you look back upon your public life and see what you have done to bring about the present issue, are you not sorry for the ground you have taken?’ I would say, No. I bless God for every word I have spoken and every influence I have exerted in that direction. Knowing all that was to be, I would do over again all that I have done if the same state of things existed, only my little finger should be as heavy as my loins have been.

“Now that the time of conflict has come, we must accept it. I mean to go through it, and you shall; and I pray God that the whole anointed Church at the North may, bearing the banner of Christ along with the banner of our country. The stars over us shall not be brighter and purer than those that we carry into this very conflict. We have had examples enough to know that even in such a desperate case as civil war a man may be a Christian. I thank God that praying men have gone into the army from this church. Every day and night there is a prayer-meeting in our camp, and there will be to the end. And I believe that among our soldiers are those who, if they saw the bitterest and most blasphemous of the enemy suffering and dying, would relieve their sufferings by kind offices and soothe their last moments by comforting words. God grant that it may be so, and that, both in the service of the country and in the service of the Lord Jesus Christ, they may be true soldiers!”

It is impossible to describe, or even, in our time, to conceive, the fervor of patriotism that followed the firing upon Fort Sumter. Patriotic meetings were held in nearly every village of the North, and the raising of flag-poles with their accompanying exercises was the order of the day. A monster mass-meeting was held in Union Square, New York, over which John A. Dix presided, and where the flag which had been lowered at Sumter was displayed. The attack on the Massachusetts regiment in Baltimore as it hastened to the defence of Washington deepened and increased the excitement. The ranks of military companies already organized were speedily filled, and the young men met, in most of our Northern cities, week by week for military drill. A squad of these was formed in Brooklyn. Some fifteen of us wanted to go to the front, and offered ourselves to one of the New York regiments, but the offer was refused with thanks. Their ranks were full and they had no place for us. Hearing of this, Mr. Beecher, who took a deep interest in this whole matter and used to attend our drills, proposed that two of us, his own son and one who expected to belong to his family, should join a cavalry regiment then being enlisted in New York. He gave us each a horse, brought us home our equipment of pistols, bowie-knives, etc., and, the next day, went with us to New York to see us enlist; but the enlisting officer had received notice from Washington the day before to accept no more recruits—cavalry regiments were not thought to be necessary for the ninety days’ struggle; and so we were refused. One of us went to Riker’s Island, and, after a month of waiting, was able to get into service; the other, having just finished his theological course, and having for weeks been importuned by a church to become its pastor, concluded that it was God’s will that he should preach, left the city, and went to work.

There was great variety of work to be done. No need now of efforts to arouse the public mind—the firing upon Fort Sumter had done that; no need now of urging men to the front—the young men of the nation had formed into companies and regiments faster than the government was willing to accept them. Illinois asked permission to furnish all the men that were required. But another work pressed upon heart and hand. Homes at the North were being made desolate, not only by the absence but by the death of their loved ones. Tidings began to reach us of what afterwards seemed skirmishes, but were important battles in those days—Big Bethel, Newport News, and others; and the list of the dead, small to what it afterwards became, carried with it then, as always, sorrow and heart-break. The bodies of fallen sons and brothers, picked up on the battle-field or gathered from the hospitals, covered with the stars and stripes, were being borne through the streets of our cities on the way to bereaved homes, and the people needed comforting. Then it was that the words of one perfectly assured of the justice of the cause, that it was of God, and that those who upheld their country’s flag were doing His work, and who viewed life and death as only and equally desirable when they accomplished His will, rang out like the resurrection challenge of St. Paul: “O death! where is thy sting? O grave! where is thy victory?”

In a sermon preached May 26, 1861, when but the first mutterings of the storm had been heard and the first splashes of rain were felt, he says: “He whose remains are to pass to-day, amid many tears, through yonder city, lived long though he died early. Why? Because he lived to a moral purpose. Because he has given his name to patriotism. Millions of men shall live four-score years and shall not leave any such memorial as he has left. He had lived long enough. Any man that can give the whole weight of his being and his heart-life to a great truth or cause has lived long enough. Measure him by the higher and not by the lower standard. Do not say that he has lost days, that he has lost coming honors, that he lost pleasure. He lost nothing. He gained everything. He gained glory, and paid his life for it in such a way as to take on immortality.”

One very intimate with him in those days says: “I do not think that he spent a moment in solicitude for the fate of those who were at the front, not even of his own flesh and blood. Everything seemed swallowed up in his zeal for his country, and for her he was ready to sacrifice everything without complaint or hesitation.”

“My oldest son is in the army, and shall I read with trembling anxiety the account of every battle to see if he is slain? I gave him to the Lord, and I shall not take him back and I will not worry and fret myself about him. I will trust in God though He slay not only him but me also; and all I have I put on the same ground—I try to, sometimes not succeeding and sometimes succeeding a little. My God, this Christ Emmanuel—God with me—has sustained and comforted me in care and trouble, and taken away my fear and put hope in its place, and I will look to Him still; and if there are any here that have carried burdens, and whose faces are wrinkled with care, I beseech of you to try living by faith in a present Saviour that loves you and ordains all things, and says that everything shall work for your good if you love God.”

Among the things that occupied his time and called forth all his energies was the equipment of the Fourteenth Long Island Regiment. His home at 124 Columbia Heights became a store-house of military goods and a place of consultation for men interested in the events that were taking place; Plymouth Church became a rendezvous for regiments passing to the front, and the church parlors a workshop where the women and maidens of the church, under the direction of Mrs. Beecher, met daily to sew and knit and pack for the soldiers. He told Mrs. Beecher to use all his salary in this direction, except such as was absolutely necessary for running the household. She did this, and added to the amount by personal solicitation from families and merchants, until an immense sum was raised and expended.

While many men sent single substitutes, Mr. Beecher determined to be represented in the war by a whole regiment; and so, after helping to fit out two regiments, he took upon himself the entire burden of equipping a new one, called “The Long Island Volunteers,” afterwards the Sixty-seventh New York. This regiment would never have had any existence but for the labors of Mr. and Mrs. Beecher, and the members of the church whom they interested in it. Their eldest son, Henry Barton Beecher, joined it and was made a lieutenant. In those days the government had plenty of men and very little money, and therefore declined to accept this regiment for many weeks after it was organized, during which time the entire expense of feeding and clothing the men was borne by subscriptions raised by Mr. Beecher. It was not until after the battle of Bull Run, at the end of July, 1861, that the regiment was even in form accepted, and not until much later that it was actually mustered into the national service.

In those days of multiplied and harassing labors Mr. Beecher did not lose his hope, his cheerfulness, nor even his mirthfulness. He had a refuge to which he constantly fled when the pressure became too heavy. He had also the power of seeing the humorous side of many common or even tragic events, and drawing from them laughter as well as tears. The flowers, too, and the clouds had their message for him. He kept the channels of his soul wide open on every side to receive, and became a fountain of perpetual inspiration to others.

At this time, while the route through Baltimore was closed against our troops on their way to Washington, he preached to the “Brooklyn Fourteenth,” on the eve of their departure to the front, upon “Our National Flag.” After giving the history of our banner he more particularly addressed the soldiers before him:

“And now God speaks by the voice of His providence, saying, ‘Lift again that banner! Advance it full and high!’ To your hands God and your country commit that imperishable trust. You go forth self-called, or rather called by the trust of your countrymen and by the Spirit of your God, to take that trailing banner out of the dust and out of the mire, and lift it again where God’s rains can cleanse it, and where God’s free air can cause it to unfold and stream as it has always floated before the wind. God bless the men that go forth to save from disgrace the American flag!

“Accept it, then, in all its fulness of meaning. It is not a painted rag. It is a whole national history. It is the Constitution. It is the government. It is the free people that stand in the government on the Constitution. Forget not what it means; and, for the sake of its ideas rather than its mere emblazonry, be true to your country’s flag. By your hands lift it; but let your lifting it be no holiday display. It must be advanced ‘because of the truth.’

“That flag must go to the capital of this nation; and it must not go hidden, not secreted, not in a case or covering, but full high displayed, bright as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners! For a single week that disgraceful work, that shameful circuit, may be needful; but the way from New England, the way from New York, the way from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, to Washington, lies right through Baltimore, and that is the way the flag must and shall go! [Enthusiastic cheers.] But that flag, borne by ten thousand and thrice ten thousand hands, from Connecticut, from Massachusetts (God bless the State and all her men!), from shipbuilding Maine, from old granite New Hampshire, from Vermont of Bennington and Green-Mountain-Boy patriotism, from Rhode Island, not behind any in zeal and patriotism, from New York, from Ohio, from Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Delaware, and the other loyal States—that flag must be carried, bearing every one of its insignia, to the sound of the drum and the fife, into our national capital, until Washington shall seem to be a forest in which every tree supports the American banner!

“And it must not stop there. The country does not belong to us from the Lakes only to Washington, but from the Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. The flag must go on. The land of Washington shall see Washington’s flag again. The land that sits in darkness, and in which the people see no light, shall yet see light dawn and liberty flash from the old American banner! It must see Charleston again, and float again over every fort in Charleston harbor. It must go further, to the Alligator State, and stand there again. And sweeping up through all plantations and over all fields of sugar and rice and tobacco, and every other thing, it must be found in every State till you touch the Mississippi; and, bathing in its waters, it must go across and fill Texas with its sacred light. Nor must it stop when it floats over every one of the States. That flag must stand, bearing its whole historic spirit and original meaning, in every Territory of this nation!”

Other sermons of similar character followed. “The Camp, its Dangers and Duties,” was one:

“For any one that is going forth to meet the temptations of camp life I had almost said I would sum up in one single word of remembrance a talisman of safety—temperance, absolute temperance.... The men that are dangerous in camps are not bloated drunkards, shameless gamblers, and such as they. But an accomplished officer, a brilliant fellow, who knows the world, who is gentle in language, who understands all the etiquettes of society, who is fearless of God, who believes nothing in religion, who does not hesitate, with wit and humor, to jeer at sacred things, who takes an infernal pleasure in winding around his finger the young about him, who is polished and wicked, and walks as an angel of light to tempt his fellow-men, as Satan did to tempt our first parents—if there be in camp such a one, he is the dangerous man.

“There ought to be a bold stand taken in favor of virtue by the good in each one of the various companies. If there is not such a stand taken in Company C of the Fourteenth Regiment, I shall be ashamed of my preaching.”

He was constantly invited to lecture, and almost any sum was offered to secure his services. These, as we may well conceive, were mostly patriotic addresses upon the great subjects that were then burning in the minds of the American people.

We remember well his having a course at Providence, Rhode Island, the third of which was delivered Monday, after the heavy work of the day previous, and when he took the train he had not touched pen to paper nor given it a moment’s thought; but his mind and heart were fully awake, and the resources of a lifetime of thought and labor were at his command.

The battle of Bull Run, which was fought in July, as is well known, was the first battle of the war of really national importance. The result was sobering and humiliating to the North. On the following Sunday evening Mr. Beecher preached a sermon upon “God in National Affairs.” After tracing His way in the history of the nation, he says:

“The battle is well begun. If I consult my pride, if I consult my vanity, I fain would never have seen our banners dip; and yet, if I consult a larger wisdom, I know not but that the best thing that can befall us is that humiliation which shall teach us not to rely so much on words and cheers and newspaper campaigns. A defeat just sufficient to make us feel that we must fall upon the interior stores of manhood, that we must have faith in God, that we must set aside everything but a solemn purpose and an earnest consecration of ourselves to this work which God has given us to do—such a defeat cannot but be beneficial.”

And so it proved. The battle of Bull Run awoke the North from its dream of easy conquest, and thenceforth she took up the war in earnest.

In his Thanksgiving sermon in November of that year, upon “Modes and Duties of Emancipation,” he shows the conservatism of his belief and his confidence in the national authority if rightly used—“This conflict must be carried on through our institutions, not over them”—and his view of the great forces engaged—“While preparations for this conflict have been going on God has poured money into our coffers and taken it away from those who might use it to our harm. He is holding back France and England, and saying to all nations, ‘Appoint the bounds! Let none enter the lists to interfere while those gigantic warriors battle for victory! Liberty and God, and slavery and the devil, stand over against each other, and let no man put hand or foot into the ring till they have done battle unto death!’ Amen! Even so, Lord Almighty. It is Thy decree, and it shall stand! And when the victory shall come, not unto us, not unto us, but—in the voice of thrice ten thousand, and thousands of thousands, of ransomed ones, mingled with Thine earthly children’s gladness—unto Thee shall be the praise and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.”

During all these years, almost from the time he came to Brooklyn, Mr. Beecher had been fortunate in having a channel of communication with the public, in general so in harmony with his own views and spirit as the New York Independent. In its second number appears an extract from a sermon of his, followed by frequent contributions from his pen called “Star Papers,” and for the last three years a sermon in full upon the second page. He is now called to its head. In the issue of December 19, 1861, appears his “Salutatory.” Since in this he gives, in brief, his conception of the office and importance of the religious newspaper, it is given in full:

“The undersigned has to-day assumed the editorial management of the Independent. This will not involve any change in the principles, the purposes, or general spirit of the paper. The Independent was founded to illustrate and to defend the truths and doctrines of the Christian religion; to employ them as the authoritative standards by which to estimate and influence events, measures, and men; to infuse a spirit of truth and humanity into the affairs of this nation; to give aid and encouragement to every judicious scheme of Christian benevolence. It has sought to leaven with the Christian spirit all the great elements of our civilization. These were the aims. The results are upon record.

“For the future, studying a catholic sympathy with all who love our Lord Jesus Christ, and seeking to promote concord among all Christians of every name, the Independent will still continue explicitly and firmly to hold and to teach those great cardinal doctrines of religion that are substantially held in common by the Congregational orthodox churches of New England and by the Presbyterian churches of our whole land. But, as heretofore, this will be done for the promotion of vital godliness rather than for sectarianism.

“The Independent will not deviate from that application of Christian truth to all public questions which has thus far characterized its course. While seeking to promote religious feeling, as such, and to incite and supply devotional wants, it will not forget that there is an ethical as well as an emotive life in true religion. We shall therefore assume the liberty of meddling with every question which agitates the civil or Christian community, according to our own best discretion.

“The editorial profession, with the progress of popular intelligence, has assumed an importance second to no other. It may unite in it the elements of power hitherto distributed in the several professions, and add, besides, many that have belonged to no other calling. He who knows the scope and power of the press need desire no higher office than the editorial.

“In that silent realm of influences out of which proceed the actions of men and the events of history, the editor is the invisible leader. Votes cannot raise him higher. His pen is more than a sceptre. Profoundly impressed with such a responsibility, desiring to honor God in the welfare of men, we ask the sympathy of good men and the remembrance of all who pray.

“HENRY WARD BEECHER.”

At this time the excitement growing out of the capture of Mason and Slidell on board the British steamer Trent, by Commodore Wilkes on the San Jacinto, was at its height. News had just reached this country of the bitter feeling awakened by “the outrage,” of the shipment of troops to Canada, and other hasty preparations by Great Britain to avenge the insult to her flag. And Mr. Beecher’s first editorial bears the somewhat ominous title of “War with England.”

As we might expect, it is both temperate and defiant in language and tone:

“We have no idea that there will be any war with that power. England has a peculiar practical wisdom in affairs which touch her own material interests. Her folly will be expended in words; her wisdom reserved for actions. It is not her interest to go to war with the Northern States in the interest of the Southern States. There is no probability that she will allow herself, whatever she has done in other days, to be found fighting for slavery against freedom....

“There is no desire on our part for so unnatural a war. To avert it we shall be willing to yield anything but honor. Our hands are sufficiently full. To have a British fleet thundering at our sea-doors, while the volcano was yet pouring lava through our Southern States, would be a little more business on hand than could be attended to with that thoroughness which our people desire in all warlike enterprises.

“Yet should England force us into war, terrible and atrocious as that would be, America is determined to put her in the wrong before the world. If we have transgressed any law of nations; if we have, indeed, violated any right of England; if we have, to the width of a hair, passed beyond the line of our own proper duty and right, we shall, upon suitable showing, need no menace to make ample reparation. We shall do it for the satisfaction of our own sense of justice. But if we are right, if we have done right, all the threatenings in the world will not move this people from their steadfastness....

“Our wish is to unite with England in a race of civilization. But if she will fight, we must.”

Some idea of the variety and character of the work he did at this time may be gained by a look at his editorials found in the Independent of January 16, 1862, the third week of his administration as editor. The first is “Our Help from Above,” in which he directs all burdened hearts to the great sources and divine methods of consolation. “The nearer our thoughts come to the infinite and the divine the more power have we over our troubles. The act of consolation is, to a great degree, the act of inspiration.”

The raising, equipping, and feeding such vast armies as, it was now seen, would be required for the prosecution of the war, awakened in the minds of thoughtful men a question scarcely second in importance to any. By what plan or on what system shall the money required for these large and expensive enterprises be secured? His second editorial upon this page takes up this matter under the head of “A Word from the People to Congress,” in which he urges the fearless imposition of taxes sufficient to carry on the war, and justifies such a course upon the simple basis of honesty. The article opens with this sentence, “Taxation and national honesty are now synonymous,” and closes with this, “Every honest man in America ought to send to Washington one message in two words, Fight, Tax.”

How to treat the black men that came into our lines, or were liberated by the advance of our armies, was another of the pressing questions at this time, and one concerning which there was a great difference of opinion. He treated this subject in a column article on this page, entitled “Men, not Slaves.” The position which he held, and advocated with great force and clearness, is given in this sentence: “One thing is plain—one thing as a starting-point admits of no doubt, needs no hesitation: let us forget that these blacks ever were slaves, and remember only that they are men. With this as our first principle we cannot go far wrong.”

This money-raising was a matter of so great importance that he devoted another column to it on this same page, on the “Duty of the Hour.” In the first article he sent a message to Congress; in this he speaks to the Christian public: “Whether the great impending patriotic tax shall be a moral triumph and a testimony to the religious life of this people will depend largely upon the conduct of Christian men and the action of Christian teachers.... There seems to have been very little education of the consciences of Christian men to the duty of a cheerful support of government by their property. Even Christian men are tempted to give grudgingly, selfishly, meanly. The nobler sentiments of the heart have been allowed but little scope in this part of citizen duty.

“Is the Gospel worn out? Are ministers of the Gospel less manly and Christian than in the days of the fathers? Has the American pulpit forgotten that its place is in the van—that it leads, not follows, the camp?

“Every church should have a public sentiment developed within it which shall make this national tax almost a free-will offering. Let Christian laymen take counsel together. Let the leading men of towns and neighborhoods not only set a good example, but make it their duty to cheer and inspirit the slow and reluctant. Let Christian men everywhere, and in all things, seek to inspire the public mind with an earnest willingness to discharge this great debt which we are called to pay for national unity, national safety, and national glory.”

In those days of dress-parades in our largest army, and “all quiet on the Potomac,” men chafed continually over what appeared to be inaction and timidity on the part of the government at Washington. This found expression in still another article by this same pen upon this same page, “Courage and Enterprise”:

“There was never a time when timidity was so nearly allied to rashness, and courage to the highest prudence, as now. We have every element of national prosperity except the courage to use our power. Standing on a centre and whirling around with sound and celerity may make a top, but never an administration. Courage to see and accept the whole national danger; courage to see and to accept the thoroughest remedy; courage to ask the people for all that is needed, without a thought of refusal; courage to use the means, willingly afforded, so as to put the whole strength of this nation into every blow; courage to dash in pieces every enemy, without stopping to consider just how we shall mend the pieces afterward—this is the very critical prudence of good administration.

“Since war is upon us, let us have courage to make war.

“There is no money needed, there are no men wanted, there is no enthusiasm that the North will not give with eager gladness, if only SOMEBODY will speak to the nation such words as the fathers spoke! Then men LOVED liberty! The nation suffered for a principle! What are we doing now? Are we raising moss on cannon-wheels, or are we fighting? Is it husbandry or war that is going on? Are we to starve Southern armies or conquer them? Do we mean to put down rebellion by soldiers or ferrets?”

These editorials showed certain features which were as characteristic of his work in the editor’s chair as they were in the pulpit and upon the platform; the first of these was this: he chose his subjects from among the things which at that time affected and interested the people. This he did, not simply because he could then get the ear of the public, nor because these were in themselves the largest or most important matters, but from a deep religious conviction that these present questions and present interests were a part of God’s providence, by which and through which He was accomplishing His purposes; and that in treating these matters he was working together with Him. He believed thoroughly in God’s action in common affairs and through the impulses given to common men. This conviction made him a leader of the people without bringing him into bondage to them. It gave him the kind of leadership to which he attained: not of the abstract thinker in the movements of a hundred years hence, but of the practical man of affairs in the battles of to-day. This gave him the boldness that he never failed to display. Confident that he was moving in harmony with God’s purpose and at His own appointed time, he waited for no gathering of numbers, but pushed on alone, if necessary, with an assurance born of faith. Storms and confusion did not daunt him, because he recognized in these but the necessary methods by which the Almighty carries out His designs in the moral and spiritual as in the material world.

Another characteristic feature was seen in his treatment of the subject in hand. He uniformly regarded it from the standpoint of the law of Christ’s kingdom on the earth—“Bear ye one another’s burdens.” This insured harmony in his policy through all changes of events around him, and ultimately secured success. All the forces of the universe, because created and administered by the Saviour of mankind, were on the side not only of justice and truth but of kindness, forbearance, and helpfulness, and must in time prevail. So deep was his conviction of the direct and universal application of the law of this kingdom that he instinctively took this side, and linked his action and his destiny with its fortunes, when prudence and policy would seem to dictate a different course, with a sublime confidence in its final victory.

A third characteristic was this: He wrote so as to awaken inspiration, to stir men’s hearts to feel. It was not enough that men believed a truth; that was nothing unless they felt it. His words must take hold, they must excite the emotions and move men to action, or they were a failure.

Besides the editorial articles referred to on this one page, there was his sermon in this same issue occupying more than four columns of the second page of the paper. It was upon the Divine Government, and moved along on these lofty heights: “We believe that God is in His own world and that He governs it by His personal will; that this government includes nations, families, and individuals; that it aims at the highest good and the everlasting good of sentient and intelligent creatures; that it is one which admits the action of our minds upon God’s and the action of God’s upon ours; that it has in it a place for all human yearnings and strivings and longings.” “I bring you a Gospel that will never wear out, a Gospel which is for ever fresh, and that is, Emmanuel—God with us: God with you, in you, around you, loving you, bearing with you, forgiving you, helping you, watching over you, taking you up and carrying you as the parent takes up and carries the little child.”

The first anniversary Sunday of the attack on Fort Sumter was marked by a sermon on the “Success of American Democracy,” the tone of which may be judged by the following passage:

“‘We will give every dollar that we are worth, every child that we have, and our own selves; we will bring all that we are and all that we have, and offer them up freely—but this country shall be one and undivided. We will have one Constitution and one liberty, and that universal.’ The Atlantic shall sound it and the Pacific shall echo it back, deep answering to deep, and it shall reverberate from the Lakes on the North to the unfrozen Gulf on the South—‘One nation, one Constitution, one starry banner!’ Hear it, England!—one country, and indivisible. Hear it, Europe!—one people, and inseparable. One God; one hope; one baptism; one Constitution; one government; one nation; one country; one people—cost what it may, we will have it!”

The summer of 1862 was, perhaps, a period of as great discouragement to the North as any during the war. After months of preparation and wearisome delays, with the grandest army that had ever been gathered on this continent, McClellan had made his advance against Richmond, only to entrench, retreat, and at last to be hurled back defeated and shattered. It was when these terrible disasters were beginning to be understood and their true significance appreciated that Mr. Beecher’s editorials in the Independent rose to their highest point of power and influence. They were directed to the people and to the government as occasion demanded, but always with such a grouping of facts, with so clear an appreciation of the situation, and with so great earnestness of appeal and power of denunciation that they must be reckoned among the loyal forces. We give the titles and a few sentences from several of that time, that their general character may be understood. On July 3, 1862, we have one upon “The Great Duty”:

“In another column will be found the President’s call for 300,000 more soldiers. These, and as many more if needed, can be raised. The North has not changed her mind. The integrity of this nation, the authority of its Constitution over all its original territory, will be maintained at every hazard and at whatever expense.

“It is our duty to the nation and to the family of nations to make a slaveholders’ rebellion so odious and disastrous that it shall stand to all ages like Sodom and Gomorrah. Whatever it may cost in men and money, the North is fully assured that for nothing else can money be so well spent, and for nothing nobler can men live, or, if need be, lay down their lives!

“The great duty now is to maintain a united North. No event can be more sure than the victory of this government over the slaveholders’ conspiracy, if the loyal States are united. But if secret feuds or open factions shall divide and paralyze the popular feeling, the cause will fail, or succeed only after long, wasting, and useless expenditures.”

In the next issue, July 10, he has an equally strong editorial upon “The Country’s Need.” The suppression of news, the failure to trust the people, the political intrigues at the capital, moved him to righteous and sorrowful indignation:

“Did the government frankly say to this nation, We are defeated? To this hour it has not trusted the people. It held back the news for days. Nor was the truth honestly told when outside information compelled it to say something. It is even to this hour permitting McClellan’s disaster to be represented as a piece of skilfully planned strategy! After the labor of two months, the horrible sickness of thousands of men poisoned in the swamps of the Chickahominy, the loss of probably more than ten thousand as noble fellows as ever lifted a hand to defend their country, McClellan, who was four miles from Richmond, finds himself twenty-five miles from the city, wagons burned, ammunition-trains blown up, parks of artillery captured, no entrenchments, and with an army so small that it is not pretended that he can reach Richmond! The public are infatuated. The papers that regaled us two weeks ago with visions of a Fourth of July in Richmond are now asking us to rejoice and acclaim—not at victory—but that we have just saved the army! McClellan is safe!—and Richmond too!

“The government, upon this disaster, procures the governors of the States to ask it to call for 300,000 more men. Why did not the President take the responsibility, plainly confess our disaster, say that we were within a hand-breadth of ruin, throw himself on the people? No. The people pay taxes, give their sons and brothers—but that is all. We are sick and weary of this conduct. We have a sacred cause, a noble army, good officers, and a heroic common people. But we are like to be ruined by an administration that will not tell the truth; that spends precious time in playing at President-making; that is cutting and shuffling the cards for the next great political campaign. Unless good men awake, unless the accursed silence is broken that has fallen on the people, unless the government is held sternly to its responsibility to the people, we shall dally through the summer, make brigadier-generals until autumn, build huge entrenchments, but fight no battles till they are forced upon us, and then we shall be called upon to celebrate our defeats or retreats as masterly strategies!

“We have a country. We have a cause. We have a people. Let all good men pray that God would give us a government!”

This is followed by one, July 17, on the “Patriotism of the People.” Its tone will be understood by these few sentences:

“There is no need of rousing the patriotism of the people. It is an inexhaustible quality. It underlies their very life. The government itself is buoyed up by it, and rides upon it, like a ship upon the fathomless ocean.

“No. It is the government that needs rousing. We do not need meetings on the Hudson, but motion on the Potomac. It is not in Boston, or Buffalo, or Cincinnati, or New York that this case is to be settled, but in Washington. There is no use of concealing it. The people are beginning to distrust their rulers—not their good nature, their patriotism, their honesty, but their capacity for the exigency of military affairs. They know that in war an hour often carries a campaign in its hand. A day is a year. The President seems to be a man without any sense of the value of time. The people admire his disinterestedness. They believe him firm when he reaches decisions. But they perceive how long a period he requires to form judgments; how wide a circuit he takes of uncertainty and vacillation before he determines. In civil affairs, that can bear to wait, the people deem him among the best of our long line of Presidents. But it is war! Armies are perishing. Months are wasting. We are in the second year of rebellion. We have been just on the eve of doing something for sixteen months!

“The nation rose up in its majesty to punish rebellion. It put a magnificent army into the President’s hand. For one year that army was besieged in the capital!

“At length, this past spring, began the campaign in Virginia. The people gloried in the belief that the majesty of the government would be asserted. After four months’ campaign the armies of the United States are on the defensive! Not less than a hundred thousand men have been lost by death, wounds, sickness, and captivity; McClellan is cooped up on James River; Pope is collecting an army; and the country is to-day actually debating whether the enemy cannot strike a blow at Washington! Is this such a management as will confirm the confidence of the country in Mr. Lincoln’s conduct of the war? Do we need to ask why men are slow to volunteer? Does any man need to be told what the end of such things must be? This is not punishing rebellion; it is helping it....

“We speak plainly, sorrowfully, earnestly. An enemy of the Administration would have no right to speak so. We are friends—all the more because we speak out what millions think but do not utter, lest it might hinder the cause. But, unless some one speaks, there will soon be little cause left to hinder or to help.”

In the next issue, that of July 24, he has another two-column editorial upon “The Duty of To-day”:

“In the beginning of this great struggle the question among loyal men was, How shall we save this nation? One year of fighting and the question is, WHETHER we can save it? That is the question of to-day....

“The South has simplicity and unity of purpose. The North is uncertain which she wishes most—to subdue the rebellion, to leave slavery unharmed, or to have the right President at the next election!

“The South adjourns every question and postpones every interest in favor of arms. The North is busy with conflicting schemes and interests—and is also mildly carrying on war.

“Does anybody doubt the result of such a course? It is so certain that it is not worth our while to waste another man or another dollar! Either the Administration policy should instantly change or the war cease! It is not more vigor so much as a different internal idea. If the Administration cannot be disenchanted of the traditional policy that has grown up during the heartless, timid, compromising era of the last half-century, and adopt the simple and straightforward policy that becomes a people striving for liberty and free institutions upon the American continent, then we are doomed! It is war that we are making—war first, war second, war wholly! It is not politics. It is not Constitution-making. It is not the decision of legal niceties. These are not the business of government, as toward the South. It is war, absolute, terrible, and immeasurable war!

“The South has organized on the fact of slavery, and fights on that issue, pure and simple. The North must organize on the doctrine of liberty, and fight right through on that issue, pure and simple.

“The South sacrifices everything that conflicts with her central idea. The North must do the same. The South is not ashamed of slavery. The North must not be ashamed of liberty!

”... The government cannot any longer avoid choosing the issue that has been made up and thrust upon it—freedom or slavery. The time has come. So long as there was a chance of solving this question as a civil question it was wise to leave it, as far as possible, to the States concerned, and to employ the moral influences which change men’s minds. But slavery has become a military question. One year has changed all things. A remiss and vacillating policy of the Administration; the committing of the armies of the United States for a whole year to a man who thought he was at West Point giving a four years’ course of instruction to five hundred thousand men infinitely at leisure, has changed the relations and possibilities of things. It has taken slavery out of the realm of discussion and placed it in the arena of war. It must be settled by force....

“Nothing will unite this people like a bold annunciation of a moral principle. Let the American flag be lifted up by Mr. Lincoln, as was the brazen serpent, and let it be known that every man who looks upon it on this continent shall be free, and a tide of joy and irresistible enthusiasm will sweep away every obstacle. Let Mr. Lincoln decree it. The nation will do it!

“Such a policy would carry the conscience of the North; would kindle the enthusiasm for liberty, which is always the most potent of influences; would bring all the historic traditions of the old American struggle to enkindle the ardor of the young, who are to form our armies. It would brush away at one stroke a thousand hindrances, give simplicity and unity to our plans, and distinctness to our policy. It would end all threat of foreign intervention. Above all, it would give to the American armies that pillar of smoke by day and fire by night by which God the Emancipator led forth His people from bondage into liberty!”

In the next issue, July 31, he writes a two-column editorial upon “The Root of the Matter”:

“It is not enough that we increase our men and means. We shall never succeed until we accept the idea latent in this conflict. Slavery must be crushed. Liberty must have absolute and unquestioned dominion on this continent. We will not have oppression under the symbol of a sceptre or of a whip—neither exported from abroad nor sprouting from our own soil! This continent is dedicated to Liberty. It is the mission of this generation of men to establish free institutions from ocean to ocean. We sought to do it in peace. Since war has come, we will seek to take from its repulsiveness and horror by making it serve the noblest ends of human liberty. If it is for liberty upon a whole continent that we fight, then every son or brother that falls is a sacrificial victim. By his blood we ransom generations of men!

“The way to make the Administration see this truth is to see it ourselves. There is a kind of political mesmerism. Our rulers will partake of our sensations. What the people see the President will see. What the people taste will repeat itself on the President’s tongue.

“Let the sentence be spoken. Let all hindrances and hesitations end. Lift up the banner! And as the winds of war roll out its folds, let those letters shine out as if God had written them with heavenly light, ‘UNIVERSAL EMANCIPATION.’”

The next editorial, August 7, is upon “A Leader for the People.” These were the days of Pope and the disasters of the army, and the uncertainty and terror at Washington. Two columns of argument and appeal for more genuine enthusiasm for the great doctrines on which this government was founded close with a prayer, the only relief of a heart bursting with a mighty passion of sorrow and impatience:

“Great God, what a people hast Thou brought forth upon this continent! What love of liberty; what heroic love of law and institution; what courage, and constancy, and self-sacrifice hast Thou given them! And no man is found to lead this so great a nation! Be Thou Leader! Lord God of Hosts, hast Thou forgotten how to lead a people? There are no ages on Thy head! Years make Thee neither old nor weary! Behind Thy unwrinkled brow no care dwells! Teach this people to need no other leader but Thyself! Then, led by Thee, teach them to be all-sufficient for every deed of justice, and omnipotent for liberty!”

These are followed, August 14, by a three-column editorial upon “The Time has Come”:

“We have been made irresolute, indecisive, and weak by the President’s attempt to unite impossibilities; to make war and keep the peace; to strike hard and not hurt; to invade sovereign States and not meddle with their sovereignty; to put down rebellion without touching its cause; to bring an infuriated people into enforced union with their enemies, and to leave all their causes of quarrels unsettled and vigorous, and yet hope for future concord.

“Thus far the conservative North has been striving to conduct this war so as not to meddle with the so-called Southern right of slavery. But, in spite of every scruple, events have crowded men to the necessity of confiscation and emancipation. There is one more step. It is the last sublime step toward national safety and national Christian glory. It is immediate and universal emancipation!”

In the next issue, August 21, is another article, upon “The Only Ground,” of the same temper, urging the same plea:

“The President has the right and power to destroy slavery. Let him account to the civilized world for not doing it.”

And another August 28, upon “Reconstruction”:

“Since, then, the old Union is de facto ceased, and all the local rights lapsed by rebellion to the hands of the government, and it is to reconstruct the Union, would it be a stretch of authority in the government so to reconstruct it as to insure its perpetuity by purging out all possible cause of future discord? The President has the authority. He is exercising it every day. All that we ask is that he will look forward and not backward; that he will consider the nation of the future, and not mere precedents in the past.... To put down rebellion first, and attend to slavery afterwards, is letting two serpents uncoil that may as well be stricken through with one blow.”

The preacher’s pulpit is in perfect accord with the editor’s chair. In a sermon of July 27, 1862, he says: “God has been pleased to bring this nation at this time into great trials that are to test the faith of all true men. I think that we have not by a long way touched bottom yet. I think that the wind has not yet blown its fiercest. There are blacker clouds than those that have yet expended their fury. I cast no confidence away. I do not know that we are to succeed to-day or to-morrow; but we are going to succeed. I do not know that we are going to succeed in Virginia for the present, but we are a-going to succeed in America.

“When I die there will be a great many things that, if I have time to think of them, I may be sorry for. After I die there may be a great many inconsistencies, a great many sins, a great many unperformed duties that, when I behold them in retrospect, I shall regret. But I tell you that, whether in the passage of death, or at the gate of heaven, or before God’s eternal throne, I never expect to be sorry that I have preached so often and so strongly in behalf of those that were in bonds; that I have spoken, as I have had opportunity, for those that could not speak for themselves; that I have roused up, according to the measure of my influence, the whole community to vindicate the cause of God toward His oppressed ones. I shall not be sorry for that. I shall be sorry that I have not done more; but I never shall be sorry that I have done so much.

“And my faith in this cause was never so strong as it is now. I do not throw it away. I feel certain that if the will of God is done in this matter, though we may have to wait, we shall have great recompense of reward in waiting.

“May God inspire the hearts of our rulers by the right things! May God unite the hearts of this great people in right counsels and in right feelings! May God accept the offerings that we make of our children, of our brothers, of our neighbors, of everything that we have! Let us put them all on the altar of patriotism, knowing that in this case the altar of patriotism is the altar of God. He will accept the offering, and in His own time, by tokens infallible, He will reward our faith and bring us forth purged, purified, strengthened by the things which we have suffered.”

With all his earnestness he must have his laugh at a contemporary, “A Queer Pulpit”:

“We knew that the Journal of Commerce was famous upon statistics and prided itself upon its good literary taste. But we had no idea before of the powers of its rhetoric. We extract a figure from its issue of August 27 that should be commended to the directors of the New York Hospital:

“‘It is the voice of a glorious past which speaks to him, in the tones of the fathers whose graves are with us. It is the voice of the living nation, millions on millions of whom utter the same words we utter to-day. It is the voice of posterity, speaking from the womb of time, that calls on him to save the Constitution, which was made, not for the duration of a human life, but to be the blessing of all men and all nations until the end of thrones and earthly powers. That he will be faithful we do not for one instant doubt.’

“This is taking part in politics rather early. Constitutional studies must be pursued under difficulties in this case. But if posterity are so greatly stirred in their minds, there is nothing for it but for the President to write them a letter. He answered Horace Greeley. Surely he will heed the sufferings of posterity in such uncomfortable quarters.

“For ourselves, we cannot be too thankful that we are already born. We prefer open-air speaking. If the President don’t save the Constitution now, it is a hopeless case!”

In an editorial, September 11, upon “The Contrast,” he sums up the difference in sentences like these:

“Richmond determines, Washington reasons; Richmond is inflexible, Washington vacillates; Richmond knows what it wants to do, Washington wishes that it knew; Richmond loves slavery and hates liberty, Washington is somewhat partial to liberty and rather dislikes slavery; Rebellion is wise and sinful, Government is foolish.”

Upon a report that a member of the Cabinet had said “that nations often lose their institutions, their liberties, and yet preserve their national life, and that in our case we must aim to preserve the national life,” he writes an editorial (September 18, 1862) which he properly entitled “The Trumpet”:

“... Let other people imagine as they may a national life, like a disembodied spirit, wandering over the continent seeking rest and finding none. We propose no such issue to this struggle. The nation must emerge from war shorn of no attribute and mutilated in none of its members. We claim this continent for liberty. We demand the execution of slavery for treason. We arraign this arch-conspirator, arrested with a dagger in its hand aimed at the life of this government and the liberties of the people, and in the name of mankind and before Almighty God we demand that its life be forfeited. Let the trumpet sound!”

These are but samples of the editorials that were sent out from his pen through the columns of the Independent. Week after week they continued, pleading for vigor, denouncing inaction, urging that liberty be recognized as the great issue at stake, and demanding immediate emancipation of the slave.

At last, after this long, weary, heart-breaking delay, he publishes, September 25, “The Proclamation” of the President announcing “that on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State, or any designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be thenceforward and for ever free.” Mr. Beecher says of it:

“We send forth to-day the most important paper ever published in the Independent, the most extraordinary document ever proceeding from this government....

“No more guises and veils. No more side-issues. No more deceitful compromises. The government has taken ground, and every man in the nation must take ground. You are for or against this government, and this government is declared to mean liberty to the slave! There is no neutral ground for traitors to hide in, playing wolf at night and sheep by day. The President’s proclamation will sift the North, give unity to its people, simplicity to its policy, liberty to its army! That whole army is no longer a mongrel something between a police force and a political caucus. It is an army organized to strike where blows will be most felt.

“The Proclamation emancipates slaves in thrice thirty days. But it emancipates the government and the army to-day. The nation is freer than it was on the 21st. We have a policy. The people will base it upon a principle. It is the policy of liberty upon the principle of justice. The future is before us! Through what dark days we must pass we know not. What battles and what reverses are in store we do not inquire. At last we have a right to believe that God is leading us. He who carried His people from bondage through the wilderness, and established them in the promised land, can surely guide us!

“Let sorrows fall fast; there is joy before us! We behold upon the troubled sea a Christ coming to us, walking on the waves! In His hand are winds and storms. Every hour now moves toward the great day of Emancipation. At length the dawn shall bring that day most eminent in our national calendar. Amid all the festivities that usher in the year, there shall be a great joy, deeper, purer, holier than ever came to us with the New Year—the joy of a nation that, after long sorrow and shame, shall cast off from itself the guilt of slavery, and stand erect before the world a consistent witness for liberty!”

He looks upon it as the beginning of the end, and is satisfied if it be God’s will that his work should now cease. On the evening of the last day of slavery in America—Wednesday evening, December 31—he says in his lecture-room talk:

“As for myself, let come what will come, I care not. God may peel me, and bark me, and strip me of my leaves, and do as He chooses with my earthly estate. I have lived long enough; I have had a good time. You cannot take back the blows I have given the devil right in the face. I have uttered some words that will not die, because they are incorporated into the lives of men that will not die. Through my instrumentality, aided by God’s providence, many souls have been converted and gone singing home to their eternal abode. I think I have a larger church in heaven than I have on earth, and I think they love me and want me there. I have no reason to ask for longer life. If my work is done, and God does not want me here, and this is my last night of labor on earth, ought I to be sorry? Ought I not to be the most grateful man that ever lived that I have had such health, that I have had such an open field, that I have had the privilege of speaking the truth right straight along for fifteen years, whether men would hear or whether they would forbear, and that I have been borne up, in doing this, by so large a church, composed of such an enthusiastic body of God’s people?

“And to-night the shadows of the past come over me. I remember when I first stood, in about this place, in the old church. I remember the sermon that I preached to you on the first Sunday night after I came among you, as if it were but an hour ago. I then declared to the inchoate congregation gathered here that it was my purpose to preach the Gospel in its applications to slavery, and peace, and war, and moral purity, and every Christian reform, and that I would do it whether you heard it or not, and whether you stood by me or forsook me. I recollect those times perfectly well.

“Fifteen years have passed since then, and here we are talking about the President of the United States emancipating four million slaves. Here we are in the midst of a war whose inevitable outcome from this time must be to make war on slavery. Mightier than Congress now is the arm for emancipation—mightier than all things! In the providence of God what wonderful revolutions and changes have taken place in fifteen years! I am willing to live fifteen years more, if God wishes it, if I may renew my youth and work on. I should dread to find now that there were no more locks to get up, and that I must henceforth travel on a dead level. I would try and pull with my freight-boat on a level, if God wished me to, though I would like here and there to rise. It would be a pleasure to live, if it were God’s will, till the day-star dawned, for I know it will dawn, but I am willing to lay down my burden at any time, if it please God. If He will accept the thanks that I give Him for all that He has permitted me to do, to say, and experience in days past, then, as to the future, let His will be done. I ask neither to live nor to die.”

This closes the third era of his work in the great anti-slavery contest. We now turn back to glance over the same period and note some of the more important events aside from this struggle, public, domestic, and private, that marked the years from 1850 to January, 1863.

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Chapter XVII

First Voyage to England—Extracts from Diary—Warwick Castle—Stratford-on-Avon—The Skylark—Oxford—Bodleian Library—London—Old-time Sadness—Paris—Catch-Words from Diary—Effect of Picture-Gallery—The Louvre—His Return.

In the middle of the year 1850 his labors were interrupted.

“Henry Ward Beecher, our esteemed brother, sailed for Europe on Tuesday, July 9, in the ship New World, Captain Knight. It was a sudden move, but having received a friendly invitation from the captain, and taking the advice of his friends that a voyage out and back would be of essential benefit to his health, which has been considerably shattered by repeated attacks of illness, he accepted the invitation, but expects to return with the vessel. During his absence the pulpit of Plymouth Church will be supplied by the pastor’s younger brother, Rev. Charles Beecher, of Indiana.” This item we find in the Independent of that week:

“Journal.—Landed from New World July 30, 1850. Waterloo Inn.”

This is the first entry in a memorandum-book now in our hands, and it tells its own story. He is in Liverpool, England.

We have spoken of Mr. Beecher’s perfect health, and such he enjoyed, for the most part, through life. But it was only retained, after he came to Brooklyn, by great care on his part. Before he had learned the necessity of this there had been several failures. One was an attack of erysiphaltic fever, in the spring of 1849, which kept him out of his pulpit for several months. During the following winter he had a severe attack of quinsy, from the exhaustion of which it seemed to his friends that he was breaking down, and they procured passage for him to Europe, as has just been stated, and gave him a three months’ leave of absence.

Another experience now opened to him. The sea, out upon which he had so often looked with longing eyes, in boyhood, from the wharves of Boston, and across whose waters he had often sailed in imagination, he now, for the first time, traversed in reality. He found it far less agreeable than he expected, and learned on this his first voyage, what no after-experience ever contradicted, that for him “the only pleasant thing about going to sea was the going ashore.”

From his note-book and diary we can follow him, step by step, and from his letters to friends can learn of some of those experiences that made this trip memorable in its impressions and influence. The next entry in his journal reads:

“July 31, Manchester and back. Hedges same as combed and uncombed hair. Railroad mile-posts subdivided; grading in manufacturing villages. Go out from London under ground, come into Manchester over tops of houses. Clothes-line across streets.

“August 3, Birmingham; railroad stations. Knight says thirty-three ocean steamers have been put afloat in eighteen months; only the Bremen steamers before afloat.

”Plated Ware.—Pattern dies, stamping, handles, etc.; spoons, forks, plain piece, cut shape, then slit tines, stamp shape; filing-room, polishing, chasing or fretting, plating, brushing. Designer gets £2 to £2 10/per week.”

This is the first page of his note-book, and is given entire, not because there is anything remarkable about it, but because it is a sample of his note-books in general. They are full of facts, and facts of every description. He seldom gives impressions or sentiments. He has a hunger for all kinds of items; give him these and the sentiments will take care of themselves. Occasionally he concludes with a description that sets the items in some higher relation and shows the processes that are going on in his own mind; as when, after giving some dozen particulars in the process of manufacturing papier-maché, he closes the list of catch-words with this: “It is the art of creating plastic wood. It grows by hand and not by vegetable vitality, then hardens and receives Art.”

But it was not items alone that he learned in his travels; he became familiar with objects of which he had read, and gained inspiration from a more intimate acquaintance. In Warwick Castle and Kenilworth he walked among scenes made vivid to him in his youth in the pages of Sir Walter Scott. He entered, as he said, “into the very life of that olden time, and took from it its good without tasting its evil.”

Cæsar’s Tower, which had stood for eight hundred years, co-eval with the Norman Conquest, especially aroused his imagination:

“I stood upon its mute stones and imagined the ring of the hammer upon them when the mason was laying them to their bed of ages. What were the thoughts, the fancies, the conversations of these rude fellows at that age of the world? I was wafted backward, and backward, until I stood on the foundations upon which old England herself was builded, when as yet there was none of her. There, far back of all literature, before the English tongue itself was formed, earlier than her jurisprudence and than all modern civilization, I stood in imagination, and, reversing my vision, looked down into a far future to search for the men and deeds which had been, as if they were yet to be; thus making a prophecy of history, and changing memory into a dreamy foresight.

“Against these stones, on which I lay my hand, have rung the sounds of battle. Yonder, on these very grounds, there raged, in sight of men that stand where I do, fiercest and deadliest conflicts. All this ground has fed on blood....

“I walked across to Guy’s Tower, up its long stone stairway, into some of its old soldiers’ rooms. The pavements were worn, though of stone, with the heavy, grinding feet of men-at-arms. I heard them laugh between their cups, I saw them devouring their gross food, I heard them recite their feats, or tell the last news of some knightly outrage or cruel oppression of the despised laborer. I stood by the window out of which the archer sent his whistling arrows. I stood by the openings through which scalding water or molten lead was poured upon the heads of the assailants, and heard the hoarse shriek of the wretched fellows who got the shocking baptism. I ascended to the roof of the tower, and looked over the wide glory of the scene, still haunted with the same imaginations of olden time. How many thoughts had flown hence besides mine!—here where warriors looked out or ladies watched for their knights’ return. How did I long to stand for one hour, really, in their position and in their consciousness who lived in those days; and then to come back, with the new experience, to my modern self!”

In this is shown his sympathy with the old Saxon yeomanry, and was his Saxon ancestry taking voice; all the romantic, picturesque elements of his nature were fed, and ran, like the streams of springtide, full-banked to the sea.

We next find in his note-book these items and references:

“Approach to Stratford-on-Avon. How peaceful the associations in contrast with those of Warwick and Kenilworth!”

“The place: old English houses; Red Horse Inn.”

“Birds: thrush, lark, nightingale, sparrow, robin, starling, rooks, cuckoo.”

“A different but, to me, even greater interest attaches to Avon from the throngs from every nation that have visited it.”

“Shakspere: eleven years old when Elizabeth visited Kenilworth.”

“No greater change can be imagined than from the warlike towers of Guy of Warwick to the quiet home of Shakspere, Stratford-on-Avon.” The change in his experience was equally marked. In the one the martial spirit of the warrior, in the other the loving, receptive spirit of the prophet and poet, were aroused and fed. In Stratford-on-Avon he had one of those luminous hours which were, in his experience, like Mountains of Transfiguration.

In a letter to a friend describing a Sabbath here, written at this time, he says:

“The scenes of Saturday had fired me; every visit to various points in Stratford-on-Avon added to the inspiration, until, as I sallied forth to church, I seemed not to have a body. I could hardly feel my feet striking against the ground; it was as if I were numb. But my soul was clear, penetrating, and exquisitely susceptible....

“I had been anxious lest some Cowper’s ministerial fop should officiate, and the sight of this aged man was good. The form of his face and head indicated firmness, but his features were suffused with an expression of benevolence.

“He ascended the reading-desk and the services began. You know my mother was, until her marriage, in the communion of the Episcopal Church. This thought hardly left me while I sat, grateful for the privilege of worshipping God through a service that had expressed so often her devotions. I cannot tell you how much I was affected. I had never had such a trance of worship, and I shall never have such another view until I gain the Gate.

“I am so ignorant of the church service that I cannot call the various parts by their right names, but the portions which most affected me were the prayers and responses which the choir sang. I had never heard any part of a supplication, a direct prayer, chanted by a choir, and it seemed as though I heard not with my ear but with my soul. I was dissolved; my whole being seemed to me like an incense wafted gratefully toward God. The divine presence rose before me in wondrous majesty, but of ineffable gentleness and goodness, and I could not stay away from more familiar approach, but seemed irresistibly yet gently drawn toward God. My soul, then thou didst magnify the Lord and rejoice in the God of thy salvation! And then came to my mind the many exultations of the Psalms of David, and never before were the expressions and figures so noble and so necessary to express what I felt. I had risen, it seemed to me, so high as to be where David was when his soul conceived the things which he wrote. Throughout the service—and it was an hour and a quarter long—whenever an ‘Amen!’ occurred it was given by the choir accompanied by the organ and the congregation. Oh! that swell and solemn cadence rings in my ear yet!

“Not once, not a single time, did it occur in that service without bringing tears from my eyes. I stood like a shrub on a spring morning—every leaf covered with dew, and every breeze shook down some drops. I trembled so much at times that I was obliged to sit down. Oh! when in the prayers, breathed forth in strains of sweet, simple, solemn music, the love of Christ was recognized, how I longed then to give utterance to what that love seemed to me. There was a moment in which the heavens seemed opened to me and I saw the glory of God! All the earth seemed to me a store-house of images made to set forth the Redeemer, and I could scarcely be still from crying out. I never knew, I never dreamed before of what heart there was in that word amen. Every time it swelled forth and died away solemnly, not my lips, not my mind, but my whole being said: ‘Saviour, so let it be.’

“The sermon was preparatory to the communion, which I then first learned was to be celebrated. It was plain and good; and although the rector had done many things in a way that led me to suppose that he sympathized with over-much ceremony, yet in his sermon he seemed evangelical and gave a right view of the Lord’s Supper.

“For the first time in my life I went forward to commune in an Episcopal church. Without any intent of my own, but because from my seat it was nearest, I knelt down at the altar, with the dust of Shakspere beneath my feet. I thought of it as I thought of ten thousand other things, without the least disturbance of devotion. It seemed as if I stood upon a place so high that, like one looking over a wide valley, all objects conspired to make but one view. I thought of the General Assembly and Church of the First-Born, of my mother and brother and children in heaven, of my living family on earth, of you, of the whole church entrusted to my hands—they afar off, I upon the banks of the Avon.”

He did not forget his old friends, birds and trees. From Stratford-on-Avon he writes:

“As I stood looking over on the masses of foliage and the single trees dotted in here and there, I could see every shade of green, and all of them most beautiful, and as refreshing to me as old friends. After standing awhile to take a last view of Stratford-on-Avon from this high ground and the beautiful slopes around it, and of the meadows of the Avon, I began to walk homeward, when I heard such an outbreak behind me as wheeled me about quick enough. There he flew, singing as he rose, and rising gradually, not directly up, but with gentle slope—there was the free-singing lark, not half so happy to sing as I was to hear. In a moment more he had reached the summit of his ambition and suddenly fell back to the grass again. And now if you laugh at my enthusiasm I will pity you for the want of it. I have heard one poet’s lark, if I never hear another, and am much happier for it.”

At Oxford a new world opened to him—that of an English university town enriched with the growth and associations of seven hundred years. The beauty of its architecture, its cloistered quiet, its galleries, and, most of all, its libraries, impressed him.

“Few places affect me more than libraries, and especially the Bodleian Library, reputed to have half a million printed books and manuscripts. I walked solemnly and reverently among the alcoves and through the halls, as if in the pyramid of embalmed souls. It was their life, their heart, their mind, that they treasured in these book-urns. Silent as they are, should all the emotions that went to their creation have utterance, could the world itself contain the various sounds? They longed for fame! Here it is—to stand silently for ages, moved only to be dusted and catalogued, valued only as units in the ambitious total, and gazed at occasionally by men ignorant as I am of their name, their place, their language, and their worth. Indeed, unless a man can link his written thoughts with the everlasting wants of men, so that they shall draw from them as from wells, there is no more immortality to the thoughts and feelings of the soul than to the muscles and the bones. A library is but the soul’s burial-ground. It is the land of shadows.”

It was, however, not all shadowy.

“Noon Refection.—‘What will you take to drink, Oxford ale or a little wine?’ Cold water. ‘Oh! not cold water, surely? A little sherry and water?’ ‘Surely you will not come to England to drink cold water?’ My dear sir, I am a thorough-going teetotaler, and you surely would not have me come to England to lose my good principles? ‘Why, sir, I am not a teetotaler, but I am a temperance man—was never drunk in my life—but you surprise me!’

“Dining and tea-room of Fellows. Elaborate carved oak—no sham. In all respects college in quadrangle proposes to take care of its students, head and stomach, soul, intellect, and body, and therefore has added kitchen to library.”

“London, August 9.—Arrived last night. Old Bell. Visited Trafalgar Square and Westminster Abbey, Guildhall, Bank of England, Tower, Tunnel, etc.”

In London something of the old-time sadness came over him, with the old-time sources of relief:

“Now, too, I am apt, if I do not fall asleep soon enough—or more frequently when I awake, hours before it is the fashion here to get up—to lie and think over my way of life hitherto; and my life-work seems to me to be so little, and so poorly done, that I feel discouraged at the thought of resuming it! I have everywhere in my travelling—at the shrine of the martyrs in Oxford, at the graves of Bunyan and Wesley in London, at the vault in which Raleigh was for twelve years confined in the Tower—asked myself whether I could have done and endured what they did, and as they did! It is enough to make one tremble for himself to have such a heart-sounding as this gives him. I cast the lead for the depth of my soul, and it strikes so soon that I have little reason for pride.

“Had it not been for paintings, and flowers, and trees, and the landscapes, I do not know what I should have done with myself. Often when extremely distressed I have gone to the parks or out of the city to some quiet ground where I could find a wooded stream, and the woods filled with birds, and found, almost in a moment, a new spirit coming over me. I was rid of men, almost of myself. I seemed to find a sacred sweetness and calmness, not coming over me, but into me. I seemed nearer to heaven. I felt less sadness about life, for God would take care of it; and my own worthlessness, too, became a source of composure, for on that very account it made little difference in the world’s history whether I lived or died. God worked, it seemed to me, upon a scale so vast and rich in details that anything and anybody could be spared and not affect the results of life.”

He crossed over to Paris in August, and his note-book gives us catch-words and sentences evidently intended for reminders of sights, incidents, and adventures that he wished to remember. So disconnected are they that they are of little worth except as showing what interested him in this great city on this his first visit, and as affording the raw materials out of which grew his letters and more finished descriptions.

When he arrived, by what route, at what hotel he stopped, he apparently did not think worth noting; but what he saw in the life of the people he wished to remember, and the first few pages of his diary are filled with items like these: “Three mothers with their babies.” “Boy and sister frolicking, six or seven years old.” “Family on seat; little thing talking, about three years old.” “Twelve soldiers going to relieve sentinels.” “Stand for flowers,” etc.

Next to the life of the common people the largest space in his diary is given to the art-galleries. On two pages he jots down “Effect of Gallery on my Mind”:

“1st. Astonishment, at number and exquisite character, beyond what had expected—not of something finer, but such as to make me feel that before I had not seen anything.

“2d. Then sense of intense pleasure, from what do not stop to inquire. It is not color, form, composition, nor mere sympathy with thing expressed. It is the whole. The walls flame out as if the hall was a summer and all shining in concentration upon you. I see all that is painted—and more. I see, beyond, other visions, the mute figures speak. I imagine the scene before the time chosen and afterwards.

“3d. Then comes sense of beauty, complex, of rich and exquisite coloring; also the beauty of the scenes. The objects, in other words, and the instrument of their manifestation.

“4th. Then you begin to select and to hang in a dreamy review over one or another. Time is not known; you wake by some footfall. Whether you have been here an hour or four you cannot tell; it seems by the populous experience a long time. You do not weary, but you exhale—i.e., the senses seem to flag, while mind is keener than ever, and you imagine rather than see; as one who is exhilarated by wine sees, to be sure, but his own mind affords the color and—”

In his letters he afterwards enlarged upon this topic: “Ah! what a new world has been opened to me, and what a new sense within myself! I knew that I had gradually grown fond of pictures from my boyhood. I had felt the power of some few. But nothing had ever come up to a certain ideal that had hovered in my mind, and I supposed I was not fine enough to appreciate with discrimination the works of masters. To find myself absolutely intoxicated; to find my system so much affected that I could not control my nerves; to find myself trembling, and laughing, and weeping, and almost hysterical, and that in spite of my shame and determination to behave better—such a power of these galleries over me I had not expected. I have lived for two days in fairyland, wakened out of it by some few sights which I have mechanically visited, more for the sake of pleasing friends at home, when I return, than for a present pleasure to myself, but relapsing again into the golden vision....

“I could not tell whether hours or minutes were passing. It was a blessed exhalation of soul, in which I seemed freed from matter, and, as a diffused intelligence, to float in the atmosphere. I could not believe that a dull body was the centre from which thought and emotion radiated. I had a sense of expansion, of etherealization, which gave me some faint sense of a spiritual state. Nor was I in a place altogether unfitted for such a state. The subject of many of the works—suffering, heroic resistance, angels, Arcadian scenes, especially the scenes of Christ’s life and death—seemed not unfitting accompaniment to my mind, and suggested to me, in a glorious vision, the drawing near of a redeemed soul to the precincts of heaven! Oh! with what an outburst of soul did I implore Christ to wash me, and all whom I loved, in His precious blood, that we might not fail of entering the glorious city whose builder and maker is God! All my sins seemed not only sins but great deformities. They seemed not merely affronts against God but insults to my own nature! My soul snuffed at them and trod them down as the mire in the street. Then, holy and loving thoughts toward God or toward man seemed to me to be as beautiful as those fleecy islets along the west at sunset, crowned with glory; and the gentler aspirations for goodness and nobleness and knowledge seemed to me like silver mists through which the morning is striking, wafting them gently and in wreaths and films heavenward. Great deeds, heroism for worthy objects, for God, or for one’s fellows, or for one’s own purity, seemed not only natural but as things without which a soul could not live.

“But at length I perceived myself exhausted, not by any sense of fatigue (I had no sense or body), but by perceiving that my mind would not fix upon material objects, but strove to act by itself. Thus a new picture was examined only for an instant, and then I exhaled into all kinds of golden dreams and visions.

“I left the gallery, and in this mood, as I threaded my way back, how beautiful did everything and everybody seem! The narrow streets were beautiful for being narrow, and the broad ones for being broad; old buildings had their glory, and new structures had theirs; children were all glorified children; I loved the poor workmen that I saw in the confined and narrow shops; the various women, young and old, with huge buck-baskets, or skipping hither and thither on errands, all seemed happy, and my soul blessed them as I passed.

“My own joy of being overflowed upon everything which I met. Sometimes singing to myself, or smiling to others so as to make men think, doubtless, that I had met some good luck or was on some prosperous errand of love, I walked on through street after street, turning whichever corner, to the right or left, happened to please the moment, neither knowing or caring where I went, but always finding something to see and enjoying all things. Nor do I know yet by what instinct I rounded up my journeyings by finding my proper lodging. That night I slept, as to my body, but felt little difference between dreaming asleep and dreaming awake.”

We turn from his note-book and letters to one of the papers of the day, and read: “Rev. H. W. Beecher, our esteemed brother, has returned from his transatlantic trip with improved health. He reached New York yesterday (evening) in the Asia, September 11.”

He arrived unexpectedly and found his family, which had been spending the summer at Sutton, Mass., with the grandmother, awaiting him. His trip had been a success in every particular. Not only was his health restored, but his field of observation had been vastly broadened and his experiences greatly deepened. England, the home of his race, had been seen and touched; he had visited her castles, colleges, and churches; walked among her fields, become acquainted with her people; and henceforth her noble history, great achievements, and mighty names seemed more real to him, and she was more admired and beloved than ever.

In Paris he became conscious for the first time of the power of true art, and began that study of it which only ended with his life.

But, whether in England or France, so well read was he in the history of the places visited, and so vivid was his imagination to bring back the scenes and men that made these places memorable, that his journey was as a sojourn with the wisest and best of our race, and he returned from it refreshed and enlarged for the work that, for a few weeks, had been laid aside.

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Chapter XVIII

Church and Steamboat—Jenny Lind—Hospitality—Colonel Pertzel—The Family—Twins—Medicine—Giving Counsel—For the Sailor—An Absurd Story Contradicted—Salisbury—Trouting—Death of Alfred and Arthur—Letters to his Daughter at School—Lenox—Equivocal Honors Declined—The Pulpit—“Plymouth Collection”—“Shining Shore.” A Church Liturgy—Courting with his Father’s old Love-letters—1857 a Year of Trial—Matteawan—Visit to Litchfield—1858 a Year of Harvest—Revival Meetings—Hospitality of Plymouth Church—Courtesy to Errorists—New Organ—Peekskill—Letters to his Daughter abroad—Marriage of his Daughter—Lecturing—Title of D.D. declined—Flowers in Church—Christian Liberty in the Use of the Beautiful—His two Lines of Labor.

No sooner has he put his foot on shore than he is engaged in battle. This time it is against religious bigotry and intolerance upon the seas. A Star article from his pen appeared September 19 upon “Church and Steamboat—Cunard Line”:

No religious service was allowed on the steamers except that which was appointed for the crew, at which the passengers were permitted to be present. No one was allowed to read the service there except the captain, who, having been playing cards late Saturday night, and being addicted to the sailor habit of profanity, was not considered fit for the office. No one at all was permitted to preach, or, if the rule were ever varied, only a clergyman of Episcopal ordination. One of the owners, who happened to be on the ship, when courteously asked to allow some one of the nine clergymen on board to preach, and to give the use of one of the several cabins to those who chose to have service of their own, lost his temper and said that if Americans did not choose to go on his line, “d——— ’em! they may go to h———.” All this appeared to Mr. Beecher as rank injustice and an interference with the freedom of worship of multitudes of travellers. Humorously, yet with good, solid, set phrase, he denounces this bigotry in the article above mentioned. Like most of his articles, it was strong enough to draw the fire of the enemy.

The captain and the son of this owner reply in letters which partly explain, partly deny, but wholly charge Mr. Beecher with falsehood. This brings another article from him in the next issue, September 26:

“It is not to be supposed, gentlemen, that either of you can sympathize fully with me in an inveterate prejudice which I have contracted against lying in all its moods and tenses. But, really, I feel hurt that you have so low an opinion of my ingenuity as to suppose that, if I set out to tell lies, I should tell such poor and graceless ones.

“Allow me to assure you, gentlemen, that while my principles forbid me to employ falsehood, yet should I attempt it I should conscientiously endeavor to lie well.”

He reiterates his charges, adds to them some further remarks upon the gambling habits of the captain, which unfit him to act as conductor of public worship, procures affidavits from responsible parties to substantiate his charges, and refers them to the courts for redress, if they think themselves aggrieved.

The first battle upon his return to his native land was waged for freedom of worship upon the high seas!

In this same month of September, Jenny Lind came to this country and began that series of concerts which have never been surpassed. Her first concert in Castle Garden, September 11, netted $30,000. Some of the papers having criticised her and her manager for the high price of tickets, and the community for paying it, Mr. Beecher takes up the cudgels in her behalf:

“Jenny Lind, if we understand her desires and aims, is employing a resplendent musical genius in the most noble accordance with the spirit of the Gospel. In her we behold a spectacle of eminent genius employing its magic power in the elevation of the human race.

“If men would spare from the disgusting weed and poisonous liquors one-half of what they spend every month, there are few so poor as not to be able to hear Jenny Lind. *”

One of his children gives this incident:

“In those early days father always had a flower-garden in the back-yard of our city homes. I remember when we lived in the little, brown wooden house on Columbia Heights, Jenny Lind came to board near us for a short time. All the neighboring children used to gather round her door to see her start for her drive; and one day when we saw the carriage in front of her house, I ran in to ask father if H——— and I could go and see her come out. He was at work in the garden among his flowers, and, after giving his consent, called me back, cut a handful of roses, and told me I could take those and give them to her. So off H——— and I went, but I believe, after all, my courage failed, and I brought them home again, very much ashamed. Father laughed, but comforted me by saying he’d rather I would be too shy than too bold.”

He closes this eventful year (1850) with two Star articles—the one (December 12), “Remember the Poor”: “Upon the whole, we doubt if there is any other means of grace so profitable to a Christian as the whole duty of relieving the poor; for giving money is but a small part, and often the least effective part, of duty to them. Every man ought to take a single case or family, and look after them through the winter.” Another (December 19) upon “Different Ways of Giving”: “Now and then you will find a man whose face is March but whose pocket is June. He will storm and scold at you, but send you away with ten times as much as you asked.”

Mr. Beecher was very hospitable, and kept open house for friends, and even for such chance acquaintance as came to be associated with him. “When Kossuth was in this country, Colonel Pertzel, his chief of staff, with his wife, stopped with us for several weeks. When they went away she gave me her bracelet of national coins, which, she said, was prized by the Hungarian women in their exile above all their possessions.

“Our own family circle at this time consisted of father, mother, and three children—two boys and a girl. Besides these Aunt Esther was with us, whom I remember as little and round, straight and precise, with snapping black eyes, looking after the second generation of nephews and nieces, and telling us stories; and also Grandma Bullard, doing the mending and cosseting while she sang ‘Bounding Billow’ and ‘Like the Hart and the Roe.’ Dear, ideal old grandmother!”

December 20, 1852, there was an addition to this circle. “I can remember sitting in the parlor one evening with Aunt Esther, and father’s coming in, going up to her, and kissing her first on one cheek and then on the other, and her giving a little jump, saying, ‘Not two, Henry!’ and his answering, ‘Yes, two.’ Then he told me that I had two little new brothers up-stairs.

“Father was so proud of these twins that I remember on New Year’s day he took fifteen or twenty of the Hungarians who were making New Year’s calls up into mother’s room to see them.”

At the Thanksgiving service of this year Mr. Beecher had announced that an effort would be made to raise by subscription the sum of $13,000 to pay off the floating debt of the church before January 1, and the papers of a later date contain the announcement that the sum was promptly subscribed, “and Plymouth Church may now be considered on a firm foundation in temporal matters, and is in every way in a prosperous condition.”

The church entered the new year, 1852, without debt, and more than ten thousand dollars were realized from the rent of the pews.

Evidently he begins the year with especial effort to overcome spiritual coldness among the people, and bring in the summer of Christian life and growth, for his Star Papers are upon subjects like these: “Ice in the Church,” “Various Convictions of Sin,” and later are announcements in the papers of morning prayer-meetings in “Plymouth Church,” “Preaching Every Evening.”

In due time the announcement is made that “sixty persons were last Sabbath morning received into the church, fifty upon profession of faith.”

He is experiencing one of the evils to which religious meetings are prone, and concerning it he sends out a note of warning, “One Cause of Dull Meetings”:

“We hardly know of a more unprofitable exercise for social meetings than what is called exhortation. Men impose upon themselves and social meetings degenerate into absurd formalities—a pretence of caring for what they do not care for, of renouncing what all the world knows they do not renounce, of asking for what they do not desire and desiring what they dare not ask.”

Through life Mr. Beecher was as free with pathies in medicine as of isms in religion, and used allopathy, homœopathy, hydropathy, electricity, or hand-rubbing, as seemed to him at the time most likely to secure the coveted result. In general he trusted more to the man than to the system. His position on this matter, which he held substantially for years, is given in a review of a medical work:

“In good earnest, we regard medicine with little favor. Our first recipe for sickness is, not to get sick. Our second is reliance upon a well-bred, sensible doctor. We select the doctor. It is his business to select the medicine, and we do not care a pin what it is. To all who ask us, therefore, what school we belong to, we reply: ‘We are firmly persuaded of Dr. ———.’ This is the sum of our present creed.”

His interest in common men and their affairs brought many to him by letter or in personal conversation for advice in their difficulties. Probably few physicians or lawyers in good practice were consulted by more people than came daily to Mr. Beecher. So practical were his principles of action, so great his sympathy with men in trouble, and such his ability to see through the difficulty, that men came to him for counsel from far and near.

A man asks him as to his duty to his creditors under certain peculiar circumstances which he mentions. Mr. Beecher goes over the matter in detail, states the ground of difficulty in that and all similar cases, and points out the way of relief in this fruitful sentence: “Selfishness is the great mischief-maker in settlements. Men think of their own rights first and their creditors’ afterwards. Reverse this. Be careful first that no man suffer by you.”

Again, at this time a man writes asking as to the duty of a temperance man and a professor of religion in regard to selling liquor as an agent.

“... He, therefore, who loves his situation or his pocket more than his religion can expect but little sympathy from robust Christians, and little favor from that Christ of the cross who has ordered a church of cross-bearing disciples. But we will turn our friend in such a dilemma over to our friend Hall, a drayman in New York, who utterly refuses to cart liquor, who will not unload a ship if in so doing he must cart brandy. For he says he will not disgrace any horse that he owns by letting him be seen with a load of liquor behind him.”

While carrying a free lance ready as any knight of old to champion every cause that was suffering injustice, we want to emphasize the fact that he had none of that small, truculent spirit that leads to personal attacks. He was very lenient to individual human failures, charitable in his judgments, and would rather attempt to save by hiding than to punish by exposing them. In answer to a question which we once asked concerning a man who, to our mind, had greatly transgressed the limits of public propriety, if not of morality, “Why don’t you pitch in and show up this matter?” this man of a thousand battles said quietly, with just a shade of rebuke for the spirit we had shown in his tone: “I don’t like to pitch into folks as much as some do.” But when wrong or injustice had wrought itself into a system, it made no difference to him how high in position they were who upheld it, or how low in the scale were the sufferers, or how securely entrenched was the wrong; he waited for no invitation, he asked no permission, he sought for no support, but attacked it at once, aiming to expose and remove the root element of the evil.

An illustration of this characteristic of Mr. Beecher is afforded by an article written by him at this time upon “Naval Discipline,” in which he brings to the sailor the same broad sympathy, established principles, and clear reasoning that he was accustomed to employ in the case of another and very different class:

“... It is of little use to cobble a system whose radical idea is wrong. This is our judgment in the case of the American navy. The republican institutions of America, slavery always excepted, contemplate the improvement and elevation of the masses. Government does not undertake to educate the citizen, but it contemplates, it is obliged from its origin to accommodate itself to the radical idea of, the liberty of the people to move among themselves, to guide, to change, to advance freely in any direction. The American navy is a monarchy. Its subjects are regarded in but one light—they are to be under service. More than this nothing is thought of. Sailors have no liberty. There is neither provision for, nor expectation of, improvement.... There must be an entirely new spirit infused into the whole system of such service.

”... In short, the naval system must address the social and moral need of the sailor. They must be allowed to act under all those high motives which develop men on shore.”

While moved by these world-wide sympathies, he was in no mood to submit with patience to bigotry nearer home, and utters a very strong protest against the ostracizing of certain Sabbath-schools by the orthodox schools of Brooklyn in their yearly parade:

“We ought to seize such an occasion to promote kindly feelings and cultivate such sympathy as differing sects might lawfully have in common. There is no liberality in urging this matter; it is simply common sense and common decency....

“Does the ——— (paper) regard it as dangerous to walk the streets with a Unitarian? Is heresy like smallpox, so contagious that one school will give it to another by sitting for an hour in the same audience-room with it?... We shall pray more earnestly than ever for the advance of that day when the love of God shall abound in the hearts of men and inspire men to love each other.”

His Star Papers of 1852 close with this, which will at once be recognized as eminently characteristic:

“We had always supposed that absurd stories grew in this vicinity like weeds in the tropics or trees planted by rivers. For once, however, the country newspapers have got ahead of our neighborhood.

“We have made diligent search, taken the census, examined every cradle, drawer, closet, crib, nook, and corner, and are prepared to affirm the following story, which was born in the Windham County Telegraph, the Norwich Tribune, Springfield Republican, Boston Chronicle, and other papers, to be exaggerated:

“‘Rev. H. W. Beecher’s lady has presented him with five little responsibilities in a little better than one year: two soon after the arrival of Kossuth and three the other day.’

“Twins there were a year ago whose blessed faces fill the house with light, but the three above-mentioned were born of those maternal editors whose brains fulfil the prophet’s word, ‘Ye shall consume chaff; ye shall bring forth stubble.’

“We turn these mousing, mongering editors over to the next woman’s-rights convention; or, if they are not fit for a seat there, they may amuse the children with nursery tales while the mothers are at discussion; or, if not fit for that, let them in mercy be bound out as very dry nurses at some foundling hospital.”

He spends the summer of 1853, as he had the one preceding, at Salisbury, Connecticut.

“Once more we find ourselves at home among lucid green trees, among hills and mountains, with lakes and brooks on every side, and country roads threading their way in curious circuits among them. All day long we have moved about with dreamy newness of life. Birds, crickets, and grasshoppers are the only players upon instruments that molest the air. Chanticleer is at this instant proclaiming over the whole valley that the above declaration is a slander on his musical gifts. Very well; add chanticleer to cricket, grasshopper, and bird. Add, also, a cow, for I hear her distant low melodious through the valley, with all roughness strained out by the trees through which it comes hitherward. O this silence in the air, this silence on the mountains, this silence on the lakes!”

He closes a long letter upon trouting in this fashion:

“You forget your errand. You select a dry, tufty knoll, and, lying down, you gaze up into the sky. O those depths! Something in you reaches out and yearns. You have a vague sense of infinity, of vastness, of the littleness of human life, and the sweetness and grandeur of divine life and of eternity. You people that vast ether. You stretch away through it and find that celestial city beyond, and therein dwell oh! how many that are yours! Tears come unbidden. You begin to long for release. You pray. Was there ever a better closet? Under the shadow of the mountain, the heavens full of cloudy cohorts, like armies of horsemen and chariots, your soul is loosened from the narrow judgments of human life, and touched with a full sense of immortality and the liberty of a spiritual state. An hour goes past. How full has it been of feelings struggling to be thoughts, and thoughts deliquescing into feeling! Twilight is coming. You have miles to ride home. Not a trout in your basket! Never mind; you have fished in the heavens and taken great store of prey. Let them laugh at your empty basket. Take their raillery good-naturedly; you have certainly had good luck.”

The sadness which is plainly visible in the passage quoted is an old acquaintance. We have learned to expect its appearance somewhere at every feast. At this time undoubtedly it comes the oftener because of the sorrowful experiences of the early summer. The twins, Alfred and Arthur, “whose blessed faces fill the house with light,” had both died on the fourth of July of this year, and been buried in the same grave.

It was one of the deep sorrows of his life, seldom mentioned save when attempting by his sympathy to comfort others in like affliction; it became a fountain of deep and tender feeling for all in distress, and of earnest longings for the rest and the reunions of heaven.

The going away of his daughter to boarding-school during the autumn makes another break in the family, to which he refers in a letter in November:

“... This is the first departure of any of my children from home, and it is an experience which testifies to my affection for you and my solicitude; yet I do not in the least doubt that you will do well....

“There is little news at home. Your room is occupied by E——— B———, who now lives with us and takes care of W———. She seems a very good girl, and W——— is getting very fond of her. He makes no resistance to her dressing him, and submits even to having his hair curled with great peace. The rogue is fat and happy, and opens his big eyes with a half-tearful, dreamy look when we ask him: Where is Sister H———?...

“We are all going to Aunty H———’s to dinner, and in the evening Mrs. H——— and family will come round there too. As for me, I am in the agony of writing my Thanksgiving sermon....

“There, H———, I have made quite an effort, for me, at letter-writing and news-telling. Let me hear from you.

“Your loving father, “H. W. B.”

In a letter to her the following June he mentions an important domestic event:

“BROOKLYN, June 24, 1854.

”My dear H———:

“I must answer your last letter to me before you leave, lest I lose my repute as a good and frequent correspondent; and I am the more willing to do it as I have very agreeable tidings to communicate to you.

“You will receive a visit from W——— A———, of our church, whom I presume you remember. Well, it has been thought best, after consultation, and some mysterious correspondence with your Aunt S——— which you may have noticed, that you should meet me at Cleveland and spend the next Sabbath there, July 2; go to Painesville and spend July 4 with me there; and then come back at our leisure to see your mother and a new little brother who was safely born into this world on last Thursday, June 22, at three o’clock in the afternoon, weighing ten pounds, and filling all people’s hearts with joy at his health and general peaceable qualities. As yet we have fallen upon no name....

”... Meanwhile young Master Nameless is sleeping off all traces of remembrance of that former state of existence from which Edward supposes him to be an emigrant to this world....

“H. W. B.”

This year he spent the summer in Lenox, Berkshire County, Massachusetts, where a few friends have aided him to purchase a farm, “which the deeds, with great definiteness, say contains ninety-six acres, more or less.” Annoyed by the inquisitiveness of certain newspapers, he goes on to say:

“We gave for farm and farm-buildings $4,500; for the crops, stock, implements, etc., $1,000 more; total, $5,500. Any person in search of useful information can have further particulars as to terms of payment and any other private publicities by personal application to us.”

His emotions upon taking possession are described in a letter of that date:

“It was in the presence of this pasture elm, which we name the Queen, that we first felt to our very marrow that we had indeed become owners of the soil! It was with a feeling of awe that we looked up into its face, and when I whispered to myself, ‘This is mine,’ there was a shrinking, as if there were sacrilege in the very thought of property in such a creature of God as this cathedral-topped tree! Does a man bare his head in some old church? So did I, standing in the shadow of this regal tree, and looking up into that completed glory at which three hundred years have been at work with noiseless fingers! What was I in its presence but a grasshopper? My heart said, ‘I may not call thee property, and that property of mine! Thou belongest to the air. Thou art the child of summer. Thou art the mighty temple where birds praise God. Thou belongest to no man’s hand, but to all men’s eyes that do love beauty, and that have learned through beauty to behold God! Stand, then, in thine own beauty and grandeur! I shall be a lover and a protector, to keep drought from thy roots and the axe from thy trunk.’”

Although the owner of the farm, we are not to suppose that he took hold of work as the neighboring farmers did. We fancy that his love of downright hard work exhausted itself in the West.

“The chief use of a farm, if it be well selected and of a proper soil, is to lie down upon. Mine is an excellent farm for such uses, and I thus cultivate it every day. Large crops are the consequence, of great delight and fancies more than the brain can hold. My industry is exemplary. Though but a week here, I have lain down more hours and in more places than that hard-working brother of mine in the whole year that he has dwelt here. Strange that industrious lying down should come so naturally to me, and standing up and lazing about after the plough or behind the scythe so naturally to him!”

When we remember how many ministers who take an interest in public affairs find themselves elected to some town or village office, made mayor of a city, sent to the State Legislature or even to Congress, we are surprised that Mr. Beecher was never elected, so far as we remember, to the smallest public office. This was largely owing to the fact that he looked upon the work of a preacher, to inspire men to right conduct in public affairs, as more important than filling any official position, however high.

He declares this opinion facetiously, but none the less as a matter of deliberate judgment, in a letter:

EQUIVOCAL HONORS DECLINED.

“The Tribune last Saturday, in reply to a private letter asking its advice on the matter, recommends that we be nominated for Congress, elected and sent, and, when that shall be done, that we go....

“Had the proposal to go to Congress proceeded from the American Board of Missions there would have been grave reasons for considering it. We doubt whether they have a harder field in all heathendom, nor yet a field where the Gospel is more needed. But, for mere political reasons, to backslide from the pulpit into Congress is a little too long a slide for the first venture. We beg to decline in advance.”

In some of the sharp discussions of this year, 1854, the ministry have been bitterly criticised by papers who opposed politics in public, and a great deal of advice has been given to ministers concerning preaching. This receives his attention in this fashion:

“When one considers the amount of advice given to ministers about preaching, it is surprising that there should ever be again a dull or improper sermon.

”... We have no doubt that a rigorous landlord, having sharked it all the week, screwing and gripping among his tenants, would be better pleased on Sunday to doze through an able Gospel sermon on divine mysteries than be kept awake by a practical sermon that, among other things, set forth the duties of a Christian landlord. A broker who has gambled on a magnificent scale all the week does not go to church to have his practical swindlings analyzed and measured by the ‘New Testament spirit.’ Catechism is what he wants; doctrine is to his taste. A merchant whose last bale of smuggled goods was safely stored on Saturday night, and his brother-merchant who on the same day swore a false invoice through the custom-house—they go to church to hear a sermon on faith, on angels, on resurrection. As they have nothing invested in those subjects, they expect the minister to be bold and orthodox. But if he wants respectable merchants to pay ample pew-rents, let him not vulgarize the pulpit by introducing commercial questions. A rich Christian brother owns largely in a distillery, and is clamorous against letting down to the vulgarity of temperance sermons. Another man buys tax-titles and noses around all the week to see who can be slipped out of a vacant lot. On Sunday he naturally wants us to preach about eternity, or moral ability and inability. A mechanic that plies his craft with the unscrupulous appliance of every means that will win, he, too, wants “doctrine” on the Sabbath—not these secular questions. Men wish two departments in life—the secular and the religious. Between them a high and opaque wall is to be built. They wish to do just what they please for six long days. Then, stepping the other side of the wall, they wish the minister to assuage their fears, to comfort their conscience, and furnish them a clear ticket and insurance for heaven. By such a shrewd management our modern financiers are determined to show that a Christian can serve two masters, both God and Mammon, at the same time.”

While fully alive to all the advantages of natural forces, the Sabbath, the pulpit, and a spiritual church-membership always held the highest place in his regard.

“It is no small thing, as it regards the education of the community, that from their youth up they have been taught to discuss all questions from ascertained and authoritative moral grounds....

“The pulpit is the popular religious educator. Its object is to stimulate and develop the religious feelings....

“When a whole community are wont to have their social life, their secular business, their public duties taken out of their low and selfish attitudes, and lifted up into the light of God’s countenance, and there measured, judged, repressed, or developed, and wholly bathed or inspired by the spirit of conscience and of love, then they are receiving a moral education for which there is no other provision except the Sabbath and the pulpit.

“Such are the members that make a church rich—poor in this world’s goods, but rich toward God—rich in faith, in hope, in meekness, in patience, in prayer, and, according to the feeble measure of their ability, in good works. Many a church is destroyed through an ambition of having strong and wealthy men, only rich, not holy....

“It may be very easy to sustain a church that has great wealth and little piety, but it is not worth sustaining. It is not a moral power.”

He had no confidence in secret political organizations. “One might as well study optics in the pyramids of Egypt or the subterranean tombs of Rome, as liberty in secret conclaves controlled by hoary knaves versed in political intrigue, who can hardly enough express their surprise and delight to find honest men going into a wide-spread system of secret caucuses. Honest men in such places have the peculiar advantage that flies have in a spider’s web—the privilege of losing their legs, of buzzing without flying, and of being eaten up at leisure by big-bellied spiders!...

“When will men understand that simple, open integrity, an unflinching adhesion to PRINCIPLE, is the peculiar advantage of truth and liberty? All that the Right asks is air, light, an open enemy, and room to strike. It is Wrong that sneaks in the dark and gains by the stiletto. *”

From time to time he gave examination to modern spiritualism, with this result:

“I am a stout unbeliever in the spiritual origin of this phenomenon, either by good spirits, bad spirits, or any spirits whatever.

“A belief in modern spiritualism seems to weaken the hold of the Bible upon conscience, the affections, and to substitute diluted sentimentalism and tedious platitudes instead of inspired truth.”

In 1855 Mr. Beecher published the “Plymouth Collection.” Of its history he has spoken somewhat at length:

“Soon after I came to Brooklyn from the West the conductor of music in this church was a Mr. Jones. He was intimately associated with the house of Mason Bros., publishers of music in New York, and sons of Lowell Mason, of honored and revered memory. I desired very much to inaugurate a new day in music—that is to say, to transfer to the great congregation on Sunday the same methods, so far as singing was concerned, that we had already instituted in our evening meetings, our conference meetings, and our revival meetings—namely, that of having both the hymns and the music before them at the same time.

“I can go back in my memory, easily, to the time when there was no hymn-book with notes for church use. The ‘Christian Lyre,’ edited by Joshua Leavitt, was largely used in the revivals under Dr. Finney, and ‘Christian Songs,’ by Mr. Hastings (the sweet singer of Israel, whose service to the church was never adequately recognized), were also used in revivals. When these books came they brought a progeny with them; but still there was nothing of the kind for the great congregation. The music-books for choirs were those long, narrow, inconvenient ones which could not well be held in the hand, but must always needs be laid upon a shelf. These were granted to the choir only, and the congregation had to sing from memory or not at all. It seemed to me that it would be a step in the right direction to put the tunes and hymns together, so that everybody who had the one should also have the other.

“With this end in view I asked the trustees of this church to agree to purchase a few copies of the ‘Temple Melodies,’ a small book of hymns, the music for which was to be selected by Mr. Jones and myself, and in which I interested the publishing house of Mason Bros.

“Connected with this was a curious incident. Mason Bros. would not publish the book unless we would pay for the stereotype plates; and the trustees agreed to take a certain number of copies of the book—enough to cover the cost of the plates—so that the publishers should suffer no loss. When the book came to be published there was an acknowledgment of the services of Mr. Jones, but my name was not mentioned. Although I did not care particularly about that, I was curious to know how it should happen that Mr. Jones, conductor of music in my church, was personally mentioned, and I, who had given to the work time and influence, and who had obtained means with which to pay for the plates, was not mentioned at all. Though I was the father of the book, everybody else got a slice of the credit, and I was left without a crumb. I asked Jones how it was, and, blushing up to his ears, he said (if you will pardon the adjective) that the publishers said that they would not have the name of a d—d abolitionist in their book.

“This was the first step in that direction. The success of the undertaking was such as to satisfy me that a larger endeavor of the same sort would be successful also; and I went to work and laid the foundation for the ‘Plymouth Collection.’ It was to be published by Mr. A. S. Barnes, but it was necessary that there should be a guarantee in the form of an advance sufficiently large to pay for the plates, that the publishers might run no risk in issuing the book. Mr. Henry C. Bowen and Mr. James Freeland agreed to furnish the money, with the understanding that when the income, if there was one, from our copyright should equal the amount they had advanced, with interest, all further profits from the copyright should inure to the benefit of the choir of this church.

“The book has been a profitable one on the whole; but I know not how much the choir has ever received from it. There was no written agreement, and the memorandum lapsed. I forgot to make any arrangement for myself. The consequence was that I was left out in the cold, and never got a penny for my services in the matter. I do not care for that. The object for which I was eager and earnest was to procure for the churches a book of hymns and tunes, so that they should have both before them at the same time.

“The book was assailed, but was defended, and it made its way.

“Since that time there have been eight or ten books of the same general character adopted, and they have so exactly copied the ‘Plymouth Collection’ as to size, type, and form that you may take the eight or ten volumes and set them on a shelf, and unless a man stood close to them he could not tell one from the other. So that the ‘Plymouth Collection’ not only has been a good book for this church, but has been a good pattern for other churches to follow. Although it was the first one of its kind, it was so well adapted to the want of the community that it has not been deemed expedient to change in the least degree its form, nor to change, except to a very small extent, its method. It has invariably proved to be a book acceptable and well suited to the purpose for which it was designed. It was made on a theory of my own, or rather it was the result of my observation and experience. I had observed what hymns appealed to the imagination and the affections of the people; and I did not believe that any hymn-book would ever be popular which had not in it hymns the elements of which appealed to these faculties. I had observed, also, what tunes the people loved. I had observed that any music, however irregular or grotesque, that appealed to their imagination and affection, they would adopt and make their own. Guided by that observation, I introduced into the book a great many melodies of a kind that were unknown in the sobriety of the old-fashioned psalmody, but that have been developed more fully and skilfully in subsequent books.

“With that conception of what a hymn-book should be, I was very much shocked in a conversation with Mr. Lowell Mason, whose services to American music cannot be over-estimated, and who has gone to a higher choir, but who in his old age fell upon a theory that I thought to be as vicious as it could possibly be—the theory, namely, that all music should be of one character, and that the tune should be the main thing. He said to me one day: ‘I think a perfect hymn-tune is one to which you ought to be able to sing every psalm in the whole collection.’ I considered that simply monstrous, literalizing and Platonizing everything. His late books lost ground a great deal because they were so insuperably flat. A man might sing them to all eternity and not find in them anything which hooked on to his memory or affections, or anything that had a tendency to develop his higher nature.

“About twenty years ago Mr. Love, of Chicago—who has conferred great benefit upon churches and schools by his compositions—and I were riding together from Brooklyn to Boston, and we discussed this question of music. He was under the influence of Mr. Mason, and partook of his views on the subject, and I blew him up soundly and told him how preposterous I thought they were. He went home pondering what I said, and subsequently, as I afterward heard, cut out from a newspaper the verses beginning ‘My days are gliding swiftly by,’ and with that conversation in his mind he sat down and wrote the ‘Shining Shore’ to go with them. Whether this tune has justified my idea or not, it has been employed in this congregation for many years. Moreover, it was taken by the Brooklyn Fourteenth Regiment to the war, it was performed by their band, and whenever they gave anything like a serenade in the army the ‘Shining Shore’ was called for. Since that time this tune has been played and sung all over the continent. How great a favorite it has been here you know.”

This collection was vehemently attacked by one of the religious papers of the day in the lead, several others following, and was vigorously defended by Mr. Beecher in a series of articles in the Independent over his well-known signature, the *. So simple a matter as bringing out a hymn-book for the use of his own church, and only for others so far as they chose, would hardly seem likely to call out so strong a protest, but it shows the position that he had already come to occupy in the public mind. With his advanced views and strong following, everything that he did demanded examination, must be sifted and probably marked dangerous. In the vigorous defence of this child of his heart he discourses at length upon hymns. We have room for only two or three extracts:

“Hymns are the exponents of the inmost piety of the Church. They are crystalline tears, or blossoms of joy, or holy prayers, or incarnated raptures. They are the jewels which the Church has worn; the pearls, the diamonds, and precious stones formed into amulets more potent against sorrow and sadness than the most famous charms of wizard or magician. And he who knows the way that hymns flowed knows where the blood of piety ran, and can trace its veins and arteries to the very heart.

“Oftentimes when, in the mountain country, far from noise and interruption, we wrought upon these hymns for our vacation tasks, we almost forgot the living world, and were lifted up by noble lyrics as upon mighty wings, and went back to the days when Christ sang with His disciples, when the disciples sang too, as in our churches they have almost ceased to do. Oh! but for one moment, even, to have sat transfixed and to have listened to the hymn that Christ sang and to the singing! But the olive-trees did not hear His murmured notes more clearly than, rapt in imagination, we have heard them!

“There, too, are the hymns of St. Ambrose and many others, that rose up like birds in the early centuries, and have come flying and singing all the way down to us. Their wing is untired yet, nor is the voice less sweet now than it was a thousand years ago.

“There are Crusaders’ hymns, that rolled forth their truths upon the Oriental air, while a thousand horses’ hoofs kept time below and ten thousand palm-leaves whispered and kept time above! Other hymns, fulfilling the promise of God that His saints should mount up with wings as eagles, have borne up the sorrows, the desires, and the aspirations of the poor, the oppressed, and the persecuted, of Huguenots, of Covenanters, and of Puritans, and winged them to the bosom of God.

“In our own time, and in the familiar experiences of daily life how are hymns mossed over and vine-clad with domestic associations!

“One hymn hath opened the morning in ten thousand families, and dear children with sweet voices have charmed the evening in a thousand places with the utterance of another. Nor do I know of any steps now left on earth by which one may so soon rise above trouble or weariness as the verses of a hymn and the notes of a tune. And if the angels that Jacob saw sang when they appeared, then I know that the ladder which he beheld was but the scale of divine music let down from heaven to earth.”

We must find room for his answer to the charge of having left out from Watts “fifteen splendid hymns,” whose first lines are mentioned. After accounting for five of them by showing that they were left out because others of Watts’s versions of the same Psalms, and better ones, have been selected, he goes on to say: “Next in the list the ——— charges that we have omitted Watts’s hymn, ‘Glory to Thee, my God, this night.’ This evening hymn, dear to thousands of hearts, was probably written before Watts was born, certainly before he had written his psalms and hymns, by Bishop Ken, who was thirty-seven years old when Watts was born, and who died when Watts was but thirty-six years old. There is not, perhaps, another hymn in the language which it would require such ignorance to ascribe to Dr. Watts. To make the blunder full-orbed, it turns out that the hymn is not omitted, after all, from ‘Plymouth Collection,’ but may be found at page 416, hymn 1287.

“The next omission from Watts charged by the ——— is the hymn ‘While my Redeemer’s near.’ We left that hymn out from Watts because Dr. Watts left it out himself, not thinking it honest, we suppose, to insert a hymn before it was written, or to appropriate another author’s labors as his own. For this hymn was written by Mrs. Steele, I know not how many years after Watts’s death. How dearly this critic must have loved Watts!

“We are next charged with excluding from ‘Plymouth Collection’ the hymn of Watts, ‘God is our Refuge and Defence.’ Alas! this hymn is by Montgomery, and not by Watts at all.

“How precious Watts’s hymns must be to a man who cannot tell a Steele or a Montgomery from a Watts! With what grief must one be afflicted at the injury done to Watts by not ascribing to him Bishop Ken’s hymns? Why did not the ——— go on and mention the even more glaring omissions from Watts in the ‘Plymouth Collection,’ such as ‘Ye Mariners of England, ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes,’ ‘To be or not to be’—all of which are left out of Watts and the ‘Plymouth Collection,’ and which should have attracted the learned attention of the critic of the ———.

“It is rumored that the Psalm-Book of the New School Assembly is to be revised. If so, the interests of the Church require that the editor of the ——— should be put on the committee. His accuracy, his carefulness, his profound knowledge of hymns, and especially his intelligent admiration of Dr. Watts, cannot be spared in such a labor.”

In this discussion his adversaries found out, what to this day, we think, is not well understood, that his action, however impulsive it might appear, really sprang from very clearly defined principles, which could be justified whenever, wherever, and by whom attacked, and that, however careless he seemed, he had a habit of making himself thoroughly acquainted with the matter in hand, and was prepared to meet any antagonist. Mr. Beecher had great boldness and perfect confidence in his conclusions, and was willing to stand alone upon them, because he had thought them out and settled the matter once for all.

From the kindly manner in which he had often spoken of the Episcopal Church, his mother’s communion, and in his account of the effect which the service had upon him at Stratford-on-Avon, it might seem that he would attempt to bring some form of it into use in Plymouth Church; but no movement in that direction was ever made, and he appears to have been well satisfied with the possibilities that lay in the simple forms of his own order. He has several articles at different times upon a proposed “Congregational Liturgy,” but advocates no change of method, only an improvement of spirit. “Our services are barren, not from any want of common forms of devotion, but from the want of common sympathy. A church has a right to the gifts of every one of its members, and the minister is set to disclose and develop them. He is not to lean upon the strong, or avail himself alone of the services of those already developed. It is his office to take hold of every individual man, and to educate him, so that he may bring forth the one, or five, or ten talents which are committed to him for the use and profit of all his brothers. A man of books, a man of ideas, a man of sermons, is not Christ’s idea of a minister. ‘Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.’ A minister is a man of men. He is an inspirer and driller of men.... But a dead church with a liturgy on top is like a sand desert covered with artificial bouquets. It is bright for the moment. But it is fictitious and fruitless. There are no roots to the flowers. There is no soil for the roots. The utmost that a liturgy can do upon the chilly bosom of an undeveloped, untrained church is to cover its nakedness with a faint shadow of what they fain would have but cannot get....

“As to ‘surpliced boys,’ we have them already. The whole congregation is a choir, and our boys, bright and happy, unite and respond with the elders; so the surplice which they wear is just that thing which the dear mother threw over them when they left her.

“If we were disposed to use any liturgy, we know of no one which we should sooner employ than that which expressed the earliest religious feelings of our own mother, now in heaven. The mere fact that she had used and loved it would for ever make it sacred to us. We never hear it pronounced by a sincere and earnest man without deriving profit from it ourselves; and we have no doubt that others are benefited by its use. We do not, however, believe that its continual use as the only vehicle of expression of the religious feeling of the congregation would be as profitable, on the whole, as an extemporaneous worship. If we did we should use a liturgy. While, then, we decline to use it in public, because we think it, on the whole, less edifying than the usage of Congregational churches, we do it without wishing to detract from its intrinsic excellence, and without wounding the feelings of those who delight to use it.”

At this time he takes pains to contradict the report that he had spoken slightingly of the Episcopalian forms in saying that “he would as soon go a-courting with his father’s old love-letters as to go to church and carry a book to pray out of”:

“So far from its being true that the remark in this story was applied to the Episcopal or any other liturgy, it was applied to what are called extemporaneous prayers in Congregational and Presbyterian prayer-meetings. We were reprehending the practice of praying without sincerity or real religious feeling. We said that when men began to lead in public prayer they should be simple, truthful, and strictly individual, expressing their own wants or feelings with child-like truthfulness. We commented upon the undeniable fact that men too often borrowed their prayers, copying the elder or deacon or minister, not to express real feelings, but as forms. Thus extemporaneous prayers became hereditary. And it was in reference to these unwritten forms of prayer, in our own Congregational churches, that the remark imputed to us was made. It was not a fling at the Episcopal service. We never indulge in such remarks at the expense of other denominations, and never intend to do it. We regard the whole practice of railing at other sects or their religious usages, from the pulpit, as not only unchristian but discourteous and ungentlemanly.”

The year 1857 was one of great commercial trouble through the country. Many of his people were involved and became bankrupt. This gave him much uneasiness from his sympathy with them, and to some extent affected his health, which he alludes to in a letter to his brother later in the year:

“I do not think it safe for me to undertake so much work this winter. My head is already suffering from overwork and anxiety induced by commercial troubles among my people. God will in the end make it a greater blessing than their prosperity.”

A family affliction which he felt very keenly, both in his personal affection and in sympathy with those who were bereaved, added to his burden. In a letter to the Independent, July 16, 1857, he says:

“The writer has been called by the stroke of violence to part with three nephews within two weeks—two of them of one age—dying, one in New Hampshire, and the others in Ohio.

“Two sons of Dr. Talbot Bullard, of Indianapolis, Ind.—Henry, aged thirteen, and Frank, aged eighteen—were thrown with the cars over an embankment, and died the same day.

“Nobler, truer, more gentle, and more amiable natures never were. Just a moment before the accident one of them said to a gentleman by their side: ‘In a few moments we shall be at home.’ They were indeed nearer home than they thought.

“Henry E. B. Stowe was the eldest son of his father’s family. On the 9th of July, while bathing in the Connecticut River, he was drowned. But we sorrow not as those without hope: his race was quickly run.”

We are not surprised, therefore, that we detect in most of the letters of this year a tinge of sadness accompanied with increased spiritual tenderness, as if he were finding the sources of consolation for himself, that he might lead others to them.

Lenox was found to be so far from Brooklyn that it was given up as a summer home, and this year, 1857, he spends his vacation at Matteawan, on the Hudson. His first letter gives us this bit of characteristic description:

“We are living in a pleasant old house, around which fruit-trees have grown in which birds have bred and lived unmolested from year to year. It is but a dozen wing-beats from the trees to the mountain woods. Nothing can please a meditative bird better than to have domestic scenes on one side and the seclusion of the wilderness on the other. A bird loves a kind of shy familiarity. Here we have a garden, a door-yard, an orchard, and a barn grouped together; and they on the other side have the young forests of scooped mountain-side. So the birds come down here for fun and go up there for reflection. This is their world; that is their cathedral.”

“In the Mountain and the Closet” he is speaking out of his own experience:

“The influences which brood upon the soul in such a covert as the closet are not like the coarse stimulants of earthly thought. The soul rises to its highest nature and meets the influences that rest upon it from above. What are its depths of calmness, what is the vision of faith, what is the rapture, the ecstasy of love, the closet knows more grandly than all other places of human experience.”

It is not all sadness even in this year of the minor key. In August we have a long article upon “Hours of Exaltation,” in which he gives us some of those higher experiences which were common to him:

“... We are filled with the very affluence of peacefulness and joy. There is neither sorrow, nor want, nor madness, nor trouble in the wide world. The glory of the Lord, that at other times hangs upon the horizon like embattled clouds full gorgeous with the sun, on such days as we have described descends and fills the whole earth. The impassioned language of the psalmists and prophets, which on other days is lifted up so high above our imaginations that we can scarcely hear it, now comes down and sounds all its grandeur in our ears. The mountains do praise the Lord; the trees clap their hands. The clouds are His chariot and bear Him through the air, leaving brightness and joy along their path. The birds know their King. The flowers lift up their hands, and with the silent tongue of perfume praise God with choice odors. The whole earth doth praise Thee.”

In September of this year he visits Litchfield with his father—the latter for the first time since he had moved to Boston—and writes a letter upon “An Aged Pastor’s Return”:

“A man past eighty going through the streets, to visit all the fathers and mothers in Israel that had been young in his ministry there, was a scene not a little memorable. One patriarch in his ninety-ninth year, when his former pastor came into the room, spoke not a word, but rose up and, putting his trembling arms around his neck, burst into tears....”

“The particular errand that brought us hither was a lecture. A new organ was to be bought. All Litchfield boys were permitted to help. Our contribution was asked in the shape of a lecture. My part was soon done. Then the aged pastor came forward. A crowd of old and young gathered at the pulpit-stairs to greet the hand that had baptized them or had broken to them the bread of life. It was a scene of few words. One woman gave her name, but was not recognized in her married name. She then mentioned her maiden name. That touched a hidden spring. Both burst into tears, but spoke no words. The history came up instantly before both, but silently, which had occasioned the preaching of those sermons upon intemperance whose influence for good will never cease.”

And now he points to one of the dangers which he has learned to avoid, and opens to us some of the lessons which he has himself learned from the experiences of this year:

“Many troubles in life cease when we cease to nurse them.

“Many troubles are but the strain which we endure when God would carry us the right way and we insist upon going the wrong. Troubles come to us like mire and filth, but when well mingled they change to flower and fruit.

“It should be borne in mind and thought of with thankfulness that although a heavy pecuniary pressure has been resting on the community, nothing perishes. No ships will rot, as under embargo; stores will not go down; not a wheel will rust, but only rest; the railroads, whose creation has cost us so much, are created, and will not go back but thunder on. Not an acre will go again to the forest; not a seed will rot.

“We shall hold the substantial elements gained, losing no art, no science, no ideas, no habits, no skill, no industry, nothing but a little temporary comfort; and for that we shall receive back steadiness, safety, reality, and consolation worth a thousand-fold.”

That there had been no diminution of the prosperity of the church appears from an announcement in one of the New York papers of the annual pew-renting, which took place January 7 of the following year:

“The membership of Plymouth Church was never so large as at present, and the size of the congregation is undiminished. The building admits of an audience of about three thousand persons, and it is not an uncommon occurrence on a pleasant Sunday evening for fully as great a number as this to go away from the church-doors, unable to get even standing-room within the walls.”

If the year 1857 was one of sadness, that of 1858 was one of rejoicing. The sowing with tears was followed by the reaping with joy. Never in the history of our country were revivals of religion so frequent, so deep and wide-spread, as in the year that followed the great financial disasters of 1857. The shattering of men’s hopes of wealth, the disturbance and destruction of their confidence in material things, was followed by a very general turning to those things that endure. From a little book entitled “The Revival in Plymouth Church,” published anonymously, from the testimony of those who were active at that time, and from letters and sermons besides, we get a very clear idea of the part which Mr. Beecher took in this great work and the methods he pursued. Near the close of the year preceding he had received a letter from a young man in New York, who described himself as slowly but surely sinking beneath the temptations which he could not escape, and who implored help from the destruction that hung over him. He said, “Preach to me the terrors of the law, anything to arouse me from this fearful lethargy.” Mr. Beecher read the appeal to his audience, and answered it by preaching on the love of God in Jesus Christ as the only remedy for man’s sin and the only power for his salvation, and said: “If this remedy fails I know of no other. If love will not save you, fear will be of no avail.” He then led the congregation in a most earnest and tender prayer for that young man and for the great multitude which he represented.

It was by such means as this, enlisting the feeling of his audience in specific cases, awakening and directing the sympathies of the church, that the work began. He disclaimed any confidence in a revival, born of mere excitement, carefully explained God’s methods in saving men, and threw the whole responsibility for success upon Christians. If their hearts were filled with the love of God the influence would be felt with power by those around them.

On the last Sabbath in February he preached upon the reasonableness, usefulness, and Scriptural nature of revivals, combated objections against them, and finally brought it home to the conscience of his people: “Ought you not to have a revival?”

On the next Sabbath, at the communion season, he preached upon the words, “For so an entrance shall be ministered unto you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ,” holding up before his people with great clearness and tenderness the privileges and the infinite rewards of patient, Christian following and labor. The father, who assisted at the service which followed, expressed the feeling of many hearts when, in his prayer, he said: “Lord, we thank Thee for the opening out of Thy word this morning; we have been brought very near heaven; we see not how we can be any nearer till we stand within the very gates.”

On the Wednesday evening following, at the usual weekly lecture, he spoke to a crowded audience upon the conversion of the Philippian jailer. It was a service of confession of the lack of faith in the ever-present grace of God, of instruction concerning the spirit and methods of the apostles, and of guidance to any who were seeking light and peace. A prayer-meeting followed, at which any who desired prayers for themselves or others were given opportunity to make their desire known, and the work was begun.

“Morning meetings were opened daily, and were attended by ever-increasing numbers, while so many remained afterward for instruction that the pastor’s work was rarely over before eleven or twelve o’clock. He called in lieutenants of both sexes, who helped him in the work. No one who attended on those occasions can ever forget the fascinating mixture of tenderness, earnestness, pathos, dry humor, quick wit, and sound common sense that ran through all the instruction of those meetings. One would be told to pray; another, whose knees were almost worn out and whose mind was diseased with useless anxiety, was told in the next breath to stop praying and go to sweeping; the many timid and shrinking ones were encouraged into freedom, while one or two, who thought that all the angels were anxiously awaiting the news of their conversion before the business of heaven could proceed, were taken down by a little quiet humor that cured yet did not wound; and all alike were brought into the one fold. Under such influences and instructions three hundred and thirty-five persons united with the church this season.

“The morning prayer-meeting has been in Plymouth Church emphatically a ‘love-feast,’ the attractive influences being love to Christ, to the pastor, and to one another in full and lively exercise. No better description of these meetings can be given than that of a happy and united family gathering together, under the guidance of a beloved and honored father, for morning worship. No wonder that men as they passed along the street, though unused to a prayer-meeting, could not resist the voice of song which fell on their ear daily in the sweet morning hour; and no wonder that, once having entered, they should be fascinated by the scene which met their eye and warmed by the atmosphere of love which they breathed, and should return saying: ‘Surely God is in this place, though we knew it not; this is indeed the house of God, and this is none other than the gate of heaven.’ There was no such feeling as that smiles, or even an honest laugh, were sinful; smiles and tears mingled in curious proximity, without any attempt at restraint; in short, everything was natural.

“At the close of a meeting, when, owing to the quaintness of speech of some of the brethren, especially the newly-awakened ones, in the relation of their varied experiences, we had laughed and cried alternately, the one as heartily as the other, Mr. Beecher said: ‘I call you to witness whether this has not been a good meeting, whether there has not been a tender spirit among us, and whether the influence of the Holy Ghost has not been here? I say this because, as you know, many persons entertain the opinion that laughing is quite inexpedient on such occasions as these and a sure means of grieving away the Spirit. Bear this meeting in mind, and let it be your answer to the charge of irreverence whenever it may be brought against us on this score.’”

He gave one of his own experiences:

“You know that my usual frame of mind is hopefulness. I am apt to look at the bright side of things and take cheerful views of life. On this very account an occasional experience of sadness is an inexpressible luxury to me. Last night, I know not why, but I could not sleep for some hours. I lay restlessly, turning from side to side, till this morning between one and two. No sooner was I asleep than it seemed to me I was in an Episcopal church, robed in black, where a clergyman was celebrating the Lent service. By and by he ascended the pulpit and began to speak. There was no eloquence in his language, nor anything particularly striking in his mode of dealing with his subject, but his heart was evidently in it. He was setting forth in simple language the sufferings of Jesus, and as I listened there seemed to rise up before me a vivid conception of the Saviour in His last agony on Calvary. I gazed till the tears gushed from my eyes, and I awoke to find my pillow soaking wet. I composed myself again to sleep, and my imagination took up the stitch just where I had dropped it, and knitted on. I beheld the same vision, and again the tears flowed. I gazed and wept until it seemed to me as if my very soul would dissolve and the fountain of tears be itself exhausted. Again I awoke, and, again falling asleep, the vision was for the third time repeated, and I seemed to weep my very life away. I know not when I had before such a sweet, rich experience of the love of my Saviour; and when I awoke finally this morning, it was with a tenderness of soul I cannot well describe. I was thankful I did not sleep sooner, and that when I did sleep I made such good use of my time.”

Opportunity was given at these meetings to any who wished to ask the brethren to pray for themselves or for others, and was largely used. A little before the close of the meeting Mr. Beecher would rise, and, taking the slips of paper that covered his table, read from them aloud. After reading these he would ask, “Are there any here who desire to make requests on behalf of their friends?” And then when these had all been made he would say, “Are there any who desire to ask on their own account?” Then having caught the eye of each as they arose, and acknowledged the request by a slight inclination of the head, in token of recognition, until they ceased rising, “in a low, soft tone would come the words, ‘Let us unite in prayer,’ and instantly every head was bowed. The prayers which followed these scenes were the most precious opportunities of communion with the Lord Jesus Christ which we were ever permitted to enjoy. We believe that he who uttered them was taught of the Holy Ghost, and that he spake as the Spirit gave him utterance. There was an exuberance of faith and love in these utterances not usually found in prayer; a gladness on the part of the speaker, and a recognized consciousness of gladness on the part of Christ. They were the breathings of love into a loving ear.” “We always concluded with a hymn, for Mr. Beecher was wont to say that he liked to send us away with a full tide of song, and for a long time our choice for concluding hymns lay between ‘Shining Shore’ and ‘Homeward Bound.’”

March 27, 1858, Mr. Beecher gave a twenty-minute address in Burton’s old theatre in Chambers Street at the noon prayer-meeting. “I wish to leave the impression that the matter of salvation is a matter between your own heart and the Lord Jesus Christ; that there is between you a sympathy so plain that there is no need of any interference. You may become a Christian now, and go home to your household and be enabled to ask a blessing at your table to-day.”

Letters are frequent this year upon subjects like this, “Trust in God”:

“We ought not to forget that an affectionate, confiding, tender faith, habitually exercised, would save us half the annoyances of life, for it would lift us above the reach of them. If an eagle were to fly low along the ground every man might aim a dart at it; but when it soars into the clouds it is above every arrow’s reach. And they that trust in God ‘shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.’”

About this time he answers a criticism that appeared in several papers upon the extravagant income of Plymouth Church:

“It is easy to stand off and rail. Will any one suggest a plan by which five thousand men can be put into a church that can hold only three thousand?

“The poor should be held in lively remembrance. But ought we to provide for the poor in a way that shall punish those who are not poor?...

“In closing we will only say that from the beginning no church ever more conscientiously endeavored to give the Gospel to all classes, rich and poor, resident or strangers. For ten years the members of this society have cheerfully submitted to an inconvenience, for the sake of the poor and of strangers, such as has rarely had a parallel. Gentlemen have paid hundreds of dollars for pews which were, with the exception of a single Sabbath in the year, more or less filled with the poor.

“Every Sabbath day families who have paid hundreds of dollars for a pew, coming to church, find it pre-occupied by the poor and the stranger, and it is a rare exception that in such cases there is any irritation.

“Generally the owner, distributing his family as best he can, takes a seat in the aisle or stands in the entry. And this is not an occasional thing. It is the regular experience of the congregation, year after year.”

The year 1859 opens with some very characteristic letters from Mr. Beecher. He had been charged with having held the doctrine of total depravity up to ridicule in a lecture which he delivered in Boston. This brings from him a letter, two or three passages of which we here transcribe:

“But although we did not employ the phrase total depravity in any opprobrious sense at the time mentioned, we do not hesitate to say that we regard it as one of the most unfortunate and misleading terms that ever afflicted theology....

“On the other hand, we do believe, with continual sorrow of heart and daily overflowing evidence, in the deep sinfulness of universal man.... We heartily hate the phrase total depravity, and never feel inclined to use it except when reading the ethics of ——— or the religious editorials of ———.”

He was shortly after this attacked for lecturing in a “Fraternity Course” in the same city. This calls out a long answer upon “Working with Errorists,” in which he says:

“I have long ago been convinced that it was better to love men than to hate them, that one would be more likely to convince them of wrong belief by showing a cordial sympathy with their welfare than by nipping and pinching them with logic. And although I do not disdain but honor philosophy applied to religion, I think that the world just now needs the Christian heart more than anything else. And even if the only and greatest question were the propagation of the right theology, I am confident that right speculative views will grow up faster and firmer in the summer of true Christian loving than in the rigorous winter of solid, congealed orthodoxy or the blustering March of controversy....

“If tears could wash away from Mr. Parker’s eyes the hindrances, that he might behold Christ as I behold and adore Him, I would shed them without reserve. If prayers could bring to him this vision of glory, beyond sight of philosophy, I would for him besiege the audience-chamber of heaven with an endless procession of prayers, until another voice, sounding forth from another light brighter than the noonday sun, should cast down another blinded man, to be lifted up an apostle with inspired vision.

“But since I may not hope so to prevail, I at least will carry him in my heart; I will cordially work with him when I can, and be heartily sorry when I cannot.

“While we yet write word comes that Mr. Parker, broken down by over-labor, seeks rest and restoration in a warmer climate. Should these lines reach his eyes let him know that one heart at least remembers his fidelity to man in great public exigencies, when so many swerved of whom we had a right to expect better things. God shield him from the ocean, the storm, the pestilence, and heal him of lurking disease! And there shall be one Christian who will daily speak his name to the heart of God in earnest prayer, that with health of body he may receive upon his soul the greatest gift of God—faith in Jesus Christ as the Divine Saviour of the world.”

Another incident calls forth a similar response:

“At the recent celebration of Tom Paine’s birthday at Cincinnati the infidels present toasted: ‘The heretic clergy, Parker, Emerson, Conway, Chapin, Beecher, and all who love man above all creeds, and sects, and rituals, and observances, who regard man as the highest and holiest and most sacred of all in the universe—may their motto be: Ever onward, greater freedom, and clearer light.’” Having disclaimed any distinction as one who loves man more than creeds, since this is “true of all Christians when they are in their most Christian disposition,” and having accepted their motto as being in line with sundry passages of Scripture, he gives his true and honest feeling towards them in these words:

“Let no man think that we despise the sympathy and well-wishing of a convention of infidels. We thank them for their kind feelings. Like our Master, we had rather discourse with publicans and sinners than dine with the most select and eminent Pharisee. But we love a true Christian better than either. But, infidel or Pharisee, all need the grace of God, and all, by repentance of sin and faith in Christ, the Saviour of sinners, may yet meet in heaven.

“Gentlemen of the Cincinnati convention of infidels! we should be ashamed to be less kind and courteous than you have been, and in concluding we take leave of you kindly, saying, in the words of Inspired Writ:

“‘Now may the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you perfect in every good work to do His will, working in you that which is well pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ. To whom be glory for ever and ever.’ *”

The setting up of a new organ in Plymouth Church this winter is thus duly announced:

“The organ long expected has arrived, been unpacked, set up, and glorified over. It has piped, fluted, trumpeted, brayed, thundered. It has played so loud that everybody was deafened, and so softly that nobody could hear.”

After speaking of the characteristics of the many organists who have tried it, and of one who was an especially brilliant player, he says: “But he was not a Christian man, and the organ was not to him a Christian instrument, but simply a grand Gothic instrument, to be studied just as a mere Protestant would study a cathedral, in the mere spirit of architecture and not at all in sympathy with its religious signification or uses. And before long he went abroad to perfect himself in his musical studies, but not till a most ludicrous event befell him. On a Christmas day a great performance was to be given. The church was full; all were musically expectant. It had been given out that something might be expected. And surely something was had a little more than was expected. For when every stop was drawn, that the opening might be with a grand choral effect, the down-pressing of his hands brought forth not only the full expected chord, but also a cat that by some strange chance had got into the organ. She went up over the top as if gunpowder had helped her. Down she plunged into the choir, to the track around the front bulwark of the gallery, until opposite the pulpit, when she dashed down one of the supporting columns, made for the broad aisle, when a little dog joined in the affray, and both went down toward the street-door at an astonishing pace. Our organist, who, on the first appearance of this element in his piece, snatched back his hands, had forgotten to relax his muscles, and was to be seen following the cat with his eyes, with his head turned, while his astonished hands stood straight out before him, rigid as marble!”

In the spring of this year he purchased a farm in Peekskill, and explains his object as follows:

“I knew that the place was good for grass, for grain, and for fruits, of all which I talked a good deal during the preliminary approaches to a purchase, but for which I cared about as much as I should whether the inside of my boots were red or yellow.

“If the thing must be told—and I mention it to you, Mr. Bonner, confidentially—it was the remarkable aptitude of the place for eye-crops that caught my fancy. It was not so much what grew upon the place, as what you could see off from it, that won me. It is a great stand for the eye. If a man can get rich by looking, I am on the royal road to wealth. And, indeed, it is true wealth that the eye gets, and the ear and all the finer senses; riches that cannot be hoarded or squandered; that all may have in common; that come without meanness and abide without corrupting. So long as it remains true that the heavens declare the glory of God, and the earth His handiwork, so long will men find both heart wealth and strength by a reverent admiration of the one and a sympathetic familiarity with the other.”

In a letter to his daughter he describes the new home:

“... Farm—I wrote so far at home, but being interrupted have brought it up to the green hills. You will be quite ashamed to think that Matteawan ever seemed beautiful to you when you shall have seen this place. It has no wild or romantic features, but it is full of soft, nice, beautiful views. No barren fields are seen, no brown pasture-lands, no rugged hills—the very mountains in the horizon are carved into round and graceful shapes. The near hills are round, gentle, smooth, and verduous to the very top. Only one summit is rugged and wild, and we keep that in the distant foreground as a contrast to all the other graceful shapes. The river in the distance is like a lake, except the fleets of sloops and schooners give it a sense of navigation. From the top hill of the farm you can see almost as wide a prospect as from Bald Mountain in Salisbury—on the north and east, wild, mountainous, solitary; but all the rest beautiful and cultivated, with the Hudson rolling along the west. I have traced a rude diagram[6] on the opposite page, but it will be only just better than nothing, though you must confess that it is exceedingly well drawn for me!

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Footnote 6:

The Publishers regret that the diagram could not be given.

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”... I heard from H——— yesterday. He is well and lively, and wrote me quite a sprightly and witty letter. W——— is round, rosy, curly, and loving as usual. B———, the rogue, is fairly recovering from a double charge of scarlet-fever and whooping-cough, and is becoming most healthfully saucy.“

Early in the autumn they returned from the country and began life again in the city. We give copies of several letters written to his daughter:

”BROOKLYN, Sept. 4, 1859.

“... In the beginning let me say, my dear child, that I heartily approve of all that you have done. I am not a superstitious observer of the Sabbath, nor do I hold to the rigor either of the Jewish or the Puritan Sabbath. But I do believe that one-seventh part of our time was originally appointed for rest, for home-society, and for religious culture....

“When I was myself in Paris I acted just as I do in Brooklyn. I took no more liberties, and was quite as observant of my home proprieties. And I must say that I do not relish the idea of our young countrymen going to Europe to learn how to get rid of religious habits. Foreign travel should improve our manners, increase our information, enlarge our experience of men, enrich our imagination, cultivate our tastes, but not enervate our conscience....

“Everything is going well at the farm. I have bought a yoke of cattle, white with mottled necks and red heads; also two Ayrshire calves, and a little bull calf of the same breed. Your mother is driving away at her cheeses in the most housewifely style. She has already made, eaten, and given away two or three, and she has four or five on hand, good large ones, which are to grow old for city use. Already I imagine myself a nimble little maggot making the cheese fly. The pet ponies do bravely, the pigs are fat and flourishing, the chickens comely, and the ducks noisy but drawing very near to doom and dinner.

“I would not advise you to use wine unless you are weak and it is recommended by judicious advisers for real reasons of health; and then I should take it frankly and without hesitation. But while you do not use it, you are not bound to take it on any occasion for others’ sake. If the occasion comes, call for a glass of water and calmly lift that to your lips. But more of this by and by. I have no objection to your learning to dance as a part of physical education.”

The home life in Brooklyn ran undisturbed through the autumn, until, early in 1860, a serious accident befell Mrs. Beecher, which Mr. Beecher describes in the following letter:

“FEBRUARY 11, 1860.

”MY DEAR CHILD H———:

“I suppose you will not scold me if I relieve your mother of letter-writing this steamer; it is, I think, the first time she has missed. But she is too lame to write to-day, having had an accident that ought to have killed her, and that would have killed anybody else. And that your fears may not magnify the matter, I shall go back and describe it all to you.

“On Wednesday last, February 8, she took the horse and chaise (a two-wheeled chaise, which we have bought of Mr. M———), and started to go to New York and meet and bring me home from the New Haven depot. Eliza and Bertie were taken in, the former to go over to the Hudson River Railroad for milk, and Bertie for the ride. The horse was spirited and soon got under way beyond control, but did not run till, turning into Hicks Street from Orange, she dashed off like lightning, ran to Fulton Street and right across it, up on to the pavement and headlong on to the Brooklyn Bank steps. The carriage was broken and turned over, and all, of course, heaped up together—horse, chaise, and people. Men sprang to the horse, held and detached her; others succored the party. Bertie had a smart thump on his right eye, or above it, which has done him no harm, and he has not been kept in from his play, though made a little homelier than he was before. Eliza was thrown against the stone and a smart slit cut in her head, which bled profusely, and though she has kept her bed by the doctor’s orders, she expects to be about to-day. Your mother, as usual, took everybody’s share on herself. She was shot out apparently head-first, and fell upon the right side of her head, neck, and shoulder, bruising her, but breaking nothing. She was insensible when taken into the drug-store close by. I know not how H——— was notified so soon, but he seems to have been on the spot within five minutes, and manifested as much self-possession and decisive wisdom as would have done credit to a much older head. He gave orders to have his mother taken home, sent for Dr. Adams to come to the drug-store, sent another messenger to the stableman to look after the carriage and horse (who, confound her homely self! was but little hurt), and then took a hack to meet me at the New Haven depot and bring me home.

“I reached the house very nearly as soon as your mother did. Found Mrs. E——— B———, Mrs. L———, Mrs. B———, Mrs. E———, and one or two strange ladies present, the doctor, a policeman or two, and scores of people running to and fro; yet, in the main, there was order and good sense.

”... The doctors regard her as out of danger, but she will be a sufferer for a week or more. Everything is going on regularly in the house, except that I am at home all the time, which is very irregular in my habits.

“... And so when you read this you must remember that though it seems to you as if it had just happened, it will have been all past, and your mother doubtless, while you read, will be marching forth in full authority. Everybody who saw the scene speaks in admiration of her courage and skill. She guided the horse to the last, though she could not control her, and was game to the end. But that we should all expect. Nor does her courage flinch yet. Some one said to her yesterday: ‘Well, I suppose you will never drive that horse again.’ ‘Yes, I shall too,’ said she; and she shall. We are very grateful for her safety and merciful deliverance, and although she will suffer from twinges, yet, as there are no internal injuries, no bones fractured, it is only a matter of patience.... Slept very well and has the beginning of an appetite, although I am constrained to say that when I mentioned the little luxury of gruel as something appetizing and excellent for her, she turned up her nose (I could not be mistaken) at the suggestion, so that she is evidently not quite settled yet in her mind. She can walk slowly, takes her bath, submits to packs, and has refreshed herself once or twice with a hand-glass, looking at the recent improvements about her countenance.

”... Love to all. I shall keep you faithfully apprised of her health, and you need not fear that anything is a bit worse than I say. I shall tell the truth. Good-by.

“May God have you in His care!

“Your affectionate father, H. W. BEECHER.”

“FEBRUARY 14.

”MY DEAR H———:

“Your aunt has told you of your mother, and little is to be added on that score.... I wish you would take all your gauze paper and send it to Cardinal Antonelli, or the pope, or the—that is, burn it up, tear it up, crumple it, throw it away, do anything with it except sending it to me. Go forth and search and buy some that is respectable, for I wow a wow that I will vex my eyes no more with such intolerable stuff. I feel as though I could say a little more with great comfort to myself, but, as I must receive several letters before this reaches you and reforms your writing materials, I reserve a stock of wrath for those several occasions.

”Wednesday, Feb. 15.—Your mother this morning is generally better, though suffering from cramps. She is now lying in a pack. Mrs. F——— has been as good as an angel, and a great deal more useful. Indeed, I do not think much of angels, unless they have a good serviceable body on. Of course Auntie B——— is on hand kindly and constantly. Everybody is kind. Mrs. G——— has spent four days here, two in the parlors to receive company, etc., and two with your mother. Mrs. L——— has been incessantly here, and has both watched, waited, and run for watchers and nurses without tire or fatigue. We had a meeting on Monday night for new church. The action of the trustees was confirmed, and they were requested to go ahead immediately and raise the necessary funds, and as soon as $100,000 were secured to proceed to lay the foundations. I do not regard the enterprise as quite sure yet, though looking favorably. Give my love to the pope. I am sorry for his situation. If he only sat under my preaching how much his eyes might be opened! As it is, if he chooses to write to me in regard to any of his little difficulties, I hope he will allow no delicacy to restrain him. I will do the best I can for him. Ditto Antonelli.

“I am now the holder of your room. There nap I, and there sleep I, and seldom either without a faint shadow of a rosy-cheeked, Minerva-eyed girl that whilom tenanted it. I have removed the boys, W——— and B———, into the room next it, formerly H———’s, while he holds the front large room, now pink-papered and famously carpeted and furnished. Eliza is quite well and trots about the house with a diligence that shows how wholesome it is for an Irishwoman to have her head broke. I have promised her, whenever she is sick, to give her a granite-steps course, instead of water, as being much better adapted to her wants and nationality. Give my love to all the great American family.... Remember that paper, THAT PAPER, THAT PAPER!

“Your loving and longing father, “H. W. B.”

“Good-by, old fellow. Give my love to Hattie, and tell her that her father hasn’t forgotten her,” were the first words of Mr. Beecher to me that I remember. I had been introduced to him the evening before, but he had just returned from a lecturing tour, tired and sleepy, and if he said anything brilliant it has entirely escaped my memory. I was going, in company with Mrs. Stowe’s son, to take a pedestrian tour in Europe. We expected, in time, to join her party, who were then on the Continent, and were busy getting ready to go on board ship that day. It was a hearty send off to one who was comparatively a stranger, that was very characteristic of the man.

Of course I remembered the message and gave it faithfully; and after several months’ acquaintance, travelling in Switzerland and Italy, made an addition of the same in kind on my own account, which being accepted and reciprocated, we were married September 25, 1861.

“The innumerable friends of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher would hardly forgive us if we were to omit mentioning the pleasing incident that occurred at his country residence at Peekskill last week. On Wednesday morning, after the dew was dry, Mr. Beecher chose a spot under the shadows of the trees near his garden, where, in the presence of a fit circle of friends and neighbors, he gave away his only daughter in a novel ceremony of marriage. The beauty of the day and the beauty of the ceremony together rendered the scene singularly charming, tender, and impressive.”

Of his method of making himself acquainted with the peculiar features of the villages in which he lectured, and his pleasant words concerning the people he met, the following letter is a good illustration:

“MY DEAR DOCTOR:

“I sent you a scrap from the goodly town of Norwich, N. Y., in which I have most pleasantly spent a portion of three days, and would fain have added as many more. It is one of the many towns in this Chenango Valley of which Dr. Dwight said that the time would come when men of wealth would leave the seaboard cities and retire to it as a place of rare repose.

“The great hammer manufactory of the New World is also located here. What hardware man has not seen David Maydole’s name? Many of the best improvements in the hammer have sprung from his ingenious skill. But there is room for improvement still. Thus our hammers have the power of hiding themselves.

“After investigating many cases it becomes plain that hammers have a power of locomotion, and that when we are asleep they crawl off. We have never seen them actually move, but we have almost. We have found them on the ground or floor, and they were probably on their way somewhere when we surprised them, and then, like many insects, they feigned dead.... We should be glad to listen every night to as sweet music as that which rose up before our window in Hamilton and in Norwich.”

As a complement to the above an experience in not lecturing is here given in full:

“ST. LOUIS, ———, 1859.

”REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER, Brooklyn:

“DEAR SIR: On behalf of the Mercantile Library Association of this city, it is my pleasant duty to address you. We are now endeavoring to form the lecture programme for our association for the coming season, and we wish to do so as early as possible. Fully appreciating your well-known reputation as a lecturer and an orator, we should be pleased to make an engagement with you for two or three lectures the coming fall and winter. If you can serve us, will you be so kind as to give us your terms, time, and subject as soon as possible?

“As our Association may not be well known to you, permit me to say one word in regard to it. We think that there is no library association in this country that is in a more prosperous condition than ours. It has some eighteen hundred members, and is rapidly increasing. Its members are merchants, clerks, and members from the several professions. As a matter of course these members come from all parts of our country, and naturally entertain a variety of views, both as to politics and religion. Hence it becomes our Association to be very careful to eschew all matters pertaining to either of these subjects in its lectures. Should you be so kind as to favor us with a course of lectures—and we sincerely hope you will do so—you will please bear the above facts in mind. Hoping to hear from you at your earliest convenience, I remain, Yours truly,

“R. H. D———, ”Chairman Lecture Committee, M. L. A.“

They heard from him at once as requested, and this was the answer:

MR. BEECHER’S REPLY.

”BROOKLYN, ———, 1859.

“DEAR SIR: I have received your letter politely inviting me to give one or more lectures before the St. Louis Mercantile Library Association next fall or winter. But you ask, in consequence of the diversity of opinions among your members, that I should, if I accepted your invitation, ‘eschew all matters pertaining to politics and religion.’ I am too much of a patriot to eschew the one, and too good a Christian to neglect the other. Indeed, the only motive that I have for lecturing at all is the hope that I may make better citizens and better Christians of my fellow-men. And it seems to me that a course of lectures from which have been strained out ‘all matters pertaining to politics and religion,’ must afford but a very meagre diet to the young people of St. Louis.

“Nor can I imagine why you should, under the circumstances, have wished me to visit you. If I have ever been of any service to my fellow-men, it has been because I never would eschew any topic which I thought it needful for them to hear. Nor have I ever allowed myself to stand on any platform where I could not follow my own judgment as to what should be said with the most unlimited freedom. And it is too late in my life for me to yield up my sense of self-respect and come under a censorship.

“I hope I have not taken seriously a matter which, perhaps, you meant only as a pleasant jest. For, on reading your letter again, I hardly repress the conviction that you deemed it a pleasant jest to ask me to come all the way to St. Louis to give lectures, under an implied agreement that I should ‘eschew all matters pertaining to politics and religion!’”

When the title of Doctor of Divinity was offered him he declined it, as follows:

“PEEKSKILL, August 21, 1860.

”To President and Board of Trustees of Amherst College:

“GENTLEMEN: I have been duly notified that at the last meeting of the Board of Trustees the title of D.D. was conferred upon me. It would certainly give me pleasure should any respectable institution bear such a testimony of good will, but that Amherst College, my own mother, should so kindly remember a son is a peculiar gratification. But all the use of such a title ends with the public expression. If the wish to confer it be accepted, for the rest it would be but an encumbrance and furnish an address by no means agreeable to my taste. I greatly prefer the simplicity of that name which my mother uttered over me in the holy hour of infant consecration and baptism.

“May I be permitted, without seeming to undervalue your kindness or disesteeming the honor meant, to return it to your hands, that I may to the end of my life be, as thus far I have been, simply

HENRY WARD BEECHER.”

One of the peculiar features of Mr. Beecher’s work in those days of 1861-63 was the revival interest that continued, with variations of intensity, it is true, but with no substantial interruption, for years. The revival of 1858 had not entirely ceased at that time, and although those days of war, especially since he gave himself so intensely to public matters, would naturally be regarded as unfavorable to any marked religious interest, yet it continued notwithstanding, as is shown by the numbers that constantly sought admission to the church upon profession of faith. This was owing, we doubt not, to the perfect conviction of Mr. Beecher that the whole work of that time was the Lord’s, and to his entering upon it with such consecration that he was continually shielded and refreshed by experiences of the divine presence. This gave a deep practical spirituality to his preaching, which was appropriated and reflected by his church, making the Gospel attractive, in those days of trouble, as never before. Men turned to the refuge which they saw he had found, and which, with deepest sympathy and with abundant hopefulness, he was pointing out to them. He himself says: “It is a mistake to suppose that the preoccupation of the public mind with the war, and the great excitements which are fed by the ever-changing rumors and news, are unfavorable to the work of a true minister of the Gospel.”

The continued ingathering into Plymouth Church during all those years of the war was something almost phenomenal. One marked occasion, the May communion of 1862, was described in a newspaper of that day: “Every part of the house was densely packed. The platform and desk were decorated with vases of flowers, while banks of azaleas, magnolias, carnations, fuchsias, white lilies, roses, and other plants in blossom reached from the pulpit floor to the orchestra. After the usual exercises of singing, reading, and prayer, Mr. Beecher read a list of about eighty names of persons who were to unite with the church. Many of them were members of the Sabbath-schools and Bible-classes. Some were persons of middle age; a few were persons of advanced years. After a brief address Mr. Beecher read the articles of faith, to which the parties gave their assent. The ordinance of baptism was then administered to those who had never before received it; after which the members of the church arose and received the new members into full and cordial communion. Mr. Beecher took his text from John x. 3, 4. There had been provided memorial bouquets for each new communicant, which were distributed at the close of the services.”

These floral decorations may almost be said to have been introduced by Plymouth Church, and were justified by Mr. Beecher upon the highest moral and religious grounds. He says of “Flowers in Church”:

“They are simply the signs of gladness. They are offerings of joyful hearts to God.

“Flowers are not of man. They are divine. Man can, by culture, develop all that God has hidden in them, but can add nothing to them, nor can he invent or build them.

“God has made flowers for everybody. They are next in abundance to the great elements—air, light, water. The poorest man has a roadside flower-garden. No mission-church is so poor that it cannot afford wild flowers upon the altar and a few assorted leaves in the windows. How beautifully would woman’s hand light up the dreary plaster wall and frigid seats of many a church room, if permitted to garnish them with these field-thoughts of God!

“The effect upon children is well worth our thought. To teach a child to love flowers is to give him riches that no bankruptcy can reach. This is the wisdom of finding our pleasures, not in conventional arrangements, but in sympathy with nature, which never is confiscated, or goes out of fashion, or becomes old and exhausted. There is a new heaven and a new earth every day, as if suggesting that grand and final event of prophecy.

“The use of flowers on social and religious occasions soon gives to them meanings which they had not to us before. We read nature more thoughtfully and lovingly.

“Weeds change to flowers. The moment a plant inspires intelligent emotion in us it ceases to be a weed and becomes a flower. The natural world is not any longer godless or commercial and mechanical. It has a moral power.

“At first many will shrink at seeing flowers upon the speaker’s desk or on the pulpit. But why? Is the place too holy? But is it holier than God? And are not flowers His peculiar workmanship? If God deemed it suitable to His dignity and glory to occupy His mind with making and preserving such innumerable flowers, are we wise in disdaining them or considering the place too sacred for God’s favorites? Do men reflect that God has been pleased to name Himself from flowers? ‘I am the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley.’”

In line with this are his views upon “Christian Liberty in the Use of the Beautiful”:

“I cannot but think Christian men have not only a right of enjoyment in the beautiful, but a duty, in some measure, of producing it, or propagating it, or diffusing it abroad through the community.

“But in all your labors for the beautiful, remember that its mission is not of corruption, nor of pride, nor of selfishness, but of benevolence! And as God hath created beauty, not for a few, but hath furnished it for the whole earth, multiplying it until, like drops of water and particles of air, it abounds for every living thing, and in measure far transcending human want, until the world is a running-over cup, so let thine heart understand both the glory of God’s beauty and the generosity of its distribution. So living, life shall be a glory, and death a passing from glory to glory.”

If we have supposed that his love for nature was intuitive or came to its fulness without effort or study, the following letter will correct that impression:

“We are performing not alone a work of love in commending Ruskin, but paying a small part of a debt that can never be discharged. We are more indebted to him for the blessings of sight than to all other men. We were, in respect to nature, of the number of those who, having eyes, saw not; and ears, heard not. He taught us what to see and how to see. Thousands of golden hours and materials both for self-enjoyment and the instruction of others, enough to fill up our whole life, we owe to the spirit excited in us by the reading of Ruskin’s early works.

“The sky, the earth, and the waters are no longer what they were to us.

“We have learned a language and come to a sympathy in them more through the instrumentality of Ruskin’s works than by all other instrumentalities on earth, excepting always the nature which my mother gave me—sainted be her name!”

We have again come to the point, 1863, which we once before reached in this biography, but this time upon entirely different lines. In our first examination, for the sake of unity of impression, we confined ourselves to the events of the great anti-slavery conflict. In this which we have just completed we have sketched the outline of other labors and the events of his home life during this period. No one, we suspect, reading the first record, the record of strife and battle, would conceive it possible that a life so full of all manner of peaceful pursuits and home labors was being lived; nor, on the other hand, would any one going over his work of preaching, lecturing, writing helpful Star articles upon all manner of common subjects, imagine that he had the time or the spirit for the former work. But, in fact, in his case they were each the necessary complement of the other.

We have seen how, at the West in the midst of continued revival efforts, he took up the study of landscape-gardening as an alterative. This was an illustration of his habit through life. In the midst of the most exciting events he would escape and go apart from them all, if possible, to some point where he could look out upon the landscape or up to the clear heavens. Such places at such times seemed to become Mountains of Transfiguration, where he would meet the Master and be refreshed by His presence, and whence returning he would bring back a store of beautiful experiences that enabled him to give cheer and inspiration to his fellow-toilers, who had not, perhaps, noted his absence from their side. Or he would escape to some quiet nook and hold converse with birds and flowers, delight himself in quaint and pleasant fancies, look at life from a new standpoint, until he was able again to take up the burden without weariness; or he would sit down with his boxes of seeds or catalogues of plants, and lose himself in their imagined growth and beauty; or, drawing from his pocket some one of the precious stones he always carried with him, gather rest and inspiration as he watched its changing hues.

In this way he was enabled to carry on the most various and exhaustive labors, and at the same time to preserve that mental health and good cheer for which he was remarkable.

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Chapter XIX

Visit to England in 1863—The Need of Rest—Condition of Affairs at Home—Arrival at Liverpool—Refusal to Speak—Visit to the Continent—Reception by the King of Belgium—Civil War Discussed—News of Victories—Return to England.

The spring of 1863 found Mr. Beecher thoroughly exhausted and greatly in need of both mental and physical rest. The past twelve years had been a season of unremitting care and toil. In addition to the regular duties of his new and growing church, and the active revival work carried on at this period, which were quite enough to task the energies of any one less fortunately endowed with mental and vital energy, he had taken a very active part in the anti-slavery agitation, and from the pulpit, the lecture platform, and the columns of the Independent kept up a constant fire upon this national evil. In 1856, as we have seen, he had thrown himself heart and soul into the Fremont campaign, well-nigh destroying his health. From 1860 he had been laboring, without rest, to uphold the government, to rouse and maintain the patriotic confidence of the North, and through all of this time was a contributor to the New York Independent, and since 1861 its editor-in-chief. Fagged out and despondent from exhaustion, rest was imperative.

His church, with that generous love which has always characterized it, voted him a four months’ leave of absence with expenses paid.

In company with Dr. John Raymond, then the president of Vassar College, a warm personal friend, he set sail early in June for a holiday, making his second trip across the water.

Fortunately we are able to give almost wholly in his own words the history of this trip:

“I left New York in June, 1863, for a tour through Europe during the summer vacation. I was not requested, either by President Lincoln nor by any member of the Cabinet, to act in behalf of this government; it was purely a personal arrangement. The government took no stock in me at that time. Seward was in the ascendency, and, as I had been pounding Lincoln during the early years of the war, I don’t believe there was a man in Washington, excepting perhaps Mr. Chase, who would have trusted me with anything; at any rate, I went on my own responsibility, with no one behind me except my church. They told me they would pay my expenses and sent me off. I went away wholly for the sake of rest and recuperation. I went simply as a private citizen, and I went with a determination not to speak in Great Britain.

“It was perhaps the dreariest period in the whole war. One after another of our generals had been sent to school in the field to learn the art of generalship. The task was too large for most of them, and they took a secondary rank. At that time, up to the date of my departure, we had made a stand and maintained it, but had gained but very little. The most defensible country, perhaps, on earth is our own in its southern portion; and the line that ran two thousand miles of active warfare through our middle had been so fortified, and was defended with such skill and unquestionable bravery, that our forces had not been able to push back the line of rebellion much, and there had been nothing to encourage the hearts of our people beyond their faith—for we lived by faith and not by sight in those days.

“I had not, except in times of sickness, when the whole tone of my nervous system was lowered, had an hour of doubt. I was sure of victory. There were some sick hours in which I remember distinctly thinking, ‘One nation is ground to make soil for another, and it may be that this nation will be ground up in order that another one may grow up on its ruins’; but ordinarily I was full of courage and hope, not unfounded I think now in review; and it stood me in good stead abroad.

“At that time Grant had not emerged. McClellan had, and had retired again. Burnside had briefly shown that he was too modest and not strong enough to take McClellan’s place. Hooker, who had lost his head in the great battle which he fought, was at the head of affairs, and we were on the eve of one more change—a change which has surrounded the name of Meade with lustre. Grant was at the time besieging Vicksburg. Lee had not yet ventured into Pennsylvania, out of which he never ought to have been permitted to go.

“It was at about that stage of things that I left. The political condition of the country, and also its civic and secular condition, will justify a word or two. There was a great party of the Union, made up of men indifferently from all foregoing parties. Old lines were effaced, old questions sank to the bottom, and the one question that united the strangest elements, discordant in every other respect, was the wise determination to maintain intact the union of this whole country. That formed the band and belt that gave unity to the party of war. The great Democratic party was divided into three ranks. The largest part, and the noblest, joined themselves to the party of the Union; and better men never came from any party than those that formed under our banner, bearing briefly and for a time the name of Republicans, but very largely going back again, after the war was over, to the Democratic party. There was a second division of lukewarm Unionists in the Democratic party, that were always hoping the war would be compromised—men of great patriotism, who could not forbear to ask: ‘What will be my position politically when we shall have secured peace again?’ They were for compromise and for easy adjustment.

“Now, war is good for nothing if it is not intense and cruel. It means organized force; and it is nonsense to go into the field with anything else except guns in your hands and swords at your side. The attempt so to fight, as in the earlier periods of our struggle, as not to hurt anybody, is most disastrous, whether in prudence or in civil successes. The South never did make war except to hurt somebody; and in the earlier day the vehemence, the courage, and the convictions which they brought into the field, made them more than a match for our Northern soldiers. Very largely our generals had anticipations of Congress, or the Presidency, or what not, before them; and such political anticipations never whet anybody’s sword.

“There was a third section, and that was the least—those that were directly in league with the Southern and slavery element. Of them it is not necessary that anything should be said. They are wiped out, and that is fulfilled in regard to them which the Scriptures hath spoken: ‘The name of the wicked shall rot.’

“In that divided state Lincoln was under great discouragements, yet maintaining invincible his purpose, without compromise, to destroy all oppositions to this Union. Meanwhile we were maintaining a blockade of about three thousand miles—an unexampled blockade. We had to extemporize a navy, as we shall again if we have any war. We are always wise afterward. For the sake of economy we are the most wasteful of all nations, without foresight in such matters; too confiding. There is not a ship in the American navy to-day that could not be blown out of the water in a ten minutes’ conflict with the best-armored ships of Europe; and Congress, that has no end of money for votes, through pensions and various other channels of distributing, cannot be persuaded to do anything for stability and inexorable defence against foreign invasion and warfare.

“We had at that time converted almost every sea-going craft into a man-of-war; and this extended blockade was in the main well served. Europe stood watching as a vulture does to see the sick lamb or kine stagger to fall, and from her dried branch of observation she was ready to plunge down. Napoleon did. He already had sent French armies into Mexico. That was a mere preface. Mexico was not his final object. The recovering again of territory that once had belonged to France lay in the achievements or the expectations of this weak and wicked potentate in the future.

“In this condition of things we were hovering on the very edge of intervention. It was well known to those acquainted with the condition of affairs in other lands that Napoleon was disposed by every art and intrigue to persuade the government of Great Britain to interpose, to break the blockade, and to give its moral support to the rebellion of the South.

“I found in England the utmost scepticism prevailing as to our success, and an exaggerated conception of the endurance and courage of the South; and no sentence was more frequently uttered in my hearing than this, ‘You will never subdue the South’; to which I invariably replied, ‘We shall subdue the South.’

“I found that, with a few noble exceptions—Mr. John Bright, Richard Cobden, Mr. Forster, and such like—that the statesmen of Great Britain were either lukewarm or in avowed sympathy with the South. The middle-class and laboring people of Great Britain were in sympathy, on the whole, with the North; but they had no votes. As a general thing, the officeholders under the government, the rich families, the manufacturing interests, the educated and professional men of Great Britain, believed that our Union had been or would soon be dissolved. Some one said to me at that time, ‘All men who ride in first-class cars, and put up at first-class hotels, and live upon intellectual professions, together with most of the clergymen, even of the dissenting bodies of England, are adverse to the Northern cause.’

“The conduct of the laboring classes in Great Britain was admirable. While they were on the verge of starvation in the cotton districts, they patiently endured their sufferings without retracting their sympathy for the Northern cause. As a body, the Quakers, whose testimony against slavery had been continuous and unswerving, were in sympathy with the North. The Congregational churches of Great Britain, with few exceptions, were adverse to the North. The Congregational churches of Wales were almost wholly in sympathy with the North.

“All the world looked upon America as about to be split asunder. Here and there was a faithful witness and a faithful friend. The civilized nations of Europe looked with varying emotions upon our conflict, but agreed generally that it was an impossible task that the North had undertaken; and everywhere I felt the numbness that that produced.

“It was at just that period that I left our shores and was in Great Britain.”

From his letters home we have gathered something of an outline of his experience and first impressions:

“I reached the mouth of the Mersey, seven miles from Liverpool, on Wednesday night. The tide would not let us across till five the next morning.... Duncan was on the tug when we reached the city—for there are no wharves at Liverpool, and we lay in the middle of the stream and landed passengers by means of a little steam-tug.... Before leaving the boat a Mr. Estcourt, of Manchester, was at hand to invite me to have a reception and speech at Manchester. The same happened for Liverpool within a few hours, and letters from London, from two committees, came within a day, soliciting the same. I declined them all and declared my intention not to speak anywhere at present, and until I had had time to form some judgment of things. I find that all our American friends at Liverpool approve highly of my decision. And even those who most solicited speeches admit that they think my decision the wiser one. I will not trouble you with any description of the state of the English mind toward our country. We have nothing to hope from it when it might be of use to us, and we shall not by and by care a pin whether they think ill or well.” After a week’s run in the country he returned to Liverpool and “went to meet some friends at the parlor of a store. The great stores here have parlors, in which the heads of departments dine every day. Gave them a plain talk about America. At the end, as we got familiar, they confessed that America had sufficient reason for her complaints against Great Britain.”

Writing from London a week later:

“Every man I meet who is on our side commends my determination to keep quiet for the present. I do not mean in preaching, but public addresses and public receptions. There is but little favor for the North. Whatever may be said, a narrow but intense jealousy is felt, and fear of future rivalry....

”London, July 7.—On Monday of this week (yesterday) I met a circle of temperance men at a breakfast. It was private in this, that no reports were to be made or published. I gave them a good talk on our affairs.... To-day a like meeting with a section of anti-slavery men.”

He attended the meeting. Of course he was expected to make some remarks, and he did. He says, speaking of this incident: “Several speeches had been made when I was called upon, and made a statement expressing my indignation at the position of the Congregational clergy of England in view of this war. They were men who were seeking to know the signs of the times, and had as a whole body gone wrong and had virtually arrayed themselves on the side of slavery and against liberty. I put my best leg foremost, and, although I succeeded in making a favorable impression, I saw that I was likely to be regarded as an enthusiast, and so determined that I should clinch the arguments I had advanced with a speech from a calm-minded man, and accordingly when I had concluded I said: ‘Gentlemen, Dr. John Raymond, president of Vassar College, is present and will add a few views of his own.’ He was a cool man and not easily excited, but his sympathies were with the Union, and when he had kindled up to his work I sat and looked at him in perfect amazement. He went at them like a hundred earthquakes, with a whirlwind thrown in. He made a magnificent speech, of such towering indignation as I never have heard before or since.”

The expectation that the speeches would not be reported was misplaced; there appears to have been “a chiel amang us takin’ notes,” and the substance of the speeches was quite fully reported the next day.

Almost immediately thereafter he crossed over to the Continent, and did not return to England until the following September.

He remained strongly disinclined to make any formal addresses, though he had been urged to speak in London, Liverpool, and Manchester on his return.

Writing from Switzerland, July 28, to Mrs. Stowe, he refers to the two meetings in London, and his views regarding his return in the fall:

“My time in London, where I spent ten days, was, for the last six or eight, spent in meeting private circles of gentlemen, and talking to them like a father. I breakfasted with almost a hundred from the Temperance Alliance, with seventy-five of the Congregational Liberty Association, with forty or fifty at a soirée at Mr. Evans’s, president of the Emancipation League, where Baptist Noel was the questioner, and I responded for two hours. I hear since that great good was done, and at the time there was elicited a great deal of confession from many that they had been both ignorant and wrong. There was a universal and vehement desire that I should arrange to speak in London, and elsewhere, when I return to England in the autumn. If I see the way clear to do so, these conferences will have opened the door effectually. Meanwhile I shall wait and watch the development of things.... But let me tell you that the root of all the conduct of England is simple and absolute fear. I do not mean fear of a narrow and technical kind. But the shadow that the future of our nation already casts is so vast that they foresee they are falling into the second rank—that the will of the Republic is to be the law of the world. There is no disguising of this among Englishmen.

“I was told by Rev. Henry Allen, of London, eminent among the Congregationalists, that they had long felt that a time must come when England would have to take hold of us and curb our power, and that, now that we were divided against ourselves, they rejoice to see their work done for them. The Duke of Argyle distinctly recognized this feeling, not in himself but in others. Roebuck openly avowed it in the House of Commons. The papers on all hands abused him for it. But, in fact, it was because he spoke the truth, which they were ashamed to have spoken so boldly and openly. I met at Yungfrau a young Irishman, friendly, who gave the same view of English feeling. Indeed, I have searched into it and am thoroughly satisfied that it is mainly and deeply the dread of our gigantic national development in the future, that has been coiled up as the main-spring under all the other reasons, excuses, and pretendings, and that has, consciously or unconsciously, moved the whole mind of England. Against this what will reasoning or exposition avail? Is there any explanation that will make England ready to stand second? Is there any way of stating our gigantic power that would lead her to rejoice in it? I do not propose to pull wool over their eyes, nor to play the sheep in any way. For I distinctly see the difficulty. I know it to be unremovable, and all that can be done is to appeal to the higher feelings of the Christian part of England, that the elect few, in both countries, may hold fast the golden cords of love till God in His own way shall have settled the future.”

As late as August 27 we find him still in doubt as to what he will do in England; at that date he writes:

“When you read this, therefore, I shall probably be in London. I cannot yet decide anything about my course in England. From a distance I do not see any occasion or necessity for my squandering time there in speaking....”

On his way back to England he passed through Brussels; while there he paid his respects to the United States minister, Mr. Sandford. We give his experience in his own words:

“In drawing near to England I went to Brussels, and at a dinner by our American minister there, found him very much wavering as to our final success. I expressed such sentiments, and expressed them so firmly, as to lead him to wish that I should see King Leopold of Belgium, who was considered the wisest sovereign in Europe, and to whom Queen Victoria and others were accustomed to refer many questions for judgment or arbitration.

“For the first and only time in my life I prepared myself for the ordeal. But oh! consider it, ye that dwell at home, ye that sit at ease among flowers and all pleasant things—consider my sufferings in a fashionable hat, a white cravat, and a pair of white gloves! Yes, it was even so! I reluctated, but Sandford plead; and as it was more for his sake than my own that I consented to the interview at all, and also because the king was very influential with all the sovereigns of Europe, and especially with Victoria, and was pleased with attentions from Americans, I took to myself a hat, cravat, and gloves, and in an open barouche with two white horses, and Mr. Simmonds sitting by the side of the driver, large as life, and most happy to be the courier of a party called on in all the capitals by American ministers and consuls, and now going actually to see the king! Happy, happy Simmonds! The crowd stared; the people gave way right and left; the royal guard at the Governor’s House opened; we dismounted just at eleven (hat, cravat, gloves, and all). A golden-laced official received us at the lower door and jabbered French in our faces, which we answered by making for the stairs beyond him. At the top two officers, much dressed, bowed and seemed to be expecting us, showing us toward a pair of folding-doors which, opening into the ante-room, revealed to us an aide-de-camp in waiting, who took my card, walked softly to the next door, communed with some one within, returned, and said that in a moment the king would receive us.

“In a moment the door opened, a servant beckoned us, and we entered. A tall man in full military uniform, blue, with eleven orders, crosses, etc., on his left breast, with hair black (not his own), of a face quite reverend, long, thin, somewhat corrugated, came towards us graciously and paternally, bowed gently, and began a conversation of our travels, of Europe, of America a little. Well, it was my duty, of course, always to address him as ‘Sire,’ but I generally managed to call him ‘Sir’ with a hasty correction to ‘Sire.’

“After some conversation, in which he plainly intimated to me that he would rejoice in bringing us to terms and peace again, all the while intimating that the South could not be overcome, and that it would be very wise for us to make a compromise, and that he would be entirely willing to render service in that direction, I said to him: ‘Your majesty’—I got it out once or twice right—‘if there were any ruling sovereign in Europe to whom more than to another we should be glad to refer this question, it would be to the king of Belgium, a judge among nations and adviser among kings; but we do not propose to refer it to any one. We are going to fight it out ourselves; the strongest will win in our conflict, and so it must be settled.’

“Turning from that, he asked me what I thought of sending Maximilian to Mexico—for at that time he had not been sent to be the emperor of this new nation the Latins had established there; and, without suitable diplomacy, I said to him: ‘Your majesty, any man that wants to sit upon a throne in Mexico, I would advise to try Vesuvius first; if he can sit there for a while, then he might go and try it in Mexico.’

“This very soon brought our conversation to a close. He bowed, we bowed. He stepped back a step, we two, and, repeating the operation, we were soon at the door and out of it.”

The next day finds Mr. Beecher at London. But a short time before, and while in Paris, an event occurred that had a marked effect upon his subsequent course in England and the results which he achieved. The news came to him of the fall of Vicksburg and the repulse of Lee at Gettysburg:

“Such a revulsion of feeling as I experienced myself, and such a revulsion and intoning as all patriotic Americans experienced (for all Americans were not patriotic; very largely they were commercial cowards), from those tidings, one can scarcely imagine who was not there to see. At this time I was staying in Paris at the Grand Hotel. It was on a radiant Sunday, as I wended my way from the hotel to the church, that the news came of the surrender of Vicksburg. No words can tell the buoyancy, the awful sense of gladness that I had. I went into the house of God and sat down in the pew of our minister to France, Mr. Dayton. By my side sat his daughter. In a pause in the service I turned to Miss Dayton and asked, ‘Have you heard the news?’ ‘No,’ said she, looking earnestly at me. ‘Vicksburg has fallen!’ ‘Is it true?’ ‘Yes, be sure.’ She answered me not a word, but turning to her companion, another young lady, she whispered it to her, and both sat still as statues. The hymn was given out, the music sounded, and she began to sing; but no sooner had she opened her lips than, in a flood of tears, she buried her face in her hands and wept for gladness and triumph. It overwhelmed her, and it overwhelmed me too. And before the sun went down, yea, before the sun was at noon, the other tidings came of the victory at Gettysburg; and then my cup ran over. No man can tell how victoriously I walked. In the ample court of the Grand Hotel there usually gathered a very large company of Southern men, to whom my name was not savory; and day after day, as I went out, they were wont to collect in one corner, and with sneers and undisguised attempts at insult they met me as I came in and went out, even sending contemptible messages to me by the servants (which I never received, being intercepted at the office, although I heard of them afterwards). But on that day when I heard that Lee had been driven out of Pennsylvania and that Vicksburg had surrendered to Grant, I put on my best coat, walked down-stairs and out into that court to see how it fared with my brethren of the South; but, alas! they were not there, not one of them. They, too, had heard something!

“The effect which these tidings produced throughout Great Britain was immense. Before this no avowed friend of the North could go through the Exchange in Liverpool without being looked at and watched, largely as one would look at a bear escaped from a menagerie. My friend Charles Duncan had scarcely been able to transact business without being insulted at every step; when the good news came he went down into the Exchange to look into the faces of these men that had been so insulting, but there was not a man in the whole Exchange who had not been on our side from the very beginning, and who had not always believed in us, in our cause, and in our final victory! How wonderful are the workings of Providence!

“On returning to England representations were made to me which compelled me to consent to a series of public speeches. Our friends said: ‘We have sacrificed ourselves in your behalf, and have been counted as the offscouring, because we had championed the cause of the North; and now if you go home without making a recognition of our efforts we will be overwhelmed.’ Aside from other considerations, I found that a movement was on foot to induce Parliament to declare for the Southern Confederacy. This they were very willing to do, but did not dare to without the approval of the unvoting English, who held great power. Steps had been taken by friends of the Southern cause to have orators go through the manufacturing districts for the purpose of enlisting the sympathies of the laboring classes.

“By projecting a series of meetings on the other side it was hoped that this mischievous course might be baffled and forestalled. At first there was thought of but a single speech, and that at Manchester. So soon as it was known that there was to be such a meeting applications were made from Glasgow, from Edinburgh, from Liverpool and London, for like meetings in these places.”

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