HENRY WARD BEECHER
(1813-1887)
BY LYMAN ABBOTT
he life of Henry Ward Beecher may be either compressed into a sentence or expanded into a volume. He was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, on the 24th day of June, 1813, the child of the well-known Lyman Beecher; graduated at Amherst College in 1834, and subsequently studied at Lane Theological Seminary (Cincinnati), of which his father was the president; began his ministerial life as pastor of a Home Missionary (Presbyterian) church at the little village of Lawrenceburg, twenty miles south of Cincinnati on the Ohio River; was both sexton and pastor, swept the church, built the fires, lighted the lamps, rang the bell, and preached the sermons; was called to the pastorate of the First Presbyterian Church of Indianapolis, the capital of Indiana, where he remained for eight years, 1839 to 1847, and where his preaching soon won for him a reputation throughout the State, and his occasional writing a reputation beyond its boundaries; thence was called in 1847 to be the first pastor of the newly organized Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, where he remained with an ever increasing reputation as preacher, lecturer, orator, and writer, until the day of his death, March 8th, 1887.
Such is the outline of a life, the complete story of which would be the history of the United States during the most critical half-century of the nation's existence. Living in an epoch when the one overshadowing political issue was pre-eminently a moral issue, and when no man could be a faithful preacher of righteousness and not a political preacher; concerned in whatever concerned humanity; believing that love is the essence of all true religion, and that love to God is impossible without love to man; moral reformer not less than gospel preacher, and statesman even more than theologian: throwing himself into the anti-slavery conflict with all the courage of a heroic nature and all the ardor of an intensely impulsive one,--he stands among the first half-score of writers, orators, reformers, statesmen, and soldiers, who combined to make the half-century from 1835 to 1885 as brilliant and as heroic as any in human history.
The greatness of Henry Ward Beecher consisted not so much in a predominance of any one quality as in a remarkable combination of many. His physique justified the well-known characterization of Mr. Fowler, the phrenologist, "Splendid animal." He was always an eager student, though his methods were desultory. He was familiar with the latest thought in philosophy, had studied Herbert Spencer before his works were republished in the United States, yet was a child among children, and in his old age retained the characteristic faults and virtues of childhood, and its innocent impulsiveness.
His imagination might have made him a poet, his human sympathies a dramatic poet, had not his strong common-sense kept him always in touch with the actualities of life, and a masterful conscience compelled him to use his æsthetic faculties in sterner service than in the entertainment of mankind. The intensity of his moral nature enhanced rather than subdued his exuberant humor, which love prevented from becoming satire, and seriousness preserved from degenerating into wit. His native faculty of mimicry led men to call him an actor, yet he wholly lacked the essential quality of a good actor,--power to take on another's character,--and used the mimic art only to interpret the truth which at the moment possessed him.
Such power of passion as was his is not often seen mated to such self-control; for while he spoke with utter abandon, he rarely if ever did so until he had carefully deliberated the cause he was espousing. He thought himself deficient in memory, and in fact rarely borrowed illustrations from his reading either of history or of literature; but his keenness of observation photographed living scenes upon an unfading memory which years after he could and did produce at will. All these contrary elements of his strangely composite though not incongruous character entered into his style,--or, to speak more accurately, his styles,--and make any analysis of them within reasonable limits difficult, if not impossible.
For the writer is known by his style as the wearer by his clothes. Even if it be no native product of the author's mind, but a conscious imitation of carefully studied models,--what I may call a tailor-made style, fashioned in a vain endeavor to impart sublimity to commonplace thinking,--the poverty of the author is thereby revealed, much as the boor is most clearly disclosed when wearing ill-at-ease, unaccustomed broadcloth. 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.