Chapter XXIX
A Preacher—His Place—His Training—His Estimate of the Work—Defects—Effectual Call—Upon Drawing an Audience—His Theory—Preparation—Results—A Theologian—His Orthodoxy—Evolution—Ordinances—Christian Unity—Sectarianism—Peacemaker.
It now belongs to us, among the closing chapters of this biography, to speak of Henry Ward Beecher, or rather to allow him, for the most part, to speak for himself, as a preacher, a theologian, and an administrator of ordinances—three spheres of activity so blended that it is of advantage to treat them together. His doctrines necessarily shaped his preaching, his preaching colored and emphasized his theology, and both together determined his estimate of the Church as an organized body, and the value of its rites and ceremonies.
Among them, the preacher stood pre-eminent. He himself regarded preaching as especially his vocation, and in his judgment it ranked highest of all earthly pursuits. Nowhere else was he so happy as in this his chosen work. As a preacher he was most widely known, and for his labors in this sphere, we doubt not, he will be the longest remembered.
His field was broader than was ever before given to any preacher, and no man that ever lived preached continuously to so large and influential audiences. During his forty years in Plymouth pulpit men from every part of the civilized world came to hear him, and to every part of the civilized world did his published sermons find their way, bringing instruction, inspiration, and comfort to multitudes.
Of his rank as a preacher, it is not for us to speak dogmatically. We stood too near him—perhaps all men of the present time stand too near him—to be impartial judges. Many letters and reports of sermons have come to us in which he is given the first place among the preachers of this age, and a few, among them some from men who themselves hold the first rank, place him before all preachers since the Apostle Paul. Which of these, or whether either, is the true estimate or not, it does not belong to us nor to any man living to decide; but we believe that the latter judgment will in time largely prevail.
The open heart that receives inspiration of God; the prophetic insight of the true preacher that sees into the heart of things, and sees God there, and believes, with an intense conviction born of experience, that God’s nature is love; that this love is not for the Jew only, for those of favored lineage, of excellent position, of high moral standard and attainment, or of right belief, but is for the Gentile, for the wandering, the erring, the lost, outside the Church, outside even the sympathies and hope of religious men, the only power that can save, but able to save to the uttermost; the ability to see this love incarnated in Jesus Christ and feel it as sunshine upon the soul, continually dispelling the darkness; to love Him, as He is so manifested, with an all-absorbing passion of personal affection, before which all things pass away from their old adjustments and become new; to see Him not only head of the Church, but head over all things; to find in Him the centre of unity which the world needs, middle walls of partition between Jew and Gentile, between learned and unlearned, between ranks and classes, between science and religion, broken down; the power to rejoice in sufferings for His sake, to bear without faltering, to love without failing, although “the more we love the less we be loved”; the ability to open this Gospel to others, in speech that moved all hearts, as the winds move the tree-tops, that never touched an object, however common, but to leave it exalted, set in some new and higher relation; the ability to move men to think, to act, to love—all this, we believe, has never been possessed to an equal degree with Mr. Beecher by any preacher since Saint Paul preached to the Athenians, taking the altar of the unknown god for his text; since he described charity to the Corinthians, told the Colossians that all the creation consists, stands in harmony, in Jesus Christ, and wrote the Epistle to the Ephesians. Nor do we believe that to any one but to him has there been given a work that so nearly resembled that of the great Apostle to the Gentiles, whose part it was to bridge over by a living faith, or rather by faith in a living One, the vast differences that kept classes and orders and nationalities separate; to give expression to the new and broader hope; to reconcile the old to the new and more vital faith, and show the relation of a risen Lord to a material universe. But in this we may be unduly prejudiced by our affection. We will let the sifting processes of the years decide.
That he became a minister, as did his brothers, by reason of the unswerving faith and prayer of the parents, is already well known. “Out of six sons not one escaped from the pulpit.” “My mother dedicated me to the work of the foreign missionary; she laid her hands upon me, wept over me, and set me apart to preach the Gospel among the heathen, and I have been doing it all my life long, for it so happens one does not need to go far from his own country to find his audience before him.”
Ushered into the preparation for the ministry by the parental faith, stumbling and discouraged and ready to give up the work, another hand was not wanting to open still more clearly the way, draw back the curtains, and let in the light:
“I beheld Him as a helper, as the soul’s midwife, as the soul’s physician, and I felt because I was weak I could come to Him; because I did not know how, and, if I did know, I had not the strength, to do the things that were right—that was the invitation that He gave to me out of my conscious weakness and want. I will not repeat the scene of that morning when light broke fairly on my mind; how one might have thought that I was a lunatic escaped from confinement; how I ran up and down through the primeval forest of Ohio, shouting, ‘Glory, glory!’ sometimes in loud tones and at other times whispered in an ecstasy of joy and surprise. All the old troubles gone, and light breaking in on my mind, I cried: ‘I have found my God; I have found my God!’ From that hour I consecrated myself to the work of the ministry anew, for before that I had about made up my mind to go into some other profession.”
His early training-school for effective preaching was well selected. It was, as is well known, one of the little villages on the banks of the Ohio River, where the wants of river barge-men and frontiermen demanded his attention. It was there he decided what his life-work should be.
“‘My business shall be to save men, and to bring to bear upon them those views that are my comfort, that are the bread of life to me’; and I went out among them almost entirely cut loose from the ordinary church institutions and agencies, knowing nothing but ‘Christ, and Him crucified,’ the sufferer for mankind. Did not the men round me need such a Saviour? Was there ever such a field as I found? Every sympathy of my being was continually solicited for the ignorance, for the rudeness, for the aberrations, for the avarice, for the quarrelsomeness of the men among whom I was, and I was trying every form and presenting Christ as a medicine to men. I went through the woods and through camp-meetings and over prairies. Everywhere my vacations were all missionary tours, preaching Christ for the hope of salvation. I am not saying this to show you how I came to the knowledge of Christ, but to show you how I came to the habit and forms of my ministry. I tried everything on to folks.”
Added to the forces of experience and surroundings was always that of his own personal, natural endowment. This he found fault with and tried to change, as most people do at some period of their lives, but finally accepted and concluded to use as best he could, without murmuring, but always conscious of its limitations.
“I have my own peculiar temperament, I have my own method of preaching, and my method and temperament necessitate errors. I am not worthy to be related in the hundred-thousandth degree to those more happy men who never make a mistake in the pulpit. I make a great many. I am impetuous. I am intense at times on subjects that deeply move me. I feel as though all the ocean were not strong enough to be the power behind my words, nor all the thunders that were in the heavens, and it is of necessity that such a nature as that should give such intensity at times to parts of doctrine as to exaggerate them when you come to bring them into connection with a more rounded-out and balanced view. I know it—I know it as well as you do. I would not do it if I could help it; but there are times when it is not I that is talking, when I am caught up and carried away so that I know not whether I am in the body or out of the body, when I think things in the pulpit that I never could think in the study, and when I have feelings that are so far different from any that belong to the lower or normal condition that I neither can regulate them nor understand them. I see things and I hear sounds, and seem, if not in the seventh heaven, yet in a condition that leads me to understand what Paul said—that he heard things which it was not possible for a man to utter. I am acting under such a temperament as that. I have got to use it, or not preach at all. I know very well I do not give crystalline views nor thoroughly guarded views; there is often an error on this side and an error on that, and I cannot stop to correct them. A man might run around, like a kitten after its tail, all his life, if he were going around explaining all his expressions and all the things he had written. Let them go. They will correct themselves. The average and general influence of a man’s teaching will be more mighty than any single misconception, or misapprehension through misconception.”
Successful as he was, he yet had none of the self-conceit that would lead him to believe that he had reached perfection; on the contrary, his language was always that of one who had not yet attained, but was continually reaching out unto it. “Young gentlemen, I want to tell you true preaching is yet to come. Of all professions for young men to look forward to, I do not know another one that seems to me to have such scope before it, in the future, as preaching.
“And as my years increase I want to bear a testimony. I suppose I have had as many opportunities as any man here, or any living man, of what are called honors and influence and wealth. The doors have been opened, the golden doors, for years. I want to bear witness that the humblest labor which a minister of God can do for a soul for Christ’s sake is grander and nobler than all learning, than all influence and power, than all riches. And, knowing so much as I do of society, I have this declaration to make: that if I were called to live my life over again, and I were to have a chance of the vocations which men seek, I would again choose, and with an impetus arising from the experience of this long life, the ministry of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, for honor, for cleanliness, for work that never ends, having the promise of the life that now is as well as of that which is to come—I would choose the preaching of the Gospel: to them that perish, foolishness; to them that believe and accept it, life everlasting.”
And that not because of great success: “There is a deep enjoyment in having devoted yourself, soul and body, to the welfare of your fellow-men, so that you have no thought and no care but for them. There is a pleasure in that which is never touched by any ordinary experiences in human life. It is the highest. I look back to my missionary days as being transcendently the happiest period of my life. The sweetest pleasures I have ever known are not those that I have now, but those that I remember, when I was unknown, in an unknown land, among a scattered people, mostly poor, and to whom I had to go and preach the Gospel, man by man, house by house, gathering them on Sundays, a few—twenty, fifty, or a hundred, as the case might be—and preaching the Gospel more formally to them as they were able to bear it.”
In his whole course we believe that he was as little moved by personal ambition as any man could possibly be. Upon his graduation he took the first church that asked for his services—as undesirable a church at that time probably, in position, character, and strength, as could well have been found. And the two removes he made were the result of necessity rather than of choice. He had no large and stock sermons with which to awaken the admiration of men. Large subjects he had in plenty, but the sermon was such as grew at the time.
From our knowledge of him we believe he spoke with absolute truthfulness when he says:
“I have had no ambitions; I have sought no laurels; I have deliberately rejected many things that would have been consonant to my taste. It would have been for me a great delight to be a scholar; I should have relished exceedingly to have perfected my thought in the study, and to have given it such qualities as that it should stand as classics stand. But when the work was pressed upon me, and my relations to my own country and to mankind became urgent, I remember, as if it were but yesterday, when I laid my literary ambition and my scholarly desires upon the altar and said: ‘If I can do more for my Master and for men by my style of thinking and working, I am willing to work in a second-rate way; I am willing to leave writing behind my back; I am willing not to carve statues of beauty, but simply to do the things that would please God in the salvation of men.’”
He had not only no ambitions for himself, but he had no patience in that seeking for place which, sometimes with the best of intentions, ministers adopt. We well remember how, early in our ministry, hearing that a larger church was offered to us, and fearing lest, in our inexperienced zeal, we might accept, he telegraphed us not to decide until we had seen him, but to come on to Brooklyn, that he might urge upon us the importance of a young man’s staying in his first parish until “he had done something,” by which he meant doing the work he had gone there to undertake.
Two things he considered essential to an effectual call to the minister to change his parish: one was “an open door in front, and the other was a kick from behind.” It was not enough that there was an open door; some pressure of health or dissatisfaction was needed to make a perfect call. What a man was to do when he got the kick, and there was no open door in front, we do not remember.
Again he writes me:
“MY DEAR SAM:
“It is not needful that a Christian should be a Stoic, and indifferent to all experiences of success and popularity among others; yet, if a straightforward working man finds that he does not produce popular results, it is not for him to worry about it. If a man reaches the true spirit, he will find a certain high and solemn satisfaction, down deep in himself, that he is thoroughly and earnestly faithful without the outward signs and remunerations.
“This is working ‘as unto the Lord,’ and not unto men. You will find much of this in Paul, who was not popular, as Apollos was, and who dug out his results by the hardest—and saw but little at that—of all his real usefulness. Read 2 Cor. xii. 12-15. That last verse is deeply affecting. It goes far beyond and below any experience that you or I ever had. As to the not drawing large audiences, my own experience is probably, in my early ministry, far less encouraging than yours. My Lawrenceburg church held about one hundred and fifty to two hundred, and was never crowded. At Indianapolis I never saw my church really full but three or four times in eight years. I think that my audience for the first ten years of my preaching life did not average two hundred and fifty.
“I never regarded myself as particularly popular, nor destined to any considerable success more than belongs to any hard-working and sensible minister. The fact is, when I came East I came with a real but unexpressed determination to work hard for common folks, and not to expect much; and I have become thoroughly seasoned to the feeling that large, hard, and painful work, heartily performed for Christ, is dearer to Him when it pays nothing outwardly to the doer, than when, by overt success, it gratifies the natural feelings.
“In this, too, we must learn ‘to walk by faith and not by sight,’ by the inside eyes and not by the outside vision.
“I think a minister who is discouraged should read the eleventh and twelfth chapters of Second Corinthians every week. It is the most wonderful record of experience ever penned, if you consider how uncomplaining—without acrimony—how cheerful, how wholesome and victorious is the whole spirit in which his career is recited. It is not the language of a discouraged and baffled man. It is the calm retrospect of a great nature, superior in one part of his soul to experiences which he acutely feels in another part.
“Yours lovingly, “H. W. BEECHER.”
His theory of preaching, which came to be formed out of his experience of the grace of God and his labors for men, he himself has given:
“To preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ; to have Christ so melted and dissolved in you that when you preach your own self you preach Him as Paul did; to have every part of you living and luminous with Christ, and then to make use of everything that is in you, your analogical reasoning, your logical reasoning, your imagination, your mirthfulness, your humor, your indignation, your wrath; to take everything that is in you all steeped in Jesus Christ, and to throw yourself with all your power upon a congregation—that has been my theory of preaching the Gospel. A good many folks have laughed at the idea of my being a fit preacher because I laughed, and because I made somebody else laugh. I never went out of my way to do it in my life; but if some sudden turn of a sentence, like the crack of a whip, sets men off, I do not think any worse of it for that—not a bit. I have felt that man should consecrate every gift that he has got in him that has any relation to the persuasion of men and to the melting of men—that he should put them all on the altar, kindle them all, and let them burn for Christ’s sake. I have never sought singularity, and I have never avoided singularity. When they wanted some other sort of teaching I have always said, ‘Get it. If you want my kind, here I am ready to serve you; if you do not, serve yourself better.’”
For this preaching there was always going on a certain preparation, almost involuntarily. It consisted in a constant study of the processes of nature around him, examining them and digesting them, until he saw the relations in which they stood to other facts, and a principle was discovered or an illustration of some deeper moral and spiritual truth was gained. This action of his mind, we believe, became almost automatic. He had an insatiable curiosity to learn facts. But he wanted them for the same reason that a miller wants grain, to grind and make bread. So he worked them over until he had got something from them that fed his mind or heart, and this was the only way he could remember them.
For this preaching there had been carried on for years a study of the Bible. The evidences, found in note-books and books of analysis, of his broad and painstaking study of the Gospels have astonished us. People seeing him always on the wing, finding him never in his study—in fact, having in his house no study-room, as such—got the impression that he worked but little; but they made a great mistake. He worked, but it was in his own way. The winter that I saw him most he had Stanley’s “Commentary upon the Epistles to the Corinthians,” which he carried for weeks in his carpet-bag, studied, and annotated from beginning to end. Mr. Pond, who has travelled with him thousands of miles, says that Bible reading and study was a part of his daily work while on the train.
The results of such reading and study appear in scores of little note-books that he used, some of which lie before us, containing subjects, heads of sermons jotted down at moments of inspiration, in the family circle, on the railroad, in the street-car, after a talk with some friend, written for the most part in that strong, full hand that is so well known, sometimes plainly, at other times so obscurely as to make it doubtful if he himself could read it after it had become cold.
This was his method of getting subjects. These were the acorn thoughts, out of which grew up in time strong, wide-spreading oak-tree sermons.
With eyes wide open to see things, he kept his active sympathy and hearty fellow-feeling for men in exercise by constant intercourse with those about him. Some have a regard for mankind in general, but only criticism and coldness for the concrete specimen before them. This was not the case with him; he liked the common men of the present, and made it an object to get acquainted with them and to be with them. Very seldom did he cross the river on the ferry-boat but he made his way up into the pilot-house, to which a key had been given him, to have a talk with the pilot.
We have been often asked, “How does Mr. Beecher prepare his sermons?” His general preparation we have already given. The more special preparation for preaching on the Sabbath began on Saturday and consisted in doing as little work as possible—doing what pleased him, making it a kind of active rest-day. Perhaps, if the weather permitted, he ran up to Peekskill to look over the place, and get rid of all friction and rasp by giving attention to its common and homely details, or to feed his imagination by looking out upon its beautiful landscape. Perhaps he spent it in the city. If so, he has probably been over to New York, looking into shop-windows, dropping into Appleton’s to look at books, or into Tiffany’s to look at gems, having a little chat in each place with some of the clerks. You may be sure he did not forget his afternoon nap of from one to two hours; wherever he was he aimed to secure that. He has fed well to-day, but has been careful not to eat anything that does not agree with him. He will have the body in perfect order for the great work of the morrow. The evening he spent quietly at home, or, possibly, ran into one or two of the homes where he was most familiar, where he could have his own way and be not bored by anybody’s trying to draw him out into some excited discussion. If you had followed him there you would very likely have found him taking his ease upon the sofa, while the family life went on around him, in which he took part by humorous sallies or quiet suggestions, as the fancy prompted him; home and a few games of backgammon with Mrs. Beecher, and to bed by eleven o’clock. Up to this time he has not decided upon the subject or text that he will handle on the morrow; to have chosen it so early as this, especially to have written any part of it down, would have killed his sermon the next day. He could not have kindled up to it and made it a living thing, if it had been for so long a time buried on parchment. Even upon so important a matter as his first lecture of the Lyman Beecher lectureship in Yale College—a new enterprise, with the faculty of the college as well as the clergymen of the city present, and his lecture to be reported in the religious press—he did not touch pen to paper until after he had reached New Haven, taken dinner, had his nap, and was within an hour of its delivery, although of course the subject-matter had been for a long time a-brewing. Then while shaving the outline came clear to his mind, and he slashed his face with his razor in his eagerness, but his lecture secured the hearty and grateful commendation of Dr. Leonard Bacon, who said: “If I had heard such talk as that before I began to preach, it would have made a better preacher of me.”
The decision was made in a general way when he awoke in the morning—that is, the kind of sermon he would preach that day. If he was heavy and a little cloudy in the higher faculties, he would select a subject that was in harmony with that state of mind. If he was stirred in spirit and imagination, a subject that drew upon those higher elements, and that ministered to the same in others, would be decided upon. There was no approach to a sanctimonious expression on his face as he came down to the breakfast-table, and he did not refuse to take part in the conversation, whatever it might be; and very likely there would some humorous remark drop from his lips, or he would steal the bread from the plate of one of the children as usual. Yet it was all done with the air of a man that had something that engaged his attention apart from us. Family prayers were likely to be short that morning, and if there were any of those delays that sometimes occur in the best-regulated families, he would depute some one else to conduct them. And then he locked himself in his own room, and for an hour and a half must be left undisturbed, except in the case of some imperative necessity, and then to be approached by no one but his wife. No noise in the halls. The hour of the whole week had come to him, and he must have it without interruption. Of course none of us, and no one but God, ever saw him in that hour, but we know that then he made his final and definite selection of a subject, perhaps taking it from one of those little note-books; that he wrote with his goose-quill pen, upon large sheets of paper, his introduction; that he put down head after head, with such opening as the time permitted, and gave a word of illustration here and there. The vision stood before him, and as hastily as possible he sketched the outline. As the bell began to ring for the last time, some fifteen minutes before the opening of the service, he would come out with his papers hastily thrown together and held in his hand, or thrust into his coat-pocket, and, with scarcely a word to any one, put on his hat, take Mrs. Beecher on his arm, and start for the church.
This hour may be shortened. It may be spent in some other place than in his study, but as a rule it was had, this time of supreme choice and arrangement, and jotting down the heads of his sermon. As an extreme illustration of his powers of making all places available, and to seize the most outwardly unpropitious surroundings for this final preparation, I can say from personal knowledge that the notes of the sermon which he preached in Charleston in 1865 to the thousands in Zion Church, and which was one of great scope and power, was outlined in the outhouse of the home where we were stopping, on scraps of envelopes which he happened to have with him. From thence we went directly to the church and to the delivery of that grand sermon. When I spoke to him afterwards about the sermon and its power, he said: “The vision came to me there, and if I could only have brought it out as I saw it, it would have been worth hearing; but I could not.”
When he preached upon the occasion of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Congregational Church in Stamford, he came into my house hastily, stopping only long enough to kiss his daughter as he hurried upstairs. In about fifteen minutes he came down, putting away some notes in his side-pocket, and said to her: “Well, I have got my sermon ready for the evening.” This was in the forenoon. Being prepared so long beforehand, it got cold before the time for its delivery, and when he went into the pulpit he felt barren and dry. Neither the singing by the choir nor the prayer by a brother minister, of which he spoke afterwards very highly, gave him the desired relief, and he sat with the fixed, settled expression of a man who is bound to do his duty as well as he can; but to those who knew him well there was a lack of the light in the eye and the deep, full, restful look of countenance which was marked in him when he was all prepared. It happened that we had at that time a solo-singer of great richness and sweetness of voice, and she sang for an offertory just before preaching. “The Three Kings of the Orient.” The sympathetic rendering of the words of that beautiful solo smote the rock; the waters gushed out and suffused soul and intellect, and the sermon was one of great power and beauty.
Because of its adaptation to awaken devotion in his own heart and in the hearts of his audience he valued organ music, but it must be rendered by one who himself felt its power and could express this feeling through the instrument. If the organist failed in this, no brilliancy of execution nor facility in rendering popular tunes could atone for the fundamental lack. By reason of John Zundel’s ability to express and interpret religious emotion he valued him above all players that ever officiated at the organ in Plymouth Church. As with the organ, so with the choir. No efficiency in the leader of the choir, in the machinery, could atone for the lack of appreciation of the devotional element in the music.
In the Scripture-reading he was himself, feeding upon the word which he read, drinking in and appropriating its truths; and in the prayer he came to the fountain-head, to Christ Himself, for refreshing and life power.
And now for the sermon itself. For the first few moments his eyes followed the manuscript closely. He seemed to be reading; perhaps he was, and perhaps there were only catch sentences upon the page which he was scanning so carefully. He was gathering his forces, getting under headway, making preparatory explanations, divisions, and definitions. He will get into the full, rushing current of thought and feeling and speech presently.
We can liken the whole process to nothing better than the descent of some of our Western rivers under the care of a skilful guide. You get into the boat in some sheltered cove. He takes the oar and pushes out gently but strongly, points out the rocks on either side and avoids them, and makes his way around some tree-top that has fallen in from the shore. Like to this was often Mr. Beecher’s opening. The current now is felt and begins to bear you along on its bosom, and in that hour all your life-experiences are gone over or pointed out to you. You are in the shallows where life seems poor and worthless, and he shows you how to find the deeper channels. He points out the pleasant places on the shore, and shows you where living springs burst out; takes you under the shadow of the lofty trees whose branches sweep down within your reach, and anon out under the clear, sun-lighted heaven. Swirls of temptation are before you, and he shows you how to steer straight through or how to avoid them. You are now in the very rapids, in the rush of the life that for six days in the week is roaring around you, and all things seem to be rushing to destruction; but this man is not disturbed. He is no still-water pilot. He has thoroughly studied that river and knows all its dangers. Through the fiercest rapids that ever boat was called upon to pass he will guide you safely; over the deepest fall that ever boats must venture he will stand by you. He goes with you until he has brought you into some quiet spot of God’s great and present mercy, or perhaps to the mouth of the river and in sight of the islands of the blest. What a hand was that, so gentle, skilful, strong! What a voice, so clear, tender, inspiring, confident! What a heart, that knew all the ways of sorrow! What a guide and helper he was! “O my father! my father! the chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof!”
In the largeness of his audience, in his power over them for the time being, there can be no question; but how about the permanent results in growth and strength of Christian character, in making men and women Christlike?—for this, as he would be first to claim, is the only true success. Our first witness here, of course, must be Plymouth Church, the body that received most impress from the word he preached and the life he lived. One of the largest churches in the land, it has been called a drag-net “which has been cast into the sea and has gathered of every kind.” And undoubtedly it has its proportion of human weakness and imperfections, but, after making all deductions of this nature, it nevertheless remains true that, tried by all the tests that can apply to a church, it will answer as well as any that can be found. It has been singularly harmonious and free from quarrels and contention, and that under trials the like of which few churches have ever been called to endure. Its failures in Christian character have been as few; its works have been as broad and beneficent; its weekly care to provide for strangers that visited it as hospitable; its benevolent contributions as generous, we believe, as those of any other church. But, deeper than all this, and better than all, the spirit that has pervaded the church has been unusually kind, helpful, Christlike.
It was said that it had no life separate from Mr. Beecher. But the bearing of that body since the death of its pastor has given an emphatic denial to that statement. From the day that his body lay in state, and its members gathered like a stricken household around the coffin, the church, to all outward appearances, has been growing more earnest in developing its powers, more loving in its spirit. The seed so long planted is bearing fruit, the benediction so long resting upon it is showing its beauty, and is proving that indeed it is the fruit of but one thing, and that is the Gospel of God’s dear Son, of Jesus the Christ.
But other witnesses rise up to testify—troubled, weary, heartbroken souls the world over, who have read the sermons as they have come to them from Plymouth pulpit; and they bear witness that this one spake as he was moved of the Holy Ghost, that his message was of Him who came to heal the sick, to raise the dead, to set at liberty the captive.
We call to the witness-stand all ministers and all denominations of every name who have ever read his sermons or heard him preach, and they will testify that his message was of God.
Yea, we will go beyond this circle and ask those of other pursuits—laborers, workers, soldiers, actors—if there has not shone upon them something of the light that our Saviour shed upon all classes and conditions of men, and their answer will be unanimously in the affirmative. We go beyond the personality of men and come into the realm of beliefs and relationships, and affirm, without fear of denial, that theology is to-day more truthful, science more devout, religion more attractive, sectarianism less bitter, churches more loving, politics purer, property more humane, labor more faithful, social ranks more tolerant, and nations brought nearer together, by reason of the preaching of the Gospel by Henry Ward Beecher.
To speak of Mr. Beecher as a theologian will awaken, we are well aware, a smile of incredulity with many. It will be said that theology was not his forte; that he seldom made use of the term except to make fun of it, or of those who were its exponents and teachers. Now, we acknowledge that we might give a definition of this science in which he would appear to very poor advantage. But if theology can be considered as the knowledge of God in His relations to living men and to this present world, then was Mr. Beecher a theologian excelled by few now living or that ever have lived. He had this knowledge of God. It was as real to him as his own existence. He had the nature and order of God’s attributes very clearly settled in his own mind. He had His relations with the whole universe in which He dwelt very thoroughly outlined in his thought. He had his own system, upon which he worked from day to day, which included all existences and orders, and all times, and all worlds; that, as he believed, had a place for all truth that had ever been lived or revealed, and for all that ever should be lived or revealed, here, or in Saturn, or Sirius, in this present time or in the ages of ages. He made a great deal of fun of theologians, sometimes because of the one-sidedness of their views, sometimes because of their dryness, at others because of their pretensions, and partly because all classes of men were, in his view, at times objects of legitimate mirth-making. Yet nevertheless he greatly valued them and their work.
“Now, young gentlemen,” he said in his “Lectures to Yale Students,” “I have often indulged myself in words that would seem to undervalue theologians; but you know I do not mean it. I profess to be a theologian myself; my father was a theologian; my brothers are all theologians, and so are many men whom I revere, and who are the brightest lights of genius, I think, that have ever shone in the world. I believe in theologians, and yet I think it is perfectly fair to make game of them! I do not think there is anything in this world, whether it be man or that which is beneath a man, that is not legitimate food for innocent, innocuous fun; and if it should cast a ray of light on the truth and alleviate the tediousness of a lecture now and then to have a slant at theologians, why, I think they can stand it! It will not hurt them and it may amuse us. So let me speak freely—the more so because I affirm that it is indispensable for every man who is to do a considerable religious work during a long period, or with any degree of self-consistency, to be a theologian. He must have method; there must be a sequence of ideas in his thoughts. And if the work runs long enough and far enough, and embraces many things, there must be a system of applying means to ends, there must be a knowledge of instruments. These things are theology in a sense—a part of it, at any rate.”
Equally indispensable, in his view, was it that a man have a theology that would change by growth:
“As summer makes the tree so much larger that the bark has to let out a seam, because the old bark will not do for the new growth, and as the same thing takes place from season to season, so mental philosophy—for all theology is mental philosophy—changes from age to age through both obvious and latent causes.”
His bearing towards theological questions was largely decided, as he tells us, by his own religious experience, and by the controversies which in his early life were raging around him:
“In the first place, let me say that my early religious experience has colored all my life. I was sympathetic by nature, I was loving, I was mercurial, I was versatile, I was imaginative. I was not a poet executively, but sympathetically I was in union with the whole universal life and beauty of God’s world and with all human life. My earliest religious training was at home. My father’s public teaching may be called alleviated Calvinism. Even under that the iron entered my soul. There were days and weeks in which the pall of death over the universe could not have made it darker to my eyes than those in which I thought: ‘If you are elected you will be saved, and if you are not elected you will be damned, and there is no hope for you.’ I wanted to be a Christian. I went about longing for God as a lamb bleating longs for its mother’s udder, and I stood imprisoned behind those iron bars: ‘It is all decreed. It is all fixed. If you are elected you will be saved anyhow; if you are not elected you will perish.’ While in that state, and growing constantly and warmly in sympathy with my father, in taking sides with orthodoxy that was in battle in Boston with Unitarianism, I learned of him all the theology that was current at that time. In the quarrels also between Andover and East Windsor and New Haven and Princeton—I was at home in all these distinctions. I got the doctrines just like a row of pins on a paper of pins. I knew them as a soldier knows his weapons. I could get them in battle array. I went from my college life immediately to the West, and there I fell into another fuliginous Christian atmosphere when the Old School and the New School Presbyterians were wrangling, and the Church was split, and split on the rock of slavery, and my father was tried for believing that a man could obey the commandments of God, and Dr. Wilson was contending against him in church courts that men had no ability, either moral or physical, to obey God; and the line of division ran all through the State, and there was that tremendous whirl of Old School theology, old Calvinism and new Calvinism, and by the time I got away from the theological seminary I was so sick—no tongue can tell how sick I was of the whole medley. How I despised and hated this abyss of whirling controversies that seemed to me to be filled with all manner of evil things, of everything, indeed, but Christ! And then on one memorable day, whose almost every cloud I remember, whose high sun and glowing firmament and waving trees are vivid yet, there arose before me, as if an angel had descended, a revelation of Christ as being God, because He knew how to love a sinner; not that He would love me when I was true and perfect, but because I was so wicked that I should die if He did not give Himself to me, and so inconstant that I never should be steadfast—as if He were saying to me: ‘Because you are sinful I am yours.’ Before that thought of a God who sat in the centre and seat of power, that He might bring glory and restoration to everything that needed Him, I bowed down in my soul, and from that hour to this it has been my very life to love and to serve the all-helping and pitiful God.” This was addressed to the association of which he was a member.
One who was present wrote that while he was saying this “he seemed to lose consciousness of his audience; his voice, although clear and distinct, became low and gentle; he was carried away by one of those very inspirations which he was describing; and when he spoke of the revelation of Christ to himself, as one who loved men because they needed love, his face underwent a marvellous change: it seemed transparent with a radiant light, like a sunset glow on the Alps, while rapid and instantaneous changes of expression passed over it, such as can only be compared to heat-lightning silently playing over the golden clouds of a summer evening.”
From this living experience there came into existence an order of truths. “As I went on, and more and more tried to preach Christ, the clouds broke away and I began to have a distinct system in my own mind.” There grew up also a very decided dislike and oppugnance to much of the theology that was then in vogue, for it seemed to stand in the way of men instead of helping them:
“I dedicated myself, not to be a fisher of ideas, nor of books, nor of sermons, but a fisher of men, and in this work I very soon came to the point in which I felt dissatisfied with the views of God that had been before given. I felt dissatisfied with that whole realm of theology which I now call the machinery of religion, which has in it some truth, and I would it had more. But I came to have this feeling, that it stood in the way of sinful men. I found men in distress, in peril of soul, on account of views which I did not believe were true, or, if true, not in any such proportion. If you want to know why I have been fierce against theology, that is it: because I thought with Mary, and I said time and again, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him.’ It seemed to me that men could not believe in such a God as I heard preached about, that men could not believe such a schedule of truth as I had seen crystallized and promoted among men. I do not care the turn of my hand about a man’s philosophy; I do not care about one system or another; any system that will bring a man from darkness to faith and love I will tolerate; and any system that lets down the curtain between God and men, whether it is canonical priest or church service or church methods, whether it is the philosophical or theological—anything that blurs the presence of God, anything that makes the heavens black and the heart hopeless, I will fight it to the death.”
But how about his orthodoxy? He says: “I hold there is but one orthodoxy, and that all others are bastard orthodoxies. The orthodoxy of the heart, that loves God, and loves man to such an extent that it is willing to suffer for him, and to endure hardship for the sake of the love it bears to men—that is the true orthodoxy, and there is none other.”
He said in an address given at a meeting of Congregational ministers in London in September, 1886:
“I think I am as orthodox a man as there is in this world. Well, what are the tests of orthodoxy? Man universally is a sinner; man universally needs to be born again; there is in the nature of God that power and influence that can convert a man and redeem him from his animal life; and it is possible for man so to bring to bear this divine influence in the ministration of the Gospel as that men shall be awakened, and convicted, and converted, and built up in the faith of Jesus Christ. There is my orthodoxy. But how about the Trinity? I do not understand it, but I accept it. If anybody else understands it I have not met him yet; but it seems to me that that is the easiest way of rendering the different testimonies or words of truth in the New Testament, neither do I see any philosophical objection to it at all, and I accept it without questioning. What about original sin? There has been so much actual transgression that I have not had time to go back on to that. On what grounds may a man hope? On the atonement of Christ? Yes, if you want to interpose that word, atonement, on that ground, unquestionably, I am accustomed to say Christ saves men. But how? That is His look-out, not mine. I think that because the nature of God is sanative, God is love. ‘If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good gifts to them which ask Him?’ If you choose to fix it in this way, and say that Christ saw it possible to do thus and so, and that was the atonement He made—if you take any comfort in it, I shall not quarrel with you. But it is enough for me to know this, that Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, has proclaimed, to whosoever will, health, life, new life—‘born again.’ He has offered these, and therefore I no more want to question how he does it than a sick man questions the doctor before he takes a pill. If he says, ‘Doctor, what is in it?’ the doctor says, ‘Take it and you will find out what is in it.’ If men think I am heterodox because I do not believe this, that, and the other explanation of the atonement of Jesus Christ, it is enough for me to say I believe in Christ, and I believe Christ is atonement. Now, if you ask me whether I believe in the divinity of Christ, I do not believe in anything else. Let a man stand and look at the sun, then ask him what he sees beside. Nothing: it blinds him. There is nothing else to me when I am thinking of God: it fills the whole sphere, the heaven of heavens, and the whole earth and all time; and out of that boundlessness of love and that infiniteness of divine faculty and capacity it seems to me that He is, to my thought, what summer is when I see it marching on after the cold winter is over. I know where the light comes from and where the warmth comes from. When I see anything going on for good and for the staying of evil I know it is the Sun of Righteousness, and the name to me is Jesus—every time Jesus. For Him I live, for Him I love, for Him I labor, for Him I rejoice in my remaining strength, for Him I thank God that I have yet so much in me that can spend and be spent for the only one great cause, which should lift itself above every other cause in this whole world.”
Concerning one other doctrine, future punishment, he states his belief as follows:
“I have my own philosophical theories about the future life; but what is revealed to my mind is simply this: The results of a man’s conduct reach over into the other world on those that are persistently and inexcusably wicked, and man’s punishment in the life to come is of such a nature and of such dimensions as ought to alarm any man and put him off from the dangerous ground and turn him toward safety. I do not think we are authorized by the Scriptures to say that it is endless in the sense in which we ordinarily employ that term. So much for that, and that is the extent of my authoritative teaching on that subject.”
From his life-long interest in material science it may well be supposed that he watched the development of the theory of evolution with the greatest eagerness. It was not, in substance, unknown to him:
“Slowly, and through a whole fifty years, I have been under the influence, first obscurely, imperfectly, of the great doctrine of evolution. In my earliest preaching I discerned that the kingdom of heaven is a leaven, not only in the individual soul but in the world; the kingdom is as a grain of mustard-seed. I was accustomed to call my crude notion a seminal theory of the kingdom of God in this world. Later I began to feel that science had struck a larger view, and that this unfolding of seed and blade and ear in spiritual things was but one application of a great cosmic doctrine which underlay God’s methods in universal creation, and was notably to be seen in the whole development of human society and human thought. That great truth—through patient accumulations of fact, and marvellous intuitions of reason, and luminous expositions of philosophic relation, by men trained in observation, in thinking, and in expression—has now become accepted throughout the scientific world. Certain parts of it yet are in dispute, but substantially it is the doctrine of the scientific world. And that it will furnish—nay, is already bringing—to the aid of religious truth as set forth in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ a new and powerful aid, fully in line with other marked developments of God’s providence in this His world, I fervently believe.”
He had great hope from the influence he felt certain it would exert:
“The theology that is rising upon the horizon will still rise. I cannot hope that it will be the perfect theology, but it will be a regenerated one, and I think far more powerful than the old—a theology of hope, and of love, which shall cast out fear. Nay, more, it is to be a theology that will run nearer to the spirit and form of Christ’s own teachings, He who found the tenderness of Divine Providence in the opening lilies of the field, and the mighty power of God’s kingdom in the unfolding of germ and leaf and fruit.”
Mr. Beecher’s view of ordinances was in harmony with his practical view of preaching and of theology. To his mind the ordinance was appointed by God because it helped men, and was to be continued on that same ground, and the form best suited to that end was the one he adopted. The form of church government and of administration of ordinances was left uncertain, because it was to be adapted to the peculiar conditions of the times or the circumstances of people. It was of principle rather than of rule. It was the expression of the new life rather than of any artificial arrangement. Hence he believed that different forms of church government and different methods of administering ordinances were equally Scriptural, and to be adopted without controversy if they secured the end in view—the bringing into and training up of men in Christ Jesus—and equally antagonistic to the New Testament view when they were a mere form.
But of this he himself has spoken somewhat at length:
“Now, there is one more thing that I want to say something about—that is, church economy, ordination, and ordinance. I regard it as true that there is laid down in the New Testament no form of church government whatever nor of church ordinance—none. Paul did not see the outlines of the Church; they grew, they developed out of the nature of things. And so I say, in regard to all church worship, that is the best form of church economy that in the long run helps men to be the best Christians. Whatever thing is found when applied to human nature to do good, that is God’s ordinance. If there are any men that worship God through the Roman Catholic Church—and there are—I say this in regard to them: ‘I cannot, but you can; God bless you!’ In that great, venerable church there is Gospel enough to save any man, no man need perish for want of light and truth in that system; and yet what an economy it is, what an organization, what burdens, and how many lurking mischiefs that temptation will bring out! I could never be a Roman Catholic, but I could be a Christian in a Roman Catholic Church; I could serve God there. I believe in the Episcopacy—for those that want it. Let my tongue forget its cunning if I ever speak a word adverse to that church that brooded my mother, and now broods some of the nearest blood kindred I have on earth. It is a man’s own fault if he do not find salvation in the teachings and worship of the great Episcopal body of the world. I was for ten years a member of the Presbyterian Church, for I swore to the Confession of Faith; but at that time my beard had not grown. The rest of the Book of Worship has great wisdom in it, and, rather than not have any brotherhood, I would be a Presbyterian again if they would not oblige me to swear to the Confession of Faith. On the other hand, my birthright is in the Congregational Church. I was born in it, it exactly agreed with my temperament and my ideas; and it does yet, for although it is in many respects slow-moulded, although in many respects it has not the fascinations in its worship that belong to the high ecclesiastical organizations, though it makes less for the eye and less for the ear, and more for the reason and the emotions, though it has therefore slender advantages, it has this: that it does not take men because they are weak and crutch them up upon its worship, and then just leave them as weak after forty years as they were when it found them. A part of its very idea is so to meet the weakness of men as that they shall grow stronger; to preach the truth and then wait till they are able to seize that truth and live by it. It works slowly, but I tell you that when it has finished its work it makes men in the community.”
“I immerse, I sprinkle, and I have in some instances poured, and I never saw there was any difference in the Christianity that was made. They have all, for that matter, come out so that I should not know which was immersed or which was sprinkled.
“The unity of Christians does not depend upon similarity of ordinance or methods of worship. It is a hard business. I do not believe the millennium will see one sect, one denomination, any more than the perfection of civilization will see only one great phalanstery, one family. The man on this side of the street keeps house in one way, and the man over on the other side keeps house in another. They do not quarrel; each lets the other alone. So I hold about churches. The unity of the Church is to be the unity of the hearts of men—spiritual unity in the love of Christ and in the love of each other. Do not, then, meddle with the details of the way in which different persons choose to conduct their service. Let them alone; behave at least as decently in the church of Christ as you would do in your neighborhood and in each other’s families. I do not know why they should not concurrently work in all the great causes of God among mankind. I am not, therefore, to teach Congregationalism, I am not to teach the Baptist doctrine, I am not to teach Presbyterianism; I am to preach ‘O ye that are lost by reason of your sins, Jesus Christ has found a ransom for you; come, come, and ye shall live.’ That is my message, and in that I have enthusiasm. It is not to build up one church or another church, or to cry down one church or another. Brethren, we have been trying conscience for a great while; what have we got by it? About one hundred and fifty denominations. There is nothing so unmanageable as a conceited conscience. Now, suppose we should try another thing; suppose we should try love a little while; suppose we should try sympathy, trust, fellowship, brotherhood, without inquisitorial power; suppose we should let men’s theologies take care of themselves, and bring this test to bear upon them: What is the fruit of their personal living, and what is the fruit of their personal teaching? ‘By their fruits shall ye know them’ did not exhaust itself in personal thought alone. It is a good test for denominationalism, and whenever I find a denomination that puts emphasis upon holiness, where there is no envy, nor detraction, nor backbiting, nor suspicion, nor holding each man to philosophical schedules, when I find a denomination in which they are full of love and gentleness and kindness, I am going to join that denomination. But I do not expect to change for some time.”
His estimate of sectarianism was very low:
“The selfishness that inheres in the very elements of sectarianism is radically opposed to the spirit of the Gospel. Love works from within outward. Selfishness or sectarianism works from without inward. One is centrifugal, the other is centripetal. The only difference between a pious denominational spirit and sectarianism is the difference between a cub and a full-grown wolf. You may baptize your wolf every year with what soft names you please; it is a wolf still, that will never cease to make havoc on the flock. As for ourselves, in all this tumult of men running up and down throughout the vast and misty realm of ecclesiasticism, we will none of it. There is a fairer realm, there are brighter skies, distilling selecter influences. We are well satisfied that this world will never behold any earthly force so great as the heart of man irradiated by the fire of Christ, and turned in all its warmth upon men; hence our prayer for our brethren shall not be for esprit de corps but for esprit de Christ.”
And so, wherever he was, we find him bearing one character. In the matter of rituals he grasped the reality, as he thought, and, looking at men on either side of him, asking, not surrender of principle, but charity. And all sects found that they had something in common with him.
In doctrines, while accused of heresy, yet, when making a full statement of his belief before the New York and Brooklyn Association, or the meeting of Congregational ministers in England, his views received the heartiest commendation from men of all shades of opinion; while as a preacher what multitudes of every class and of all sects have been brought together in Plymouth Church!
Among parties, except when in the very onset, it was the same. When the battle had been fought, not a blow more than was necessary to secure the victory, not an act for revenge. In the very midst of the war of the Rebellion, in 1862, as we have already mentioned, he said, “I think I never pray for the loyal States without praying, at least in thought, if not in utterance, for those misguided men in the South that wage this rebellion; and, let me tell you, I have a tender place in my heart for them.” And when the war had ceased he stood up for what he deemed best for their prosperity, at the loss, for the moment, of a great deal of his popularity at the North. In England he plead, with no tones of fear but with manly words, for peace between the mother and daughter. In this age of spiritual growth on one side and materialistic tendencies on the other, Mr. Beecher, born with an intense love for nature, given a surpassingly deep and rich Christian experience, and reconciling them both in himself, and feeling that each interprets and enriches the other, and both are unified in Him who is the head over all, became—he was raised up for that purpose—a mediator between the deepest spiritual experience and the most advanced stage of real science.
One scene illustrates his true position—the place he has held between many diversities, and the one that we are sure will be more and more recognized as his as the years go by. It was when the delegates from England were presenting their credentials to the National Council of Congregationalists in Boston, at about the close of the war. There was a very sore feeling in the hearts of many of the loyal people of the North at the position of antagonism that their brethren in England and Wales had taken in the great Rebellion, and it happened that the delegates present had belonged very decidedly to the obnoxious side. The question was upon receiving them, and several speeches had been made, and it seemed that a very unpleasant result would be reached. At last Mr. Beecher was recognized and called to the platform. In a few words he described the situation, represented the failure of each side in the great matter of Christian charity, showed how grand an opportunity was given to illustrate this highest of Christian virtues, and closed by reaching down and clasping a hand of each delegate, while the whole audience of venerable ministers and delegates arose and showed their delight by cheers and waving of handkerchiefs. It was his rightful place, won by years of patient charity. Other names have been given him. He has been called Reformer, War Trumpet, Popular Lecturer, Preacher. They are all good, but we lift a name that we never remember to have seen applied to him, but which is his by right, which represents the resultant of all his life of toil and battle—the name which belongs to him as to but few men that ever lived—and place it lovingly upon his brow, while our eyes long for the look which he used to give: the name “PEACEMAKER”; and the familiar words come with a new significance as if spoken for him, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.”
Chapter XXX
Love of the Country—Communion with Nature—Farming at Salisbury—Lenox—Matteawan—The Peekskill Farm.
Like the fabled Antæus of old, Mr. Beecher found strength by contact with old Mother Earth; not only that, but rest, health, and inspiration; while from the study of natural processes, in which he delighted, he gained a deep insight into the beautiful and, to so many eyes, hidden mysteries of nature, which was a never-failing source of comfort and pleasure to him through all his life—a rich treasury, from which he drew so much of that illustrative imagery which illuminated and beautified his writings and speeches. If Earth was the mother, Nature was the grandmother, equally beloved and loving. Nothing that came from her hands was uninteresting; each and every of her children found a true and faithful brother in Mr. Beecher, to whom in turn they showed that trust and confidence that opened up to him such glorious visions, such secrets, full of exquisite beauty, vouchsafed to but few among mankind. Of course he was fond of fishing and hunting. Not that he ever shot or caught anything: he was generally innocent of any such charge. He loved to tramp the woods, and stroll along the brookside, ostensibly hunting or fishing, but really communing with nature. The gun and rod were only for pretext. We take his own confessions:
“But, aside from the pleasure which arises in connection with seeking or taking one’s prey, we suspect that the collateral enjoyments amount, often, to a greater sum than all the rest: the early rising, the freshness of those morning hours preceding the sun, which few anti-piscatory critics know anything about; that wondrous early-morning singing of birds, compared to which all after-day songs are mere ejaculations—for such is the tumult and superabundance of sweet noise, soon after four o’clock in summer, that one would think that if every dewdrop were a musical note, and the bird shad drank them all, they could not have been more multitudinous or delicious. Then there is that incomparable sense of freedom which one has in remote fields, in forests, and along the streams. His heart, trained in life to play with jets, like an artificial fountain, seems, as he wanders along the streams, to resume its own liberty, and, like a meadow-brook, to wind and turn, amid flowers and fringing shrubs, at its own unmolested pleasure.
“Care and trouble, in ordinary life, and especially in cities, disturb the fountains of feeling, as rubbish fallen into the fountains of ruined cities in the East chokes them, or splits and scatters their streams through all secret channels.
“One who believes God to have made the world, and to have expressed His own tastes and thoughts in the making, cannot express what feelings those are which speak music through his heart. A little plant growing in silent simplicity in some covert spot, or looking down upon him from out of a rift in some rock uplifted high above his reach or climbing—what has it said to him, that he stops and gazes as if he saw more than material forms? What is that rush of feeling in his heart, and that strange opening up of thoughts, as if a revelation had been made to him? Who that has a literal eye could see anything but that solitary flower casting a linear shadow on the side of the gray rock—a shadow that loves to quiver, and nod, and dance to every step which the wind-blown flower takes? But this floral preacher up in that pulpit has many a time preached tears into my eyes, and told me more than I was ever able to tell again.
“Indeed, in many and many a tramp the best sporting was done on my back. Flat under a tree we lay, a vast Brobdingnag, upon whom grasshoppers mounted, and glossy crickets crept, harmless, with evident speculation of what such a phenomenon could portend. Along the stems creep aspiring ants, searching with fiery zeal for no one can even tell what. The bluejay is in the tree above you. The woodpecker screws round and round the trunk, hammering at every place like an auscult doctor sounding a patient’s lungs. Little birds fly in and about, gibbering to each other in sweet little detached sentences, confidentially talking over their family secrets, and expressing those delicate sentiments which one never speaks above a whisper in twilight. When you rise, the birds flutter and fly, and clouds of insects fly off from you like sparks from a fire when a log rolls over. The brook that gurgled past the tree, feeding its roots, and taking its pay in summer shadows, varied every hour, receives a portion of out-jumping fry. Far off their coming shines. But before they had even touched the water, that bold trout sprung sparkling from the surface and sunk as soon, leaving only a few bubbles to float down. There! if the trout has a right to his grasshopper, have I not a right to the trout? I’ll have him! After several throws I find that it takes two to make a bargain.
“At length one must go home. I never turn from the silence of the underbrush, or the solitude of the fields, or the rustlings of the forest, without a certain sadness as if I were going away from friends.”
Flowers and birds were his delight. Every spring he watched almost impatiently for the first arbutus, anemone, bloodroot, and violet, and enjoyed their short stay with an intensity that years increased rather than abated. The first song of the robin, the first plaintive note of the bluebird, and the sweet lay of the song-sparrow were each year listened for, and eagerly announced to the family with all the enthusiasm of early boyhood. Through the summer he watched and cared, with tender solicitude, for the roses, lilies, dahlias, and chrysanthemum, with the many, many other of the flower-world which he always had about him. And as each in its turn lived out its short span, faded, and fell, he watched the scattering petals almost mournfully, finding consolation only in the certainty of their return another year.
Each season with its many changing moods was a living allegory to him.
Spring was the young child just born, full of smiles, of tears, and winsome ways—the beginnings of life. Summer was early maturity, in which the first promises of fruitage were beginning to be fulfilled. Steadier and more sober, with increasing responsibilities. Fall perfected maturity with its full fruitage. Early winter, extreme old age, lingering at the threshold of the grave. Midwinter, nature’s death, which, like the soul’s, ends not in destruction, but only rests awhile to awaken into a more glorious resurrection.
Nature was to him God’s book wide open, each leaf free and unbound, filled with that which comforted his soul and confirmed his faith.
Not even in evolution, that bugbear of so many of his clerical brethren, did he find anything to disturb his trust in God, his faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, or his confidence in the Bible, as life’s guide-book; but quite the contrary. He found his trust, his faith and confidence, strengthened and enlightened thereby. Many rough places were smoothed, many dark spots enlightened.
In it he saw the highest proof of God’s wonderful wisdom. A mind that could conceive, perfect, and put into operation so wonderful, so simple and yet effective a natural law, could only be divine.
It is not strange that, with his tastes and feelings, a plot of land to cultivate became early a necessity. While not exactly “brought up” on a farm, he was brought into intimate relation with most forms of farm-labor. The small plot of land around his father’s house furnished the field for quite a little practical farming. For in New England every one was expected to raise the greater part of his own vegetables, and the boys, as soon as they were big enough to run around, were expected to contribute their little quota towards the common good.
It was not until he was settled in Indianapolis that Mr. Beecher owned a plot of his own large enough for flowers, fruit, and vegetables. There he worked daily, finding rest from his head-work, fresh air, and healthful exercise, which would alone have more than repaid him for all expense or trouble. Rising before five in the summer, he was out in his garden when most of his neighbors were enjoying the sweet unconsciousness of their morning naps. Aside from the big dividend of increased health and vigor, he was further rewarded by unusual success in raising small fruits and flowers. His roses were a revelation to the community, and lent their fragrance to many an humble home or sick room. For fruit and flowers did pastoral duty, cheering the sick, brightening the dark side of life in many a poverty-cramped family; while the impulse along the line of taste and love for the beautiful, and the feeling of the dignity of honest labor, which he gave to the whole community, we are told is still felt, and will long be remembered as a souvenir of his pastorate in Indianapolis.
His contributions to the theory of gardening and farming in the Indiana Farmer and Gardener we have already referred to in an earlier chapter.
During the first few years of his Brooklyn pastorate he does not seem to have had the time to look about for any place in which to practise his favorite avocation.
Of course the crowded condition of city life precluded the possibility of having either farm or garden near his home. He was accustomed then to visit among friends a part of the time, spending the bulk of the summer in some picturesque place.
The earliest bit of country that lies within our memory was Salisbury, in Connecticut, where Mr. Beecher spent the summers of 1852 and 1853.
We remember well how, with the semi-savagery of early boyhood, we, with our misguided playmates, lay in wait for some frisky guinea-pigs, playing harmlessly in their little pen, and, after capturing a number, transported them to an upper veranda, and, in imitation of the ancient heathen’s treatment of captives, dashed them upon the stones below; and how retribution, in the form of a very indignant father, seized upon our youthful person, and, with the dexterity born of some little practice, gave us a long-abiding illustration of how dreadful a thing was cruelty. There also we obtained our first practical insight into a hornet’s disposition and activity.
Salisbury, doubtless, was a lovely spot, but its memories to us are not cheering, and we pass on.
In 1853 Mr. Beecher purchased his first farm in the East, a plot of ninety-six acres, situated in the town of Lenox, up among the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts. This was known as the “Blossom Farm.” It was justly celebrated for its fine fruit, especially apples. But it did not altogether suit Mr. Beecher, nor tempt him into any great agricultural outlay. It was too far from the city. He could not run up for a day, and back again. He could not be there in spring and seed time, owing to his pastoral duties. Six weeks’ vacation time in midsummer, with an occasional visit of two or three days, was about the limit of his time there. He had to run the farm by proxy, which was about as enjoyable, to him, as employing some one to eat his meals.
Having a chance, in 1857, to sell the place, he did so, and then hired another farm at Matteawan, just back of Fishkill Landing, on the Hudson River. This promised to be a more satisfactory place; but a little over two hours from New York, he could run up and back the same day, and spend many a halfday at work in his garden, from which he was debarred by distance at Lenox. This, doubtless, would have been his country-place, had not some happy chance led him a little further down the river, to Peekskill-on-the-Hudson, just at the entrance to the Highlands. There he found his ideal summer home, on the east side of the river, facing the sunset, but about forty miles from New York; the land rising by a succession of easy hills, terrace-like, six hundred feet above the river level, until one reached the farm a little over a mile and a half from the depot. Although when he first saw it the place was rough, but little cultivated, with gnarled and half-dead apple-trees scattered here and there over it, yet the possibilities were such that on the first inspection he decided to buy. So it came about that in the fall of 1859 he gave up his Matteawan place and bought the hillside at Peekskill, which he named “Boscobel.”
At the foot of his lawn the turnpike runs along a level stretch for nearly a quarter of a mile; from the road the land rises on the north by a gradual, easy grade in graceful lines up to a comparatively level plateau, on which the cottage and the old barns were located, in true old-fashioned style, in happy disregard of either convenience or scenic effect. Taking a fresh start, the grade rose upward again for three or four hundred yards, forming a third level space on top, and then plunged steeply down into the valley of Peeks-kill. From the turnpike the private approach ran up between a double row of stately maples to the very doorstep. This hill was one of the spurs that ran back from the river at right angles to its course—a detached foot-hill of the Highlands.
With the exception of a few acres on the crest of the hill, the farm lay along the south slope, sheltered by its own crest from the north winds, its face to the southern sun. In this Mr. Beecher saw peculiar advantages for early fruit and vegetables, while the view in every direction delighted his eye. From the house, looking west, lay the river, visible only for a mile or so, and lying like a beautiful Swiss lake encircled by protecting mountains. To the south and southeast the landscape was varied and charming—low hills, woodland and green fields, making up a beautiful picture. Whilst from the hill-top, reputed to be the highest point in Westchester County, the country lay out like one great panorama on all sides, the view to the north and west being especially grand; another glimpse of the Hudson being visible just before it is swallowed up by the grim mountains of the Highlands. Over all in the distance rise, blue and faint, the Catskills, whilst to the east the country rolls in graceful, broken stretches for miles.
Such were the general features of the farm when Mr. Beecher bought it.
The house was a low, two-story, wooden farm-house of pre-Revolutionary origin, where, as the legend goes, that sturdy old warrior, Israel Putnam, had his headquarters at one time—a legend strongly corroborated by the silent testimony of cannon-balls, bayonets, and various military trappings from time to time unearthed by the inquisitive and grubbing plough. In the spring of 1860 Mr. Beecher took possession of his new farm of thirty-six acres, and began at once the work of reformation and improvement.
At first the low, scrubby bushes that, under the pretence of bearing edible fruit, had long been allowed to outlive their usefulness, were grubbed up and made into fagots for kindling. Then one by one the trees in the ancient apple-orchard, which Putnam’s patriots had, doubtless, many a time assaulted and carried by storm well-nigh a hundred years before, and which in turn took a sharp and colicky revenge upon their assailants—unless the quality of their fruit had greatly deteriorated in modern times—yielded to the axe, and in the generous open fireplace, the glory of the old-fashioned farm-house, paid their last tribute to their master, man.
The last to fall a victim to axe and fire, and then only when extreme old age and decay had ended its apple-bearing life, and made it a standing menace of danger to all who passed under its rotted branches, was one entitled to special notice. Mr. Beecher wrote of it:
“I have a tree on my place at Peekskill that cannot be less than two hundred years old. Two ladies, one about eighty years old, called upon us several years ago, saying that they had been brought up on the farm, and inquiring if the old apple-tree yet lived. They said that in their childhood it was called ‘the old apple-tree,’ and was then a patriarch. It must now be a Methuselah, and is probably the largest recorded apple-tree in the world. I read in no work of any apple-tree whose circumference exceeds twelve or thirteen feet. This morning I measured the Peekskill apple-tree, and found that, at four feet from the ground, where the limbs begin to spring, it was fourteen feet and ten inches in circumference, and at six feet from the ground fourteen feet and six inches. I am sorry to add that the long-suffering old tree gives unmistakable signs of yielding to the infirmities of old age.” Where the enormous limbs branched out, so great was the space, a summer-house was built, in which the children played keeping house.
Then the old ramshackle barns were taken in hand, with their successive additions hitched on, as more space might be required—architectural after-thoughts, regardless of everything except capacity. Some were torn down, others removed to more convenient and less obtrusive localities—the smaller buildings doing duty for carriages and chickens; the larger ones, with a little ingenuity and the aid of a carpenter or two, being consolidated into one commodious building.
Of course this was the work of several years, and required no little planning and arranging, furnishing that restful change of occupation, from the continuous and intense mental strain, which Mr. Beecher so much needed.
The surface cleared, then began the more serious work of subsoiling, draining, and clearing up of stones. Every inch of the thirty-six acres, save only where trees and buildings stood, was turned over to the subsoil. The deep subsoil plough, with four sturdy oxen to give it force, drove its steel nose twenty inches down into the earth, taking different parts of the farm in successive seasons, each then being seeded down to grass, grain, or vegetables, as the case might be. The loose stones, having first been carefully gathered from the upturned surface, were then utilized in laying gutters by the roadside, in building foundations for barns, sheds, etc., or in making drains—for he found that the live springs that filled the hillside, unless regulated, might make his lawn too damp. So deep drains were sunk across the lower half of the hill in different directions, which carried off the surplus moisture; while under house, barn, and cattle-sheds wells were sunk from eight to ten feet, furnishing a supply of cool, sparkling water, never failing in the dryest summer. With these later improvements began his real gardening and farming; every form of flower, fruit, and vegetable that the latitude would permit was planted and raised. Pears, apples, and grapes, among the fruit, might be said to have been his specialty; between two and three thousand trees and vines were planted, carefully watched, trimmed, and pruned year by year until they came into full bearing, while the smaller fruit, vines, and bushes became well-nigh innumerable. Though he kept the place always well stocked with what might be called the standard crops, he was very fond of taking up, for a year or two, several specialties, devoting his principal attention and study to these until he had pretty thoroughly mastered their habits, peculiarities, and capacities, then for the next year or two take up something else, and so on, gradually in time making a special study of every flower, fruit, and vegetable that could be grown in that latitude.
When strawberries were in hand he tried every variety, early and late, large and small, sweet and tart, and in such numbers that several hundred quarts were often picked in one day. The same was true of pears, apples, plums, peaches, cherries, grapes, raspberries, blackberries, as well as peas, corn, potatoes, cabbages, etc.
After one class of fruit or vegetable had had its turn, it was not neglected, but one or two of the varieties found best adapted to the locality were retained (except in the large fruit-trees, of which a large assortment was always kept), and only sufficient planted to supply the family with about four times as much as could possibly be used; for, unless there was enough of everything, so that each person in the family at the time might, if so inclined, make a meal of any one thing, he would not touch it. “Skimpy messes,” as he used to call them, were his utter abomination. But the thing that gave him the greatest pleasure was to beat his neighbors in early crops. Across the turnpike, at the foot of the lane, for many years lived a very dear friend, Mr. George Dayton, a gentleman of means, well skilled in every phase of scientific farming; and between the two was carried on, so long as Mr. Dayton lived, a most earnest rivalry on the subject of farming. Nothing delighted Mr. Beecher more than to gather a basket of peas, a large dish of strawberries, or a dozen ears of corn, the first of the season, that had ripened just a day or two ahead of Mr. Dayton’s, and bringing them down to his friend’s, deliver them to him, as, with an air of mock sympathy, he condoled with him over his inability to raise early vegetables or fruit; then, with a hearty laugh, invite him up on to the hillside to learn how a farm should be run. The natural advantages of his location, sheltered from the north and open to the first warm breezes from the south, generally gave him these pleasant triumphs by two or three days; though once in a while the tables would be turned, and he had to take his turn at being bantered and receiving his friend’s so-called charity.
We confess we used to prefer these infrequent reverses, for our youthful eyes watched regretfully the dishful of great, luscious strawberries going in triumphal procession to Mr. Dayton’s. We used to think that the first fruits, like charity, should be tried at home, and had to find such guilty consolation as we could in a surreptitious visit to the strawberry-bed. This was not altogether satisfactory, for aside from the attendant risks, the remaining berries would only be half-ripe.
At the same time he bought the place it was his good fortune to meet an English gardener, Mr. Thomas J. Turner, and to secure his services as superintendent, or “boss,” as he was known to the men—one of those simple-minded, faithful, hard-working men, who never spared himself, nor his subordinates. His devoted attachment to the family and the place—“Our farm” he used to call it—made him an invaluable helper.
For flowers and ornamental shrubs Turner had at first but little taste; his great ambition was to make the farm “pay,” and the contest for supremacy between master and man caused much amusement to all parties.
Turner was always trying to extend the borders of his pea and potato patches, encroaching on the hollyhocks and dahlias, while Mr. Beecher would crowd the corn and lima beans to make more room for roses and pinks.
How Mr. Beecher outwitted his opponent we will let him narrate:
“I am as set and determined to have flowers as my farmer, Mr. Turner, is to have vegetables; and there is a friendly quarrel in hand all the season, a kind of border warfare, between flowers and vegetables—which shall have this spot, and which shall secure that nook; whether in this southern slope it shall be onions or gladioluses; whether a row of lettuce shall edge that patch, or of asters. I think, on a calm review, that I have rather gained on Mr. Turner. The fact is, I found that he had me at a disadvantage, being always on the place and having the whole spring to himself. So I shrewdly tampered with the man himself, and before he knew what he was about, I had infected him with the flower mania (and this is a malady that I have never known cured), so that I had an ally in the very enemy’s camp. Indeed, I begin to fear that my manager will get ahead of me yet in skill and love of flowers!”
In the years when corn, cabbage, or potatoes were being specialized Turner was happy. With a proud and beaming face he would drive down to the local market, load after load of choice vegetables. His cup of happiness would overflow when he returned and announced that “our vegetables” brought the best price of any in the market.
But, alas! like many a man before him, his pride became, figuratively speaking, his ruin; for after a while the fact was discovered that Turner was selecting the largest and fairest for the market, and that the home table had to be content with second and third rates, too poor to sell with credit. That ended all further farming for profit. From that time on nothing further was raised for the market.
As full of interest as every process connected with farming and fruit culture was, Mr. Beecher’s greatest pleasure was in the cultivation of flowers and ornamental shrubs. Their ever-varying form, their delicate perfume, and, above all, their abounding wealth of color, furnished him a bouquet of which he never tired. Roses were perhaps his standard favorites, and, whatever other specialty he might be studying, they were kept up always. Of these he wrote:
“All rosedom is out in holiday attire, and roses white and black, green and pink, scarlet, crimson, and yellow, striped and mottled, double and single, in clusters and solitary, moss-roses, damask roses, Noisette, Perpetual, Bourbon, China, tea, musk, and all other tribes and names, hang in exuberant beauty. The air is full of their fragrance. The eye can turn nowhere that it is not attracted to a glowing bush of roses. What would not people shut up in cities give to see such luxuriance of beauty!... The wonder is that every other man is not an enthusiast, and in the month of June a gentle fanatic. Floral insanity is one of the most charming inflictions to which man is heir. The garden is infectious. Flowers are ‘catching,’ or the love of them is. Men begin with one or two. In a few years they are struck through with floral zeal. And one finds, after the heat, and strife, and toil of his ambitious life, that there is more pure satisfaction in his garden than in all the other pursuits that promise so much of pleasure and yield so little.”
In different years he tested every variety of form and color which could be found in the single and double hollyhocks, single and double dahlias, phlox, geraniums, pansies, lilies, fuchsias, and chrysanthemum, sometimes massed in great banks of color, sometimes scattered in different beds and along borders, or in little beds hidden amid the shrubbery. From early May till frost came, “Boscobel” was always ablaze with the glories of flowers in their different seasons.
It is given to few to understand, and fewer still to experience, the wonderful effect which flowers had upon him. Fagged with hard work, vexed with cares, with nerves strained and irritated, a few hours among his flowers rested his brain, soothed his nerves, and refitted him for days of hard work. Doubtless change of occupation, open air, and the slight physical exertion required in tending his pets, did something towards rest and recreation; but there was a subtle power in many colors that worked upon his nerves in a strangely mysterious way, that gave him more relief from nerve excitement in an hour than any drug ever compounded. Flowers and colored gems—which he called unfading flowers—possessed this soothing power above everything else.
In his younger days his farming and gardening experiences were intimately associated with hard physical work. But after he had settled at “Boscobel” the number and pressure of his regular engagements made farm labor, except by proxy, impossible. He worked some, it is true, but principally for exercise; the real use and benefit of the farm being its sweet and soothing restfulness.
His description of his “work” and the unalloyed pleasure he found in “farming” needs no enlarging:
“The light is just coming. I do not care for that, as I do not propose to get up at such an hour. But the birds do care. They evidently wind up their singing apparatus over-night, for when the first bird breaks the silence, in an instant the rest go off as if a spring had been touched which moved them all. There are robins without count, wood-thrushes, orioles, sparrows, bobolinks, meadow-larks, bluebirds, yellowbirds, wrens, warblers, catbirds (as the Northern mocking-bird is called), martins, twittering swallows. Think of the noise made by mixing all these bird-notes together; add a rooster and a solemn old crow to carry the base; then consider that of each kind there are scores, and of some hundreds, within ear-reach, and you will have some faint conception of the opening chant of the day. You may not think that I wake so early, but I do; or, having awakened, I again go to sleep, but I solemnly do. I don’t think of getting up before six.
“After breakfast there are so many things to be done first that I neglect them all. The morning is so fine, the young leaves are so beautiful, the bloom on the orchard is so gorgeous, the sounds and sights are so many and so winning, that I am apt to sit down on the veranda for just a moment, and for just another, and for a series of them, until an hour goes by. Do not blame me! Do not laugh at such farming and such a farmer.
“The soil overhead bears larger and better crops, for a sensible man, than does the soil under-feet. There are blossoms in the clouds. There is fruit upon invisible trees, to those who know how to pluck it.
“But then sky-gazing and this dallying with the landscape will not do. What crowds of things require the eye and hand! Flowers must be transplanted. Flower-seeds must be sown; shrubs and trees pruned; vines looked after; a walk taken over the hill to see after some evergreens, with many pauses to gaze upon the landscape, and many birds watched as they are confidentially exhibiting their domestic traits before you. The kittens, too, at the barn must be visited, the calf, and the new cow. Then every gardener knows how much time is consumed in watching the new plants. For instance, I have eight new kinds of strawberries that need looking after, each one purporting to be a world’s wonder. I am quite anxious about eight or ten new kinds of clematis, two new species of honeysuckle, eight or ten new and rare evergreens, and ever so many other things, shrubs and flowers.
“But what shall I say of the new peas, new beans, rare cucumbers, early melons, extraordinary potatoes? Do you not see that it is impossible for me, amid such incessant and weighty cares, to write? The air is white with apple-blossoms; the trees are all singing; the steaming ground beseeches me to grant it a portion of flower-seeds; by night the whippoorwill, and by day the wood-thrush and mocking-bird, fill my imagination with all sorts of fancies, and how can I write?”
After a number of years Mr. Beecher began to think that he would like to build a house that should embody his ideal of what a home should be—a real homestead whose hospitable largeness could readily accommodate all the children and the children’s children, and which in design, in finish and decoration, should be an education for his children. Several years were spent in talking over plans and examining designs proposed by architects before the final plan was adopted. Then the Tilton conspiracy broke out, and for a short time deferred the proposed building. But the need of some diverting occupation, something that should change the entire current of his thoughts, became so decided that in self-defence he began building the new house. On that peaceful hillside, amid the busy workmen, he found a grateful asylum and refuge from the tempest with which his enemies had sought to destroy him.
It has never been doubted in his family, that the relief which he found in the pure air, the beautiful scenery, the sweet communion with flowers and birds, at Peekskill, with his engrossing interest in “the house,” saved his life during those years when the burden was the heaviest.
He has often said that he never spent money more profitably than in building his new house and in laying out his grounds.
Stone by stone and brick by brick he watched the foundations and the lower stories rise. Each floor-beam, joist, and girder received his zealous scrutiny. The reasons for this, and the causes for that, he must know all about; until, long before the house was finished, he was, barring the manual dexterity, as good a mason or carpenter as the best of those at work. Every day, and often a dozen times a day, he climbed from cellar to ridge-pole, studying, investigating, making suggestions, or proposing alterations—these latter the terror of his architect; for, though often decided improvements on the first plans, they sometimes involved a serious modification of the work in hand. Every gentleman who visited him must make the tour clear to the ridge-pole, for there the view was finest. Once, when a young man was his visitor and victim, he insisted that they should mount the lofty but unfinished chimney to get a little more extended outlook, setting the example himself; but his companion, who was hugging a firmly-secured cross-tie, in momentary fear of losing his balance and falling, declared that he drew the line at the chimney, and would aspire no higher.
When finally the house was up came the internal finishing and decoration. Nothing was omitted that, in his opinion, would increase comfort or convenience; while, in the decorative and ornamental finish, he aimed at results which should educate the eye and tastes of his children.
“Boscobel” was to be the family home, and ultimately his permanent residence, for then he used to say that when he reached seventy, he proposed to retire from the public and devote his closing years to literary work.
Here children and grandchildren were together each summer, pilgrims to this domestic Mecca. The house must be large enough to hold them all, and friends besides, without crowding; and it was, twenty and twenty-five being no unusual number gathered within its walls. And on one occasion, when a clerical union was invited to meet at “Boscobel,” thirty were, with a little ingenious packing, entertained over-night.
It was not until the summer of 1878 that the workmen were finally dispossessed and the family entered into the new house. What a sense of expansion we all experienced! We looked back upon the humble little cottage, hallowed by so many years full of enjoyment, and wondered how it could ever have held us all—something as a butterfly, with broad, expanded wings, might contemplate its empty chrysalis, surprised that it had lived so long, cramped within so small a compass.
The richness of the wall-paper and the delicacy of the frescoing would not permit the hanging of pictures, while Mr. Beecher’s love of the beautiful would not permit him to rest quiet until he had found some way of further decoration appropriate to his walls. This led him to the study of the various ornamental ceramics. China, Japan, England and France, Germany and America, were each laid under contribution for its characteristic productions. Fortunately he had made his mantel-pieces broad and high, with many little shelves and brackets, convenient resting-places for vases, cups, and bowls. Once the house was complete came the final work of improvement—the landscape, grading, planting ornamental shrubs, and laying out of his lawn, whose ten acres spread out before the new house. The trimming of trees and shrubs into fantastic or mathematical figures, and strict regularity of path and plot, he detested. Landscape-gardening should be only an assistant to nature, not a remodeller.
On this theory he laid out his place. In the changing of grades, grouping of shrubs, planting of tangled copses, he sought to give to everything the appearance of natural growth and formation.
Having taken up ornamental trees and plants, with his usual thoroughness he exhausted the subject. Every tree and shrub that with reasonable care could be made to grow on that favored place was planted. And so skilfully and naturally have they been grouped that, though there are over sixteen hundred of the ornamental varieties growing within the limits of those thirty-six acres, they are not crowded, and nearly twenty acres are free for grass, vegetables, and fruit.
It was stated by an experienced landscape-gardener, in 1884, that, with the exception of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, no collection similar in extent and variety could then be found in America.
Of course this building, improving, and planting called for a constant and heavy outlay of money. It was in part to meet this that he projected and carried out the series of lecture-tours that ran through the last ten years of his life.
In the commercial sense of the word his farming was not profitable. He spent upon his place many thousands of dollars that never came back to him in coin or currency. His receipts were of the kind not to be found in the open market, not affected by the flurries in “The Street”; neither defaulting cashier nor stock-jobbing speculator could depreciate or lessen them.
If money be valued at the amount of comfort and happiness it affords, then the thousands lavished on his beloved home were well spent, for seldom has the same amount given so much of real, healthful happiness, and to so many.
None outside of the family will ever know to how many “Boscobel” was a veritable tower of refuge in dark days and troublous times; how many found inspiration there for greater work, and increased courage for burden-bearing; whilst to Mr. Beecher it was an investment that repaid him, in dividends of life-lengthening rest, reinvigoration, and happiness, many hundred per cent. No wonder that he loved every spear of grass, every budding leaf and perfumed flower, upon that hillside. They were his children, at least by adoption. No wonder that the birds, and even the very insects, his uninvited summer guests, were dear to him; and that each fall, as he turned his back upon the summer and the hillside, to enter again into the harassing turmoils of city life, his thoughts ran back in gratitude to the many friends that had contributed so much to his happiness:
“Neither can a sensitive nature forget his summer companions, or stint them in their meed of praise and gratitude. Worms whose metamorphosis we have watched; spiders whose webs glitter along the grass at morning and at evening, or mark out geometric figures among the trees—spiders red, brown, black, green, gray, yellow, and speckled; soft-winged moths; gorgeous butterflies, steel-colored and shining black crickets, locusts and grasshoppers, and all the rabble of creaking, singing, fiddling fellows besides, which swarm in air and earth—we bid you all a hearty good-by. Sooth to say, we part from some of you without regret. But for the million we feel a true yearning, so much have we watched your ways, so many hours has our soul been fed by you through our eyes. Ye are a part of the great Father’s family.
“Oh! how goodly a book is that which God has opened in this world! Every day is a separate leaf—nay, not leaf, but volume, with text, and note, and picture, with every dainty quip and quirk of graceful art, with stores of knowledge illimitable, if one will only humble himself to receive it! One should not willingly be ungrateful, even to the smallest creatures or to inanimate objects that have served his pleasure.
“And so, to reed and grass, bush and tree, stone and hill, brook and lake, all creeping things and all things that fly, to early birds and late-chirping locusts, we wave our hand in grateful thanks!
“But to that Providence over all, source of their joy and mine, what words can express what every manly heart must feel?
“Only the life itself can give thanks for life.”
While house, flowers, and plants occupied the greater part of his farming time, they by no means monopolized it. He took a very deep interest in his chickens. White Leghorns, Buff Cochins, and Brown Brahmas, out of the many kinds that he tried, were the final favorites, and repaid him well in eggs—the universal hen currency—for his pains and care. Of these he wrote:
“It is a day for the country; the city palls on the jaded nerve. I long to hear the hens cackle. There are lively times now in barn and barn-yard, I’ll warrant you.... The Leghorn, of true blood, leads the race of fowls for continuous eggs, in season and out of season—eggs large enough, of fine quality, and sprung from hens that never think of chickens. For a true Leghorn seldom wants to sit. They believe in division of labor. If they provide the eggs, others must hatch them.... The Brahmas and Cochins have good qualities. They are large, even huge. They are peaceable. And the Cochins do not scratch—an important fact to all who have gardens.... But a more ungainly thing than Buff Cochins the eye never saw. A flock of Leghorns is a delight to the eye; their forms are symmetrical, and every motion graceful. But the fat, podgy Cochins waddle before you like over-fat buffoons. They are grotesque, good-natured, clumsy, useful creatures, with a great love of sitting. We keep Cochin hens to sit on Leghorn eggs.”
So long as he raised chickens in the good old-fashioned, orthodox way he was very successful; but when, one unlucky day, he fell into the hands of the agent of some patent chicken-breeding process, his sorrows began.
The hatcher and brooder appeared in due time, with trays, tin pans, heater, self-regulating thermometer, and enough other paraphernalia to hatch out an ostrich. Three hundred selected eggs were taken for the first experiment, carefully stowed in the trays, the heat turned on, the regulating thermometer put in gear; then we all stood back and gazed in wondering admiration upon the machine which was to grind out chickens like a mill. Our impatience could hardly be restrained to await the eventful day when the shells should crack, and the downy occupants come tumbling out of the trays; while visions of tender broiled chickens, chickens roasted, stewed, and fricasseed without limit, danced through our exultant minds. Three hundred spring chickens! Phew! And the process could be repeated indefinitely.
At last the long-expected day arrived when, according to the regulations, all well-behaved eggs should hatch.
Mons laboravit et—no, not a mouse, but one solitary little chicken came forth. Two hundred and ninety-nine good eggs had gone wrong!
The second trial resulted better: one in every ten responded at the roll-call. But even these found this cold world uncongenial, and, what with the pips, gapes, and other maladies incident to chicken babyhood, their little band rapidly diminished to zero. But these discouragements only stimulated Mr. Beecher to greater effort, determined that, if the machine could be made to work, he would make it. It would be hard to say what the upshot might have been, had not the machine, one fine night, started off on an original plan of its own, with a view to forcing the eggs, which resulted in burning the hatcher, chicken-house, part of a barn, and nearly cleaning out the entire general establishment. After that the hens had a monopoly of the hatching business.
With his cattle he was uniformly successful, no one having invented any calf-hatching machine. For many years he raised nothing but Ayrshires—very handsome cows and very generous milkers—but finally he began to try the Jerseys, and never after changed from them. Their beautiful deer-like heads, small, graceful limbs, and kindly dispositions made them universal favorites; while their milk, scant in quantity but wonderfully rich in cream, made berry-time a marked season of the year. As he never cared to keep more than six or eight cows, he had each year to sell several heifers; these, thanks to the kindness of Mr. Kittredge, his next-door neighbor, having been registered in the Jersey stock-book, sold for large prices.
No farm so well stocked with flowers should be without its bees; so about eight years ago he purchased four hives of Italian bees, had a proper shed erected, and the bees duly installed.
After a few preliminary experiments he delegated the care and culture of bees to our hands. The necessity of appearing in his pulpit at regular stated times, with a face reasonably free from distortion, compelled him to forego the pleasure and exercise of caring for and dodging bees. But if he found it prudent to turn the bees over to others, he none the less enjoyed watching his proxy, making humorous suggestions—from a convenient distance. Though he did not himself handle them, he kept himself fully posted respecting their habits. All that the text-books could teach he learned, and then would question us as to our actual experience. Whenever a hive swarmed he was on hand, if at the farm, and none were more interested in capturing the swarm than he.
As we have intimated, his bees sometimes showed a want of respect for “the cloth,” and an inappreciation of his friendly interest. At these times he joined as heartily as the less interested spectators in the laugh raised at his expense; for there seems to be something irresistibly comical in the sight of a full-grown man waging a hopeless war with a mere mite of a bee. His relish for the humorous could not be stayed even by the smart of a bee’s sting, while a little patience was sure to afford him a chance to return the laugh with interest.
On one occasion an enormous swarm had settled on the lower limbs of a cherry-tree, just over the place where an unconscious calf was tethered and peacefully browsed. By some strange freak the swarm dropped from the limb upon the unsuspecting calf. Fortunately, while swarming, bees are not apt to be aggressive. The calf, terrified at this crawling mass so suddenly enveloping it, began to bleat and rush frantically around as far as its chain would permit. The bees, at last annoyed at the shaking up they received, began to remonstrate in a very pointed manner. Matters were momentarily growing more and more serious for the calf, when one of the farm-hands, happening by, rushed in, with more zeal than discretion, trying to free the calf; before he could unfasten the chain the calf succeeded in entangling him, finally tripping him up and falling with him to the ground, a confused mass of calf, bees, and Irishman. Fortunately another man ran in, and, pulling up the spike to which the chain was fastened, released them all. Happily no one was seriously hurt, but the final rescuer, with face and hands still smarting, meeting Mr. Beecher, burst out, in somewhat incoherent excitement: “Those domded bees have murthered the calf, an’ Kelly’s kilt and gone to h——— the other way.”
Mr. Beecher was never able to get any satisfactory explanation as to what the “other way” was.
Between the Jerseys and the bees, Boscobel soon became a land veritably flowing with milk and honey.
No account of the Peekskill home would be complete without some mention of the dogs. Like all true lovers of nature, Mr. Beecher was very fond of dogs, and generally had a fairly large family on hand.
From Bruno and Jack, two canine giants—one a St. Bernard and the other half Russian bloodhound and half mastiff—to the little, wiggling mite of a diminutive black-and-tan, all bark and wiggle, through all the intervening grades of size and kind—mastiff, colly, Esquimaux, and terrier—one thing only was insisted upon invariably: the dog must be kind and gentle to children. He might be ever so homely, ever so useless, and he would be petted and loved; but if he once snapped at the little ones who tumbled over him, pulling tail and ears, the fiat went forth, as irrevocable as the laws of the Medes and Persians—banishment or death. He loved to watch them frolicking among themselves or with the children, chasing and being chased. With them he would take long walks, and often sit upon the bank and talk to the companion who, with ears pricked up and wagging tail, seemed almost to understand him. Of one he once wrote:
“I have a four-legged heathen on my place—‘Tommy.’ He is a most intelligent and a most discriminating little dog; he is a gentleman in disguise, and I am really sorry for him that he cannot talk. If ever there was a dog that was distressed to think that he could not talk, that dog is. I sit by him on the bank, of a summer evening, and I say, ‘Tommy, I am sorry for you’; and he whines, as much as to say, ‘So am I.’ I say, ‘Tommy, I should like to tell you a great many things that you are worthy of knowing’; and I do not know which is the most puzzled, he or I—I to get any idea into his head, or he to get any out of mine; but there it is: I know what he thinks, and he knows not what I think. He knows that there is something above a dog, and he manifests his canine uneasiness by whining, and in other ways. His aspiration shows itself from his ears to his tail. He longs to be something more and better; he yearns to occupy a larger sphere; but, after all, he does not, and he cannot.”
To the children “Boscobel” was a beautiful home, filled with everything that could educate the eye and taste, and cultivate the love of the beautiful in nature; made doubly dear by the daily association with our father in his happiest and brightest moods.
To the friends for whom its doors were ever open it was a delightful, to its owner a veritable haven of rest.
From its commanding height he looked out upon the country lying below and beyond, with the eye of ownership; for he used to say: “I own all I can see. I enjoy all that there is of beauty and peacefulness in my neighbor’s lands as much as they, without the responsibility or the taxes.” This, he declared, was the most profitable kind of land-owning.
Chapter XXXI
Home Life—Love of Children—His Method of Training and Education—Formation of Library and Art Collection—Personal Traits.
To the public Mr. Beecher was best known as the eloquent preacher and speaker, the fearless advocate of right and foe to wrong, the champion of the weak and oppressed, a friend to all mankind. But it was only to those who knew him in his home-life that the softer and sweeter sides of his nature were fully revealed. For his home and family he had the deepest and most tender affection. Though brought up in New England, where respectful reverence from child to parent was often carried to such an extreme that the father was almost unapproachable to his children, he retained none of the puritanical austerity that largely filled the social atmosphere of Connecticut seventy years ago, partly because in his own home there was more of the feeling of fellowship between the father and children, but more especially because his intense love for children swept away all barriers of cold formality. To his own he was the companion and playfellow, the partner in every joy, the comforter in every sorrow. Patient in unravelling those mysteries of mind and matter that perplex the early life of every healthful child, he never answered their childish wonderings with the impatient “don’t bother me,” which too often checks that curiosity which is nature’s mode of self-education, and which often makes childhood one long, continuous “why.”
Every little prattler was his by love’s adoption. In more than a score of households he was the “Grandpa” par excellence, often sadly interfering, we fear, with the rules of government; for, by tacit consent between parents, children, and “Grandpa,” he was superior to all nursery regulations. His consent, and often co-operation, was a warrant of pardon for any and all pranks and escapades committed thereunder.
He was always very careful to exercise this power along the line of healthy sport, in little pranks that gave amusement to all, but at the same time leading the boys to be more manly and the girls to be more womanly. Many a young man and woman today looks back upon those bright days of their childhood with deep and tender affection, and sees where, in what seemed then mere sport and fun, they had caught the inspiration for higher and nobler living.
In this childhood’s Utopia things were sometimes strangely transposed. Nothing would at first more surprise a stranger, in whose memory still lingered pungent recollections of early discipline, than to see a troop of children pounce down upon Mr. Beecher, clamoring with shouts and laughter for a whipping. He remembered that shouts and clamor were constant concomitants in the execution of domestic penalties in his early days, but nothing in his experience recalled laughter in that connection.
The mystery would soon be explained, when, with mock frowns and assumed violence, the children were seized, twirled and tumbled into a row along the wall; and ordered to hold out each right hand; one after another each hand was seized and several blows administered—with a stick of candy. Of course the sticks did not get away. The rods were not spared, and we don’t think that any of the children were spoiled.
And the stranger, as with quiet smile he looks upon them, wonders, after all, if parents resorted to that kind of whipping more, whether the increased feeling of good-fellowship would not render the need of the other kind less frequent.
In the training of his own children he seldom resorted to actual physical punishment, and then only when the little culprit had been guilty of some especially aggravated offence. But when he did resort to the laying on of hands, he entered into it with great earnestness. Dishonesty, falsehood, cruelty, and meanness of every kind were capital offences. The sinner did not lose his head in such cases, but some other parts of his person were so actively stimulated, that standing became the most comfortable position for a long time thereafter. These little rencounters naturally produced profound impressions. We were not apt to invite another by repeating that particular offence.
We well remember some experiments in natural philosophy, conducted by us when about six or seven years old, in which a kitten and a tub of water figured prominently, some features of which, bordering on the barbarous, we will omit. Just then our father came along, and—well, things were generally reversed, including the youthful experimenter. The kitten was fished out, and we had it so thoroughly impressed upon our understanding that kittens won’t swim under water, that we do not remember to have experimented any further in that direction.
After these profoundly impressionable interviews he would talk earnestly and lovingly to the culprit, declaring that it hurt him more to punish than it did the sinner to be punished—which we can well believe now, from our knowledge of his deep and tender loving-kindness, and from the similar duties time has brought to us. Then it used to seem strongly paradoxical, measuring his pain by our still smarting skin we generously thought that we would willingly have foregone any benefits derived from the experience, and have spared him so much suffering.
Happily, these graver cases were infrequent. The minor misdemeanors from childhood’s restless carelessness were generally met with quiet, gentle talks, the mischief fully explained with all its whys and wherefores; the little penitent being finally dismissed with a kiss, honestly and heartily determined to keep out of mischief, and succeeding, by great effort, for an hour or two, until he tumbled into something else. With such cases the father’s patience was infinite.
As the children grew older he was untiring in his care that they should form those habits of body, mind, and morals that should make them strong, useful, and moral men and women. He stimulated their natural curiosity, but at the same time taught them to be self-helpful. If a question were asked that could be answered by any book that he had, the questioner was sent for it, and told, “Now read that carefully, and tell me what you learn; I want to know it, too;” adding: “Information which you get when your attention is fully aroused, and for which you have to stop and take some little trouble, you will be pretty sure to remember.”
“Never ask a question,” he used to say, “if you can find the answer yourself, but never hesitate to ask if you can’t find it: remember always you have a tongue in your head.”
His letters to the absentees at school and college were full of well-considered advice, and well illustrate what we have referred to:
“I am more glad than I can express that you feel so much interest in religious meetings, and I hope that God will lead you to embrace with your whole soul a religious life. It is the only way to perfect honor and to the highest truth and duty. Religion is only the highest use and regulation of every faculty. To love God and live in true benevolence toward men is the very way to make yourself wise, happy, and good.... In all your own personal conduct act upon conscience, and do not try to please yourself merely, but to do what is right, and because it is right. Towards your companions, in all things, seek to be unselfish, kind in little things, studying their good and not your own.... One word as to reading your Bible. You must not regard the book with superstition, and imagine that you will get good by merely reading it. You must remember that it is a very large and widespread book; many things will not be of service to you yet. It has something in it for every age and all circumstances.... Every day try to put in practice something that you read in the Bible. Remember that being a Christian does not take away anything that is innocent and joyous, but only adds to them higher and nobler joys.”
“MY DEAR ———:
“I am glad that you have found a pleasant friend in the minister. It seems fit that the son of a minister, whose father’s father was a minister, should have a liking for ministers. I am glad, too, that you are fortunate in having a man who is sensible enough to understand that a Christian is not less than a man. Whatever it is right for anybody to do, it is right for a Christian to do; and what a Christian gentleman may not do, nobody has a right to do. Religion regulates our pursuits and pleasures, but does not destroy them....
“You are fifteen years old; that is close upon manhood. I have no doubt that you begin to look at times quite seriously toward the future. But fidelity to the present is the best preparation for the future. Do everything thoroughly. Do not be a superficial scholar. Go to the roots of everything you study.
“As to profanity out of doors, I should not, in ordinary cases, meddle much, especially in a way that should seem as though you owned the boy, or were responsible for his conduct. Nothing is more provoking to a young person than to have people assume authority over them in moral things. But in your own room it is different; profanity there is an intrusion on your rights, and is not to be tolerated. If kind measures will not check it, then peremptory ones should. I would say to such a one: ‘You must take your choice, to find some other room or to observe the decencies of life here!’ ... Now as to your studies. It is not mainly the time employed, but the concentration of mind, that induces rapid progress. Mere scholars study without great grasp and sharp and quick application of thought. They take two hours to do what could better be done in one. In part this capacity of rapid comprehension and accurate perception depends upon one’s native endowments, but it depends even more on habit and training. While you seek primarily accuracy, you should steadily aim with it to accelerate your process, to see quicker, think quicker, decide quicker. But if you study intensely you must take much air. Don’t be tempted to give up a wholesome air-bath, a good walk, or skate, or ride every day. It will pay you back over your books, by freshness, elasticity, and clearness of mind. I have noticed that lessons which require acuteness and memory both, are best gotten by studying them the last thing before going to bed, and then taking hold again early in the morning. That which we study just before sleeping seems to come out in strong relief the next day, if we renew the impression by going over the work again. For difficult tasks, then, take this hint: go over just before sleeping, and review in the morning. But, again, take care of health; learning in a broken body is like a sword without a handle, like a load in a broken-wheeled cart, like artillery with no gun-carriage.”
“But, my dear fellow, there is one thing that will be hard, but that is to be the root of all success and enjoyment—viz., the habit of boning down to things which you don’t like. In all your after-life, your success will depend upon your ability to do things which you do not particularly like to do. In other words, duty must become your watchword, and not pleasure or liking.”
“I wish, at the beginning of your college course, to say a few words which, if you will read over once in a while, may help you. You are not in college for the sake of its pleasures, or for form’s sake, but to have your whole intellectual nature roused up and brought into efficient drill. No matter what powers one has by nature, he requires thorough drill to know how to use them. It is not wise for you to choose a profession, long before you have any knowledge of yourself, with such thoroughness as is needful. You are not grown yet inwardly. You do not know your own powers and adaptations. The business of life is too serious to be settled upon before one knows anything about his fitness for one or another’s course.... Bear in mind that life is given you not to be trifled with. God will hold you to strict account for the use you make of your endowments.
“You were sent into life to work and be useful, not to frolic and enjoy yourself. You are drawing near the time when you must begin life for yourself. My dear boy, your own soul, your honor, and your father’s name are committed to your keeping. Guard them from dishonor. May God have you in his holy keeping!”
“I want to say a word to you about your style. In every energetic nature, the style, in its essential spirit, will follow a man’s disposition. So it is somewhere said that ‘style is the man.’ But while this is true of its spirit, yet its external form may be much modified and improved by attention and care. Now, you have never apparently made this a matter of thought, and still less of study.
“I am not going to recommend, in addition to your other studies, that you should read on style, but only this: that in conversation and in your letters you should begin to consider ease, fulness, grace, and scrupulous accuracy. I wish you would get from the library a copy of Cowper’s letters and read them, and some of them many times. See what interest he throws around trivial things by an elegant way of narrating them. He draws pictures, he puts daily trifles in an artistic light. He is as thorough and complete in each instance as if it were a great historical event, instead of being a rabbit’s play, a bird’s freak, or a tea-table affair. The simplicity of his style, its purity and clearness, its accuracy, as clear cut as is the finest cut-glass goblet, are worthy of notice and imitation. Now, the first step towards improvement is a consciousness of its necessity, then an instant attempt at it. Suppose you make your letters a means of practice; see that nothing is stated in an awkward or slovenly way; leave nothing merely hinted and left for the reader to make out as best he can; and, generally, make it a rule never in letters, nor even in the mere sketchy memoranda for the purpose of study, nor in your note-book, to do things carelessly. Form the habit of stating things clearly, and in scrupulously accurate and grammatical language; you have formed the habit of not letting your lips tell falsehoods; now do not let your pen do so either, nor let it tell half-truths, nor grotesque truths, but pure and simple truths, as they are. That is good style.”
To a young friend who had much artistic ability, but who was discouraged because it was not of the highest grade, he wrote:
“Your note pained me for your sake, as it indicated a bad state of ideality. The sense of the beautiful and of the perfect was designed to stimulate and not to discourage effort. We are not to aim at the highest, but the highest attainable by us. Here, however, comes in that pride of which you speak, and which is unwise, inartistic, unchristian.
“Now, the province of art may be said to be to make homely things handsome, and good things beautiful.
“The power or the gift of the artist is not to glorify himself, but to make the way of human life smoother to tender feet. While, then, high art has an important function, so has decorative art. It is the democratic form of art—i.e., the form which allies it to Christianity.
“Washing the feet is not an agreeable but a most necessary act. ‘If I, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another’s,’ etc. It is the keynote of Christianity that one should be willing to serve, not rule. Christ ‘emptied Himself of reputation,’ ‘took upon Him the form of a servant.’
”You are not willing to do things which give pleasure to common people. You are not willing to make plain people happy, to make common homes more cheerful and beautiful. You do not join ideality to benevolence, but to self-adoring pride. If you could perform great works, you would be willing to toil, and even suffer. Being unable to do that, you are not willing to perform the gentler offices of art, the sweetest and most womanly, and give hues and colors to those homely implements that every-day life needs.
“If I had your gifts and your calling, I think that every day I should send thanks to God that, though I could not do great things, I could do that which would cheer daily human life, that would cast a ray of beauty along the homely path where the poor must walk.
“It seems to me that your eyes are holden, and that you do not see God’s angel sent to you, saying, ‘Will you not be a worker together with God, for all, and for the lowly first?’ You push him away and say, with bitterness, ‘Let me help the strong, the high, the rich, or let me die.’
“It is a wicked pride, and you must be born again, and repeatedly, until you can say to your Lord, ‘I will follow Thee in Thy poverty, in Thy humiliation, and if need be I will die to the highest ambition, that I may with my whole soul work for the lowly and in a lowly way!’
“Idealized pride.
“Idealized conscience.
“These are your enemies. They stand between you and your life’s work—between you and Him who died for you.
“I would never have taken the trouble to write this, if I did not love you so much, and did not hope to see you yet one day, ‘clothed and in your right mind, sitting at the feet of Jesus.’”
It was his idea that home should be a training-school for his children, by precept, example, and by object-teaching. Partly in gratification of his own love of learning and of the beautiful, but more for the training of the family and development of correct tastes in all departments of literature and art, he covered his walls with paintings, etchings, and engravings; when wall-space gave out, portfolios, drawers, and cabinets were filled with the choicest specimens of art that he could find—not with the zeal of a collector, who seeks the rare merely for its rarity, but because the thing itself was beautiful, or illustrated some type or period of art. As a result his collection of prints furnished a good illustration of etching and engraving, from the earliest rude woodcuts of the fifteenth century, through the various growths of improvement, down to the parchment proofs of the modern etcher. Dürer, Rembrandt, Ostade, Wille, Schöngauer, and many others, exemplified the old school, while through a multitude of the French, German, Italian, and English artists were traced the growths of modern art. All the wall-space that could be spared from the paintings and framed engravings was devoted to book-cases well filled. The ancient and the English classics were well-nigh complete, and every modern writer of note, in any department of learning, could find upon Mr. Beecher’s shelves the best of his brain’s offspring. As in art, so in literature, he bought nothing because it was rare, but only because it would gratify the higher tastes or could teach something. The student in any department of art, science, manufacture, agriculture, medicine, or theology would find in Mr. Beecher’s library the best authorities in his special branch of study, and generally with the marks of careful reading apparent upon their pages; while the professional man, whose life had been devoted to the study and practice of his particular profession, has often wondered how Mr. Beecher could have found it possible, with his many duties, to acquire a theoretic knowledge, in that branch of learning, so accurate and comprehensive. The solution of the mystery lay in the fact that he never had to learn a thing twice. The knowledge he acquired he retained. He was remarkably watchful and observant was deeply interested in everything that was going on about him; and when he became interested in a subject, would buy all the books he could find that would enlighten him, and study them carefully. He delighted in visiting workshops, factories, laboratories, studios, and all other places where men worked, there watching attentively the worker, and in a few probing questions reaching such facts as he had failed to find in his books—applying the precept he gave his children: learning what he could by his own observation, then filling the gaps by questioning.
While his memory of words, dates, and the like was very bad, rendering it almost impossible for him to quote accurately, or recall figures or dates, yet his memory of facts was wonderfully accurate. The language by which he learned a fact he could seldom repeat, but the information he never forgot. The former was only the shell; it was the meat of the nut alone that he cared for.
Of course in making up his library he bought many books which in fact he never used, for he said: “A library is like a bountiful table, on which each guest can find everything that he wants; yet it don’t follow that each guest must eat from every dish. My library is the table for my mind, from which I take what I want to-day, and from which I can get what I may want at any time hereafter.” His library was eminently a working library. Most of his books were bought when he was still a young minister, when economy and love of books waged constant warfare, of which contest we give his humorous description:
“Alas! where is human nature so weak as in a book-store? Speak of the appetite for drink, or a bon-vivant’s relish for dinner! What are these mere animal throes and ragings to be compared with those fantasies of taste, of imagination, of intellect, which bewilder a student in a great bookseller’s temptation-hall?...
“Then, too, the subtle process by which the man satisfies himself that he can afford to buy. Talk of Wall Street and financiering! No subtle manager or broker ever saw through a maze of financial embarrassments half so quick as a poor book-buyer sees his way clear to pay for what he must have. Why, he will economize; he will dispense with this and that; he will retrench here and there; he will save by various expedients hitherto untried; he will put spurs on both heels of his industry; and then, besides all this, he will somehow get along when the time for payment comes! Ah! this SOMEHOW! That word is as big as a whole world, and is stuffed with all the vagaries and fantasies that Fancy ever bred on Hope....
“Moreover, buying books before you can pay for them promotes caution. You don’t feel quite at liberty to take them home. You are married. Your wife keeps an account-book. She knows to a penny what you can and what you cannot afford. She has no ‘speculation’ in her eyes. Plain figures make desperate work with airy ‘somehows.’ It is a matter of no small skill and experience to get your books home, and in their places, undiscovered. Perhaps the blundering express brings them to the door just at evening. ‘What is it, my dear?’ she says to you. ‘Oh! nothing—a few books that I cannot do without.’ That smile! A true housewife, that loves her husband, can smile a whole arithmetic at him in one look! Of course she insists, in the kindest way, in sympathizing with you in your literary acquisition. She cuts the strings of the bundle (and of your heart), and out comes the whole story. You have bought a whole set of costly English books, full bound in calf, extra gilt! You are caught, and feel very much as if bound in calf yourself, extra gilt, and admirably lettered.
“Now, this must not happen frequently. The books must be smuggled home. Let them be sent to some near place. Then, when your wife has a headache, or is out making a call, or has lain down, run the books across the frontier and threshold, hastily undo them, stop only for one loving glance as you put them away in the closet, or behind other books on the shelf, or on the topmost shelf. Clear away the twine and wrapping-paper, and every suspicious circumstance. Be very careful not to be too kind. That often brings on detection. Only the other day we heard it said somewhere: ‘Why, how good you have been lately! I am really afraid that you have been carrying on mischief secretly.’ Our heart smote us. It was a fact. That very day we had bought a few books which ‘we could not do without.’ After a while you can bring out one volume, accidentally, and leave it on the table. ‘Why, my dear, what a beautiful book! Where did you borrow it?’ You glance over the newspaper, with the quietest tone you can command: ‘That? Oh! that is mine. Have you not seen it before? It has been in the house this two months.’ And you rush on with anecdote and incident, and point out the binding, and that peculiar trick of gilding, and everything else you can think of; but it all will not do—you cannot rub out that roguish, arithmetical smile. People may talk about the equality of the sexes! They are not equal. The silent smile of a sensible, loving woman will vanquish ten men. Of course you repent, and in time form a habit of repenting.”
When we consider how strongly developed was his love of the beautiful, we are not surprised at his fondness for music and precious stones. At first the two seem widely dissimilar, but to his mind they were only different forms of the same thing, and to both he was profoundly impressionable. Gems and precious stones were only valued for their color. They were color crystallized, and to color he was peculiarly and strangely susceptible. Music was color expressed in terms of sound. The one was color to his eye, the other to his ear. The mere enjoyment of sweet sounds and beautiful colors we can readily understand; it is common to all who can see or hear, in greater or less degree. But the marked peculiarity in Mr. Beecher’s case was what we might describe as their drug effect. This is not, perhaps, unusual with others in the case of music, for, with many, soft and gentle music will quiet the excited mind, soothe the soul, and bring peace where the tempest raged. This was so with him, but in a greater and more marked degree. Colors would produce the same effect. When disturbed or nerve-tired, or when, after some marked effort in the pulpit or upon the platform, he found his brain aflame and every nerve keyed to the highest tension, he would sit down in his study, take out from his pocket or table-drawer an opal, garnet, hyacinth, or flashing diamond, hold it lovingly in his open hand, drinking in through his eyes the soft, rich rays of color. Almost as if by magic, the turgid veins on brow and temple grew less prominent, the deep flush upon his face softened gradually into its natural color, the muscular tension abated, the nerve-strain relaxed, and a soft and gentle peacefulness settled down upon him, like the comforting shadow of an angel’s wing. Casting himself upon his bed, he would sleep as peacefully as a child upon its mother’s bosom.
A notable illustration of this occurred while in England in 1863. When he returned to his hotel, after a three hours’ struggle with the mob in the Philharmonic Hall at Liverpool, he found himself still under the excitement of the fierce strife, every nerve still vibrating under the strain. The waves of thought and imagination rolled through his brain, like the billows of the ocean still tossing after the gale has passed. He had been roused to the very centre of his being, and it promised to be a night of restless, sleepless tossings. He had with him an opal of wonderful fire and color. Sitting down in his room, he placed the stone in his hand, and for half an hour sat watching the play of its changing colors. As he watched, the stormy brain grew quiet, a gentle sense of physical fatigue and sleepiness stole over him, yielding to which he went to bed, dropping at once into a quiet, unconscious sleep, unbroken till, late in the morning, he awoke, rested and refreshed.
These color-opiates he always carried with him; a dozen of the finest stones were set in rings and strung upon a key-ring carried in his pocket; while in the recesses of some inner vest-pocket were hidden a number of unset stones, carefully wrapped in paper. His love in that direction was well known to all the prominent jewellers, who laid aside for his inspection the finest specimens of those stones for which he especially cared. One of these gentlemen writes:
“Mr. Beecher’s love for fine gems was neither on account of their value nor their rarity. He loved them because they spoke to him of nature and the God who rules nature, and this voice appealed to him most strongly in the specimens which possessed the richest colors. He might admire a perfectly clear diamond if it was unusually brilliant, but this admiration sank to insignificance by the side of that awakened by one possessing color. ‘How grand,’ he would say, ‘is that nature which can catch the hues of the rainbow and fasten them in imperishable stone! The rainbow passes away, the beautiful flowers fade, but in the loveliness of these gems are held permanently the colors of both.’ In one of my visits to Europe I secured a magnificent diamond, which I am confident has never been excelled. Its color is hard to describe, but I likened it to molten gold. I had no commission from Mr. Beecher to purchase anything of this kind, but nevertheless it was for him I bought it, knowing his taste in these matters, and consequently I resisted all temptations to sell it abroad, and brought it home with me. Mr. Beecher was delighted, as I thought he would be, and compared its hue to the deep reddish gold of a setting sun. This gem was set in a black enamelled ring, and was often worn by him—the only jewel I ever knew him to wear. He was as loyal to the gems of his cabinet as he was to his animate friends, and indeed the stones were also his friends. Rubies, sapphires, amethysts, topaz, hyacinths, aqua-marines, all were objects of his deep love, not alone because they gratified his keen enjoyment of color, but also because he seemed to read in them a page of the great book of nature. Neither was there any superstition connected with or tainting this love. The ill-omened opal was a part of his collection when the prejudice against it was strongest, and, in fact, Mrs. Beecher wore these stones frequently. I have said that richly-colored gems were his friends, and so they were, and more. From them he gathered inspiration, rest, peace, and even truth itself. He saw them, but he also saw beyond them. Their colors seemed to him to be one of those mysteries through which God speaks to man—a mystery in which his spirit delighted to bathe, and from which he seemed to inhale strength and much of that inspiration which all nature appeared to yield up to him ungrudgingly. His gems gratified his sense of sight, his sense of poetry, his sense of a beautiful nature, and, more than all these, his sense of an omnipotent divinity. None of them, that I know of, had any special history. He loved them for themselves alone and for what they might teach him.”
He used to say half-jokingly, but with a great deal of underlying earnestness, that it was the duty of every one to be healthy and strong; that weakness was the penalty which men had to pay for disobeying the laws of nature, sins committed either by themselves or their parents. Preservation of health was a prime duty, its waste a cardinal sin.
As he preached, so he practised; he handled his body as an intelligent engineer does his engine. He made it a matter of careful study. He knew just what he could do with impunity, and just what he must avoid. If he found that eating a certain thing harmed him, that thing he left alone. For the stomach was the furnace and must be kept free and clear; if that broke down, the whole engine came to a standstill.
He studied the effect upon himself of the various kinds of food and drink, and used them at the times and in the manner which experience and study taught him would give the best results.
Some things affected him very peculiarly, and of this he took advantage in their use. This was markedly so with tea and coffee. He found that coffee produced a mild kind of mental stimulus that made all things look brighter and more joyous; that its use before preaching stimulated the brighter and happier side of his nature, adding a slightly roseate tinge to all he saw. It was optimistic. While with tea the effect was the reverse. Objects appeared in their more sober, sombre colors. The rosy faded into the blue, and while it could not be said that he felt depressed exactly, yet the tendency was downward. Life seemed somewhat sterner, its responsibilities became more prominent, its joys less conspicuous. Tea was slightly pessimistic.
But, strangely, when he drank both, as he usually did, they held each other in check; he then saw both the lights and the shadows of life in their true relation to one another. His mind pursued the even tenor of its way.
Wines, beer, and their like he never used for pleasure or as beverages; as medicines, in certain conditions of stomach disorders, he found them useful. But then, as his library attests, he first carefully studied and investigated the peculiar properties of each that he used, and confined their use to the condition in which he found them most useful. For instance, Burgundy wine was used only to counteract certain tendencies toward hepatic trouble. Beer was used only as a substitute for the bromides to relieve insomnia.
Writing to a friend, who had inquired anxiously as to the truth of certain rumors respecting his use of stimulants, he replied:
“BROOKLYN, February 21, 1870.
”MY DEAR SIR:
“In reply to your letter of February 14th, I would say that I do keep intoxicating liquors of various kinds in my house, and probably shall do so as long as I keep house. But I am not ‘in the habit of offering them to my friends when they call.’ Nothing can be more false or injurious than the impression conveyed by such language. I keep them and use them strictly and always as I would medicine, and I should as soon think of offering a well man a dose of rhubarb as a dose of brandy.
“I am a total abstainer, both in belief and in practice. I hold that no man in health needs or is the better for alcoholic stimulants; that great good will follow to the whole community from the total disuse of them as articles of diet or luxury; and that so soon as the moral sense of society will sustain such laws, it will be wise and right to enact prohibitory liquor laws. My practice strictly conforms to my precepts. When I was depressed in health, at times, I have made use of various kinds of stimulants, precisely as I would have used drugs—indeed, as a substitute for them. This has been occasional, exceptional, and wholly medicinal....”
Careful as he was himself, he disliked exceedingly to have others looking after or inquiring about his health. If unwell, he would lie down, and in careful dieting and sleep soon find relief. On such occasions he preferred to be left to himself, undisturbed by questioning or fussing. If well, he repelled solicitude by jokes or humorous bantering.
Exposed so constantly in his lecture-tours (in one season travelling twenty-seven thousand miles) to the danger of accidents, and to sickness through unavoidable exposures, it was not strange that Mrs. Beecher felt no little anxiety for his welfare, and when rumors came back, with the usual newspaper distortions and exaggerations, her solicitude would naturally be greatly increased. On one occasion, when her anxiety, in consequence of some rumor, became too great to be restrained, she wrote an anxious letter to him, inquiring about his health and expressing her fears. She received the following characteristic letter in reply:
“MY DEAR WIFE:
“I see that you are incorrigible. O cruel woman! will not forty years of incessant assault suffice?
“How many heads have you crushed! Not a bone in my body that you have not broken; not a method of mutilation that you have not tried. You have plunged me down ravines, pitched me over precipices, drowned me, burned me, torn me asunder. I have lost innumerable arms, legs, and feet. I go limping, handless, toward I know not what dire future. You have conspired with every element of earth, air, and water, by day and by night, and wrung out every terrible fate that ever poet sang or Dante dreamed of. I do not think that there is—well! well! Just think of this latest. I had some disturbance in my stomach—you turn me end for end and call it apoplexy. I was faint—you changed it to paralysis. I am getting to crouch and creep through life in fear that you have set some terrible disaster upon me. I think I see leaves winking mischief at me. Every stone seems ready to fly at me. Cars and engines are traps, and seem to say, ‘Will you walk into my parlor, Mister Fly?’ ... I am fighting fine—my knees better, head clear; and if I only had a wife” (Mrs. Beecher was then in Florida) “I should be perfect.”
What a careful observance of the rules of health did toward keeping his body in thorough working order, sleep did for his brain. Every hour of sleep that he could get he counted clear gain; but even that was regulated according to the drafts made upon his brain. During vacation time, or when he had but little work on hand—rare occasions—he found the night’s rest sufficient. But on Sundays, while lecturing, or when pressed by mental work of any kind, he would supplement the night with a long nap in the afternoon. So long as he kept his health and had sleep enough, no amount of work tired him. Under such circumstances it might almost be said that his brain worked spontaneously; thinking came as easily and naturally to him as breathing.
He was spared the mental drudgery that oppresses so many men. His own illustration was that “some men are like live springs, that bubble up and flow perpetually; while others are like pumps—one must work the handle for all the water he gets.”
His methods of preparation for the pulpit were peculiar. In one sense his whole life was a constant preparation, for he was always observing and studying, laying up stores for future use, seldom knowing just when he would utilize the material, yet sooner or later employing it all. His memory was a great magazine, filled with ammunition, on which he drew as the occasion required. This might be called his general preparation. Just before preaching or speaking he would enter into his special preparation, unlock the magazine, and lay out the material he wished to use. This he would do just in advance of speaking (his ammunition was highly volatile, and, if left exposed too long, was apt to evaporate and be lost).
His Sunday-morning sermons were prepared after breakfast, and the evening sermons after tea. He would retire to his study and think out the result which he wished to reach, making outline notes of the steps by which he proposed to reach it. He could never preach a sermon on a given topic unless it was in his mind. It sometimes happened that after wrestling with his subject in his study for an hour or two, and finally preparing a very unsatisfactory outline of what he wanted to preach, he would go to his church, and, while the choir were singing the opening hymn, the whole subject would come up before his mind in the form he wanted. Hastily tearing a fly-leaf from his hymn-book, or taking the back of his notes, he would sketch out in a few lines the new-born sermon, which would perhaps occupy an hour in its delivery. These were very apt to be among his best sermons.
Speaking on this subject, he once said: “My whole life is a general preparation. Everything I read, everything I think, all the time, whether it is secular, philosophic, metaphysic, or scientific—it all of it goes into the atmosphere with me; and then, when the time comes for me to do anything—I do not know why it should be so, except that I am of that temperament—it crystallizes, and very suddenly too, and so much of it as I am going to use for that distinct time comes right up before my mind in full form, and I sketch it down and rely upon my facility, through long experience, to give utterance and full development to it after I come before an audience. There is nothing in this world that is such a stimulus to me as an audience. It wakes up the power of thinking and wakes up the power of imagination in me.”
After a speech or sermon had once been formed in his mind, if not soon delivered, it would evaporate and be lost. While he might recall it, it would be in different form.
When in the delivery, and the thoughts were surging at full tide through his brain, he became like one inspired, but half-conscious of his external surroundings.
The sermon once preached, and his mind quieted down to its normal condition, it would be impossible for him to recall or repeat the words and expressions that had but just left his lips. The general outline, the result, he could of course recall, but the language was a part of the inspiration, and left him with it.
His reply to one asking for a copy of a prayer illustrates this:
“You request me to send you the prayer made on Decoration Day evening. If you will send me the notes of the oriole that whistled from the top of my trees last June, or the iridescent globes that came in by millions on the last waves that rolled in on the beach yesterday, or a segment of the rainbow of last week, or the perfume of the first violet that blossomed last May, I will also send you the prayer that rose to my lips with the occasion, and left me for ever. I hope it went heavenward and was registered there, in which case the only record of it will be found in heaven.”
The thought and labor necessary to keep up with his duties as pastor, editor, and lecturer would seem to have been enough to tax to the uttermost his time and strength. But, by a kind of selfish blindness, the general public seemed wholly unconscious of the value of his time. By post or in person, an unending stream poured in upon him, seeking everything that human ingenuity or perversity could suggest.
Begging for help in every conceivable form. One wanted three thousand dollars to lift the mortgage from his farm. A clergyman in distress asked for a thousand, saying that the Lord would repay it. A young theologian asked that Mr. Beecher would write him a lecture that he might deliver, and from its proceeds pay his education for the ministry. A school-girl requested that he write for her a composition, suggesting the topic and briefly outlining the way she wished it treated. Another came in person from a distant State, requesting that he adopt and educate her; as she had exhausted her means coming on, he had to pay her fare back. One man, who had discovered the locality of Captain Kidd’s treasures, wanted him to bear the expense of their exhumation, the profits to be divided. These are a few actual incidents in the line of begging letters.
He has described the callers:
“It is six o’clock in the morning. The day is begun. The family are emerging. Breakfast will be ready in half an hour. You look for the Tribune. The bell rings. A man has called thus early for fear you might be out. You despatch his business. Sitting down to breakfast, the bell rings, and the servant says the man will wait. But what pleasure can one have at a meal with a man upstairs waiting for him, and the consciousness of it hastening the coffee and the toast on their way? You run up. Can you marry a couple at so-and-so? That is settled. Prayers are had with the family. The bell rings once, twice, three times. When you rise there are five persons waiting for you in the front parlor. A young man from the country wishes your name on his circular for a school. A young woman, in failing health by confinement to sewing, does not know what to do; behind in rent; cannot get away to the country; does not wish charity, only wishes some one to enable her to break away from a state of things that will in six months kill her. Another calls to inquire after a friend of whom he has lost sight. While you are attending to these the bell is active, and other persons take the place of those who go. A poor slave-mother wants to buy her son’s wife out of slavery. A kind woman calls in behalf of a boarder who is out of place, desponding, will throw himself away if he cannot get some means of livelihood. Another calls to know if I will not visit a poor family in great distress in ——— Street. A good and honest-looking man comes next; is out of work, has ‘heard that your “riverince” is a kind man,’ etc. Another man wants to get his family out from Ireland; can pay half, if some one will intercede with ship-owners to trust him the balance. A stranger has died, and a sexton desires a clergyman’s services. Several persons desire religious conversation. It is after ten o’clock. A moment’s lull. You catch your hat and run out. Perhaps you have forgotten some appointment. You betake yourself to your study, not a little flurried by the contrariety of things which you have been considering. You return to dine. There are five or six persons waiting for you. At tea you find others also, with their divers necessities.
“This is not overdrawn, and for months of the year it is far underdrawn. There is no taxation compared to incessant various conversation with people for whom you must think, devise, and for whose help you feel yourself often utterly incompetent.”
Half of his life-work would have been left undone had he attempted to have given the letters and callers his personal attention. All that related to his pastoral duties, and much besides, he attended to personally. The rest he turned over to his wife. If his life has been a benefit to mankind, then the world owes a heavy debt of gratitude to her for the self-sacrificing protection she afforded him. She was his helpmeet indeed; nine-tenths of his correspondence she carried on. Few save his church-members and personal friends had access to him until she had first learned their errand, and determined whether the case was one that should be brought to his attention. Yet, with all this care, he seldom saw less than ten or a dozen callers each day while he was at home.
The drain upon his purse was constant, for he could hardly withstand a tale of suffering and want. Of course he was not infrequently imposed upon, as every generous man is apt to be. He used to say that the satisfaction of relieving one really deserving sufferer was compensation enough to make up for being swindled ten times.
Nor was his generosity, or its abuse, confined to those who sought material aid. Among those who engaged his affection and confidence, some there were who, Judas-like, turned against him when it seemed for their interest to do so. Toward these he never felt resentment, save momentarily under the smart of some sudden, treacherous blow. The love which he once gave to a friend he never forgot. He would be very slow to believe any one, once trusted, to be unworthy, and never lost a deep and tender feeling for such, even after he felt that they were unworthy of confidence. It was this feeling that led to no little criticism at the hands of those whose cynicism made trusting hard and hating easy. By these his tender, sympathetic trustfulness was called “gush” and “slopping over.” To their criticisms he replied:
“I suppose I do slop over sometimes. Well, I never saw a pan just full of milk that did not slop over. If you do not want any slopping-over, take a pint of milk and put it in a big bucket. There will be no slopping-over then. And a man who has only a pint of feeling, in an enormous bucket, never slops over. But if a man is full of feeling, up to the very brim, how is he going to carry himself without spilling over? He cannot help it. There will be dripping over the edges all the time. And as every flower or blade of grass rejoices when the rain falls upon it, so every recipient along the way in which a man with overflowing generous feeling walks, is thankful for his bounty.
“How to carry a nature full of feeling, and administer it without making mistakes, I do not know, you do not, nobody does, nobody ever did, and nobody ever will; so we must take it and get along as best we can. Life is a kind of zigzag, anyhow; and we are obliged to resort to expedients, and make experiments, and learn from our blunders, which are inevitable. We find out a great deal more from men’s mistakes than from their successes.
“But, after all, I am not sorry that I have been imposed upon, and that I have trusted men that were not worthy to be trusted. I am not sorry that I have been duped. It falls out from an abundance of generous feeling. It is the mistake of a disposition that I think it is a great deal better to have, with all the impositions which it suffers, than that kind of cold caution which prevents your venturing anything on the side of kindness, because you always want to be safe.
“I was much impressed with what I once heard my father say. His chance sayings have been like rudders to me all my lifelong. A man whom he had befriended, and done a great deal for, turned against him and acted very meanly. One day father came home very much exercised about it, and I expected he was going to blow out—for he shook his head in a peculiar way that he had when his feelings were very much wrought up. He said (raising his hand, and bringing it down slowly, but with great emphasis), ‘Well, when I have acted honorably toward a man, and he goes away and acts meanly toward me, I am never sorry that I acted honorably toward him!’
“Now, I think that was a sign of nobility.”
Plymouth Church, although the principal field of his ministerial work, was not by any means his only pastorate; he had a number of other subsidiary pulpits. Most prominent among them was the White Mountains. Such was his thirst for work in the fields of his Master, he made even his infirmities an instrumentality for good. For nearly thirty years he had been afflicted with that but little understood American malady, “hay fever,” which attacked him every year about the 16th of August, almost to the day. For nearly six weeks he suffered the torments of that distressing malady; during which reading, writing, and almost all forms of mental work were impossible.
Finally his attention was called to the exemption which the clear, bracing air of the White Mountains afforded, and, trying the experiment, happily found complete relief. The first year or two he merely rested, but after that he began holding, at first, informal services Sundays; then the large hotel parlor became the church, and every Sunday morning he preached. Soon the demand for more room crowded them out, and then one of the great tents used in the State fairs was secured, filled with benches. Here, during the last two or three years that he visited the Twin Mountain House, he preached regularly every Sunday during his six weeks’ vacation.
From the neighboring hotels and all the adjacent towns the people came by hundreds, filling the great tent. Each morning, after breakfast, fifty to a hundred of the guests would gather in one of the smaller rooms and join with Mr. Beecher in family prayers. To these he read a chapter from the Bible, briefly expounding its meaning, and then made a short prayer.
Another field in which he worked, widely different from any other, was the State militia. In January, 1878, he was invited to take the chaplaincy of the “Brooklyn Thirteenth,” as it was called, and accepted the invitation. His reasons for this step we give in his own words:
“It was not because I had nothing to do, and wanted to fill up vacant time. It was not, certainly, because I have any eminent military gifts, or what might be called a military spirit, by which I am led to delight in such things. I was as much surprised as any one could be when the invitation came through Colonel Austen, bearing the request of all the officers and all the privates in this regiment that I should act as their chaplain.
“After the surprise had a little subsided, of course my first impulse was to say, ‘No, I cannot.’ My second thought was, ‘Is it a matter simply of your own convenience, or is there a moral duty here?’ The question came, not exactly ‘Should you?’ but, ‘Why should you not?’ Is it not an eminently wise and proper thing for a body of citizen-soldiery to have a chaplain, and ought we not to be grateful that they desire it? Made up, as our regiments are, of young men in the prime of life, in this and in all associations of men, unrestrained and uncivilized, one might almost say, in the absence of woman, great mischiefs have often ensued from a relaxation of moral principle, a sort of vortex being formed, down which young men might slide to their destruction; and therefore it is a matter of importance that they should have a moral influence thrown about them. And when the request came from the Thirteenth that I would act as their chaplain, it seemed to me that somebody ought to answer their request; and there were some reasons why I thought I should answer it. I was forward in all those movements which brought on the war, and during the whole period of the conflict I did as much as I possibly could to bear my part of the responsibility; and with the end of the war, to drop the whole matter of our citizen-soldiery and show no more interest in them, to throw them aside as an instrument employed and worn out and no longer of use, did not appear to me wise or proper.
“Moreover, many of these young men belong to my congregation and to my parish; they were therefore in some sense my own sheep, after whom I ought to look; and I reasoned that if it was desirable to have a citizen-soldiery as a kind of background on which civil authority could retreat in times of great peril, it was eminently desirable that that soldiery should be moral, manly, expert, and in every way fitted for the high task to which they were assigned.
“Under those circumstances, because I am an old citizen here, because I have a right in some sense to be a father to the young men in this neighborhood, and because I very heartily believe in the formation of these centres of citizen-soldiery, I did not feel at liberty to shrink from the duty that was laid upon me; and I went with the hope and purpose, not simply as a mere recipient of courtesy, but with the feeling that I might be able to do them good—to do them good in the first instance as soldiers, and in the second instance as men.”
As their chaplain he preached to his “boys”—as he was fond of calling them—at stated intervals, and, as far as his other engagements permitted, attended at their reviews and public parades.
Of course his inexperience in military matters led to many amusing incidents.
Being a capital horseman, he found no trouble in maintaining himself in his saddle; but when it came to manipulating his sword, his troubles began. Then the path to martial glory did not seem easy. His first trouble was to get his sword drawn; once drawn, he was puzzled to know what on earth to do with it. He almost invariably neglected to salute his reviewing officer, to the great amusement of his fellow-members on the staff, who enjoyed bantering him. As one of his colonels remarked:
“His temporal sword was a source of some anxiety to him, and he always drew it with reluctance, preferring, as he said, to wield the more familiar ‘sword of the spirit.’”
Next to his sword the receipt of military orders bothered him most, leading often to humorous comments to those about him or to his commanding officer. To one of these orders he replied:
“DECEMBER 19, 1884.
”MY DEAR COLONEL:
“I enclose a circular with a humble request for its interpretation. It is, without doubt, clear as crystal to the military mind, but to my peaceful mind it is as dark as theology, or a pocket, or midnight, or a wolf’s mouth.
“It orders, first and beginning, that we are to come in fatigue uniform, without side-arms.
“It ends by ordering us to bring our best coat, knots, and swords. I humbly inquire whether one end of this letter does not seem to eat up the other.
“Shall I wear my resplendent chapeau or my ridiculous cap, in which I look like a pumpkin with a ribbon around it? Shall I wear my coat and golden straps, or my other military coat, which I have not got, and never had?
“Lastly, may I go directly to Historical Hall, and not to the armory?
“I am, your ignorant chaplain and captain,
”HENRY WARD BEECHER.
“Are overcoats forbidden? Thermometer nearly down to zero!”
On another occasion receiving a circular printed by one of the reduplicating processes then in vogue, but which was nearly illegible from the paleness of the ink, he wrote the colonel:
“FEBRUARY 12, 1885.
”MY DEAR COLONEL:
“I do admire black ink and legible writing. I return you a model. Do help me.
“(1) Is this a spiritual communication—from some feeble spirit to some pale-ink medium? How shall I reply? Do you keep a heavenly mail?
“(2) Or is it from Wolseley, asking me to come to the Soudan? I cannot go, of course, without your permission.
“(3) Or is it merely an advertisement of a writing-master, showing how to increase piety by teaching men to live (and read) by faith, and not by sight?
“(4) In that case have you got any more clerks—who can write invisible messages? I might want them for my Sunday-schools.
“(5) You ought to send out a reader (if this is a military document) to inform all who read it what it says.
“(6) On the theory that it is a regimental order, I shall soon commence studying the tactics, and be ready for a parade—which, if it resembles the writing, ought to take place at midnight, after the moon is gone, by the light of oil street-lamps.
“H. W. B.”
As chaplain he enjoyed the “rank and pay” of captain, and on all military occasions was addressed as “Captain Beecher.” A few years after his appointment, being at the New England dinner with General Grant, the latter referred to him several times as “major.” Supposing it to be a slip of the tongue, “Captain” Beecher said nothing about it. A few nights later they met again at some other public dinner, when the general persisted in calling him “colonel”; then the captain protested, but Grant assured him laughingly that the next time he should promote him to be general, “and if you don’t keep on going higher it will be because the titles give out.” We believe he never got above “general.”
All of those who were familiar with Mr. Beecher, either in the pulpit, on the platform, or in social life, are familiar with that moral courage which led him to face unhesitatingly an adverse public sentiment in defence of what he believed to be right. The preceding pages are filled with many illustrations of this.
His physical courage, though perhaps not so well known to the public, was quite as pronounced as his moral courage. Athletic, self-reliant, and in his younger days wonderfully agile, he faced the most threatening danger without a tremor of his nerve.
In his advocacy of the slave he daily carried his life in his hands. At Liverpool he faced undaunted an imminent danger, no doubt largely averted by the utter fearlessness of his bearing. But in more marked degree was his courage shown in an incident, never made public, that occurred soon after he settled in Brooklyn.
A rabid dog, with lolling tongue and dripping jaws, threatening death in its most frightful form, appeared suddenly in the street near his house, and fortunately ran for a moment into the area under the front-door steps of a neighbor’s house, where he lay crouching in the corner, with his glaring eyes turned to the doorway. In the street children were playing; at any moment, the impulse to spring out might seize the beast. Seeing the danger, Mr. Beecher sprang instantly to the area-door, within less than four feet of the crouching brute, and closed the gate. Stepping back to his house, he got his axe. When he returned the dog was rushing furiously around in the confined space, striving to get out. Raising the axe with one hand, with the other Mr. Beecher opened the area-door, and as the dog sprang at him struck him dead with one blow.
Chapter XXXII
1886—England Revisited—Speaking in the City Temple—Westminster Abbey—Lecturing through Great Britain—Addressing the Theological Students at City Temple—“Life of Christ”—Sickness—Rest.
For several years before his death earnest efforts were made to induce Mr. Beecher to revisit England. His manly fight against such odds, in 1863, had quite captured the heart of the English people, who always have a tender feeling for a good fighter.
What began as admiration steadily grew and deepened into affection. His sermons, his writings, and even the meagre reports of lectures and speeches, were eagerly read—quite as much so in England as in America.
And when the great cloud of scandal loomed up in 1873-6, none were any more steadfast and loyal in love and confidence than the friends in old England. Among the many testimonials treasured by his family are the resolutions of sympathy and confidence received from clerical associations in England, Scotland, Wales, and even from the distant provinces.
With each succeeding year the importunities that he should spend a summer in England increased, until, in the early spring of 1886, he finally decided to brave the discomforts of an ocean voyage—to him no slight trial—and visit again his English friends. This being a trip of peace and not of war, he determined to take Mrs. Beecher with him. His decision was made the latter part of May. The next Sunday he made the announcement from the pulpit. On the following Sunday he preached his farewell. The church was packed, if possible, fuller than usual, the throng crowding around the pulpit-steps at the close of the service to say farewell.
He engaged passage on the Etruria for Saturday, June 19. The Friday night preceding the regular prayer-meeting night became a regular leave-taking. The services were over by nine o’clock, and from that hour until eleven Mr. and Mrs. Beecher were the centre of a circle of friends that filled the lecture-room and overflowed into the church auditorium, anxious to shake hands and say God-speed.
The Etruria was to start early Saturday morning, so Mr. and Mrs. Beecher went aboard Friday night.
Promptly at six o’clock the hawsers were cast off, and the great steamer slowly drew out from the pier, and, gathering headway, turned her prow eastward and slowly steamed down the bay. Almost simultaneously the excursion steamer Grand Republic, with three thousand friends—whose enthusiastic affection had called them, before the sun was up, to pay their farewell tribute—left her wharf in Brooklyn to intercept the Etruria in the Upper Bay. Just off Liberty Island the Etruria slowed down and the Grand Republic came alongside; her passengers, crowding to the nearer guards, gave vent to their feelings in ringing cheers. Mr. and Mrs. Beecher, standing on the upper deck, responded with hat and handkerchief. The band aboard the Grand Republic played “Hail to the Chief,” the whistles of the steamers saluted, and as the Etruria, getting under way again, forged rapidly ahead, the choir of Plymouth Church sang the Doxology, the sweetly solemn notes growing fainter as the steamers drew apart.
Going below, they found their staterooms literally embanked in flowers. One enthusiastic friend had left twenty homing pigeons, with instructions to release them at stated intervals during the day. To these short notes were attached, and borne back by the swift, home-seeking wings, being the last words to many friends until the cable announced Mr. Beecher’s safe arrival at Queenstown on the 26th.
Our space forbids an attempt to give more than a very general account of this visit; a full account of the entire trip has already been published, with verbatim reports of the sermons and lectures delivered by Mr. Beecher in England.[18]
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Footnote 18:
“A Summer in England with Henry Ward Beecher.” By J. B. Pond. Published by Fords, Howard & Hulbert, of New York City.
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It would be impossible in cold words to express the deep and tender feelings with which Mr. Beecher put his foot again on English soil after an absence of nearly a quarter of a century. Memory, swift-flying, ran back through the twenty-three years past, and like some grand panorama the impressive events, both national and personal, moved by his mind’s eyes in silent procession.
Slavery, that blight upon America’s fair name, had been blotted out, and the places that had known it, knew it no more for ever. The struggle for national existence, which had been hanging almost on even balance when, twenty-three years before, he had raised his voice in this same land, and pleaded the nation’s cause, had ended in complete victory and triumphant vindication of those principles for which he had contended. It was with no little pride that he was able to stand again before an English audience and say “that every single substantial sentiment that was set forth in those several popular addresses had now become history.”
Within that same period he had himself passed through the flood of a personal persecution which, for persistent and malignant intensity and unchristian bitterness, exceeded anything recorded in the annals of history. He had seen his name, his life-work, all that he had lived and labored for, threatened with black destruction. Through this he had passed, emerging safely upon the firm shore of the continued love and confidence of his countrymen. Nor could he forget the assurances of fullest trust that came to him from public utterances and private letters of the many friends in England:
“For no other nation except our own have I such strong affinities as for Great Britain. My ancestors came from there. I have been bred on its literature. I have fed on the thought and feeling of its heroic men. I am a child, though born away from home, of the English people; and God forbid that I should be indifferent to those throes which are to bring forth the man-child yet! I look with profound sympathy, with the feeling of a child that venerates a parent in distress, upon that people; and I go there with a heart as warm for them as it was for its own country in the day of its division and trials. Twenty-three years—and what a space between! Twenty-three years! Darkness, thunder, tears, blood, and war—they have gone, and the white mantle of peace is spread over our shores, and the fields laugh and rejoice, and the heavens are propitious, and the earth is bountiful, and men are growing more and more into manliness. What hath God wrought!”
After a short rest in Queenstown, Mr. and Mrs. Beecher went direct to Liverpool; there on the 28th he had an opportunity to hear Mr. Gladstone, meeting him after the address.
The next day they proceeded to London, where, on the following Sunday, Mr. Beecher was to preach for Dr. Parker at the City Temple. On Thursday he attended the regular weekday services held in that church every Thursday, intending to enjoy the unusual pleasure of listening to somebody else’s preaching. But after the sermon Dr. Parker insisted upon his addressing the meeting and closing it in prayer. On calling Mr. Beecher to the pulpit, the doctor spoke a few words in tribute to his friend, concluding with the much-quoted sentence:
“My brethren, I am sorry to break in upon a man’s singularity, so that the palm may, even for a moment, seem to be divided between two; I am, however, constrained to violate the sanctity of a definite personality, and to say that last week there was in England a Grand Old Man: to-day there are two of them!”
On the 4th he preached for Dr. Parker, and on the 5th attended a dinner given to him by the lord mayor of London. On the 11th he preached for Dr. Henry Allen in London, and in the afternoon attended the service at Westminster Abbey, calling afterwards, by previous invitation, upon Dean Bradley, with whom were present a number of the clergymen of the Church of England, who had been invited to meet him. After tea the dean invited him to visit the various historical private rooms of the Abbey.
Many of the rooms were quite as familiar to Mr. Beecher, through his reading, though never seen before, as they were to the clergy of the church itself. These listened with intense interest to his familiar exposition and discussion, of what must have seemed to them to be their own peculiar province of history.
The “Jerusalem Chamber” greatly impressed him. “I am struck with awe. No room has greater interest to me, unless it be the ‘Upper Room.’”
He recalled with deep interest the many notable events that had there occurred intimately connected with religious history—the Westminster Assembly, the Confession of Faith, the two revisions of the Bible, etc. This was to Mr. Beecher a red-letter day, fuller of quiet, tender enjoyment, probably, than any other during his stay.
On the 19th, as he said, his play-day being over (he had preached every Sunday, generally twice, and delivered addresses every week), his work began. At Exeter Hall, London, where he delivered the last of the famous speeches in 1863, he delivered the first of his lectures in 1886. From that time on until the 21st of October he lectured, on an average, four nights a week, preaching every Sunday. A letter home gives some humorous experiences:
“... You would be amused at the way of public meetings in England and Scotland. After the lecture the chairman calls on some one, previously agreed upon, to move a vote of thanks, which he does, with a speech in which he pours out such a flood of compliments that before he is half through you lose all sense of personal identity, and wonder what heroic personage he is talking about, and then he moves the distinguished gentleman a vote of thanks. Thereupon the chairman informs the audience that Reverend or Professor So-and-so will second the motion. He takes up the thread of eulogy where the other bit it off, and winds you up with golden cords until you swing high in the heavens. Thereupon the vote is put by the chairman, the audience raise their hands, and then fall into a perfect tempest of clapping; as this subsides, you are expected to rise and, with modest self-depreciation, to explain how much you are elated and how grateful you are.... But it is after the assembly is dismissed that the most serious business of the evening begins. All on the platform shake hands; women climb up and shake you; at every step downward a host of hands—men, women, girls, and boys are reaching; the hallway is crowded with men that pull you, shake you, hustle you; the outward passage is lined with scores and scores, and finally, on the sidewalk, the rush to get your hand is fearful, and the police have to crowd them back to get you into the carriage, and then the windows bristle with more hands, and as the carriage moves on the crowd run along by its side still fiercely pushing each other to get a chance to shake.
“A ludicrous event happened at York. Just away from the hall is a bridge, for which foot-passengers pay a cent and carriages two cents. A woman or girl stands out on the sidewalk, extending her hand for the fee. After I had shaken hands at the hall, along the street, with scores, we came to the bridge, hardly yet shaking off the crowd. A hand was thrust into the window, which I shook; the woman said something indistinctly, which I afterwards learned was, ‘A penny, sir.’ Thinking it some affectionate blessing, I took her hand again, and gave it a more emphatic shake. She put her face in the window and said, ‘A penny, sir’; Pond meanwhile sitting by and laughing heartily.
“Your mother, too, frequently comes in for her share, and you can imagine how comical she looks as, with a modest smile and some surprise, she deals out her ‘thank you’s’ to the host of admirers.”
From July 4, when he preached first for Dr. Parker, until his departure, October 24, Mr. Beecher preached seventeen times, delivered nine public addresses and fifty-eight lectures. This was his summer vacation. From this period of restful recreation, such was his peculiar capacity and enjoyment of mental activity, he derived great benefit; and on his return home, after a few days’ rest from the disturbing influences of the, to him, ever-unrestful ocean, he declared that he never felt stronger, or more vigorous, or better equipped for work in his life. In the course of his stay he visited and lectured in each of the cities, and generally in the same hall where he had “fought with the wild beasts of Ephesus,” as he used to say, in 1863.
Just before his departure he addressed one meeting which, on account of its peculiar significance, we must mention more fully ere we pass on. So much has been said of late in certain quarters respecting Mr. Beecher’s theology, so many criticisms upon his orthodoxy, that his standing among so conservative a body as the English clergy may not be uninteresting. He had already addressed the London Congregational Board, the Congregational School (for the sons of Congregational clergymen), and had preached nearly twenty times, so that there had been a tolerably fair opportunity to learn something of his religious views, when he was invited to address the theological students on the subject of preaching.
The meeting was held in the City Temple, October 15. Six hundred students attended, the remaining space in the body of the house being occupied by ministers, who came from all parts of the country to attend this meeting. It was understood that Mr. Beecher would, after the address, answer such questions as any might want to ask. As the hour fixed was eleven o’clock in the forenoon, all of the theological schools had to rearrange their school-hours for that day, in order to allow the scholars a chance to attend. This was done with great readiness. After an address of nearly an hour, he offered to receive such questions, pertinent to the topic discussed, as might be put by the scholars or any of the clergy present, and occupied the remainder of his time in answering them.
On the 24th Mr. and Mrs. Beecher boarded the Etruria at Queenstown for their return home, reaching New York on the 31st.
In accordance with his expressed wishes no attempts were made to “receive” him, but he was allowed to go quietly home and rest, his people reserving their welcome until the following Sunday.[19] On that day the church was decorated with flowers and evergreen vines, the pulpit being literally a bank of flowers, which ran up along the face of the great organ, even to the ceiling. After the service his people thronged around the pulpit-stairs for one shake of the hand and one word of welcome.
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Footnote 19:
The Common Council of Brooklyn voted him a public reception, which he declined. The resolutions were as follows:
“IN COMMON COUNCIL, STATED SESSION, Monday, Nov. 8, 1886.
“The following was presented:
”Whereas, This Common Council has heard with pleasure of the return from abroad of that distinguished American, our fellow-citizen, the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher; and
“Whereas, In recognition of the eminent services rendered to his country and mankind, both here and on the other side of the Atlantic, of the broad and generous nature of his manhood and of his genius, which has already shed its lustre for half a century; therefore be it
”Resolved, That his Honor the Mayor be, and he is hereby requested to offer to the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, on behalf of the Mayor, Aldermen, and Commonalty of the City of Brooklyn, a public reception at the Academy of Music, at such time as may suit his convenience.
“Resolved, That a committee of five members be appointed by the chair, who, together with his Honor the Mayor, of which committee he shall be chairman, shall make the necessary arrangements for such reception, and to insure an adequate expression on that occasion of the honor and esteem in which the citizens of Brooklyn, without distinction of party or creed, hold this their distinguished and beloved fellow-citizen.
“The resolutions were unanimously adopted by the following vote:”
(Signed by the Mayor and Common Council).
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Early in the winter he began to seriously think of completing the second volume of the “Life of Christ.” Friends and members of his family had for some years been urging that the book should be completed. A fatality seemed to have hung over that book.
At the time when the Tilton conspiracy first broke out he had written a considerable part of Volume II., and undoubtedly would have soon finished it, when that outbreak, with the church persecutions that followed, interrupted the work, and for a number of years kept his mind so engrossed in other matters as to make writing an impossibility. This was followed by the business embarrassments of his publishers, and then the care of reorganizing the Christian Union. At last, peace and quiet having been restored, he began again to arrange for the completion of the work, when a vexatious suit was brought against him by Samuel Wilkeson, who had bought the original contract for the book from the publishers at an assignee’s sale, and, claiming that Mr. Beecher had broken his contract, sued for $60,000. The pendency of this suit stopped all further work on the book. After some delay the cause was tried and the complaint promptly dismissed by the court.
Twice, after the suit, an attempt was made by Mr. Beecher to accomplish the long-deferred completion of the book, but on each occasion something occurred to interrupt and further defer the work.
Finally, in January, 1887, he determined to complete the book, and at the same time to write his Autobiography. No small part of the credit for this final determination is due to Major J. B. Pond, who for many years past had been Mr. Beecher’s lecture manager, and who joined with Mr. Beecher’s family in urging the undertaking of both works. Finally it was decided that he would deliver no more lectures during the year 1887, but devote all of his time outside of his church duties to these literary labors.
In February a contract was made with Charles L. Webster & Co., of New York—our present publishers—to publish both books. The “Life of Christ” was to be completed before July 1, 1887, and the Autobiography before July 1, 1888.
With great zeal Mr. Beecher began at once to re-read, revise, and complete the “Life of Christ,” sometimes resting his mind by changing his work and writing a little on his Autobiography. In this way, by March 1, he had revised all of his former manuscript of the “Life of Christ,” and had completed it down to chapter xxv. Eight chapters of Volume II. were completed in this manner, and the outlines of the remaining three, within which space he intended to complete the work, were clearly blocked out in his own mind. As he got more and more back into the long-interrupted current of thought, his interest deepened, and with increased interest came greater mental ease.
Several times he remarked that he had never seen the subject so clearly and luminously in his mind before. It seemed at times as though Christ’s life were revealed to him with a clearness and a nearness that had never before been given him. In one of his exalted moods he burst out: “Twenty men could not in a life-time write all I now see; how can I put it into one book?”
But a few days before his last sickness an English clergyman called to see him, and after a pleasant chat, as he rose to leave, asked if there was any prospect of his completing the “Life of Christ.” Mr. Beecher replied that he was at work on it then, and would probably finish it in two or three months. The clergyman was greatly delighted, saying that he had been long waiting, hoping for the second volume. As the visitor left, Mr. Beecher, kneeling in his great arm-chair, as was often his wont when in a reverie, with one elbow on the chair-back, and chin resting in his open palm, gazed in silent abstraction out of the window facing him. Suddenly, his face lighting up, he exclaimed, as though thinking aloud: “Finish the Life of Christ! Finish the Life of Christ! Who can finish the Life of Christ! It cannot be finished.”
Prophetic words! Almost within the week he was called to that closer communion with his Saviour, and entered into that lasting peace for which he had so often longed.
During the day of Thursday, March 3, he was in the best of spirits and apparently perfect health. He had repeatedly stated since his return from England that he had never felt better, or better able to work. We had often during the past month jokingly called him the youngest boy in the house. None of us dreamed that Thursday was to end his long career of usefulness.
During the night he awoke, complaining of nausea, and was taken with vomiting, but soon fell asleep again. Friday morning he did not get up; though he roused when spoken to, he would immediately after fall asleep again. These symptoms disturbed no one, as they were quite common whenever he had any bilious trouble. The family thought that something he ate for supper had disagreed with him, and that he was working it off in his usual way, by sleeping and lying quiet.
Friday afternoon the doctor was for the first time called in. He thought, with the family, that the trouble was with the stomach, though some symptoms made him think that perhaps there might be some other complicating causes than mere biliousness.
Later in the evening, when one of his sons called in, he roused himself quite fully, called for toast, complained that his feet were cold, and that his head ached some. When asked what was the matter, he replied, jokingly, in a sort of half-sleepy manner:
“I had a dream last night. I thought that I was a duke and your mother a duchess, and I was trying to figure the interest on a hundred thousand pounds a year—you know I never was good at mathematics. It gave me a headache; but I’ll have your mother boil a page of arithmetic and make a tea of it. I’ll cure it homœopathically.”
He was then helped to sit up in bed and eat his toast, which he did with eyes still closed, as though half-asleep. When laid back upon his pillow he fell asleep at once.
Saturday morning the dreadful truth first became apparent. Dr. Searle found that the left side showed unmistakable signs of paralysis, and then, recalling the previous symptoms, which had been attributed to other causes, said at once that it was apoplexy and that there was nothing to hope for. At first none would believe the diagnosis. Up to that moment all had thought the illness nothing that need cause any apprehension, when with the suddenness of a lightning-stroke came the announcement of utter hopelessness.
That no chance should be overlooked, Drs. Hammond and Helmuth, of New York, were called in consultation during the day, and confirmed the hopeless diagnosis. Nothing could be done—nothing but wait. The patient did not suffer; only those who stood about his bed, watching the beloved face, suffered.
Several times during Saturday afternoon, in response to loud questions put by the doctors, he roused enough to comprehend the questions and briefly answer them. With each attempt his articulation became more difficult.
After the consultations were over he never spoke again. His unconscious sleep became deeper and more profound through Sunday and Monday, until Tuesday morning, at twenty minutes to ten, his breath grew fainter—then stopped. The end he had hoped for was his. As warriors of old prayed that they might die in full armor, not a piece wanting or rusted from disuse, in the full activity of the fight, so he prayed that he might be spared the slow wasting of disease or the impairment of his physical and mental powers.
No black, no mourning drapery of any kind, was permitted about the house or on his coffin. At the door hung a beautiful wreath of delicate pink and white roses, gathered at the top by a large white satin bow, renewed afresh each morning by the hands of a beloved friend.
Against every form of mourning he had always revolted; to him death was but the gate to heaven, and the black symbols of ancient paganism he could not endure:
“The scholastic theology, filled with gloomy ideas sifted through stern Romish minds from teachings of pagan Romans has come down to us, until the representations of death that exist in the literature of Rome are more abominable and cruel than all the vices of all the Neros, or any other of the corrupt emperors. The scholastic conceptions of dying and of death are unworthy of reason, unworthy of conscience, and are blasphemous to God and to His government. They have no foundation in the New Testament, none certainly in the Old, and they ought to be purged out of our imaginations. Yet it lingers with us, and when death has come the household has not one note of triumph, not one star shines through the grief, nor one door of flashing light is opened. We cover the pictures, we shut up the instruments of music, we close the windows and shut out the light; we have a black hearse with plumes plucked from the wings of midnight, and we send for our minister, who doles out lugubrious, mournful themes, and we sing awful hymns. And then because one’s child has gained the coronation of glory, and is in the arms of Jesus, and rests from all labor and trial and temptation, we put on black—black over the head, black around the neck, black down to the feet, black inside! We carry the habiliments of woe and darkness and gloom, and think that we can see death everywhere. No other thing is as this. The one thing that men carry everywhere with them, and they are bound to share alike with brothers, strangers, friends, is that one thing that is borrowed from the despotism and cruelty of heathenism. Not one joy, not one thanksgiving, not one gleam of faith and hope, not one promise of Jesus Christ, not one single second of immortality and glory, is permitted to cheer the soul. All is night, black night, hopeless night. Sinful, the whole of it, unchristian, ungrateful!...
“One of the most beautiful things I ever saw in my whole European tour was the burial place of a Prussian queen who died during the great struggle against Napoleon, when the nation was ground almost to extinction, leaving her kingly husband almost inconsolable. At some distance from the capital, and in the midst of the solemn wood, he built a temple to her memory. It was of marble. As I entered, the light shone down through blue glass, casting a sad, sorrowful tone on all that its rays shone upon. But further on, upon entering the inner chamber, the cheerful light of God’s sun streamed in through the numerous windows and illuminated the ceiling, which was covered with glowing Scripture passages of death and immortality. And there in that blessed sunlight lay the sculptured form of the queen, forming the most perfect embodiment of rest, and peace, and triumph that my eyes ever beheld. There was nothing, sad or sorrowful, or painful to be seen; only the light of the glory of God as set forth in the sun; and the whole room glowed with cheer and brightness, and the monument was not gloomy but peaceful. I bless God with all my heart for that sight; it has been a comfort to me in many a dark day and long struggle of suffering, for already have I seen the triumph of death, the sweetness and the peace of victory, in that monumental marble.”
On Thursday a private funeral service was held at the house, the Rev. Dr. Charles H. Hall, of the Church of the Holy Trinity, officiating, in accordance with the expressed wish of Mr. Beecher. Between the two a deep and lasting friendship had existed. In the dark days, when not a few of the clerical brethren of his own denomination in Brooklyn doubted, or, hesitating, held back awaiting the result, Dr. Hall, in a manner characteristic of his brave and manly nature, went out of his way to show, in public, his confidence and love for Mr. Beecher. The latter attending service one day, during the time when the clouds hung heaviest, at the Church of the Holy Trinity, the doctor, seeing him in the congregation, descended into the aisle, and, taking his friend by the hand, led him to a seat within the chancel. Mr. Beecher, always forgetful of injuries, never forgot an act of friendship. It was his oft-repeated wish that, should he be called first, the voice of this brave, beloved friend might speak the words of cheer and comfort to those he left behind.
At the close of the service, Company G, of the Thirteenth Regiment—which, having been largely recruited from the young men of Plymouth Church, was called the “Plymouth Company,” and affectionately styled by Mr. Beecher “My boys”—with arms reversed, banners furled, and muffled drums, marched to the house, and, as a guard of honor, escorted the body of their pastor, chaplain, and friend to the church, as he was borne for the last time within its doors, and laid him, silent for the first time, at the foot of that pulpit from which his voice, during well-nigh forty years, had so often rung out to right the wrong, to lift up the down-trodden, to uphold the weak, to elevate mankind; that had so often preached comfort to the sorrowing, light to those in great darkness, pointing out the way of life to struggling sinners, and revealing that boundless love of God which was the keynote of his theology.
Till Saturday morning an almost continuous stream passed through the church to look in a last farewell upon the face of a friend, scarcely ending with midnight, renewed again by daylight, all day long. Old men and children, rich and poor, met to mourn a common loss.
He rested in a bed of flowers, the coffin hidden from sight by twining smilax, covered with white pinks and rosebuds; pulpit and organ buried in flowering shrubs and graceful plants, decorated with many floral designs.
On Friday morning the public funeral service was held, Dr. Hall preaching the sermon.
Simultaneous with the services at Plymouth, funeral services were held in the three nearest adjoining churches.
On the proclamation of the mayor, business was suspended during the day; the Legislature adjourned, sending a special committee to attend as its representatives at the funeral.
On Sunday a memorial service was held in Plymouth Church, in which the representatives of every creed took part—Jew and Gentile, Catholic and Protestant—and nearly every denomination of Protestantism vying each with another in paying tributes of respect, gratitude, and love to their common brother—a most fit, practical example of that for which he had always preached, the universal brotherhood in God.
On Saturday, the 12th, the body was taken quietly to Greenwood.
“To-day Henry Ward Beecher’s body was buried in Greenwood. His hearse was followed in sympathy and honor by millions of his countrymen. The mourners were of all kindred and of every language. Not in this generation, at least, has there been a funeral so nobly significant. In the stately procession walked the viewless forms of principles, of governments, of nations, and of races. The guardian spirit of the slave whom he helped to liberate; the fair, sad genius of the Green Isle, for which he so often and so eloquently pleaded; the dusky representative of the Chinese Empire, in behalf of whose sons he again and again demanded justice; the fair form of modern science with the radiance of the morning sun on her queenly brow; the benign angel of charity, clothed in the whiteness of that purity which renders sin invisible; democracy, with her free step, flowing hair, and cap of many hues; Columbia, full of matronly grace and benignant as the atmosphere of June; and Christianity, calm, motherly, and forgiving—these are the pall-bearers by whom the body of our hero was borne to its resting-place....”[20]
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Footnote 20:
From the Brooklyn Citizen of March 12.
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On a sunny slope in that most beautiful of all cemeteries, overlooking the Bay of New York, is the grave of Henry Ward Beecher. But it is only the grave: “When I fall, and am buried in Greenwood, let no man dare to stand over the turf and say, ‘Here lies Henry Ward Beecher,’ for God knows that I will not lie there. Look up; if you love me, and if you feel that I have helped you on your way home, stand with your feet on my turf and look up; for I will not hear anybody that does not speak with his mouth toward heaven.”
With all our sorrow we cannot begrudge him the rest and peace so well earned, nor that for which he had so often prayed—a quiet, painless departure while yet each faculty was unimpaired. He remembered with deepest pain the failing years of his own father, who lingered till all his faculties became impaired:
“My venerable father, who was a second David in his time—a man of war—and yet who had as sweet a heart as ever an angel woman had, lived through many last years of weakness and obscuration, and I had to remember a great way back to find my father. It was very pitiful, very painful.
“That is one reason why I do not want to be an old man. I hope God will have so much consideration for my weakness—if it be a weakness—as to let me drop down in my harness and in the full energy of work. I have no fear whatever of dying: it is only the fear of living that I have before my eyes....
“Some persons talk about a man having passed through a stormy life, and sitting now at the end of his life in quiet, preparing himself for heaven. Heaven does not want any such preparation as that. That is the best preparation which a man makes when he is using the whole force of his being in his day and time. I would rather die with the harness on and be dragged out by the heels. I would like to fall in the traces. You cannot help scoring one year against yourself and growing old in one way; but it is the outward man that is growing old. The wine that is in you ought to be growing better and better every year. Time should mellow and ripen it. True, if a man’s power is dried up, he cannot do more than he has strength for; but every man should do up to the measure of his strength, and not forget the sudden appearing of God in his own day and in his own time.
“I love those streams that run full, clear to the ocean. Some men there are who are like mountain streams, torrent-fed, that boom in the spring, with wondrous glory of fulness and power, and go rushing through the earlier months, but slacken their speed, and by midsummer are only a trickling reminiscence of the river. I like to think of streams like the old Merrimac, that begin work up near their head-waters, and never run a league without turning some mighty wheel of industry, and have no vacation to the end, but go into the sea with the very foam on their surface.”
For him death had no terrors; it was the gate opening into eternal rest and peace—that peace for which he had so often yearned and longed in his later years. Death was the welcome friend, not the dreaded foe.
“Is there anything sweeter to grief and sorrow than that passage where the New Testament, sweet book of the soul, speaks of dying? Let Tuscanized Romans talk of death; let heathen mythologies come to us with skulls, and cross-bones, and hideous images of dying, of the monster Death, of the tyrant Death, of the scythe-armed Death, of a grim and terrible fate; but what terror can any of these representations have for us when we have for our encouragement and hope the promises of the New Testament?
“On a summer’s day the gentle western wind brings in all the sweets of the field and the garden; and the child, overtasked by joy, comes back weary, and climbs for sport into the mother’s lap; and before he can sport he feels the balm of rest stealing over him, and lays his curly head back upon her arm; and look! he goes to sleep; hush! he has gone to sleep, and all the children stand smiling. How beautiful it is to see a child drop asleep on its mother’s arm! And it is said, ‘He fell asleep in Jesus.’ Is there anything so high, so noble, or divine, as the way in which the New Testament speaks of dying? How near death is, and how beautiful!
“If you have lost companions, children, friends, you have not lost them. They followed the Pilot. They went through airy channels, unknown and unsearchable, and they are with the Lord; and you are going to be with Him, too. I die to go, not to Jerusalem, but to the New Jerusalem. I die, not to wait in the rock-ribbed sepulchre, which shall hold me sure; I die, that when this body is dropped I shall have a place, in the inward fulness of my spiritual power, with the Lord.
“Then welcome gray hairs! they come as white banners that wave from the other and higher life. Welcome infirmities! they are but the loosening of the cords preparatory to taking down the tabernacle. Welcome troubles! they are but the signs that we are crossing the sea, and that not far away is our home—that house of our Father in which are many mansions, where dwells Jesus, the loved and all-loving. And let us rejoice that He has gone from the body, that He may be ever present in the spirit, and that ere long we may be with Him.”
His life had been full and complete. Unconsciously, in words of matchless beauty, he painted his own picture when he said:
“And the most beautiful thing that lives on this earth is not the child in the cradle, sweet as it is. It is not ample enough. It has not had history enough. It is all prophecy. Let me see one who has wrought through life; let me see a great nature that has gone through sorrows, through fire, through the flood, through the thunder of battle, ripening, sweetening, enlarging, and growing finer and finer, and gentler and gentler, that fineness and gentleness being the result of great strength and great knowledge accumulated through a long life—let me see such a one stand at the end of life, as the sun stands on a summer afternoon just before it goes down. Is there anything on earth so beautiful as a rich, ripe, large, glowing, and glorious Christian heart? No, nothing.”