Chapter XVIII (1)

Church and Steamboat—Jenny Lind—Hospitality—Colonel Pertzel—The
Family—Twins—Medicine—Giving Counsel—For the Sailor—An Absurd Story
Contradicted—Salisbury—Trouting—Death of Alfred and Arthur—Letters
to his Daughter at School—Lenox—Equivocal Honors Declined—The
Pulpit—“Plymouth Collection”—“Shining Shore.” A Church
Liturgy—Courting with his Father’s old Love-letters—1857 a Year of
Trial—Matteawan—Visit to Litchfield—1858 a Year of Harvest—Revival
Meetings—Hospitality of Plymouth Church—Courtesy to Errorists—New
Organ—Peekskill—Letters to his Daughter abroad—Marriage of his
Daughter—Lecturing—Title of D.D. declined—Flowers in
Church—Christian Liberty in the Use of the Beautiful—His two Lines
of Labor.

No sooner has he put his foot on shore than he is engaged in battle. This time it is against religious bigotry and intolerance upon the seas. A Star article from his pen appeared September 19 upon “Church and Steamboat—Cunard Line”:

No religious service was allowed on the steamers except that which was appointed for the crew, at which the passengers were _permitted_ to be present. No one was allowed to read the service there except the captain, who, having been playing cards late Saturday night, and being addicted to the sailor habit of profanity, was not considered fit for the office. No one at all was permitted to preach, or, if the rule were ever varied, only a clergyman of Episcopal ordination. One of the owners, who happened to be on the ship, when courteously asked to allow some one of the nine clergymen on board to preach, and to give the use of one of the several cabins to those who chose to have service of their own, lost his temper and said that if Americans did not choose to go on his line, “d——— ’em! they may go to h———.” All this appeared to Mr. Beecher as rank injustice and an interference with the freedom of worship of multitudes of travellers. Humorously, yet with good, solid, set phrase, he denounces this bigotry in the article above mentioned. Like most of his articles, it was strong enough to draw the fire of the enemy.

The captain and the son of this owner reply in letters which partly explain, partly deny, but wholly charge Mr. Beecher with falsehood. This brings another article from him in the next issue, September 26:

“It is not to be supposed, gentlemen, that either of you can sympathize fully with me in an inveterate prejudice which I have contracted against lying in all its moods and tenses. But, really, I feel hurt that you have so low an opinion of my ingenuity as to suppose that, if I set out to tell lies, I should tell such poor and graceless ones.

“Allow me to assure you, gentlemen, that while my principles forbid me to employ falsehood, yet should I attempt it I should conscientiously endeavor to lie well.”

He reiterates his charges, adds to them some further remarks upon the gambling habits of the captain, which unfit him to act as conductor of public worship, procures affidavits from responsible parties to substantiate his charges, and refers them to the courts for redress, if they think themselves aggrieved.

The first battle upon his return to his native land was waged for freedom of worship upon the high seas!

In this same month of September, Jenny Lind came to this country and began that series of concerts which have never been surpassed. Her first concert in Castle Garden, September 11, netted $30,000. Some of the papers having criticised her and her manager for the high price of tickets, and the community for paying it, Mr. Beecher takes up the cudgels in her behalf:

“Jenny Lind, if we understand her desires and aims, is employing a resplendent musical genius in the most noble accordance with the spirit of the Gospel. In her we behold a spectacle of eminent genius employing its magic power in the elevation of the human race.

“If men would spare from the disgusting weed and poisonous liquors one-half of what they spend every month, there are few so poor as not to be able to hear Jenny Lind. *”

One of his children gives this incident:

“In those early days father always had a flower-garden in the back-yard of our city homes. I remember when we lived in the little, brown wooden house on Columbia Heights, Jenny Lind came to board near us for a short time. All the neighboring children used to gather round her door to see her start for her drive; and one day when we saw the carriage in front of her house, I ran in to ask father if H——— and I could go and see her come out. He was at work in the garden among his flowers, and, after giving his consent, called me back, cut a handful of roses, and told me I could take those and give them to her. So off H——— and I went, but I believe, after all, my courage failed, and I brought them home again, very much ashamed. Father laughed, but comforted me by saying he’d rather I would be too shy than too bold.”

He closes this eventful year (1850) with two Star articles—the one (December 12), “Remember the Poor”: “Upon the whole, we doubt if there is any other means of grace so profitable to a Christian as the _whole_ duty of relieving the poor; for giving money is but a small part, and often the least effective part, of duty to them. Every man ought to take a single case or family, and look after them through the winter.” Another (December 19) upon “Different Ways of Giving”: “Now and then you will find a man whose face is March but whose pocket is June. He will storm and scold at you, but send you away with ten times as much as you asked.”

Mr. Beecher was very hospitable, and kept open house for friends, and even for such chance acquaintance as came to be associated with him. “When Kossuth was in this country, Colonel Pertzel, his chief of staff, with his wife, stopped with us for several weeks. When they went away she gave me her bracelet of national coins, which, she said, was prized by the Hungarian women in their exile above all their possessions.

“Our own family circle at this time consisted of father, mother, and three children—two boys and a girl. Besides these Aunt Esther was with us, whom I remember as little and round, straight and precise, with snapping black eyes, looking after the second generation of nephews and nieces, and telling us stories; and also Grandma Bullard, doing the mending and cosseting while she sang ‘Bounding Billow’ and ‘Like the Hart and the Roe.’ Dear, ideal old grandmother!”

December 20, 1852, there was an addition to this circle. “I can remember sitting in the parlor one evening with Aunt Esther, and father’s coming in, going up to her, and kissing her first on one cheek and then on the other, and her giving a little jump, saying, ‘Not two, Henry!’ and his answering, ‘Yes, two.’ Then he told me that I had two little new brothers up-stairs.

“Father was so proud of these twins that I remember on New Year’s day he took fifteen or twenty of the Hungarians who were making New Year’s calls up into mother’s room to see them.”

At the Thanksgiving service of this year Mr. Beecher had announced that an effort would be made to raise by subscription the sum of $13,000 to pay off the floating debt of the church before January 1, and the papers of a later date contain the announcement that the sum was promptly subscribed, “and Plymouth Church may now be considered on a firm foundation in temporal matters, and is in every way in a prosperous condition.”

The church entered the new year, 1852, without debt, and more than ten thousand dollars were realized from the rent of the pews.

Evidently he begins the year with especial effort to overcome spiritual coldness among the people, and bring in the summer of Christian life and growth, for his Star Papers are upon subjects like these: “Ice in the Church,” “Various Convictions of Sin,” and later are announcements in the papers of morning prayer-meetings in “Plymouth Church,” “Preaching Every Evening.”

In due time the announcement is made that “sixty persons were last Sabbath morning received into the church, fifty upon profession of faith.”

He is experiencing one of the evils to which religious meetings are prone, and concerning it he sends out a note of warning, “One Cause of Dull Meetings”:

“We hardly know of a more unprofitable exercise for social meetings than what is called exhortation. Men impose upon themselves and social meetings degenerate into absurd formalities—a pretence of caring for what they do not care for, of renouncing what all the world knows they do not renounce, of asking for what they do not desire and desiring what they dare not ask.”

Through life Mr. Beecher was as free with pathies in medicine as of isms in religion, and used allopathy, homœopathy, hydropathy, electricity, or hand-rubbing, as seemed to him at the time most likely to secure the coveted result. In general he trusted more to the man than to the system. His position on this matter, which he held substantially for years, is given in a review of a medical work:

“In good earnest, we regard medicine with little favor. Our first recipe for sickness is, not to get sick. Our second is reliance upon a well-bred, sensible doctor. _We_ select the doctor. It is his business to select the medicine, and we do not care a pin what it is. To all who ask us, therefore, what school we belong to, we reply: ‘We are firmly persuaded of Dr. ———.’ This is the sum of our present creed.”

His interest in common men and their affairs brought many to him by letter or in personal conversation for advice in their difficulties. Probably few physicians or lawyers in good practice were consulted by more people than came daily to Mr. Beecher. So practical were his principles of action, so great his sympathy with men in trouble, and such his ability to see through the difficulty, that men came to him for counsel from far and near.

A man asks him as to his duty to his creditors under certain peculiar circumstances which he mentions. Mr. Beecher goes over the matter in detail, states the ground of difficulty in that and all similar cases, and points out the way of relief in this fruitful sentence: “Selfishness is the great mischief-maker in settlements. Men think of their own rights first and their creditors’ afterwards. Reverse this. Be careful first that no man suffer by you.”

Again, at this time a man writes asking as to the duty of a temperance man and a professor of religion in regard to selling liquor as an agent.

“... He, therefore, who loves his situation or his pocket more than his religion can expect but little sympathy from robust Christians, and little favor from that Christ of the cross who has ordered a church of cross-bearing disciples. But we will turn our friend in such a dilemma over to our friend Hall, a drayman in New York, who utterly refuses to cart liquor, who will not unload a ship if in so doing he must cart brandy. For he says he will not disgrace any horse that he owns by letting him be seen with a load of liquor behind him.”

While carrying a free lance ready as any knight of old to champion every cause that was suffering injustice, we want to emphasize the fact that he had none of that small, truculent spirit that leads to personal attacks. He was very lenient to individual human failures, charitable in his judgments, and would rather attempt to save by hiding than to punish by exposing them. In answer to a question which we once asked concerning a man who, to our mind, had greatly transgressed the limits of public propriety, if not of morality, “Why don’t you pitch in and show up this matter?” this man of a thousand battles said quietly, with just a shade of rebuke for the spirit we had shown in his tone: “I don’t like to pitch into folks as much as some do.” But when wrong or injustice had wrought itself into a system, it made no difference to him how high in position they were who upheld it, or how low in the scale were the sufferers, or how securely entrenched was the wrong; he waited for no invitation, he asked no permission, he sought for no support, but attacked it at once, aiming to expose and remove the root element of the evil.

An illustration of this characteristic of Mr. Beecher is afforded by an article written by him at this time upon “Naval Discipline,” in which he brings to the sailor the same broad sympathy, established principles, and clear reasoning that he was accustomed to employ in the case of another and very different class:

“... It is of little use to cobble a system whose radical idea is wrong. This is our judgment in the case of the American navy. The republican institutions of America, slavery always excepted, contemplate the improvement and elevation of the masses. Government does not undertake to educate the citizen, but it contemplates, it is obliged from its origin to accommodate itself to the radical idea of, the liberty of the people to move among themselves, to guide, to change, to advance freely in any direction. The American navy is a monarchy. Its subjects are regarded in but one light—_they are to be under service_. More than this nothing is thought of. Sailors have no liberty. There is neither provision for, nor expectation of, improvement.... There must be an entirely new spirit infused into the whole system of such service.

”... In short, the naval system must address the social and moral need of the sailor. They must be allowed to act under all those high motives which develop men on shore.”

While moved by these world-wide sympathies, he was in no mood to submit with patience to bigotry nearer home, and utters a very strong protest against the ostracizing of certain Sabbath-schools by the orthodox schools of Brooklyn in their yearly parade:

“We ought to seize such an occasion to promote kindly feelings and cultivate such sympathy as differing sects might lawfully have in common. There is no liberality in urging this matter; it is simply common sense and common decency....

“Does the ——— (paper) regard it as dangerous to walk the streets with a Unitarian? Is heresy like smallpox, so contagious that one school will give it to another by sitting for an hour in the same audience-room with it?... We shall pray more earnestly than ever for the advance of that day when the love of God shall abound in the hearts of men and inspire men to love each other.”

His Star Papers of 1852 close with this, which will at once be recognized as eminently characteristic:

“We had always supposed that absurd stories grew in this vicinity like weeds in the tropics or trees planted by rivers. For once, however, the country newspapers have got ahead of our neighborhood.

“We have made diligent search, taken the census, examined every cradle, drawer, closet, crib, nook, and corner, and are prepared to affirm the following story, which was born in the _Windham County Telegraph_, the Norwich _Tribune_, Springfield _Republican_, Boston _Chronicle_, and other papers, to be _exaggerated_:

“‘Rev. H. W. Beecher’s lady has presented him with five little responsibilities in a little better than one year: two soon after the arrival of Kossuth and three the other day.’

“Twins there were a year ago whose blessed faces fill the house with light, but the _three above-mentioned_ were born of those maternal editors whose brains fulfil the prophet’s word, ‘Ye shall consume chaff; ye shall bring forth stubble.’

“We turn these mousing, mongering editors over to the next woman’s-rights convention; or, if they are not fit for a seat there, they may amuse the children with nursery tales while the mothers are at discussion; or, if not fit for that, let them in mercy be bound out as very dry nurses at some foundling hospital.”

He spends the summer of 1853, as he had the one preceding, at Salisbury, Connecticut.

“Once more we find ourselves at home among lucid green trees, among hills and mountains, with lakes and brooks on every side, and country roads threading their way in curious circuits among them. All day long we have moved about with dreamy newness of life. Birds, crickets, and grasshoppers are the only players upon instruments that molest the air. Chanticleer is at this instant proclaiming over the whole valley that the above declaration is a slander on his musical gifts. Very well; add chanticleer to cricket, grasshopper, and bird. Add, also, a cow, for I hear her distant low melodious through the valley, with all roughness strained out by the trees through which it comes hitherward. O this silence in the air, this silence on the mountains, this silence on the lakes!”

He closes a long letter upon trouting in this fashion:

“You forget your errand. You select a dry, tufty knoll, and, lying down, you gaze up into the sky. O those depths! Something in you reaches out and yearns. You have a vague sense of infinity, of vastness, of the littleness of human life, and the sweetness and grandeur of divine life and of eternity. You people that vast ether. You stretch away through it and find that celestial city beyond, and therein dwell oh! how many that are yours! Tears come unbidden. You begin to long for release. You pray. Was there ever a better closet? Under the shadow of the mountain, the heavens full of cloudy cohorts, like armies of horsemen and chariots, your soul is loosened from the narrow judgments of human life, and touched with a full sense of immortality and the liberty of a spiritual state. An hour goes past. How full has it been of feelings struggling to be thoughts, and thoughts deliquescing into feeling! Twilight is coming. You have miles to ride home. Not a trout in your basket! Never mind; you have fished in the heavens and taken great store of prey. Let them laugh at your empty basket. Take their raillery good-naturedly; you have certainly had good luck.”

The sadness which is plainly visible in the passage quoted is an old acquaintance. We have learned to expect its appearance somewhere at every feast. At this time undoubtedly it comes the oftener because of the sorrowful experiences of the early summer. The twins, Alfred and Arthur, “whose blessed faces fill the house with light,” had both died on the fourth of July of this year, and been buried in the same grave.

It was one of the deep sorrows of his life, seldom mentioned save when attempting by his sympathy to comfort others in like affliction; it became a fountain of deep and tender feeling for all in distress, and of earnest longings for the rest and the reunions of heaven.

The going away of his daughter to boarding-school during the autumn makes another break in the family, to which he refers in a letter in November:

“... This is the first departure of any of my children from home, and it is an experience which testifies to my affection for you and my solicitude; yet I do not in the least doubt that you will do well....

“There is little news at home. Your room is occupied by E——— B———, who now lives with us and takes care of W———. She seems a very good girl, and W——— is getting very fond of her. He makes no resistance to her dressing him, and submits even to having his hair curled with great peace. The rogue is fat and happy, and opens his big eyes with a half-tearful, dreamy look when we ask him: _Where is Sister H———?_...

“We are all going to Aunty H———’s to dinner, and in the evening Mrs. H——— and family will come round there too. As for me, I am in the agony of writing my Thanksgiving sermon....

“There, H———, I have made quite an effort, for me, at letter-writing and news-telling. Let me hear from you.

“Your loving father,
“H. W. B.”

In a letter to her the following June he mentions an important domestic event:

“BROOKLYN, June 24, 1854.

”_My dear H———_:

“I must answer your last letter to me before you leave, lest I lose my repute as a good and frequent correspondent; and I am the more willing to do it as I have very agreeable tidings to communicate to you.

“You will receive a visit from W——— A———, of our church, whom I presume you remember. Well, it has been thought best, after consultation, and some mysterious correspondence with your Aunt S——— which you may have noticed, that you should meet me at Cleveland and spend the next Sabbath there, July 2; go to Painesville and spend _July 4_ with me there; and then come back at our leisure to see your mother and a new little brother who was safely born into this world on last Thursday, June 22, at three o’clock in the afternoon, weighing ten pounds, and filling all people’s hearts with joy at his health and general peaceable qualities. As yet we have fallen upon no name....

”... Meanwhile young Master Nameless is sleeping off all traces of remembrance of that former state of existence from which Edward supposes him to be an emigrant to this world....

“H. W. B.”

This year he spent the summer in Lenox, Berkshire County, Massachusetts, where a few friends have aided him to purchase a farm, “which the deeds, with great definiteness, say contains ninety-six acres, more or less.” Annoyed by the inquisitiveness of certain newspapers, he goes on to say:

“We gave for farm and farm-buildings $4,500; for the crops, stock, implements, etc., $1,000 more; total, $5,500. Any person in search of useful information can have further particulars as to terms of payment and any other private publicities by personal application to us.”

His emotions upon taking possession are described in a letter of that date:

“It was in the presence of this pasture elm, which we name the Queen, that we first felt to our very marrow that we had indeed become owners of the soil! 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! What was I in its presence but a grasshopper? My heart said, ‘I may not call thee property, and that property of mine! Thou belongest to the air. Thou art the child of summer. Thou art the mighty temple where birds praise God. 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 axe from thy trunk.’”

Although the owner of the farm, we are not to suppose that he took hold of work as the neighboring farmers did. We fancy that his love of downright hard work exhausted itself in the West.

“The chief use of a farm, if it be well selected and of a proper soil, is to lie down upon. Mine is an excellent farm for such uses, and I thus cultivate it every day. Large crops are the consequence, of great delight and fancies more than the brain can hold. My industry is exemplary. Though but a week here, I have lain down more hours and in more places than that hard-working brother of mine in the whole year that he has dwelt here. Strange that industrious lying down should come so naturally to me, and standing up and lazing about after the plough or behind the scythe so naturally to him!”

When we remember how many ministers who take an interest in public affairs find themselves elected to some town or village office, made mayor of a city, sent to the State Legislature or even to Congress, we are surprised that Mr. Beecher was never elected, so far as we remember, to the smallest public office. This was largely owing to the fact that he looked upon the work of a preacher, to inspire men to right conduct in public affairs, as more important than filling any official position, however high.

He declares this opinion facetiously, but none the less as a matter of deliberate judgment, in a letter:

EQUIVOCAL HONORS DECLINED.

“The _Tribune_ last Saturday, in reply to a private letter asking its advice on the matter, recommends that we be nominated for Congress, elected and sent, and, when that shall be done, that we _go_....

“Had the proposal to go to Congress proceeded from the American Board of Missions there would have been grave reasons for considering it. We doubt whether they have a harder field in all heathendom, nor yet a field where the Gospel is more needed. But, for mere political reasons, to backslide from the pulpit into Congress is a little too long a slide for the first venture. We beg to decline in advance.”

In some of the sharp discussions of this year, 1854, the ministry have been bitterly criticised by papers who opposed politics in public, and a great deal of advice has been given to ministers concerning preaching. This receives his attention in this fashion:

“When one considers the amount of advice given to ministers about preaching, it is surprising that there should ever be again a dull or improper sermon.

”... We have no doubt that a rigorous landlord, having sharked it all the week, screwing and gripping among his tenants, would be better pleased on Sunday to doze through an able Gospel sermon on divine mysteries than be kept awake by a practical sermon that, among other things, set forth the duties of a Christian landlord. A broker who has gambled on a magnificent scale all the week does not go to church to have his practical swindlings analyzed and measured by the ‘New Testament spirit.’ Catechism is what he wants; doctrine is to his taste. A merchant whose last bale of smuggled goods was safely stored on Saturday night, and his brother-merchant who on the same day swore a false invoice through the custom-house—they go to church to hear a sermon on faith, on angels, on resurrection. As they have nothing invested in those subjects, they expect the minister to be bold and orthodox. But if he wants respectable merchants to pay ample pew-rents, let him not vulgarize the pulpit by introducing commercial questions. A rich Christian brother owns largely in a distillery, and is clamorous against letting down to the vulgarity of temperance sermons. Another man buys tax-titles and noses around all the week to see who can be slipped out of a vacant lot. On Sunday he naturally wants us to preach about eternity, or moral ability and inability. A mechanic that plies his craft with the unscrupulous appliance of every means that will win, he, too, wants “doctrine” on the Sabbath—not these secular questions. Men wish two departments in life—the secular and the religious. Between them a high and opaque wall is to be built. They wish to do just what they please for six long days. Then, stepping the other side of the wall, they wish the minister to assuage their fears, to comfort their conscience, and furnish them a clear ticket and insurance for heaven. By such a shrewd management our modern financiers are determined to show that a Christian _can_ serve two masters, both God and Mammon, at the same time.”

While fully alive to all the advantages of natural forces, the Sabbath, the pulpit, and a spiritual church-membership always held the highest place in his regard.

“It is no small thing, as it regards the education of the community, that from their youth up they have been taught to discuss all questions from ascertained and authoritative moral grounds....

“The pulpit is the popular religious educator. Its object is to stimulate and develop the religious feelings....

“When a whole community are wont to have their social life, their secular business, their public duties taken out of their low and selfish attitudes, and lifted up into the light of God’s countenance, and there measured, judged, repressed, or developed, and wholly bathed or inspired by the spirit of conscience and of love, then they are receiving a moral education for which there is no other provision except the Sabbath and the pulpit.

“Such are the members that make a church rich—poor in this world’s goods, but rich toward God—rich in faith, in hope, in meekness, in patience, in prayer, and, according to the feeble measure of their ability, in good works. Many a church is destroyed through an ambition of having strong and wealthy men, only rich, not holy....

“It may be very easy to sustain a church that has great wealth and little piety, but it is not worth sustaining. It is not a moral power.”

He had no confidence in secret political organizations. “One might as well study optics in the pyramids of Egypt or the subterranean tombs of Rome, as liberty in secret conclaves controlled by hoary knaves versed in political intrigue, who can hardly enough express their surprise and delight to find honest men going into a wide-spread system of secret caucuses. Honest men in such places have the peculiar advantage that flies have in a spider’s web—the privilege of losing their legs, of buzzing without flying, and of being eaten up at leisure by big-bellied spiders!...

“When will men understand that simple, open integrity, an unflinching adhesion to PRINCIPLE, is the peculiar advantage of truth and liberty? All that the Right asks is air, light, an open enemy, and room to strike. It is Wrong that sneaks in the dark and gains by the stiletto. *”

From time to time he gave examination to modern spiritualism, with this result:

“I am a stout unbeliever in the spiritual origin of this phenomenon, either by good spirits, bad spirits, or any spirits whatever.

“A belief in modern spiritualism seems to weaken the hold of the Bible upon conscience, the affections, and to substitute diluted sentimentalism and tedious platitudes instead of inspired truth.”

In 1855 Mr. Beecher published the “Plymouth Collection.” Of its history he has spoken somewhat at length:

“Soon after I came to Brooklyn from the West the conductor of music in this church was a Mr. Jones. He was intimately associated with the house of Mason Bros., publishers of music in New York, and sons of Lowell Mason, of honored and revered memory. I desired very much to inaugurate a new day in music—that is to say, to transfer to the great congregation on Sunday the same methods, so far as singing was concerned, that we had already instituted in our evening meetings, our conference meetings, and our revival meetings—namely, that of having both the hymns and the music before them at the same time.

“I can go back in my memory, easily, to the time when there was no hymn-book with notes for church use. The ‘Christian Lyre,’ edited by Joshua Leavitt, was largely used in the revivals under Dr. Finney, and ‘Christian Songs,’ by Mr. Hastings (the sweet singer of Israel, whose service to the church was never adequately recognized), were also used in revivals. When these books came they brought a progeny with them; but still there was nothing of the kind for the great congregation. The music-books for choirs were those long, narrow, inconvenient ones which could not well be held in the hand, but must always needs be laid upon a shelf. These were granted to the choir only, and the congregation had to sing from memory or not at all. It seemed to me that it would be a step in the right direction to put the tunes and hymns together, so that everybody who had the one should also have the other.

“With this end in view I asked the trustees of this church to agree to purchase a few copies of the ‘Temple Melodies,’ a small book of hymns, the music for which was to be selected by Mr. Jones and myself, and in which I interested the publishing house of Mason Bros.

“Connected with this was a curious incident. Mason Bros. would not publish the book unless we would pay for the stereotype plates; and the trustees agreed to take a certain number of copies of the book—enough to cover the cost of the plates—so that the publishers should suffer no loss. When the book came to be published there was an acknowledgment of the services of Mr. Jones, but my name was not mentioned. Although I did not care particularly about that, I was curious to know how it should happen that Mr. Jones, conductor of music in my church, was personally mentioned, and I, who had given to the work time and influence, and who had obtained means with which to pay for the plates, was not mentioned at all. Though I was the father of the book, everybody else got a slice of the credit, and I was left without a crumb. I asked Jones how it was, and, blushing up to his ears, he said (if you will pardon the adjective) that the publishers said that they would not have the name of a d—d abolitionist in their book.

“This was the first step in that direction. The success of the undertaking was such as to satisfy me that a larger endeavor of the same sort would be successful also; and I went to work and laid the foundation for the ‘Plymouth Collection.’ It was to be published by Mr. A. S. Barnes, but it was necessary that there should be a guarantee in the form of an advance sufficiently large to pay for the plates, that the publishers might run no risk in issuing the book. Mr. Henry C. Bowen and Mr. James Freeland agreed to furnish the money, with the understanding that when the income, if there was one, from our copyright should equal the amount they had advanced, with interest, all further profits from the copyright should inure to the benefit of the choir of this church.

“The book has been a profitable one on the whole; but I know not how much the choir has ever received from it. There was no written agreement, and the memorandum lapsed. I forgot to make any arrangement for myself. The consequence was that I was left out in the cold, and never got a penny for my services in the matter. I do not care for that. The object for which I was eager and earnest was to procure for the churches a book of hymns and tunes, so that they should have both before them at the same time.

“The book was assailed, but was defended, and it made its way.

“Since that time there have been eight or ten books of the same general character adopted, and they have so exactly copied the ‘Plymouth Collection’ as to size, type, and form that you may take the eight or ten volumes and set them on a shelf, and unless a man stood close to them he could not tell one from the other. So that the ‘Plymouth Collection’ not only has been a good book for this church, but has been a good pattern for other churches to follow. Although it was the first one of its kind, it was so well adapted to the want of the community that it has not been deemed expedient to change in the least degree its form, nor to change, except to a very small extent, its method. It has invariably proved to be a book acceptable and well suited to the purpose for which it was designed. It was made on a theory of my own, or rather it was the result of my observation and experience. I had observed what hymns appealed to the imagination and the affections of the people; and I did not believe that any hymn-book would ever be popular which had not in it hymns the elements of which appealed to these faculties. I had observed, also, what tunes the people loved. I had observed that any music, however irregular or grotesque, that appealed to their imagination and affection, they would adopt and make their own. Guided by that observation, I introduced into the book a great many melodies of a kind that were unknown in the sobriety of the old-fashioned psalmody, but that have been developed more fully and skilfully in subsequent books.

“With that conception of what a hymn-book should be, I was very much shocked in a conversation with Mr. Lowell Mason, whose services to American music cannot be over-estimated, and who has gone to a higher choir, but who in his old age fell upon a theory that I thought to be as vicious as it could possibly be—the theory, namely, that all music should be of one character, and that the tune should be the main thing. He said to me one day: ‘I think a perfect hymn-tune is one to which you ought to be able to sing every psalm in the whole collection.’ I considered that simply monstrous, literalizing and Platonizing everything. His late books lost ground a great deal because they were so insuperably flat. A man might sing them to all eternity and not find in them anything which hooked on to his memory or affections, or anything that had a tendency to develop his higher nature.

“About twenty years ago Mr. Love, of Chicago—who has conferred great benefit upon churches and schools by his compositions—and I were riding together from Brooklyn to Boston, and we discussed this question of music. He was under the influence of Mr. Mason, and partook of his views on the subject, and I blew him up soundly and told him how preposterous I thought they were. He went home pondering what I said, and subsequently, as I afterward heard, cut out from a newspaper the verses beginning ‘My days are gliding swiftly by,’ and with that conversation in his mind he sat down and wrote the ‘Shining Shore’ to go with them. Whether this tune has justified my idea or not, it has been employed in this congregation for many years. Moreover, it was taken by the Brooklyn Fourteenth Regiment to the war, it was performed by their band, and whenever they gave anything like a serenade in the army the ‘Shining Shore’ was called for. Since that time this tune has been played and sung all over the continent. How great a favorite it has been here you know.”

This collection was vehemently attacked by one of the religious papers of the day in the lead, several others following, and was vigorously defended by Mr. Beecher in a series of articles in the _Independent_ over his well-known signature, the *. So simple a matter as bringing out a hymn-book for the use of his own church, and only for others so far as they chose, would hardly seem likely to call out so strong a protest, but it shows the position that he had already come to occupy in the public mind. With his advanced views and strong following, everything that he did demanded examination, must be sifted and probably marked dangerous. In the vigorous defence of this child of his heart he discourses at length upon hymns. We have room for only two or three extracts:

“Hymns are the exponents of the inmost piety of the Church. They are crystalline tears, or blossoms of joy, or holy prayers, or incarnated raptures. They are the jewels which the Church has worn; the pearls, the diamonds, and precious stones formed into amulets more potent against sorrow and sadness than the most famous charms of wizard or magician. And he who knows the way that hymns flowed knows where the blood of piety ran, and can trace its veins and arteries to the very heart.

“Oftentimes when, in the mountain country, far from noise and interruption, we wrought upon these hymns for our vacation tasks, we almost forgot the living world, and were lifted up by noble lyrics as upon mighty wings, and went back to the days when Christ sang with His disciples, when the disciples sang too, as in our churches they have almost ceased to do. Oh! but for one moment, even, to have sat transfixed and to have listened to the hymn that Christ sang and to the singing! But the olive-trees did not hear His murmured notes more clearly than, rapt in imagination, we have heard them!

“There, too, are the hymns of St. Ambrose and many others, that rose up like birds in the early centuries, and have come flying and singing all the way down to us. Their wing is untired yet, nor is the voice less sweet now than it was a thousand years ago.

“There are Crusaders’ hymns, that rolled forth their truths upon the Oriental air, while a thousand horses’ hoofs kept time below and ten thousand palm-leaves whispered and kept time above! Other hymns, fulfilling the promise of God that His saints should mount up with wings as eagles, have borne up the sorrows, the desires, and the aspirations of the poor, the oppressed, and the persecuted, of Huguenots, of Covenanters, and of Puritans, and winged them to the bosom of God.

“In our own time, and in the familiar experiences of daily life how are hymns mossed over and vine-clad with domestic associations!

“One hymn hath opened the morning in ten thousand families, and dear children with sweet voices have charmed the evening in a thousand places with the utterance of another. Nor do I know of any steps now left on earth by which one may so soon rise above trouble or weariness as the verses of a hymn and the notes of a tune. And if the angels that Jacob saw sang when they appeared, then I know that the ladder which he beheld was but the scale of divine music let down from heaven to earth.”

We must find room for his answer to the charge of having left out from Watts “fifteen splendid hymns,” whose first lines are mentioned. After accounting for five of them by showing that they were left out because others of Watts’s versions of the same Psalms, and better ones, have been selected, he goes on to say: “Next in the list the ——— charges that we have omitted Watts’s hymn, ‘Glory to Thee, my God, this night.’ This evening hymn, dear to thousands of hearts, was probably written before Watts was born, certainly before he had written his psalms and hymns, by Bishop Ken, who was thirty-seven years old when Watts was born, and who died when Watts was but thirty-six years old. There is not, perhaps, another hymn in the language which it would require such ignorance to ascribe to Dr. Watts. To make the blunder full-orbed, it turns out that the hymn is _not_ omitted, after all, from ‘Plymouth Collection,’ but may be found at page 416, hymn 1287.

“The next omission from Watts charged by the ——— is the hymn ‘While my Redeemer’s near.’ We left that hymn out from Watts because Dr. Watts left it out himself, not thinking it honest, we suppose, to insert a hymn before it was written, or to appropriate another author’s labors as his own. For this hymn was written by Mrs. Steele, I know not how many years after Watts’s death. How dearly this critic must have loved Watts!

“We are next charged with excluding from ‘Plymouth Collection’ the hymn of Watts, ‘God is our Refuge and Defence.’ Alas! this hymn is by Montgomery, and not by Watts at all.

“How precious Watts’s hymns must be to a man who cannot tell a Steele or a Montgomery from a Watts! With what grief must one be afflicted at the injury done to Watts by not ascribing to him Bishop Ken’s hymns? Why did not the ——— go on and mention the even more glaring omissions from Watts in the ‘Plymouth Collection,’ such as ‘Ye Mariners of England, ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes,’ ‘To be or not to be’—all of which are left out of Watts and the ‘Plymouth Collection,’ and which should have attracted the learned attention of the critic of the ———.

“It is rumored that the Psalm-Book of the New School Assembly is to be revised. If so, the interests of the Church require that the editor of the ——— should be put on the committee. His accuracy, his carefulness, his profound knowledge of hymns, and especially his intelligent admiration of Dr. Watts, cannot be spared in such a labor.”

In this discussion his adversaries found out, what to this day, we think, is not well understood, that his action, however impulsive it might appear, really sprang from very clearly defined principles, which could be justified whenever, wherever, and by whom attacked, and that, however careless he seemed, he had a habit of making himself thoroughly acquainted with the matter in hand, and was prepared to meet any antagonist. Mr. Beecher had great boldness and perfect confidence in his conclusions, and was willing to stand alone upon them, because he had thought them out and settled the matter once for all.

From the kindly manner in which he had often spoken of the Episcopal Church, his mother’s communion, and in his account of the effect which the service had upon him at Stratford-on-Avon, it might seem that he would attempt to bring some form of it into use in Plymouth Church; but no movement in that direction was ever made, and he appears to have been well satisfied with the possibilities that lay in the simple forms of his own order. He has several articles at different times upon a proposed “Congregational Liturgy,” but advocates no change of method, only an improvement of spirit. “Our services are barren, not from any want of common forms of devotion, but from the want of common sympathy. _A church has a right to the gifts of every one of its members, and the minister is set to disclose and develop them._ He is not to lean upon the strong, or avail himself alone of the services of those already developed. It is his office to take hold of every individual man, and to educate him, so that he may bring forth the one, or five, or ten talents which are committed to him for the use and profit of all his brothers. A man of books, a man of ideas, a man of sermons, is not Christ’s idea of a minister. ‘Follow me and I will make _you fishers of men_.’ A minister is a man of men. He is an inspirer and driller of men.... But a dead church with a liturgy on top is like a sand desert covered with artificial bouquets. It is bright for the moment. But it is fictitious and fruitless. There are no roots to the flowers. There is no soil for the roots. The utmost that a liturgy can do upon the chilly bosom of an undeveloped, untrained church is to cover its nakedness with a faint shadow of what they fain would have but cannot get....

“As to ‘surpliced boys,’ we have them already. The whole congregation is a choir, and our boys, bright and happy, unite and respond with the elders; so the surplice which they wear is just that thing which the dear mother threw over them when they left her.

“If we were disposed to use any liturgy, we know of no one which we should sooner employ than that which expressed the earliest religious feelings of our own mother, now in heaven. The mere fact that she had used and loved it would for ever make it sacred to us. We never hear it pronounced by a sincere and earnest man without deriving profit from it ourselves; and we have no doubt that others are benefited by its use. We do not, however, believe that its continual use as the only vehicle of expression of the religious feeling of the congregation would be as profitable, on the whole, as an extemporaneous worship. If we did we should use a liturgy. While, then, we decline to use it in public, because we think it, on the whole, less edifying than the usage of Congregational churches, we do it without wishing to detract from its intrinsic excellence, and without wounding the feelings of those who delight to use it.”

At this time he takes pains to contradict the report that he had spoken slightingly of the Episcopalian forms in saying that “he would as soon go a-courting with his father’s old love-letters as to go to church and carry a book to pray out of”:

“So far from its being true that the remark in this story was applied to the Episcopal or any other liturgy, it was applied to what are called extemporaneous prayers in Congregational and Presbyterian prayer-meetings. We were reprehending the practice of praying without sincerity or real religious feeling. We said that when men began to lead in public prayer they should be simple, truthful, and strictly individual, expressing their own wants or feelings with child-like truthfulness. We commented upon the undeniable fact that men too often borrowed their prayers, copying the elder or deacon or minister, not to express real feelings, but as forms. Thus extemporaneous prayers became hereditary. And it was in reference to these unwritten forms of prayer, in our own Congregational churches, that the remark imputed to us was made. It was not a fling at the Episcopal service. We never indulge in such remarks at the expense of other denominations, and never intend to do it. We regard the whole practice of railing at other sects or their religious usages, from the pulpit, as not only unchristian but discourteous and ungentlemanly.”

The year 1857 was one of great commercial trouble through the country. Many of his people were involved and became bankrupt. This gave him much uneasiness from his sympathy with them, and to some extent affected his health, which he alludes to in a letter to his brother later in the year:

“I do not think it safe for me to undertake so much work this winter. My head is already suffering from overwork and anxiety induced by commercial troubles among my people. God will in the end make it a greater blessing than their prosperity.”

A family affliction which he felt very keenly, both in his personal affection and in sympathy with those who were bereaved, added to his burden. In a letter to the _Independent_, July 16, 1857, he says:

“The writer has been called by the stroke of violence to part with three nephews within two weeks—two of them of one age—dying, one in New Hampshire, and the others in Ohio.

“Two sons of Dr. Talbot Bullard, of Indianapolis, Ind.—Henry, aged thirteen, and Frank, aged eighteen—were thrown with the cars over an embankment, and died the same day.

“Nobler, truer, more gentle, and more amiable natures never were. Just a moment before the accident one of them said to a gentleman by their side: ‘In a few moments we shall be at home.’ They were indeed nearer home than they thought.

“Henry E. B. Stowe was the eldest son of his father’s family. On the 9th of July, while bathing in the Connecticut River, he was drowned. But we sorrow not as those without hope: his race was quickly run.”

We are not surprised, therefore, that we detect in most of the letters of this year a tinge of sadness accompanied with increased spiritual tenderness, as if he were finding the sources of consolation for himself, that he might lead others to them.

Lenox was found to be so far from Brooklyn that it was given up as a summer home, and this year, 1857, he spends his vacation at Matteawan, on the Hudson. His first letter gives us this bit of characteristic description:

“We are living in a pleasant old house, around which fruit-trees have grown in which birds have bred and lived unmolested from year to year. It is but a dozen wing-beats from the trees to the mountain woods. Nothing can please a meditative bird better than to have domestic scenes on one side and the seclusion of the wilderness on the other. A bird loves a kind of shy familiarity. Here we have a garden, a door-yard, an orchard, and a barn grouped together; and they on the other side have the young forests of scooped mountain-side. So the birds come down here for fun and go up there for reflection. This is their world; that is their cathedral.”

“In the Mountain and the Closet” he is speaking out of his own experience: