Famous leaders among men

by Sarah Knowles Bolton

On Mr. Beecher's return he helped scrub the floors—the landlord objected to their being painted, as it would injure the wood!

Mrs. Beecher found in the back yard a broken table and shelves, which had been thrown away as useless; and covering the former with the skirts of Mr. Beecher's old coat, it became quite an elegant writing-table for the young minister. The flour-barrel and sugar-barrel—sent in by friends—were curtained from the rest of the room by a piece of four-cent calico.

Mrs. Beecher helped support the family by taking in sewing and keeping boarders. Mr. Beecher soon became the idol of his people. Mr. John R. Howard, in his life of Beecher, repeats these words of the famous preacher: "There lived over on the other side of the street in Lawrenceburg, a very profane man who was counted ugly. I understood that he had said some very bitter things of me. I went right over to his store, and sat down on the counter to talk with him. I happened in often—day in and day out. My errand was to make him like me. I did make him like me,—and all the children too; and when I left, two or three years later, it was his house that was opened to me and all my family for the week after I gave up my room. And to the day of his death, I do not believe the old man could mention my name without crying."

"Once," says a brother minister, "he called to a poor German emigrant woman that if she would bring him her clothes-line, he would show her how to get her winter's supply of fuel. She brought it, and he tied a stone to one end, and flinging it out from the shore over the logs, would draw them in. In a little while their combined efforts had brought in a dray-load."

Mr. Beecher began his work modestly: "I never expected that I could accomplish much," he said. "I merely went to work with the feeling: 'I will do as well as I can, and I will stick to it, if the Lord pleases, and fight his battle the best way I know how.' And I was thankful as I could be. Nobody ever sent me a spare-rib that I did not thank God for the kindness which was shown me. I recollect when Judge —— gave me his cast-off clothing, I felt that I was sumptuously clothed. I wore old coats and second-hand shirts for two or three years, and I was not above it, either, although sometimes, as I was physically a somewhat well-developed man, and the judge was thin and his legs were slim, they were rather a tight fit."

"At first," he says, "I preached some theology.... But my horizon grew larger and larger in that one idea of Christ.... After I had gone through two or three revivals of religion, when I looked around, he was all in all. And my whole ministry sprang out of that."

After two years at Lawrenceburg, Mr. Beecher was called to the Second Presbyterian Church of Indianapolis, then a place of four thousand inhabitants, with a salary of six hundred dollars. He declined the call twice, but finally, laying the matter before the Synod, was constrained to accept.

Here, as at Lawrenceburg, the church was filled to overflowing to hear the young, original, earnest preacher. During his ministry of eight years at Indianapolis, there were three seasons of revival. In the spring of 1842 about one hundred persons joined the church. One spring Mr. Beecher preached for seventy consecutive nights. He loved to recall those days. He said, "Talk of a young mother's feelings over her first babe—what is that compared with the solemnity, the enthusiasm, the impetuosity of gratitude, of humility, of singing gladness, with which a young pastor greets the incoming of his first revival? He stands upon the shore to see the tide come in! It is the movement of the infinite, ethereal tide! It is from the other world! There is no color like heart color. The homeliest things dipped in that forever after glow with celestial hues."

Other churches besides his own were blessed with his ministrations. He says, "For eight or ten years I labored for the poor and needy, in cabins, in camp-meetings, through woods, up and down, sometimes riding two days to meet my appointments. I had no books but my Bible; and I went from one to the other—from the Bible to men, and from men to the Bible."

Yet when he could be at home he was a diligent reader of other books,—the sermons of Jonathan Edwards, of Isaac Barrow, and of Robert South. He pored over Loudon's Encyclopædias of Horticulture, Agriculture, and Architecture. He became the editor of the Indiana Farmer and Gardener.