HENRY WARD BEECHER.
"The most brilliant and fertile pulpit-genius of the nineteenth century, and the most widely influential American of his time," says John Henry Barrows in his masterly life of Henry Ward Beecher. "To the sensitive heart of a woman, he added a lion-like courage, and a Miltonic loftiness of spirit. To the more than royal imagination of Jeremy Taylor, he added a zeal as warm as Whitefield's. In him the wit of Sydney Smith was combined with the common-sense of John Bunyan.
"In the annals of oratory his place is near that of Demosthenes. Among reformers he need fear no comparison with Wendell Phillips, John Bright, Mazzini, or Charles Sumner. In moral genius for statesmanship he was the brother of Abraham Lincoln; and, in the annals of the pulpit, he can only be mentioned with the greatest names,—Chrysostom, Bernard, Luther, Wesley, Chalmers, Spurgeon."
Dr. Mark Hopkins, in Edward W. Bok's "Memorial Volume," said of Henry Ward Beecher's forty years in Plymouth pulpit, "No such instance of prolonged, steady power at one point, in connection with other labors so extended and diversified, and magnificent in their results, has ever been known."
Dr. Thomas Armitage of the Fifth-avenue Baptist Church, New York, his life-long friend, gave Beecher "the first place among the preachers of the world to-day." Dr. Robert Collyer said, "To my mind, he was the greatest preacher on this planet.... Men will be his debtors for ages to come."
June 24, 1891, the statue of this great American leader, by John Quincy Adams Ward, was unveiled in front of Brooklyn City Hall. Three hundred children from Plymouth Church Sunday-school sang his favorite hymn,—
"Love divine, all love excelling,"
accompanied by the band of the Thirteenth Regiment.