Born at Litchfield, Conn., June 24, 1813: died at Brooklyn, N. Y., March 8, 1887. A noted American Congregational clergyman, lecturer, reformer, and author, son of Lyman Beecher. He was graduated at Amherst College in 1834; studied theology at Lane Theological Seminary; and was pastor in Lawrenceburg, Indiana (1837–39), of a Presbyterian church in Indianapolis (1839–47), and of the Plymouth Congregational church in Brooklyn (1847–87). He was one of the founders and early editors of the “Independent,” the founder of the “Christian Union” and its editor 1870–81; and one of the most prominent of anti-slavery orators. He delivered Union addresses in Great Britain on subjects relating to the Civil War in the United States in 1863. He published “Lectures to Young Men” (1844), “Star Papers” (1855), “Freedom and War” (1863), “Eyes and Ears” (1864), “Aids to Prayer” (1864), “Norwood” (1867), “Earlier Scenes,” “Lecture Room Talks,” “Yale Lectures on Preaching,” “A Summer Parish,” “Evolution and Preaching” (1885), etc.

Personal

  The forehead is high rather than broad; his cheeks bare; his mouth compressed and firm, with humor lurking and almost laughing in the corners: his collar turned over à la Byron, more perhaps for the comfort of his ears (as he is exceedingly short-necked) than for any love for that peculiar fashion. His voice is full of music, in which, by the way, he is a great proficient. His body is well developed, and his great maxim is to keep it in first-rate working order, for he considers health to be a Christian duty, and rightly deems it impossible for any man to do justice to his mental faculties without at the same time attending to his physical. His motions are quick and elastic, and his manners frank, cordial, and kind, such as to attract rather than repel the advances of others. With children he is an especial favorite; they love to run up to him and offer him little bundles of flowers, of which they know him to be passionately fond, and they deem themselves more than rewarded by the hearty “Thank you,” and the tender look of loving interest that accompanies his acceptance of their gift. Add to this that his benevolence is limited only by his means, and our readers will have a pretty good idea of his general character and personal appearance.

  I finished at my church to-night. It is Mrs. Stowe’s brother’s, and a most wonderful place to speak in. We had it enormously full last night (Marigold and Trial), but it scarcely required an effort. Mr. Ward Beecher being present in his pew, I sent to invite him to come round before he left. I found him to be an unostentatious, evidently able, straightforward, and agreeable man; extremely well-informed, and with a good knowledge of art.

  My little room is quiet enough. Lizzie is at Seabrook, and I am all alone. The sweet calm face of the pagan philosopher and emperor, Marcus Antonnus, looks down upon me on one hand, and on the other the bold, generous, and humane countenance of the Christian man of action, Henry Ward Beecher; and I sit between them as sort of compromise.

  I spent some hours with the famous authoress’s famous brother, Henry Ward Beecher, and heard him preach at Plymouth Church on Thanksgiving Day. Logic, humour, passionate declamation, poetry, tender pathos, were marvelously blended, and I joined with the eagerly listening crowd both in laughter and tears.

  It would be no compliment to call Henry Ward Beecher the American Spurgeon. He may be that, but he is more. If we can imagine Mr. Spurgeon and Mr. John Bright with a cautious touch of Mr. Maurice and a strong tincture of the late F. W. Robertson—if, I say, it is possible to imagine such a compound being brought up in New England and at last securely fixed in a New York pulpit, we shall get a product not unlike Henry Ward Beecher.

  In all my communications with him, in five years of the encyclopædic work of an editor, I have never touched a subject of current interest of which he appeared to be ignorant. When he was unacquainted with the subject, he could suggest a direction—a book or a living authority—to go to for information. This largeness of his nature, coupled with its quickness, its mobility, makes his serious moods seem an affectation or assumption to narrow, sluggish natures. He will pass instantly, by a transition inexplicable to men of slow mental movement, from hilarity to reverence and from reverence back to hilarity again; in a conversation about diamonds he will flash on you a magnificent picture of the apocalyptic revelation of the jewelled walls of the New Jerusalem, and before his auditor has fully recovered his breath from the sudden flight, he is back upon the earth again, telling some experience with a salesman at Tiffany’s or Howard’s. He is catholic, broad, of universal sympathies, of mercurial temperament, of instantaneous and lightning-like rapidity of mental action.

  This morning I have been to hear Ward Beecher. Places were kept, and his management of his voice and hold on his vast audience struck me wonderfully, but the sermon was poor. They said he knew I was coming, and was on his good behaviour, and therefore constrained. At the end of the service he came down into the area to see me, gave me the notes of his sermon, said that I had taught him much, that he had read my rebukes of him too, and that they were just and had done him good. Nothing could be more gracious and in better taste than what he said.

  His face and form and motion were as individual as his mind. For those who knew him well they seemed its inevitable expression.

	“His eloquent blood
	Spoke in his cheeks, and so distinctly wrought
	That you might almost say his body thought.”

His humor twinkled in his eye. One had but to see his mouth to know his nature’s tenderness; and equally his enjoyment of all things purely sensuous—all lovely colors, all beauteous forms, and all delightful sounds. The physical volume of the man was necessary to his intellectual energy and to his stormy eloquence. His impassioned outbursts would have been ridiculous in a man of slighter mould. His appearance during the last years of his life, if it did not gain in fineness, acquired greater impressiveness from his ruddy face and flowing silver hair. A stranger could not meet him on the street without knowing him to be no ordinary man; without wondering if he were not quite extraordinary.

  What strikes us in Beecher, as in Webster, is the native fashion, the way he was hewn, the part God had in him,—not his volition, but his constitution. “A splendid animal” he was called by the examiner of his body and his bumps,—his hair, a mane; his head and features reminding us, though with total absence of the cruel mien, of that great king and lion, or royal beast, Henry VIII. But, like the former Henry, Beecher was a synonym for forward, aggressive motion,—his hand everywhere, with a word which was a blow. He said, “I am positive,” to one who wanted him to spare an unpleasant passage or pass evasively over some delicate point in his speech. As civilian, politician, or theologian, he was nothing, if not on the jump. Never neutral, he provoked opposite opinions at his death, yet possessed in his traits the unquestionable excellence without which no man can attach to himself such warm and so many friends, hold a million watchers, in spirit with the actual crowd near his sick-bed, and draw, as sun and moon do the tides, abounding praises over his unshrouded remains.

  Aside from his face, Mr. Beecher would not have attracted marked attention in a crowd. His figure was short and compact. Although but five feet eight inches in height, his weight for several years had averaged about two hundred and twenty-five pounds. But his flesh was so well distributed that he did not appear clumsy nor obese. His carriage was erect and noble. His complexion was florid, and his smoothly-shaven face and white locks contrasted finely with it. His hair was somewhat thin, but to the last it fully covered his head. It was allowed to grow to the collar, and was swept behind his ears. His head was not extraordinary in size, measuring only twenty-three inches in circumference, but his massive face and features gave it an appearance of great bulk. His forehead was rather retreating than bold, except that the brow was full. His eyes were prominent and seemed large. They were grayish blue in color, and so perfect were these organs as to require no artificial aid, even for protracted work. The upper lids were full and overhanging—a formation which has been noted as characteristic of many distinguished orators and actors. His nose bore a fair proportion to the rest of his features, and presented no remarked peculiarity of form. His mouth was large, and the lips neither full nor thin. They closed firmly. The cheeks were full, quite remarkably so beneath the ears, which latter organs were well formed, and set far back upon the head. The chin was somewhat square, and gave a determined look to his face. His expression was exceedingly varied. Never was there a more mobile countenance, nor one that more quickly and decisively responded to every emotion.

  I attended Mr. Beecher’s funeral to-day at his church in Brooklyn, which was turned into a flower garden. No funeral just like it has taken place since the world began. I looked upon the dead body with the closed mouth, once so eloquent, and the eyes once flashing with genius. There were and there are preachers more profound and more spiritual, and orators more weighty and more polished than Mr. Beecher, but it is doubtful if any generation has produced a more powerful popular speaker who had such complete command and magnetic hold of his audience. His imagination was as fertile as that of a poet, though he never wrote a poem, or quoted poetry. His mind was a flower garden in perpetual bloom, enlivened by running brooks and singing birds. He was in profound sympathy with nature and with man, especially with the common people.

  It is amusing to the men and women of this day to read that the most famous of modern preachers and his wife who was about to be, on their wedding-day, made their own wedding-cake, he picking over and stoning the raisins, beating the eggs and keeping the whole family in good spirits while the hurried preparations went on. But the simplicities and homeliness of life in a Massachusetts village, a half century and more ago, are very enchanting compared with the hardships on which Mr. and Mrs. Beecher were soon to enter in their Western parish. Beginning housekeeping on a meager salary, in two rooms upstairs over a stable; calling in the assistance of the paternal household on Walnut Hills, securing a cooking-stove from a brother, and dishes from a Seminary classmate, and a variety of things from “Father Beecher and Mrs. Stowe;” cleaning out the dirty rooms with their own hands, with indomitable pluck and the merriest good nature—such were the preparations made by this loving couple for their first home.

  Good-by, my best beloved friend. I shall never have another like you. Mr. Beecher died of apoplexy at his residence in Brooklyn on Tuesday, March 8, 1887, at 9:40 A.M. The private funeral was held at 9:30 A.M. on the following Thursday at his late home, where none but the members of the family were present. The public funeral took place at Plymouth Church at 10:30 A.M. on Friday, the 11th…. Surging crowds thronged the neighboring thoroughfares. Business was suspended by proclamation of the mayor of Brooklyn. The streets in all directions were filled with the sorrowing multitude, who stood in line for hours with a hope of viewing once more the face of their departed friend. When the funeral pageant entered Plymouth Church the interior of the great structure was blooming like an immense bower of flowers and living things. Evergreens and roses, smilax and blossoming vines, greeted those who entered. It seemed, indeed, the ushering of the dead into the realm of life. Lying in state during an entire day, the body was viewed by thousands. The crush to gain one glimpse of the remains was terrible, although the interior arrangements were perfect to secure an orderly passing of the long lines of people. The Thirteenth Regiment were the guard of honor; and hour after hour, from 10 in the morning until 10 in the evening, while the great organ gave forth subdued and solemn music, the people entered, looked, and passed. It was estimated in this slow but constantly moving stream over fifty thousand persons—men, women, and children—had come to see his face for the last time.

Trial

  I love Beecher and believe in him. He has done good to thousands. If he has fallen into temptation I shall feel grieved, but would be ashamed of myself were I less his friend.

  Mr. Henry Ward Beecher is so far from suffering any diminution of his popularity as a preacher or lecturer from the defamatory accusations brought against him that he is now paid double what he formerly received for either preaching or lecturing—the great attraction of his eloquence being enhanced in public estimation by his position as a martyr to an infamous slander, or the hero of a scandalous intrigue. I have been assured that he will be supported and maintained in spite of everything in his own church, as a mere matter of money interest. The church was built upon speculation by a body of gentlemen, who engaged Mr. Beecher to preach there, expecting an immense sale of their pews at a very high price, as the result of his popularity as a preacher. Hitherto their speculation has answered admirably, and the present scandal has added to their profits by cramming the church fuller than ever, and in the interest of their pew-rents they will contrive to keep their preacher’s popularity undiminished with the public, as I am assured. The whole thing exhibits a moral tone in the community where it is taking place so incredibly degraded and so vulgarly vicious, that I think the lapse from virtue imputed to one individual, clergyman though he be, far less shocking and revolting than the whole religious tone and condition of his congregation and the society of which they form a part.

  Here is the most popular Protestant preacher, I think, that ever lived, a man whose church would be filled, if there was a bull-fight in the next street,—who gets a salary of twenty thousand dollars and is worth it to his church,—who, as a lecturer, is handled by his impresario as if he were a prima donna,—who has done more sensible, effective, good-natured talking and writing to the great middle class and the “unknown public” than any man we ever had in this country,—with a good deal of Franklin’s sense and humor, with a power of holding great assemblies like Whitefield,—the best known and most popular private citizen, I suppose, we have ever had,—a saint by inheritance and connections of every kind, and yet as human as King David or Robert Burns, so that his inherited theology hangs about him in rags, and shows the flesh of honest manhood in a way to frighten all his co-religionists,—here is this wonderful creature, popular idol, the hope of liberal orthodoxy, accused of reading the seventh commandment according to the version that left out the negative. There is no doubt that he has compromised himself with unsafe persons and brought grave suspicions on himself, but the hope is universal that his defence, yet to come, will show that he has been slandered, and that his own assertions of innocence will be made good by a thorough sifting of the testimony that is brought against him. His accuser, Theodore Tilton, appears as badly as a man can, in every point of view, but it is pretended that other witnesses are to be called, and sick as everybody is of the monster scandal, it is felt that all must be known, since so much has already been made public. I am afraid you will turn away with something like disgust from the pages that I have filled with this matter, but the truth is, nothing ever made such a talk, and if it had been a settled fact that the comet was to hit the earth on the 22nd of July, late on the evening of the 21st, people would have been talking of the great “Beecher-Tilton scandal.”

  My brother is hopelessly generous and confiding. His inability to believe evil is something incredible, and so has come all this suffering. You said you hoped I should be at rest when the first investigating committee and Plymouth Church cleared my brother almost by acclamation. Not so. The enemy have so committed themselves that either they or he must die, and there has followed two years of the most dreadful struggle. First, a legal trial of six months, the expenses of which on his side were one hundred and eighteen thousand dollars, and in which he and his brave wife sat side by side in the court-room and heard all that these plotters, who had been weaving their webs for three years, could bring. The foreman of the jury was offered a bribe of ten thousand dollars to decide against my brother. He sent the letter containing the proposition to the judge. But with all their plotting, three fourths of the jury decided against them, and their case was lost…. Never have I known a nature of such strength, and such almost child-like innocence. He is of a nature so sweet and perfect that, though I have seen him thunderously indignant at moments, I never saw him fretful or irritable,—a man who continuously, in every little act of life, is thinking of others, a man that all the children in the street run after, and that every sorrowful, weak, or distressed person looks to as a natural helper. In all this long history there has been no circumstance of his relation to any woman that has not been worthy of himself,—pure, delicate, and proper; and I know all sides of it, and certainly should not say this if there were even a misgiving. Thank God, there is none, and I can read my New Testament and feel that by all the beatitudes my brother is blessed. His calmness, serenity, and cheerfulness through all this time has uplifted us all.

Preacher and Orator

  Among the many consecrated edifices which distinguish Brooklyn as “the City of Churches,” is included one, individualized by its unusual capacity and its modest architecture…. Here gather, twice on every Sabbath of the year, except during the summer solstice, about twenty-five hundred people, and the audience sometimes numbers three thousand. It is not unusual for the capacious body of the church, the broad galleries, the second elevated gallery, the several aisles, and all vacancies about pulpit and doors, to be occupied by eager listeners, and sometimes hundreds turn away, unable to find footing within the audience-room. And this is no novel fact. It has been a fact for six years. Its persistence imparts to it the dignity of a moral phenomenon. It is unprecedented in the history of audiences, whether religious, literary, political, or artistical. What in truth is it? It is not that an orator attracts a crowd. That is often done. But it is, that twice on each Sabbath for six years, from two to three thousand people centre to an unchanged attraction. No dramatic genius, no melodious voice, no popular eloquence has ever done so much as that. Neither Macready, nor Garrick, nor Jenny Lind, nor Rachel, nor Gough, nor Clay, nor Choate has done it. The theatre must change its “Star” monthly, the singer must migrate often, the orator must make “angel visits” to concentrate three thousand people. And the phenomenon is the more remarkable, in that this gathering is around the Pulpit, where no Art wins, and no Pleasure stimulates; and, furthermore, it occurs when hundreds of other audience-rooms are opened for the same purpose, with pulpits suitably supplied; while competition must be banished, before the Stars of Art can fill three thousand seats for a single evening. And though a difference of expense has its effect, yet it is far from explaining the difference of fact.

  We cross the ferry to Brooklyn, and hear Ward Beecher at the Plymouth Church. It was a spectacle,—and himself the Preacher, if preacher there be anywhere now in pulpits. His auditors had to weep, had to laugh, under his potent magnetism, while his doctrine of justice to all men, bond and free, was grand. House, entries, aisles, galleries, all were crowded. Thoreau called it pagan, but I pronounced it good, very good,—the best I had witnessed for many a day, and hopeful for the coming time.

  Beecher preached the most dramatic and, in one sense, most effective sermon I ever heard from him, but in all the philosophy of it unspeakably crude and naturalistic; and yet I was greatly moved notwithstanding, and, I trust, profited. The close was eloquent enough to be a sermon by itself.

  No minister in the United States is so well known, none so widely beloved. He is as well known in Ottawa as in Broadway. He has the largest Protestant congregation in America, and an ungathered parish which no man attempts to number. He has church members in Maine, Wisconsin, Georgia, Texas, California, and all the way between. Men look on him as a national institution, a part of the public property. Not a Sunday in the year but representative men from every State in the Union fix their eyes on him, are instructed by his sermons and uplifted by his prayers. He is the most popular of American lecturers. In the celestial sphere of theological journals, his papers are the bright particular star in that constellation called the “Independent:” men look up to and bless the useful light, and learn therefrom the signs of the times…. He speaks for the ear which takes in at once and understands. He never makes attention painful. He illustrates his subject from daily life; the fields, the streets, stars, flowers, music, and babies are his favorite emblems. He remembers that he does not speak to scholars, to minds disciplined by long habit of thought, but to men with common education, careful and troubled about many things; and they keep his words and ponder them in their hearts…. His dramatic power makes his sermon also a life in the pulpit; his auditorium is also a theatrum, for he acts to the eye what he addresses to the ear, and at once wisdom enters at the two gates.

  It may be safely said, indeed, that as a pulpit and a platform orator he has no superior. Nothing is studied, nothing artificial, about his oratory: all is natural, frank, cordial, hearty, fearless. One great secret of his power is, that he feels deeply himself the great truths that he utters, and therefore makes his audience feel them too.

  It is not clear to the distant spectator by what aperture Mr. Beecher enters the church. He is suddenly discovered to be present, seated in his place on the platform,—an under-sized gentleman in a black stock. His hair combed behind his ears, and worn a little longer than usual, imparts to his appearance something of the Puritan, and calls to mind his father, the champion of orthodoxy in heretical Boston. In conducting the opening exercises, and, indeed, on all occasions of ceremony, Mr. Beecher shows himself an artist,—both his language and his demeanor being marked by the most refined decorum. An elegant, finished simplicity, characterizes all he does and says: not a word too much, nor a word misused, nor a word waited for, nor unharmonious movement, mars the satisfaction of the auditor. The habit of living for thirty years in the view of a multitude together with a natural sense of the becoming, and a quick sympathy with men and circumstances, has wrought up his public demeanor to a point near perfection. A candidate for public honors could not study a better model. This is the more remarkable, because it is a purely spiritual triumph. Mr. Beecher’s person is not imposing, nor his natural manner graceful. It is his complete extirpation of the desire of producing an illegitimate effect; it is his sincerity and genuineness as a human being; it is the dignity of his character, and his command of his powers,—which give him this easy mastery over every situation in which he finds himself.

  The sermon entitled “Sin against the Holy Ghost,” is one of the most powerful and instructive doctrinal discourses upon that solemn and mysterious theme that we have read; and few sermons that have ever been written have less of the husk of dogma and more of the sweet fruit of spiritual doctrine in them, than his discourse on “The Comforting God.” But it is not as a doctrinal, it is as a moral preacher, that he excels. As a moral pathologist he is wonderfully subtle in his perception of purpose and motive, understanding the bad tendencies as well as the nobler instincts of the human heart, following out a moral truth that another preacher would give in some dry formalistic husk of statement into its living issues in character, enlarging, developing, showing how it works in real life, in the family, the street, the church, tracking meanness to its hiding places, unearthing concealed selfishness, rousing the indolent and sensual, encouraging the meek heart, helping the doubting, seeing good where others would see only evil, and striving to build up a true manhood in the erring, imperfect, and lost.

  Of all the living pulpit orators of America, Henry Ward Beecher is confessedly one of the most brilliant. The son of a great pulpit orator, endowed with the rarest and most versatile abilities, he, if any man could do so, might dispense, one would suppose, with a tedious and protracted training in the art of speaking. But what do we find to have been his education? Did he shun the professors of elocution, believing, as do many of his brethren, that oratory, like Dogberry’s reading and writing, comes by nature? No, he placed himself, when at college, under a skillful teacher, and for three years was drilled incessantly, he says, in posturing, gesture, and voice-culture…. Later, at the theological seminary, Mr. Beecher continued his drill. There was a large grove between the seminary and his father’s house, and it was the habit, he tells us, of his brother Charles and himself, with one or two others, to make the night, and even the day, hideous with their voices, as they passed backward and forward through the wood, exploding all the vowels from the bottom to the very top of their voices.

  Personally I have no doubt that Mr. Beecher’s power is not a little enhanced by his almost unique gift of language. He could fill two octavo pages with the description of a cobweb, and yet there would be much more than mere words in the description. There is a subtle color in his words, so that they mass up into very striking impressiveness, however poor or contracted the subject itself may be. Mr. Beecher would be as unquotable a speaker as Mr. Gladstone but for the innumerable figures which crowd to his help. Mr. Gladstone has no rhetorical imagination; he expounds—unravels—and anatomizes his subjects with a precision and fulness truly amazing, and with an eloquence as pellucid as it is massive and forceful, but there are no flowers, no figures, no hints of an infinite background. Mr. Beecher is just as copious in mere language, but then how tropical is the luxuriance of his imagination! When he concludes it is rather out of deference to custom or convenience than because the subject is exhausted. My sober impression is that Mr. Beecher could preach every Sunday in the year from the first verse in Genesis, without giving any sign of intellectual exhaustion, or any failure of imaginative fire.

  Mr. Beecher has been one of the most popular platform orators and lecturers of his time. He has taken an active part and exerted his great influence in behalf of all the great moral reform movements of the past forty years. He was one of the boldest and most advanced public thinkers and speakers on the anti-slavery question. During the dark days of the war he made a journey to Europe. He found the popular sentiment in England running strongly against the North. He undertook to stop that current, and in a course of public addresses in the larger cities of that country, he corrected the popular misapprehension of the questions at stake, and turned the tide to flowing strongly in favor of his cause. He has done noble work for the temperance cause, and has given his mite towards advancing the cause of woman suffrage.

  I know that you are still thinking as I speak of the great soul that has passed away, of the great preacher, for he was the greatest preacher in America, and the greatest preacher means the greatest power in the land. To make a great preacher, two things are necessary, the love of truth and the love of souls; and surely no man had greater love of truth or love of souls than Henry Ward Beecher. Great services, too, did he render to theology, which is making great progress now. It is not that we are discovering new truths, but that what lay dead and dry in men’s souls has awakened. The Spirit of the Lord has been poured into humanity, and no one more than Mr. Beecher has helped to this, pouring his great insight and sympathy and courage out upon the truths which God gave him to deliver. A great leader in the theological world, believing in the Divine Christ and in eternal hope for mankind, foremost in every great work and in all progress, one of that noble band of men whose hands clutched the throat of slavery, and never relaxed their hold till the last shackle fell off; inspiring men to war, speaking words of love and reconciliation when peace had come, standing by the poor and oppressed, bringing a slave girl into his pulpit and making his people pay her ransom. A true American like Webster, a great preacher, a great leader, a great patriot, a great man.

  He regarded preaching as specially his vocation, and in his judgment it ranked highest of all earthly pursuits. Nowhere else was he so happy as in this 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 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 living man to decide; but we believe that the latter judgment will in time largely prevail.

  Mr. Beecher was not only the most popular but the most influential preacher that this country has produced. He did more than any other man to liberalize religious sentiment—to lift orthodox theology out of the ruts in which it had been running from the days of the Puritans. His sermons were very rarely doctrinal. He was in no respect a theologian. He cared little for creeds. Belief with him was a matter of secondary importance; conduct was everything.

  Henry Ward Beecher was a great man—one of the greatest and most remarkable men of his day. His personality was so large, his gifts so varied, his mental and moral composition so multiform, that a volume would be needed to give a complete character sketch of the man…. His heart was as great as his brain. He was intensely human. Artificiality he hated, and dissembling and deception he could not understand. He was sometimes called a great actor, but sincerity was his very breath of life…. Of the wonderful powers that made his preaching so remarkable in its effectiveness and so world wide in its fame it is hard to give a precise analysis. Among the component elements were a vividly creative imagination, a mind richly stocked by reading and observation, a ripe judgment, a deep sympathy, a remarkable adaptability to occasions and situations, and an unfailing earnestness and enthusiasm. He was an accomplished elocutionist with the natural advantages of a commanding presence and a voice of great power and flexibility.

  One minister I have known, who, though always preaching, was always fresh, was Henry Ward Beecher. His ideas were inexhaustible. The Rev. Hugh Price Hughes’ definition of the essential requisites of modern preaching are “simplicity, flexibility, spontaneity and earnestness”—qualities of his own preaching, aided by a voice which travels like a bird over the audience and along the galleries. Ward Beecher had the four qualities above named, with the addition of imagination; always bright and often poetical, when every sentence was tinted with a hue of its own.

General

  The author of “Norwood” is less of an artist than his sister, Mrs. Stowe, and under the relation of art his novel is below criticism. It contains many just observations on various topics, but by no means original or profound; it seizes some few of the traits of New England village life; but its characters, with the exception of Judge Bacon, Agate Bissell, and Hiram Beers are the abstractions or impersonations of the author’s theories. The author has little dramatic power, and not much wit or humor. The persons or personages of his book are only so many points in the argument which he is carrying on against Calvinistic orthodoxy for pure naturalism. The substance of his volume seems to be made up of the fag-ends of his sermons and lectures. He preaches and lectures all through it, and rather prosily into the bargain. His Dr. Wentworth is a bore, and his daughter Rose, the heroine of the story, is a species of blue-stocking, and neither lovely nor lovable. As a type of the New England cultivated and accomplished lady she is a failure, and is hardly up to the level of the New England school-ma’am. The sensational incidents of the story are old and worn out, and the speculations on love indicate very little depth of feeling or knowledge of life, or of the human heart. The author proceeds on a theory and so far shows his New England birth and breeding, but he seldom touches reality. As a picture of New England village life it is singularly unfortunate, and still more so as a picture of village life in the valley of the Connecticut, some twenty miles above Springfield, in Massachusetts, where the scene is laid, and where the tone and manners of society in a village of five thousand inhabitants, the number Norwood is said to contain, hardly differ in refinement and polish from the tone and manners of the better classes in Boston and its vicinity.

  As a theological scholar, or, indeed, as a trained and accurate writer, nobody would think of comparing him with Francis Wayland, or Leonard Bacon, or Edwards A. Park, or Frederick H. Hedge. In depth of spiritual insight, though not in depth of spiritual emotion, he is inferior to Horace Bushnell, Cyrus A. Bartol, and many other American divines. He feels spiritual facts intensely; he beholds them with wavering vision. But his distinction is that he is a formidable, almost irresistible, moral force…. An impartial student of character, accustomed to penetrate into the souls of those he desires inwardly to know, to look at things from their point of view, and to interpret external evidence by the internal knowledge he has thus obtained, would say that Mr. Beecher was exactly the heedless, indiscreet man of religious genius likely to become the subject of such a scandal as has recently disgusted the country, and yet to be perfectly innocent of the atrocious crimes with which he was charged.

  Suppose that Mr. Beecher had been confined to the city during all his young life. The result would have been that we should not have had Mr. Beecher at all. We should have had a strong, dramatic man, notable in many respects—but he would have been so shorn of his wonderful power of illustration, that his pulpit would have been but a common one. It is quite safe for us to say that he has learned more of that which has been of use to him, as a public teacher, from nature, than from his theological schools and books. He has recognized the word which God speaks to us in nature as truly divine—just as divine as that which he speaks in revelation. His quick apprehension of the analogies that exist between nature and the spiritual world has been the key by which he has opened the door into his wonderful success.

  In his death the pulpit has lost one of its most gifted orators, and the country its best-known citizen. Mr. Beecher’s place in history is that of a fixed star of the first magnitude. His genius, his character, and his career will form notable and instructive studies in all the future. He was many-sided, with a vigorous, keen, versatile intellect, most gigantic in his attainments, magnetic in power and influence, progressive in thought and action, a grand, genial, large-hearted, manly man. The chief element of his marvelous success, however, was his devotion to study. With all his rare endowments he would never trust himself to speak on any subject that he had not previously made his own through the closest analysis. In his Christian work he was a careful student of ministerial helps. He studied other preachers, he studied men, he studied himself. In his lectures on varied topics he was thoroughly informed, his mind a perfect store-house of exact knowledge, not accidentally so, but through careful, painstaking research and observation. His brain was never idle, and he esteemed it an imperative duty to keep abreast with all themes of current interest. Thus critics have rarely been able to prove him at fault in any important fact, whether stated as an argument or used as an illustration wherever he has spoken even though a combatant in the most heated controversies.

  Beecher’s “Life Thoughts,” when I was fourteen, tended to mellow the Calvinism of North Country Congregationalism, and Spurgeon’s Sermons acted as an astringent in the opposite direction.

  Mr. Beecher’s place as a writer falls below his oratorical rank. The man’s presence was so mighty, and his passions even overwhelming, that, being gone, he is like Talbot in Shakespeare’s play without his troops, and leaves but a remnant of himself on the printed page behind. What but genius suffers no privation in the cold types? Predominant talent, transcendent faculty for an occasion, and apt fancy to illustrate a point are published at a loss. Nothing save power of original thought or a divine vision, with command of beautiful expression, can constitute literature,—books that will endure. There are infinite wit and resource, but lack of whole and vital organism, in all the volumes Beecher has put forth. Every essay or sermon of his is a fragment, with the glitter in it as of crushed crystal or broken spar. He spoke or wrote to serve a purpose, well and bravely, but not for all time.

  “Norwood” showed him in no new light. There was nothing in it which was not in his sermons in a better form. His “Life of Christ” is without any critical value, and its discontinuance is not a matter for regret. It was a brilliant paraphrase of the New Testament narration, in which Mr. Beecher spoke ten times from his emotion to once from his reason. That he did not sooner resolve to write his autobiography, and carry out his purpose, is a great pity.

  Henry Ward Beecher will be remembered as a preacher, and not as a writer. He wrote much, but he was not in any measure a man of letters. Most of his pieces are fugitive; some at least would hardly have been printed if a less famous man had written them. His heart was in his ministerial work, especially in his preaching; for he does not appear to have been an ideal pastor. His powers were not very various, but he was too strong a man in his own place to need any excessive eulogy. Admitting his limitations, we cannot fail to recognise and to admire the excellent service he rendered within them. He was a parson of this world, concerned with this world’s movements, and, at heart, more eager about fitting people for citizenship of the United States than for citizenship of the New Jerusalem.

  How much of Mr. Beecher’s literary work will survive? A great deal of it has that peculiar quality, imagination, which Lowell calls “the great antiseptic.” He is one of the most quotable of men, as quotable as Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Bacon, or Emerson. Five or six volumes from his sermons, speeches, and essays, would contain too much wit and wisdom for posterity to willingly let die. He had Franklin’s and Lincoln’s homely way of saying things, and much of Thomas à Kempis’s spirituality and power of bringing consolation to bruised hearts. Poet, moralist, humorist, and master of pithy proverbs, why should not Mr. Beecher be among the immortals in literature? A hundred years hence, when the Republic has become “the most powerful and prosperous community ever devised or developed by man,” and the historian reviews the critical years of the nineteenth century, in which Mr. Beecher had so conspicuous a part, he will then be a larger and loftier figure than now.

  Mr. Beecher was too busy a man to give more than his spare moments to general literature. His sermons, lectures, and addresses were reported for the daily papers and printed in part in book form; but these lose greatly when divorced from the large, warm, and benignant personality of the man. His volumes made up of articles in the Independent and Ledger, such as “Star Papers,” 1855, and “Eyes and Ears,” 1862, contain many delightful morceaux upon country life and similar topics, though they are hardly wrought with sufficient closeness and care to take a permanent place in letters.

  Mr. Beecher’s style was not artificial; its faults as well as its excellences were those of extreme naturalness. He always wrote with fury; rarely did he correct with phlegm. His sermons were published as they fell from his lips,—correct and revise he would not. The too few editorials which he wrote, on the eve of the Civil War, were written while the press was impatiently waiting for them, were often taken page by page from his hand, and were habitually left unread by him to be corrected in proof by others…. But while his style was wholly unartificial, it was no product of mere careless genius; carelessness never gives a product worth possessing. The excellences of Mr. Beecher’s style were due to a careful study of the great English writers; its defects to a temperament too eager to endure the dull work of correction…. In any estimate of Mr. Beecher’s style, it must be remembered that he was both by temperament and training a preacher. He was brought up not in a literary, but in a didactic atmosphere. If it were as true as it is false that art exists only for art’s sake, Mr. Beecher would not have been an artist. His art always had a purpose; generally a distinct moral purpose. An overwhelming proportion of his contributions to literature consists of sermons or extracts from sermons, or addresses not less distinctively didactic. His one novel was written avowedly to rectify some common misapprehensions as to New England life and character. Even his lighter papers, products of the mere exuberance of a nature too full of every phase of life to be quiescent, indicated the intensity of a purposeful soul, much as the sparks in a blacksmith’s shop come from the very vigor with which the artisan is shaping on the anvil the nail or the shoe.

  The style of Henry Ward Beecher, for example, is remarkable for the number, aptness, and beauty of the figures of speech he uses…. His oratory is distinguished by the qualities of fervid eloquence, great abundance and variety of illustration, startling independence of statement, and brilliant humor. He was an original thinker, and many of his sermons are models of persuasive argument, combining close logical thought with beautiful imagery.

  For years his printed sermons were the main source of my instruction and delight. His range and variety in all that kind of observation and subtlety of which I have just spoken; his width of sympathy; his natural and spontaneous pathos; the wealth of illustration and metaphor with which his sermons were adorned, and which were drawn chiefly from natural objects, from his orchard, his farm, his garden, as well as from machinery and from all kinds of natural processes; his naturalism and absence of theological bias; his knowledge of average men and their ways of looking at things; in a word his general fertility of thought, filling up as it did the full horizon of my mind, and running over and beyond it on all sides, so that wherever I looked he had been there before me,—all this delighted and enchanted me, and made him for some years my ideal of intellectual greatness.

  For many years he poured forth from the pulpit of “Plymouth Church” sermons brilliant in thought, full of poetic beauty, rich and warm with the love of God and man.

  For almost half a century Henry Ward Beecher was one of the most conspicuous persons in American life. The product of his brain during all that time was enormous and exceedingly varied. That he moulded the opinions of men there is no doubt; that he urged an intelligent and devoted adherence to Christianity, there can be no question; that he entered deeply into the politics of his time is evident; and through all his activity he was unfailing in the use of his voice and pen for what he considered the advancement of human society.