Part 17

Some of this time was darkened by doubt and disbelief; but, like John Bunyan, after about two years of unsettled condition of mind, peace was assured. "It came to me," he says, "like the bursting of spring. It was as if yesterday there was not a bird to be seen or heard, and as if to-day the woods were full of singing birds. There rose up before me a view of Jesus as the Saviour of sinners,--not of saints, but of sinners unconverted, before they were any better,--because they were so bad and needed so much; and that view has never gone from me.... Never for a single moment have I doubted the power of Christ's love to save me, any more than I have doubted the existence in the heaven of the sun by day and the moon by night."

The second Mrs. Beecher had died, triumphing in her faith. Dr. Beecher, tried for heresy, was fighting theological battles, which his son Henry learned to abhor.

"I see no benefit in a controversy," he wrote. "It will be a fierce technical dispute about propositions, at the expense in the churches of vital godliness.... Others 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."

Pro-slavery riots had begun, and the printing-press of James G. Birney was destroyed by a mob of Kentucky slaveholders. Young Beecher was sworn in as a special constable, and for several nights, well armed, patrolled the streets with others, to protect the colored people. He was learning bravery early, and he had need of it through life.

Mr. Beecher graduated in 1837 from Lane Seminary, and through the influence of a Yankee woman, Martha Sawyer, was asked to go to Lawrenceburg, Ind., to preach. "There was a church in that place," says Mr. Beecher, "composed of about twenty members, of which she was the factotum. She collected the money, she was the treasurer, she was the manager, she was the trustee, she was the everything of that church."

There were about fifteen hundred persons in the little town, situated at the junction of the Ohio and Miami Rivers. There were four big distilleries in the place, and a steamboat load of liquor was carried away from it every day.

"When I went there and entered upon my vocation of preaching," says Mr. Beecher, "I found a church, occupying a little brick building, with nineteen or twenty members. There was one man, and the rest were women. With the exception of two persons, there was not one of them who was not obliged to gain a livelihood by the labor of the hands. So you will understand how very poor they were....

"I was sexton in the church. There were no lamps there, so I went and bought some and filled them and lit them. I swept the church, and lighted my own fires. I did not ring the bell because there was none. I opened the church before every meeting, and shut and locked it after every meeting. I took care of everything in the church."

The salary was to be $300--it was raised from $250--of which the Home Missionary Society was to give $150.

His friends in Cincinnati opposed his going to so small a field; but he carried out the advice which he gave years afterward to theological students: "_Don't hang_ round idle, waiting for a _good offer_. Enter the first field God opens for you. If he needs you in a larger one, he will open the gate for you to enter."

Young Beecher, having waited nearly seven years to claim his bride,--he was now but twenty-four,--wrote to Miss Bullard that he would be ready for the marriage Aug. 3. Arriving at her home on the evening of July 29, he picked over and stoned with her the raisins for the wedding-cake, beat the eggs, and in every way helped on the joyful event. At the hour chosen for the ceremony, a heavy thunder-storm came on. The bride determined to wait; and an hour after the appointed time, under a brilliant rainbow, they were married, and started for their missionary labors in the West.

They boarded for a short time, and then decided to go to housekeeping. Mrs. Beecher, during the absence of her husband at a synodical meeting, found two rooms over a stable, at a rental of forty dollars per year. She went to Cincinnati by boat, to the home of the Beechers, and received, to help in furnishing these rooms, a bedstead, a stove, some sheets and pillow-cases, and a piece of carpet. Through the sale of her cloak for thirty dollars, she obtained a husk mattress, a table, wash-tubs, and groceries.

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_.

He loved to work among flowers and raise vegetables, which he often took to market before daylight. He believed in manual labor. He painted his own house, and did not hesitate to bring his groceries home in a wheelbarrow. He said: "It is my deliberate conviction that physical labor is indispensable to intellectual and moral health."

He was as fearless as he was industrious. One man had taken offence at Mr. Beecher's plain-speaking about some of his brutal acts. He stationed himself on the hotel steps, pistol in hand, to meet the pastor as he should return from the post-office.

"Did you say thus in your sermon yesterday?" asked the man.

"I did," was the reply.

"Did you intend those remarks for me, or were you meaning me?"

"I most certainly did."

"Then,"--with an oath, "take it back right here, or I'll shoot you on the spot."

"Shoot away," said Mr. Beecher, looking the man squarely in the face, and passed on. The man followed for a few steps, and then went down a side street.

Although one of Mr. Beecher's elders had said, "If an Abolitionist comes here, I will head a mob and put him down," the brave preacher sat on the platform at an Abolitionist meeting, and in his pulpit preached so earnestly against slavery that it was predicted that his influence for all time would be destroyed. He lectured as earnestly against intemperance and other sins; and these "Lectures to Young Men" became his first volume, dedicated to his father. The book had a wide reading, both in England and America.

While at Indianapolis his little son George died. Years later he said, "I remember, to-night, as well as I did at the time, the night that my eldest son died. That was my first great sorrow.... It was in March, and there had just come up a great storm, and all the ground was covered with snow.

"We went down to the graveyard with little Georgie, and waded through it in the snow. I got out of the carriage and took the little coffin in my arms, and walked knee-deep to the side of the grave, and looking in I saw the winter down at the very bottom of it.... If I should live a thousand years I could not help shivering every time I thought of it."

Mr. Beecher loved the West, and expected to remain permanently in it; but the East had learned of his earnestness and his eloquence, and called him to Brooklyn. For a long time he refused to consider it; but his wife having suffered much from chills and fever, he finally accepted the call to the newly organized Plymouth Church, with twenty-one members, in the fall of 1847, at a salary of fifteen hundred dollars. In two years the membership had grown to over four hundred, and a new church had been built--the other having been badly damaged by fire--at a cost of $36,000.

A month after Mr. Beecher's arrival in Brooklyn, his little girl, "Caty," died, and began, as he says, "her quiet march toward the once-opened gate, to rejoin the brother."

From this time onward till Mr. Beecher's death in 1887, for forty years, Plymouth Church became the centre of almost unparalleled influence. Dr. Barrows says with truth, "It is probable that, except Westminster Abbey, no other church of English-speaking nations has in this century been visited by so many men and women of renown."

The church, accommodating three thousand persons, was year by year crowded to repletion, often as many going away as could find standing-room within. Everybody wanted to hear the most eloquent pulpit orator in America.

When Mr. Beecher first came to Plymouth Church, some said he would not please the cultivated East, but his earnestness soon satisfied all cavillers. He had one message, as he said, "The love of Christ to men. This, to me, was a burning reality.... Consequently I went into this work with all my soul, preaching night and day."

The slavery question had now come to be the foremost question among the people. By the Missouri Compromise of 1821, slavery was not to extend north beyond latitude 36° 30´. When, in 1849, California asked admittance to the Union as a free State, the South, feeling that the balance of power would be on the side of freedom, bitterly opposed it. Henry Clay, the great compromiser, brought forward his "Omnibus Bill" in 1850, the principal features of which were that California should be a free State, and the Fugitive Slave Law should be more stringent, so that Southerners might reclaim slaves in the Northern States, and take them back to bondage, and it should be the duty of Northerners to help them. President Millard Fillmore signed these measures.

Mr. Beecher wrote for the New York _Independent_ a three-column article, entitled, "Shall We Compromise?" The dying John C. Calhoun had it read twice to him. "The man who says that is right," he repeated. "There is no alternative. It is liberty or slavery."

When Daniel Webster, in his fatal speech of March 7, 1850, favored compromise, "Then it was that I flamed," said Mr. Beecher, and from that time till the Civil War was over he was at a white heat.

When Wendell Phillips was denied a place to speak because he was an Abolitionist, and no one dared to rent a hall for him through fear of a mob, Henry Ward Beecher opened Plymouth pulpit. He went to every trustee for his consent. It the man hesitated, Mr. Beecher said, "You and I will break if you don't give me this permission," and he signed.

A great audience assembled, and men were ready with revolvers to use them if the mob molested the speaker.

Mr. Beecher would not ride in omnibuses where colored persons were refused. He invited Frederick Douglass to sit beside him on the platform in Plymouth Church--he would not have a pulpit, which half hid the pastor from his people. Mr. Beecher's sister, Mrs. Stowe, had published "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as a serial in 1851, and in book form in 1852, which electrified the North and infuriated the South.

When Stephen A. Douglas proposed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which was carried in 1854, Kansas became a battle-ground between slaveholders and lovers of freedom. Houses were burned, men were murdered, and all the horrors of civil war continued for four years. Mr. Beecher's voice and pen were never silent: "Peace in Kansas," he said, "means peace everywhere; war there will be war all over the land.... What is done must be done quickly. Funds must be freely given, arms must be had, even if bought at the price mentioned by our Saviour: 'He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one.'"

He took up collections in Plymouth Church and elsewhere for Sharp's rifles, and for Bibles as well. Some of the rifles were sent, it is said, in boxes marked Bibles, though without his knowledge, and were therefore called "Beecher's Bibles."

When John C. Frémont was the first nominee of the Republicans in 1856, Mr. Beecher, with the hearty concurrence of his church, spoke for the party two or three times a week all through the State of New York. An amusing incident occurred at Rome, N.Y., which illustrated Beecher's graphic utterance.

He said: "My friends, in this great campaign there are but two sides, and we must range ourselves upon one side or the other; there is no middle ground for any of us. On the one side is Buchanan, with the black shield of slavery, and upon the other is Frémont, with the white banner of liberty, and with one or the other of these two you must take your stand; but who is this that I see crawling under the fence? Oh, that is Millard Fillmore." Immediately a little fellow in the front row jumped up, looked under the chairs, and shouted out, "Where is he?" The people laughed so heartily, that the lad got up and left the hall.

Mr. Beecher was always quick at repartee, either in conversation or address. Before an audience of ten thousand people in Chicago, he was lecturing on "Communism," and said, "The voice of the people is the voice of God." A man in the gallery shouted, "The voice of the people is the voice of a fool." Beecher replied simply, "I said the voice of the people, not the voice of one man."

In one of his anti-slavery speeches he said "that it was a penitentiary offence to teach a slave." A man in the corner of the gallery exclaimed, "It's a lie!"

"Well," said Beecher, "I shall not argue with the gentleman in the corner, as doubtless he has been there and ought to know."

Very stirring scenes were witnessed in these times. Two Edmonson sisters, of light complexion, whose mother was born a slave, but whose father was free, had been brought up in Washington. The former owner of the mother, finding that they were uncommonly attractive, determined to send them to New Orleans to be sold in the slave market. The girls tried to escape, but could not.

Their heart-broken father went to New York to see if he could raise the two thousand dollars demanded for their purchase. He was advised to see Mr. Beecher. He reached his home in Brooklyn; but having met many rebuffs, he feared to ring the bell, and sat down on the steps, while tears coursed down his cheeks. Mr. Beecher finally heard his story and arranged for a meeting at the Broadway Tabernacle. He spoke with wonderful power, as did also the Rev. Dr. John Dowling, the father of the brilliant Rev. Dr. George Thomas Dowling. The sum of twenty-two hundred dollars was raised, and the girls were set free.

Mr. Beecher said, "I think that of all the meetings that I have attended in my life, for a panic of sympathy I never saw one that surpassed that. I have seen a great many in my day."

Mrs. Stowe became responsible for the education of the sisters, and later raised enough money to purchase the freedom of the mother and two other children.

Among several who were bought for liberty "on the auction-block of Plymouth pulpit," was "Pinky," a little colored girl. "She was bought and overbought," said Mr. Beecher. "The rain never fell faster than the tears fell from many that were here." Rose Terry Cooke threw her ring into the contribution box, and Mr. Beecher put it on the child's hand and told her "it was her freedom-ring." Her expression was such a happy one that Eastman Johnson, the artist, painted her on canvas, looking at her freedom-ring. Later she was sent for a year to Lincoln University at Washington, and went back to her own people to become a teacher and a missionary among them.

In these years of incessant toil, Mr. Beecher's home was gladdened by the birth of twin boys, Alfred and Arthur, in December, 1852. They both died on the fourth of July in the following year, and were buried in one grave. Mr. Beecher could not hear their names mentioned for years, so overwhelming was the loss to the man who idolized children.

In the autumn of 1854, by the aid of friends, he purchased a farm of nearly one hundred acres at Lenox, Berkshire County, Mass. He was a devoted lover of trees. Speaking of a large elm, he said, "It was with a feeling of awe that we looked up into its face; and when I whispered to myself, 'This is mine,' there was a shrinking, as if there were sacrilege in the very thought of _property_ in such a creature of God as this cathedral-topped tree! Does a man bare his head in some old church? So did I, standing in the shadow of this regal tree, and looking up into that completed glory at which three hundred years have been at work with noiseless fingers!... Thou belongest to no man's hand, but to all men's eyes that do love beauty, and that have learned through beauty to behold God! Stand, then, in thine own beauty and grandeur! I shall be a lover and a protector, to keep drought from thy roots and the age from thy trunk."

Though he said, "The chief use of a farm is to lie down upon," knowing as all brain workers know, how restful it is to stretch one's self upon the ground, yet he always cultivated flowers and vegetables, and made the whole farm a thing of beauty.

He felt that he owed much to Ruskin's works. "The sky, the earth, and the waters are no longer what they were to us. We have learned a language and come to a sympathy in them more through the instrumentality of Ruskin's works than by all other instrumentalities on earth, excepting, always, the nature which my mother gave me--sainted be her name."

When the slavery struggles had culminated in war, and the South had fired the first gun at Fort Sumter, April 12, 1861, Beecher's heart was aflame. In his pulpit he said, "Give me war redder than blood and fiercer than fire, if this terrific infliction is necessary that I may maintain my faith in God, in human liberty, my faith of the fathers in the instruments of liberty, my faith in this land as the appointed abode and chosen refuge of liberty for all the earth!"

When his eldest son--he had already enlisted--said, "Father, may I enlist?" the instant reply was, "If you don't, I'll disown you."

After helping to fit out two regiments, Mr. Beecher took upon himself the entire equipping of a new one, called "The Long Island Volunteers," afterwards the Sixty-seventh New York.

Plymouth Church parlors became a workshop, where, under Mrs. Beecher's direction, women made articles for the soldiers at the front. By personal solicitation large sums were raised from families and merchants. Mr. Beecher told his wife to use all his salary except the smallest amount necessary for family expenses. He made patriotic addresses which were read and talked about the country over. "It is probable," said the well-known journalist, Frederick Hudson, "that there is not another man in the United States who is as much heard and read as Henry Ward Beecher, unless the other man is Wendell Phillips."

The first anniversary Sunday of the attack on Fort Sumter, Henry Ward Beecher said, "We will give every dollar that we are worth, every child that we have, and our own selves; we will bring all that we are and all that we have, and offer them up freely--but this country shall be one and undivided. We will have one Constitution and one liberty, and that universal. The Atlantic shall sound it, and the Pacific shall echo it back, deep answering to deep, and it shall reverberate from the Lakes on the North to the unfrozen Gulf on the South--'One nation, one constitution, one starry banner!' Hear it, England!--one country, and indivisible; one hope; one baptism; one constitution; one government; one nation; one country; one people--cost what it may, we will have it!"