Predominant among them was a capacity to discriminate between the essentials and the accidentals of any subject, a philosophical perspective which enabled him to see the controlling connection and to discard quickly such minor details as tended to obscure and to perplex. Thus a habit was formed which led him not infrequently to ignore necessary limitations and qualifications, and to make him scientifically inaccurate, though vitally and ethically true. It was this quality which led critics to say of him that he was no theologian, though it is doubtful whether any preacher in America since Jonathan Edwards has exerted a greater influence on its theology. But this quality imparted clearness to his style. He always knew what he wanted to say and said it clearly. He sometimes produced false impressions by the very strenuousness of his aim and the vehemence of his passion; but he was never foggy, obscure, or ambiguous.
This clearness of style was facilitated by the singleness of his purpose. He never considered what was safe, prudent, or expedient to say, never reflected upon the effect which his speech might have on his reputation or his influence, considered only how he could make his hearers apprehend the truth as he saw it. He therefore never played with words, never used them with a double meaning, or employed them to conceal his thoughts. He was indeed utterly incapable of making a speech unless he had a purpose to accomplish; when he tried he invariably failed; no orator ever had less ability to roll off airy nothings for the entertainment of an audience.
Coupled with this clearness of vision and singleness of purpose was a sympathy with men singularly broad and alert. He knew the way to men's minds, and adapted his method to the minds he wished to reach. This quality put him at once en rapport with his auditors, and with men of widely different mental constitution. Probably no preacher has ever habitually addressed so heterogeneous a congregation as that which he attracted to Plymouth Church. In his famous speech at the Herbert Spencer dinner he was listened to with equally rapt attention by the great philosopher and by the French waiters, who stopped in their service, arrested and held by his mingled humor, philosophy, and restrained emotion. This human sympathy gave a peculiar dramatic quality to his imagination. He not only recalled and reproduced material images from the past with great vividness, he re-created in his own mind the experiences of men whose mold was entirely different from his own. As an illustration of this, a comparison of two sermons on Jacob before Pharaoh, one by Dr. Talmage, the other by Mr. Beecher, is interesting and instructive. Dr. Talmage devotes his imagination wholly to reproducing the outward circumstances,--the court in its splendor and the patriarch with his wagons, his household, and his stuff; this scene Mr. Beecher etches vividly but carelessly in a few outlines, then proceeds to delineate with care the imagined feelings of the king, awed despite his imperial splendor by the spiritual majesty of the peasant herdsman. Yet Mr. Beecher could paint the outer circumstances with care when he chose to do so. Some of his flower pictures in 'Fruits, Flowers, and Farming' will always remain classic models of descriptive literature, the more amazing that some of them are portraits of flowers he had never seen when he wrote the description.
While his imagination illuminated nearly all he said or wrote, it was habitually the instrument of some moral purpose; he rarely ornamented for ornament's sake. His pictures gave beauty, but they were employed not to give beauty but clearness. He was thus saved from mixed metaphors, the common fault of imaginative writings which are directed to no end, and thus are liable to become first lawless, then false, finally self-contradictory and absurd. The massive Norman pillars of Durham Cathedral are marred by the attempt which some architect has made to give them grace and beauty by adding ornamentation. Rarely if ever did Mr. Beecher fall into the error of thus mixing in an incongruous structure two architectural styles. He knew when to use the Norman strength and solidity, and when the Gothic lightness and grace.
Probably his keen sense of humor would have preserved him from this not uncommon error. It is said that the secret of humor is the quick perception of incongruous relations. This would seem to have been the secret of Mr. Beecher's humor, for he had in an eminent degree what the phrenologists call the faculty of comparison. This was seen in his arguments, which were more often analogical than logical; seen not less in that his humor was not employed with deliberate intent to relieve a too serious discourse, but was itself the very product of his seriousness. He was humorous, but rarely witty, as, for the same reason, he was imaginative but not fanciful. For both his imagination and his humor were the servants of his moral purpose; and as he did not employ the one merely as a pleasing ornament, so he never went out of his way to introduce a joke or a funny story to make a laugh.
Speaking broadly, Mr. Beecher's style as an orator passed through three epochs. In the first, best illustrated by his 'Sermons to Young Men,' preached in Indianapolis, his imagination is the predominant faculty. Those sermons will remain in the history of homiletical literature as remarkable of their kind, but not as a pulpit classic for all times; for the critic will truly say that the imagination is too exuberant, the dramatic element sometimes becoming melodramatic, and the style lacking in simplicity. In the second epoch, best illustrated by the Harper and Brothers edition of his selected sermons, preached in the earlier and middle portion of his Brooklyn ministry, the imagination is still pervasive, but no longer predominant. The dramatic fire still burns, but with a steadier heat. Imagination, dramatic instinct, personal sympathy, evangelical passion, and a growing philosophic thought-structure, combine to make the sermons of this epoch the best illustration of his power as a popular preacher. In each sermon he holds up a truth like his favorite opal, turning it from side to side and flashing its opalescent light upon his congregation, but so as always to show the secret fire at the heart of it. In the third epoch, best illustrated by his sermons on Evolution and Theology, the philosophic quality of his mind predominates; his imagination is subservient to and the instrument of clear statement, his dramatic quality shows itself chiefly in his realization of mental conditions foreign to his own, and his style, though still rich in color and warm with feeling, is mastered, trained, and directed by his intellectual purpose. In the first epoch he is the painter, in the second the preacher, in the third the teacher.
Judgments will differ: in mine the last epoch is the best, and its utterances will long live a classic in pulpit literature. The pictures of the first epoch are already fading; the fervid oratory of the second epoch depends so much on the personality of the preacher, that as the one grows dim in the distance the other must grow dim also; but the third, more enduring though less fascinating, will remain so long as the heart of man hungers for the truth and the life of God,--that is, for a rational religion, a philosophy of life which shall combine reverence and love, and a reverence and love which shall not call for the abdication of the reason.
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