Henry Ward Beecher

FROM 1855 to the time of Mr. Beecher’s death in 1887, except for the five years which included the civil war, I was in constant fellowship with him. In this paper I propose to give some personal estimates, the result of that fellowship, and illustrated by some reminiscent incidents.

During most of his life Mr. Beecher was engaged in warfare of one sort or another. He was constantly attacking what he regarded as abuses, — social, political, religious; and he was constantly under attack for what others regarded as social, political, and religious errors in his teaching. The natural consequence was that in his lifetime many false estimates of his character and few correct ones were made. His enemies exaggerated his faults and depreciated, if they did not absolutely deny, his virtues. As an almost necessary consequence, his friends were inclined to exaggerate his excellences and to ignore, if not to deny, his defects. In battle no loyal soldier criticises his general; loyalty prevented Mr. Beecher’s friends and supporters from criticising their leader. In such a case the errors on the one side are not corrected by the errors on the other. On the contrary, the estimates of both friends and foes are apt to agree in statement although antagonistic in their animus and spirit.

Thus it had been said by both critics and admirers, though with a very different meaning, that Mr. Beecher would have made a great actor, a great lawyer, a great politician, a great author. What education might have made of him no man can tell; but take him for what he was, he would not have made a great actor because he could not deliberately assume a part, nor a great lawyer, because he could not advocate any convictions not independently his own, nor a great politician, because he did not read character correctly, being too much possessed by the spirit which “ thinketh no evil,” nor a great author, because he was not interested in art for art’s sake.

It is true that Mr. Beecher’s interests were extraordinarily varied and his knowledge multiform. He was an expert in horticulture, arboriculture, precious stones, Turkish and Persian rugs, — and in how many other things I know not. He was a judge of horses, and was very fond of a good one. When I was starting out in search of a parish he gave me this advice : " Look at the horses in every town you go to. If the men drive good horses, you may expect that there is progress or at least life in the town ; if they drive poor ones, the people are probably inert and lazy.” The remark indicates the nature of his interest. Whatever the subject, it invariably led him somehow to men, their character, their life, and the best way of reaching them with the offer of the higher life. This fact was not always recognized by undiscriminating admirers, who, from the variety of his interests, drew the conclusion that he would have excelled in all departments. But though interest is necessary to excellence, excellence is not created alone by interest. I found Mr. Beecher once, shortly after the close of the civil war, deep in Sherman’s March to the Sea. To my expression of surprise — for he was not merely reading, he was studying it in detail with war maps — he replied, “ Do you know, if I were not a preacher I would choose to be a general above anything else.” But I did not take the expression seriously, and I do not think he did — except for the moment. I am certain he would have made a poor general. The jeweler who, apropos of Mr. Beecher’s love for precious stones, said that he would have made a splendid salesman was mistaken. True, he loved and understood precious stones, but he would never have cared to sell them. His interest in farming did not make him a successful farmer. When some critic attempted to arouse prejudice against him as a wealthy preacher who owned and carried on a farm of ten acres on the Hudson, lie replied that if an enemy should give him ten more acres he would be bankrupted.

Varied as were his talents, kaleidoscopic as was his mind, universal as were his interests, he gave himself to one work with a singleness of aim which I have never seen paralleled in any man of my acquaintance except Phillips Brooks. Their aims were different; Mr. Beecher’s broader and more comprehensive, Phillips Brooks’s more exclusively individual and spiritual. Phillips Brooks was purely a preacher. His one aim in life was to impart life. He believed correctly that he could do this best by the free use of his own personality in the pulpit. When he spoke on the platform or after a public dinner he made the platform or the table a pulpit; his address was a sermon ; his audience a congregation. For a little time in Philadelphia he took an active part in public questions, but after he went to Boston he was not active as a public teacher on social or political problems. This was not because he had lost his interest in them, or his acquaintance with them, but because he believed he could render his best service to the age by preaching ; to preaching accordingly he gave himself with entire singleness of purpose. That he could write true poetry was proved by O Little Town of Bethlehem. That he had a large knowledge of architecture and a remarkably creative as well as appreciative taste is proved by Trinity Church, into which he put himself as truly as he put himself into his sermons. That he would have made valuable contributions to periodical literature if he could have been persuaded to accept the numerous and urgent invitations which poured in upon him, that as a lecturer he would have been in great demand had he consented to go upon the Lyceum platform, no one who knew him doubts. He refused because he was resolved to devote himself wholly to preaching. Even as bishop his great work was as an itinerant preacher.

Mr. Beecher’s estimate of his own function was a broader one, but it was not less clearly conceived, nor followed with less single-heartedness. That function was to impart spiritual life, but it was also to instruct in the application of the principles of spiritual life to all the various problems both of personal experience and of social order. His greatness consisted in his instinctive perception of moral principles, in his practical common sense in the application of those principles to current questions of human experience, and in his varied literary and oratorical ability in so presenting those principles as not only to win for them the assent of all sorts of men, but also to inspire in all sorts of men a genuine loyalty to those principles. He understood himself better than some of his friends and his eulogists understood him. To this one work of so inspiring, guiding, and dominating the lives of men as to direct them in the way of righteousness he gave himself with absolute singleness of aim, and, after he had fairly got an understanding of himself and his work, with undeviating purpose. He preached, he lectured, he spoke on political platforms ; he wrote, and on all subjects, social and individual, grave and gay, secular and religious. But always back of his work, inspiring it, controlling it, determining his choice between different phases of it, was the ambition, if anything sounegoistic can be called an ambition, the purpose, if anything so unconscious can be called a purpose, to help men to a happier, a better, a diviner life. And in his estimate divineness of spirit was of transcendently greater importance than conformity to ethical standards, and both were superior to mere happiness. His intuitive nature would have made it impossible for him to accept the utilitarian philosophy. Preaching, therefore, in the narrower sense of that term, as a heralding of Jesus Christ, Son of God and Saviour of man, always took the first place, though not the sole place, in his relative estimate of opportunities. I can best illustrate his comparative estimate of lecturing and preaching by quoting one of half a dozen similar letters sent by him to Major J. B. Pond: —

BROOKLYN, N. Y., 124 Columbia Heights, February 22, 1883.
MY DEAR POND, — I am sorry that Suffield should suffer,—but it can’t be helped. All the cities on the Continent are not to me of as much value as my church and its work, and when a deepening religious feeling is evident, to go off lecturing and leave it would be too outrageous to be thought of. No — No. Never — now or hereafter — will I let lecturing infringe on home work ! The next week is already arranged. Several neighboring clergymen are engaged to aid, and from Sunday to Saturday every night is allotted. I take two — Monday and Tuesday — and cannot be altered. I do not know how it will be in March. If things in the church should prosper, I will not go out, at least till May, but I cannot tell.
Yours,
HENRY WARD BEECHER.

It is difficult and perhaps hazardous to speculate on the motives which inspire men, and yet such a character-study as this would be inadequate without a consideration of the motives which dominated Mr. Beecher. He was almost absolutely indifferent to money. He did not care for it himself ; he did not reverence it in others. When in a widely misquoted address he said, apropos of certain phases of the labor problem, that he could live on bread and water, he spoke the simple truth. This was not because he was an ascetic. He enjoyed the comforts and even the luxuries of life. We had an editorial dinner at Delmonico’s one spring day in 1879 ; Mr. Lawson Valentine, then one of the largest stockholders in the Christian Union, telegraphed the office : “ I like your Delmonico. Keep at work on this line all summer,” and got from Mr. Beecher a reply equally laconic : " You are not the only fellow that likes Delmonico. We are willing to patronize him all summer if you will pay the bill.” He enjoyed good living, though rather for the social pleasure such occasions afforded than for any mere epicurean enjoyment. Much more than sensuous luxuries he enjoyed beauty in form and color. But he was not dependent upon either. And for money apart from what it could buy he cared not a jot. My first acquaintance with him illustrates his singular carelessness in money matters. I was a boy of nineteen in my brother’s law office ; I had been an attendant on Plymouth Church for but a few months; he knew me only as a younger brother of one of the members of his church when he asked me one Sunday after service to call at his house the next morning. When I called he opened a drawer in his desk, took out a package of bills, gave them to me, and asked me to go to an address in the upper part of New York city to pay off a mortgage and get a satisfaction piece. My recollection is that the amount was $10,000. I know that until I got the money out of my pocket and the satisfaction piece in its place, I was in a dread lest my pocket should be picked and his money and my reputation should go together. He rarely came out on the right side of a bargain when the bargaining was left to him. His sermons any one was welcome to publish who wished to do so. In his later life he earned thousands of dollars by his lecturing ; but this was because he had the wisdom to put himself in Major J. B. Pond’s hands, and to refer all applications for lectures to him. He was generous to a fault with his money; many were the unworthy beggars, large and small, who made off with contributions from him ; not till late in life did he learn any financial wisdom, and then not too much.

He was as indifferent to fame as he was to money. He counseled young ministers to beware of falling into the weakness of considering how they could conserve their reputation, and satirized those who were habitually considering what would be the effect of their words or actions upon their “ influence.” He resented counsel to himself based on the idea that his influence would be injured by some proposed action. Partly owing to this indifference to his reputation, partly to the orator’s instinct to use at the time not only that form of expression, but also that phase of truth which will produce the effect he wishes to produce, Mr. Beecher was careless of consistency, which, with Emerson, he regarded as the vice of small minds. Once called to account for the inconsistency of something he had just said with a previous utterance of his on the same subject, he replied, “ Oh yes ; well! that was last week.” Yet these inconsistencies were more apparent than real. Thus he preached one Sunday a sermon on the text, “ Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it,” and began by saying, “ This is not God’s policy of insurance on children, this is the statement of a natural law.” About a year later he took the same text and began his sermon by saying, “ This is God’s policy of insurance on children,” and proceeded to treat it as a divine promise. Yet the two utterances are really consistent, since God’s promises are fulfilled through natural law.

But if he cared very little what the great public thought about him, he cared a great deal about how those who knew him felt toward him. The expression uttered by him on his seventieth birthday represents his habitual mood: “I love men so much, that I like above all other things in the world to be loved. And yet I can do without it, when it is necessary. I love love, but I love truth more, and God more yet.” For great as was his love for his fellow men and his desire for their love, the dominating motives of his life were his love for God or his love for Christ — and in his experience the two phrases were synonymous—and his desire for God’s love. No one who knew him intimately could doubt the simplicity and sincerity of his piety. Christ was a very real and a very present Person to him. His disbelief in theology never involved in doubt his experience of vital fellowship with the living God. I do not mean that this experience was not more real at some times than at others ; nor that he did not have at times the experience which in Jesus Christ found utterance in the bitter cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ! ” But if so, these experiences were rare. His prevailing mood was one of the conscious presence of Christ, to whom he would at times refer as simply and as naturally as to any other friend and companion. Yet he never, if I may so speak, traded on this experience. He never assumed it as an authority. He never said that Christ had told him to do this or that. His experience accorded with and interprets practically the philosophy of Professor William James, that mystical states are authority to the persons to whom they come, but are not to be quoted as an authority to those to whom they do not come.

I make no attempt here to analyze Mr. Beecher’s power as an orator, to indicate the various elements which entered into it, or to explain its secret, further than to say, that far more important than were his voice, and face, and gesture, his skillful though inartificial rhetoric, his opalescent imagination, his illuminating humor, his unconscious art of dramatization, his perfervid and contagious emotion, far more important than all of these were the sane judgment, the dominating conscience, and the spiritual faith which used these gifts as instruments, never in the service of self, always in the service of a great cause, or, to speak more accurately, in the service of his fellow men and his God. Here I make no attempt to compare Mr. Beecher with the famous orators of history. I attempt merely to record the impression which his oratory produced on me and on others as I had occasion to observe its impression on them. In so doing I instinctively compare him with other contemporary orators whom I have heard, — Daniel Webster, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, George William Curtis, John B. Gough, William E. Gladstone, Charles G. Finney, R. S. Storrs, and Phillips Brooks. In particular qualities each of these men may have excelled him, some of them certainly did ; in combination of qualities to my thinking no one of them equaled him. As I do not analyze Mr. Beecher, so I do not analyze these his contemporaries. In respect to them all I speak only of impressions produced upon myself.

Daniel Webster impressed me by the weight of his words, Wendell Phillips by the edge of his small sword and the dexterity of his thrust, Charles Sumner by his skillful marshaling of facts, George William Curtis by the perfect finish of his art in language, tone, and gesture, John B. Gough by the combination of abandon and good sense, of dramatic impersonation and real apprehension of the actualities of life, William E. Gladstone by the persuasiveness which captivated first your inclination and afterward your judgment, Charles G. Finney by the flawless logic which compelled your sometimes reluctant assent to his conclusion, R. S. Storrs by the more than Oriental glory of his embroidered fabric, Phillips Brooks by the sense of a divine presence and power possessing him and speaking through him, as through a prophet of the olden time. Mr. Beecher was less weighty than Daniel Webster; one was a glacier, the other an avalanche ; one was a battery of artillery, the other was a regiment of horse charging with the impetuosity of a Ney. Mr. Beecher could be as clear cut and crystalline at times as Wendell Phillips was at all times, but he was never malignant as Wendell Phillips sometimes was, and never took the delight, which Wendell Phillips often took, in the skill with which he could transfix an opponent. Mr. Beecher could, and sometimes did, marshal facts with a military skill scarcely inferior to that of Charles Sumner, as witness some passages in his English speeches, but he was never overloaded and overborne by them. He summoned facts as witnesses to confirm a truth, and when their testimony was given dismissed them, while he, with dramatic imagination and emotional power, pressed home upon his audience the truth to which they bore witness. He had not the grace either of diction or of address which characterized George William Curtis. Mr. Curtis never violated the canons of a perfect taste, Mr. Beecher often did. But Mr. Curtis spoke only to the cultivated, Mr. Beecher to all sorts and conditions of men ; Mr. Curtis spoke from manuscript ; his oration combined all the perfection of the written with some of the vigor of the spoken address. Mr. Beecher never spoke from manuscript. He sometimes read manuscript; he sometimes spoke without manuscript; he sometimes alternated the two methods in the one address; but he could not, or at least he did not, maintain at one and the same time an unbroken connection with the page upon the desk and with auditors in the seat. But if he lacked the grace and perfect art of George William Curtis, he possessed an inflaming, convincing, coercing power which Mr. Curtis did not even remotely approach. It is difficult to compare Mr. Beecher’s dramatic power with that of John B. Gough. Considered simply as dramatic artists, Mr. Beecher was far more impassioned and moving, Mr. Gough more versatile. Mr. Gough was always dramatic. His lectures were continuous impersonations. He was the best story-teller I ever heard. He once told me that he was thinking of preparing a lecture to be entitled That Reminds Me, which should consist of a succession of dramatic stories so contrived that each one should suggest its successor. He never did prepare such a lecture, but he could readily have done it. Mr. Beecher could hardly have conceived, and certainly could not have accomplished, such a lecture. Mr. Gough was a skillful ventriloquist. Once, when I was driving with him in a closed carriage in the country, he greatly excited a little girl, who was our companion, by the mewing of a cat, for which she searched everywhere in vain. Mr. Gough would have made a brilliant success as an actor in either farce or light comedy ; Mr. Beecher would not. I never heard him tell a story on the platform, unless the narrative of personal incidents in his own experience might be so regarded, and rarely in the social circle. I do not think he used his dramatic art for purposes of amusement. I doubt whether he was ever conscious in his imitations ; he certainly was not so ordinarily. A purpose to be achieved in the life of his audience always dominated him, and he was dramatic only incidentally and unconsciously, because in describing any incident, whether real or imaginary, his face, and tone, and gesture came naturally into play. He stopped at the office of the Christian Union once on his way from the dog show, and he described the dogs to me. “ There was the bulldog,” he said, “ with his retreating forehead, and his big neck, and his protruding jaw, like the highwayman who might meet you with his demand for your money or your life; ” and his forehead seemed to retreat, and his jaw protruded, and he looked the character he portrayed, so that I should have instinctively crossed the street had I met after dark a man looking as he looked. “ And there was the English mastiff,” he continued, “ with a face and brow like Daniel Webster’s ; ” and his whole face and even the very form and structure of his head seemed to change in an unconscious impersonation of the noble brute he was describing. For Mr. Beecher was as dramatic off the platform as on it; imitation was not with him a studied art, it was an unconscious identification of himself with the character he was for the moment portraying. I heard Mr. Gladstone but once; it was in the English House of Commons ; his object was to commend and carry his motion for the use of the closure, before unknown in Parliament. It would be absurd to attempt an estimate of Mr. Gladstone’s oratory from this one address. But comparing that one address with the many I have heard from Mr. Beecher, it was more persuasive, but less eloquent. As he spoke, it seemed as though his conclusions needed no argument to sustain them ; I found myself saying in response to all he said, “ Of course.” But of the dramatic portrayal, the pictorial imagination, the warm feeling, the brilliant color, the iridescent humor, the varied play of life, catching now one hearer by one method, now another hearer by another method, converting hostility into enthusiasm and indifference into interest, which characterized Mr. Beecher’s greatest addresses, there was in this one speech of Mr. Gladstone scarcely a trace. Charles G. Finney corralled his audience; he drove them before him, penned them in, coerced them by his logic, — though it was a logic aflame, — convinced their reason, convicted their conscience, compelled them to accept his conclusions despite their resistance. His sermons are essentially syllogistic. Syllogisms are as rare in the sermons of Mr. Beecher as in the sermons of Phillips Brooks. He was not logical, but analogical. He did not coerce men ; he either enticed them, or he swept them before him by the impetuosity of his nature. He sought to convince men of sin chiefly by putting before them an ideal, and leaving them to compare themselves with it. He spoke to conscience through ideality.

There were frequent opportunities for comparing Dr. Storrs and Mr. Beecher since they often spoke on the same platform, and for forty years they ministered side by side in the same city. Dr. Storrs drew his illustrations from books, Mr. Beecher from life ; Dr. Storrs was more rhetorical, Mr. Beecher more colloquial; Dr. Storrs more artistic but sometimes artificial, Mr. Beecher more spontaneous but also more uneven ; after hearing Dr. Storrs, the people went away admiring the address ; after hearing Mr. Beecher, they went away discussing the theme. Comparing Henry Ward Beecher and Phillips Brooks, I should describe Phillips Brooks as the greater preacher, but Mr. Beecher as the greater orator. The distinctive function of the preacher is to bring home to the consciousness of men the eternal and the invisible. He may teach ethics, or philosophy; he may move men by argument, by imagination, by emotion, to some form of action, or some phase of thinking, or some emotional life: this he does in common with the orator. But the unveiling of the invisible world, looking himself and enabling others also to look upon the things which are unseen and are eternal — this is the preacher’s distinctive and exclusive function. It is this which makes him, what the Old Testament calls him, a prophet; a forth-teller, speaking by a spirit within, of a world seen only from within. This Mr. Beecher did to a remarkable degree ; but he did much more and other than this — though nothing higher, for there is nothing higher that any man can do for his fellow men. This is to open the eyes of the blind and enable them to see. This was the exclusive mission of Phillips Brooks. He might have said of himself, without irreverence, “ I have come that they might have life and might have it more abundantly.” Mr. Beecher was also a life-giver ; but he was besides a guide, a counselor, a teacher. He moved men by his immediate spiritual power, awaking in them a power to perceive and receive spiritual life ; but he also moved them indirectly and mediately through argument, humor, imagination, imitation, human sympathy, the contagious power of a passionate enthusiasm. It was his spiritual life which made Phillips Brooks the orator; Mr. Beecher would have been a great orator though he had lacked spiritual life.

To sum up in a sentence the impression on my own mind of Mr. Beecher’s oratory as compared with that of other contemporary orators : in particular elements of charm or power he was surpassed by some of them ; in combination of charm and power by none ; but his power was greater than his charm, and his charm was subsidiary to power and its instrument. If the test of the oration is its perfection, whether of structure or of expression, other orators have surpassed Mr. Beecher ; if the test of oratory is the power of the speaker to impart to his audience his life, to impress on them his conviction, animate them with his purpose, and direct their action to the accomplishment of his end, then Mr. Beecher was the greatest orator I have ever heard; and in my judgment, whether measured by the immediate or by the permanent effects of his addresses, takes his place in the rank of the great orators of the world. I doubt whether in history greater immediate or more enduring effects have ever been produced by any orations than were produced on English sentiment and English national life by his speeches in England.

A remarkable illustration of charm and power combined was furnished by his speech delivered at the testimonial dinner given in New York city to Herbert Spencer, on the eve of the latter’s return to England. The dinner was a long and elaborate one. The diners were with few exceptions scientific men of eminence. There were very few who were known as active in the Christian Church or in the religious world. Mr. William M. Evarts presided, and lightened an otherwise heavy series of speeches with occasional sallies of wit. But there had been no humor, and no emotion, and little of literary charm in the speeches. The two last speakers were John Fiske and Mr. Beecher; their theme Science and Religion. Mr. Fiske read an essay, clear, crystalline, coldly intellectual; he dealt with theology, not with religion. It was nearing midnight when Mr. Beecher rose to make the last address. The room was filled with tobacco smoke. The auditors were weary and ready to go home. Not a vibrating note had been struck throughout the evening. It seemed to me as Mr. Beecher rose that all he could do was to apologize for not speaking at that late hour and dismiss his audience. By some jest he won a laugh; caught the momentary attention of his audience; seemed about to lose it; caught it again ; again saw it escaping, and again captured it. In five minutes the more distant auditors had moved their chairs forward, the French waiters, who had paid no attention to any one else, straightened themselves up against the walls to listen; Herbert Spencer on one side of him and Mr. Evarts on the other were looking up into his face to catch the utterance of his speaking countenance as of his words. And then he preached as evangelical a sermon as I have ever heard from any minister’s lips. He claimed Paul as an evolutionist; he read or quoted from the seventh chapter of Romans in support of the claim ; he declared that man is an animal, and has ascended from an animal, but is more than animal, has in him a conscience, a reason, a faith, a hope, a love, which are divine in nature and in origin ; he appealed to the experience of his auditors to confirm his analysis ; he evoked cries of “ That’s so, That’s so,” like Methodist amens from all over the room ; and when he ended, in what was in all but its form, a prayer that God would convey Herbert Spencer across that broader and deeper sea which flows between these shores and the unknown world beyond, and that there the two might meet to understand better the life which is so truly a mystery and the God who is so much to us the Unknown here, the whole audience rose by a common impulse to their feet, as if to make the prayer their own, cheering, clapping their hands, and waving their handkerchiefs. I can see the critic smiling with amused contempt at this paragraph, if he deigns to read it. None the less, he is shallow in his perceptions, as well as wrong in his judgments, if he is not able to recognize both the charm and the power of the orator who can win such a response, at such a time, from such an audience. This was the occasion on which Surgeon-General Hammond went up, and reaching out both hands to congratulate Mr. Beecher said, possibly somewhat patronizingly, “You’re the greatest man in the world, Mr. Beecher,” and received the quick response, “You forget yourself, Dr. Hammond.”

Thus far I have spoken chiefly of the impressions which Mr. Beecher’s public character and conduct made upon me. What impression was left by his private life ? It is somewhat difficult to answer that question, because he was a man of various moods as well as of versatile talents, and produced different impressions at different times. Every man is a bundle of contradictions ; in general the greater the man the greater the contradictions. They were certainly great in Mr. Beecher.

He was most intense in his activity; the story of his life shows that. One who saw him only in his work would imagine that he was never at rest. On the contrary, in his hours of rest he was absolutely relaxed in mind and body. He was fond of horses, as I have said, and both rode and drove well; he talked eloquently of fishing and hunting ; he advocated athletic sports — for others ; he believed in the healthfulness of billiards and bowling; yet except croquet, he had no favorite recreation. But he loved to lie under the trees and follow his own counsel by “ considering ” the flowers, the clouds, the trees; in the city he would go to the house of a familiar friend, throw himself upon the sofa, and listen to the conversation of others, perhaps joining in it, perhaps not; or he would rest both mind and body by joining in a frolic with children, of whom he was very fond. His work was strenuous, but his rest was absolute.

Of his combination of courage and caution, courage in determining what to do, caution in determining how to do it, I have already spoken. The fact that the front seats of the gallery in a theatre at Richmond are occupied by men prepared with eggs to throw at him does not daunt him in the least; he faces the hostile audience without a tremor. But he disarms them by a compliment to their state pride before he begins to give them some economic lessons sorely needed at that time, especially in the Southern states.

He was at once outspoken and reserved. Those who knew him only by his public speech thought he wore his heart upon his sleeve, because he used his own most sacred experiences without hesitation, if he thought they would serve his fellow men. What father, and mother, and home, and children, and Bible, and prayer, and Christ, and God were to him he told again and again in public discourses, and he urged others to make equally free use of their experiences. Yet in private he rarely talked of himself except as he thought the self-revelation would help some struggling and perplexed soul, into light and freedom. Nothing in his experience was too sacred to be used for that purpose. He was not otherwise given to indulgence in reminiscence, and never to narrating his achievements. It was with difficulty I induced him to tell a group of friends the story of his English experiences, that I might get the autobiographical narrative for a sketch of his life which I was then preparing with his approval. He could be as reticent and Sphinx-like as General Grant, and could preserve a silence as impenetrable, as he proved by being unmoved by all the misconstruction to which his silence subjected him, when speech would have disclosed the secret of the household whose unity and good name he was determined if possible to preserve, at whatever cost to himself. He had a way at times of abstracting himself from all around him, and becoming in appearance, and I rather think in reality, deaf and blind to everything external. When he was about to deliver his address in Burton’s Theatre,by which time he knew me well, and I had done that financial errand for him of which I have already spoken, finding it difficult to get tolerable accommodation at the front, I went to the stage door, and waited, hoping that I might get in when he entered. He brushed against me as he passed, but with that far-away look in his eyes, which seemed to say, “ whether in the body or out of the body I know not; ” so my device failed. He often walked as abstracted and unobservant on the street, oblivious of all about him. Yet at other times he would pass immediately into the pulpit from what serious-minded folk would regard as unseemly frivolity. The last Sunday morning of his ministry, as he entered the church, he greeted the usher at the door, an old familiar friend, with a request for a seat. The usher caught his mood, and replied, “ If you will wait here till the pewholders are seated, I will try to accommodate you.” “ Could I get a seat in the gallery ? ” said Mr. Beecher. “ You might try in the upper gallery.” “ But 1 am a little hard of hearing,” said Mr. Beecher, putting his hand to his ear, “ and want a seat near the pulpit.” All this was done without a suggestion of a smile ; the next moment he was in his pulpit chair turning over the leaves of his hynm-book for his hymns. Men to whom reverence and merriment are incongruous can be pardoned for not comprehending the apparent inconsistency in such a change of moods.

Quite as marked a characteristic, and to many as inexplicable, was his singular combination of self-confidence and selfdepreciation. No doubt he was conscious of his power; otherwise he could not have used it. A great meeting, my recollection is on behalf of the Freedmen, was gathered in the Brooklyn Academy of Music one evening during Andrew Johnson’s presidency. The feeling in the Republican party against the President was already growing into bitterness. Mr. Beecher still defended him. The Academy was crowded. “ They say,” he whispered to me as I joined him on the platform, “ that—is going to attack the President to-night; if he does there will be music here before we get through.” The attack was not made, and I did not hear the music — shall I confess it ? — to my regret. Yet despite his self-confidence before speaking, he was never self-satisfied after speaking. On one occasion, when he had preached a sermon which involved a vigorous attack on Calvinism, and we were about to publish it in the Christian Union, I went with him to his house after prayer-meeting on Friday evening, determined that he should revise the sermon. “ There are expressions here,” said I to him, “ which were well enough when interpreted by your intonation, but they will have a very different meaning in cold print. You must revise this proof.” He began ; cut out here ; interpolated there ; again and again threw down the proof in impatience; again and again I took it up and insisted on his continuing the task. At last, sticking the pencil through the proof with a vicious stab, and throwing both upon the table before him, he said, “ Abbott, the thing I wanted to say I did n’t say, and the thing I did n’t want to say I did say, and I don’t know how to preach anyhow.” Nor do I doubt he expressed the mood of the moment. He never wanted to read his own writings ; he rarely had enough patience with them to revise them. It was not that he shirked the labor ; it was because the product so dissatisfied him.

But with all these contradictions he possessed certain qualities which were always present and potent, and which never changed with changing moods. Among these were the spontaneity of his humor, his love of beauty, the strength of his conscience, his chivalry toward women and children, and his transparent sincerity.

He was humorous in the pulpit because he instinctively saw things in their incongruous relations, and described them as he saw them. He did not crack a joke for the sake of making a laugh, either in public or in private. But he could scarcely write a letter, or carry on a conversation, without that play of imagination, often breaking into humor, which characterized his work in the press and on the platform. He was at Peekskill; I was carrying through the press an edition of his sermons ; this is the letter he wrote me to tell me that he was going to Brooklyn, and that I should thereafter address him at that city : —

PEEKSKILL, October 24, 1867.
MY DEAR MR. ABBOTT, — Norwood is done — summer is done — autumn is most done. The birds are flown, leaves are flying, and I fly too — so hereafter send to Brooklyn.
Truly yours,
H. W. BEECHER.

He sent a check to a jeweler to pay for two rings, and this is the letter which went with the check : —

BROOKLYN, February 8, 1884.
JNO. A. REMICK :
DEAR SIR, — Please find check for amount of the opal ring and the moonstone ring. They suited the respective parties exactly.
The opal goes to my son’s mother-inlaw, who puts to shame the world-wide slander on mothers-in-law.
I think old maids and mothers-in-law are, in general, the very saints of the earth.
I looked to see you after the lecture, and to have a shake of the hand with Mrs. Remick. But you neither of you regarded the ceremony as “ any great shakes,” and decamped hastily.
Yours in the bonds of rainbows, opals, etc.
HENRY WARD BEECHER.

The Brooklyn Postmaster sent him formal notice that a letter had been returned to him from the Dead Letter Office, and got this in reply : —

October 28, 1880.
COLONEL MCLEER :
DEAR SIR, —Your notice that a letter of mine was dead and subject to my order is before me.
We must all die ! And though the premature decease of my poor letter should excite a proper sympathy (and I hope it does), yet I am greatly sustained under the affliction.
What was the date of its death ? Of what did it die ? Had it in its last hours proper attention and such consolation as befits the melancholy occasion ? Did it have any effects ?
Will you kindly see to its funeral ? I am strongly inclined to cremation.
May I ask if any other letters of mine are sick — dangerously sick ? If any depart this life hereafter don’t notify me until after the funeral.
Affectionately yours,
HENRY WARD BEECHER.

On April 1 he found in his morning mail a letter containing only the words “ April Fool.” “ Well! well! ” he said, “ I have received many a letter where a man forgot to sign his name ; this is the first time I ever knew of a writer signing his name and forgetting to write a letter.” After I took the editorship of the Christian Union I urged him to give his views on public questions through its columns. “ As it is now,” I said, “ any interviewer who comes to you gets a column from you ; and the public is as apt to get your views in any other paper as in your own.” “ Yes,” he said, I am like the town pump ; any one who will come and work the handle can carry off a pail full of water.” On one occasion I argued for Calvinism that it had produced splendid characters in Scotland and in New England. “ Yes,” he replied, “ Calvinism makes a few good men and destroys many mediocre men. It is like a churn ; it makes good butter, but it throws away a lot of buttermilk.” Charles Sumner in the Senate and Thaddeus Stevens in the House were pressing forward the Reconstruction measures based on forcing universal suffrage in the South. In conversation with me Mr. Beecher thus diagnosed the situation. “ The radicals are trying to drive the wedge into the log butt-end foremost ; they will only split their beetle.” They did ; they solidified the South and divided the Republican party. If he had been preaching on Reconstruction, the figure would have flashed on him then, and he would have given it to his congregation from the pulpit as he did a like humorous figure in the following instance. He was denouncing the inconsistency of church members; stopped; imagined an interlocutor calling him to account for exposing the sins of church members before the world, and thus replied to him : “ Do you not suppose the world knows them better than I do? The world sees this church member in Wall Street, as greedy, as rapacious, as eager, as unscrupulous as his companions. He says to himself, ’Is that Christianity ? I will go to church next Sunday and see what the minister says about this.’ He goes ; and what is the minister saying ? ” Then, instantly, Mr. Beecher folded one arm across his breast, held an imaginary cat purring comfortably there, as he stroked it with the other hand, and continued: " The minister is saying, ‘ Poor pussy, poor pussy, poor pussy.’ ” Mr. Beecher made his congregation laugh not of set purpose and never for the sake of the laugh, but because he saw himself, and made them see, those incongruities which are the essence of humor and often the most powerful of arguments. And they flashed in his conversation as frequently and as brilliantly as in his public addresses.

Æsthetically Mr. Beecher was selfmade. When he came to Brooklyn from life in the West, in what was essentially a border community, he brought with him both the unconventionality and the lack of cultivation which such life tends to develop. He never possessed that kind of taste which only inheritance and early training can impart. But he trained himself. His love of form and color, in flowers, in precious stones, in rugs, in household decorations, and in painting, was such as to make him no mean critic respecting them all. He built his house in Peekskill, as he once said to me, because he wanted to express himself in a home ; he selected all the woods, the papers, the rugs, the various decorations ; to that extent he was his own architect. While in church life I rather think that music always seemed to him the best which was the most effective vehicle for the expression of the emotional life of the congregation, he became a lover of the best music, and a habitual and thoroughly appreciative attendant on the Philharmonic Concerts in Brooklyn.

But doubtless righteousness, and not beauty, was his standard; ethics, not æsthetics, afforded the law of his life. He would have taken the Latin virtus, not the Greek τò κaλóν, — valor, not beauty, — to express his ideal of character. The Puritan is distinguished by two characteristics : the strength of his conscience, and the will to impose it as a standard upon others. Mr. Beecher had the Puritan conscience, but he had no inclination to impose it on others. He loved righteousness ; but he also loved liberty ; and he believed that righteousness could never be imposed from without, but must be wrought from within. Nevertheless, though advocating liberty of choice for others, the Puritan habits remained with him to the end. He was a purist as regards all relations between the sexes. He did not play cards, he did not smoke, and he was an habitual though not strictly a total abstainer. In his later life he occasionally took a glass of beer to induce sleep. He went on rare occasions to the theatre, but, I judge, rather seriously. In one of his letters he speaks of studying Hamlet as a preparation for seeing Irving. The theatre did not appeal to him, for the same reason that it did not appeal to his friend John H. Raymond, — because he had too much imagination. The crude interpretation of character and the cruder scenery offended and obstructed his understanding of the play.

This Puritan conscience was mated to a spirit of chivalry, and both were aroused and inflamed by the treatment to which slavery subjected a poor and ignorant race. He always sympathized with the unfortunate. And this was not the professional sympathy of the reformer. Traveling one day he came to a station where the passengers were to change cars. All his fellow passengers were hastening to get good seats in the adjoining train. A woman with three children, and packages to correspond, was helplessly waiting for her chance. Mr. Beecher, standing on the station platform, took hold of both railings of the car, braced himself against the crowd, and said, “ Is no gentleman going to help this poor woman to a seat ? ” The word was enough ; the crowd responded ; and the woman found half a dozen willing hands to help her. Mr. Beecher’s old-fashioned courtesy to his wife, and his chivalric attitude toward women in general, was not less noteworthy, though it has been less noted, than his love for little children.

No one, I think, who knew Mr. Beecher at all intimately ever doubted his sincerity. He never pretended ; I do not think he had the capacity to carry a pretense out to a successful issue. He practiced what he preached ; and he was powerful as a preacher primarily because his preaching was the sincere and simple expression of himself. His literal interpretation of Christ’s teaching concerning the forgiveness of enemies has been often ridiculed as impossible. To many men I doubt not that it is impossible ; to him it was natural. Some year or two after his public trial, Mr. Moulton, whose treachery had first deceived him as to the facts, and then betrayed him into writing those letters which were the only ground on which any suspicion against him was based, became involved in financial difficulties. With moistened eyes, Mr. Beecher said to me, “ I wish I could help him ; I would gladly loan him the money to extricate himself, but I suppose I could not. He would not understand it, — no one would understand it.” And he was right. No one would have understood it. The humor, the imagination, the righteous indignation, the pleading, forgiving love of Mr. Beecher were none of them assumed or excited for a purpose; none of them belonged to the platform or the pulpit. They were his very self.

I lean back in my chair. I close my eyes. The years that have elapsed are erased. I am sitting in the gallery pew. It is 1858. A Southern slaveholder is at my side. The preacher has declared, as he often did, that he has no will to interfere with slavery in the states ; no wish to stir up insurrection and discontent in the slave. Thereupon he pictures the discontented slave escaping ; portrays him stealthily creeping out from his log cabin at night; seeking a shelter in the swamp ; feeding on its roots and berries ; pursued by baying bloodhounds ; making his way toward liberty, the North Star his only guide; reaching the banks of the Ohio River; crossing it to find the Fugitive Slave Law spread like a net to catch him. And I see the fugitive, and hear the hounds, and my own heart beats with his hopes and fears; and then the preacher cries, “ Has he a right to flee ? If he were my son and did not seek liberty I would write across his name, Disowned,” and he writes it with his finger as he speaks, and I see the letters of flaming fire ; and the slaveholder at my side catches his breath while he nods an involuntary assent; and as we walk out together, he says, “ I could not agree with all he said, but it was great, and he is a good man.”

Yes. He was a good man and a great one. Not infallible. Not faultless. But in his love for God and his love for his fellow men a good man ; in his interpretation of the nature of God and the duty of man to God and to his fellow man great, with a clearness of vision and a courage in application which not many of us attain.

Lyman Abbott.