The value of Beecher’s work in England was fully recognized by President Lincoln and Secretary Stanton. With these leaders, whom he had never hesitated to criticise when he believed it his duty to do so, he now entered into warm relations. It was he who was invited to deliver the address at the raising of the old flag over the regained Fort Sumter.
His active participation in public affairs continued up to his death. His part in the election of 1884 is of course fresh in the memory of readers—so fresh, indeed, that it can hardly be reviewed without intrenching upon the prejudices of present day partisanship.
Henry Ward Beecher was a great man—one of the greatest and most remarkable men of his day. His personality was so large, his gifts so varied, his mental and moral composition so multiform, that a volume would be needed to give a complete character sketch of the man. We can only attempt within the limits of this article to bring out the two main elements of his character that seem to have inspired Mr. Ward’s conception of his subject. On the one hand is the positive, almost militant expression that typifies Beecher’s fearless championship of the oppressed; on the other his universal sympathy, his unselfish kindliness, and his especial love for children, betokened by the figures beside the pedestal. His heart was as great as his brain. He was intensely human. Artificiality he hated, and dissembling and deception he could not understand. He was sometimes called a great actor, but sincerity was his very breath of life. “Some men,” he once said, “are like live springs that bubble and flow perpetually, while others are like pumps—one must work the handle for all the water he gets.” And rare indeed are such live springs of imagination and eloquence, of intellect and of affection, as that which welled in Beecher’s own heart. “He was quite as likely,” says one of his biographers, “to burst out into splendid eloquence amid a small group of chatting friends, or even to a single listener, as before a vast audience. One would as soon suspect the Atlantic of holding back a particularly grand roll of surf at Long Branch until people should come down to see it, as to imagine Mr. Beecher keeping a fine thought or a striking figure till he had an audience.”
Or again, as Oliver Wendell Holmes says in his essay on Beecher’s English speeches: “He has the simple frankness of a man who feels himself to be perfectly sound in bodily, mental, and moral structure; and his self revelation is a thousand times nobler than the assumed impersonality which is a common trick with cunning speakers who never forget their own interests. Thus it is that wherever Mr. Beecher goes, everybody feels, after he has addressed them once or twice, that they know him well, almost as if they had always known him; and there is not a man in the land who has such a multitude who look upon him as their brother.”
When Beecher was a man, he was a man; when he was a boy, he was a boy. Brought up in the rigid atmosphere of an old time New England parsonage, there was nothing sanctimonious or unhealthy about his boyhood religion. Plain living and high thinking was the regime of his youth, but withal he was a warm blooded, high spirited lad. At school Hank Beecher, as his playmates called him, was a leader in outdoor sports, and at college he was an enthusiastic athlete. Dr. Holmes called him, later in life, “the same lusty, warm hearted, strong fibered, bright souled, clear eyed creature, as he was when the college boys at Amherst acknowledged him as the chiefest among their football kickers.” Strangely characteristic was a document that he drew up on leaving the school at Amherst that bore the high sounding title of Mount Pleasant Collegiate Institute. It was a covenant between him and his chief schoolboy “chum,” wherein Henry W. Beecher and Constantine F. Newell formally undertook, “in the presence of God and his holy angels,” to be “real, lawful, and everlasting brothers”—an agreement that was faithfully kept, in spite of long separations, until the death of Beecher’s boyhood friend in 1842. Another touch of nature that may be cited from the annals of his early career was his trial sermon at Lawrenceburg. No less than a hundred souls—an unprecedented assemblage—had gathered to hear the young college graduate, who is said to have been so nervous that his address was a total failure—rather a contrast to the flow of noble thoughts clad in impressive language that afterward held many a vast audience spell bound.
His forty years’ ministry at Plymouth Church will always remain a unique landmark in the annals of the American pulpit. It was in June, 1847, that Beecher, then in the prime of early manhood, received an invitation to become the first pastor of the newly formed Congregational church, which had indeed been organized only the day before, with a membership of twenty one. Coming to his charge four months later, the first thing he did was characteristic. He had the pulpit cut away, and a simple desk set in its place, upon a broad platform. He wanted to draw nearer to his audience—literally as well as figuratively. He wished to “get at” his hearers—to grasp them closely. He was a fisher of men’s hearts and souls. Of the wonderful powers that made his preaching so remarkable in its effectiveness and so world wide in its fame it is hard to give a precise analysis. Among the component elements were a vividly creative imagination, a mind richly stocked by reading and observation, a ripe judgment, a deep sympathy, a remarkable adaptability to occasions and situations, and an unfailing earnestness and enthusiasm. He was an accomplished elocutionist, with the natural advantages of a commanding presence and a voice of great power and flexibility.
From its small original nucleus, Plymouth Church expanded to be larger than any other similar body in the country, with a membership of fifteen hundred. Scores came to it from widely variant sects, and found in its broad and liberal Christianity a common ground whereon they could stand together and work shoulder to shoulder. It has often been said that nowadays churches are filled with women, almost to the exclusion of their husbands, brothers and fathers. Such was not the case with Beecher’s congregation. Men always flocked to hear him, and felt themselves irresistibly drawn toward the sunlight of his strong nature.
Intense as was his interest in the growth and success of Plymouth Church, it was to him a means, and not an end in itself. He sought to make not a prominent church, but one active and powerful in all good works. The success of its schools and missions, its meetings and societies, was the outward evidence of the inspiration it received from the master mind around which it was focused.
Lesser men have ventured to criticise Beecher as deficient in theology. Such criticism implies inability to understand the great preacher’s breadth. He was thoroughly grounded in theological lore by his father, who was one of the leading controversialists of the day. In Lyman Beecher’s home dogma and doctrine reigned supreme. “Of him I learned,” his son says, “all the theology that was current at that time. In the quarrels between Andover and East Windsor and New Haven and Princeton—I was at home in all these distinctions. I got the doctrines just like a row of pins on a paper of pins. I knew them as a soldier knows his weapons. I could get them in battle array.” After graduating at Amherst, he studied at the Lane Theological Seminary, of which his father had become president. He entered into Dr. Beecher’s controversy against Unitarianism in Boston, and the subsequent conflict between the so called old and new schools of Presbyterianism, of which latter his father was the protagonist.
But the more he saw of these doctrinal battles, the less he believed in their real utility and importance. “I will never be a sectary,” was a resolve that he formed very early in his independent ministry. “Others,” he once said, “may blow the bellows, and turn the doctrines in the fire, and lay them on the anvil of controversy, and beat them with all sorts of hammers into all sorts of shapes; but I shall busy myself with using the sword of the Lord, not in forging it.” His religious sympathy was as wide as humanity, and his ardor for the good of mankind partook of the divine, for to quote his own words again—and the thought they express is a fine one—the love of God for man comes “not from a ‘law’ or ‘plan of salvation,’ but from the fullness of His great heart.”