Chair Used by Henry Ward Beecher in Plymouth Church
Perhaps still more important is the development of the church activities. In Mr. Beecher's time the great feature of church life was the sermon. To-day it is church organisation. Some seem to think that the preaching of to-day is inferior to that of a generation ago. While it may be true that no single man stands out as did Mr. Beecher, Dr. R. S. Storrs, or Dr. William M. Taylor, it seems to me that the average of preaching is higher. Dr. Hillis is not Mr. Beecher, but he is Dr. Hillis, and Plymouth people never go from Plymouth Church without the thought of a good and great presentation of truth. However that may be, one thing is very noticeable: the growth in Plymouth, as elsewhere, of church societies. The women have their societies for Home and Foreign Missions, there is a Young Woman's Guild, and a Henry Ward Beecher Missionary Circle, a Young Men's Club, and an organisation of older men known as Plymouth Men. The year that Mr. Beecher died The Plymouth League was formed and had a successful career until a few years ago, when it was dropped.
So Plymouth has kept abreast of the times, using any means that seemed to promise usefulness, ever ready to change where change was adjudged wise, ready to drop anything that in the shifting conditions had outlived its usefulness, loyal to its past, yet realising that the highest loyalty is to a future ideal rather than a past achievement. Mr. Beecher was no iconoclast, and at the same time, the past, however great and grand, as such, had no attraction for him. His eye was set on the future, a future that included the individual life and the corporate life. Present-day socialism had scarcely dawned during his day, but were he living now he would be found in line with the broadest and the freest conceptions of society, and true to his belief that the church should lead. This not because it is an organisation, including wise men, or divinely ordered, but because it expresses in the fullest and best way the divine principles that must govern society. That this idea of his so dominated the church in its early life and has continued to control it to the present day is the true basis for confidence as to its future.
Plymouth Church will stand just so long as it represents this ideal, and applies it to all classes and conditions of men, without regard to race or creed. To-day, as of old, men of every form of belief or no belief find a welcome and find help, and many go forth with old ideas changed, new ambitions stirred, a clearer vision of what it means to live a Christian life. If the time ever comes when that is not true, then Plymouth Church will be a relic of the past, a curiosity, to be visited by strangers as Plymouth Rock or Westminster Abbey. That that time will ever come I do not believe. However much the centres of population may change, the needs of men never change, and even if other churches should follow their constituencies to other sections, Plymouth will remain, a living monument to the truth and the life that has been from its origin its power.
THE END
Transcriber's Note: