Men of the Time, eleventh edition/Beecher, Henry Ward
BEECHER, Henry Ward, fourth son of Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote Beecher, born at Litchfield, Connecticut, June 24, 1813. He studied in public Latin schools at Boston, graduated at Amherst College, Mass., 1834, and studied theology under his father at the Lane Seminary, near Cincinnati, Ohio. He first settled as a Presbyterian minister at Laurenceburg, Indiana, in 1837, removed in 1839 to Indianapolis, and became pastor of the Plymouth Congregational Church at Brooklyn, New York, in 1847. His church edifice has seating capacity for nearly 3,000 persons, and his church has a membership of over 2,000. During his whole career he has mingled to a greater extent than almost any other preacher and pastor of his denomination in matters not directly professional. For nearly a year, during his theological course, he edited the Cincinnati Journal, a religious weekly. In Indiana he was editor of the Farmer and Gardener. In Brooklyn he was soon known as an earnest opponent of slavery, and an advocate of temperance, peace, and other reforms, and very early became prominent as a platform orator and lecturer. He has always been a strong Republican, and has preached a number of political sermons from his pulpit, and has addressed a number of political meetings. From the date of the establishment of the Independent newspaper to 1858, he was a constant contributor to its columns, and from 1861 to 1863 its chief editor. In 1870 he became the editor-in-chief of the Christian Union, a weekly religious paper, a position he retained for about ten years, when he resigned it to Mr. Lyman Abbott, his associate editor. Mr. Beecher has twice visited Europe, and the last time (in 1863) addressed large audiences in the principal cities of Great Britain on the questions evolved by the civil war then raging in the United States. In 1871, Henry W. Sage, a parishioner of Mr. Beecher's, founded a lectureship of Preaching, called the "Lyman Beecher Lectureship," in the Yale College Divinity School, and the first three annual courses were delivered by Mr. Beecher. His regular weekly sermons, as taken down by stenographic reporters, have been printed since 1859. Besides these he has published "Lectures to Young Men," 1850; "Star Papers," 1855; "Plymouth Collection of Hymns and Tunes," 1855; "Life Thoughts," 1858; "Pleasant Talks about Fruits, Flowers, and Farming," 1859; "Eyes and Ears," 1862; "Freedom and War," 1863; "Royal Truths," 1864; "Aids to Prayer," 1864; "Pulpit Pungencies," 1866; "Prayers from Plymouth Pulpit," 1867; "Norwood," a novel, 1867; "Overture of Angels," 1869; "Lecture-Room Talks," 1870; "Morning and Evening Exercises," 1870; "Life of Christ" (of which only the first volume has ever been issued), 1871; "Yale Lectures on Preaching," 3 vols., 1872–74; and "A Summer Parish," 1874. In the summer of 1874 Mr. Theodore Tilton, formerly his associate, and afterwards his successor, in the editorship of the Independent, charged him with criminality with Mrs. Tilton. A committee of the Plymouth congregation reported that this charge was without any foundation; but meanwhile Mr. Tilton commenced a civil suit against Mr. Beecher, laying his damages at $100,000. The trial was protracted during six months; and at its close the jury, after being locked up for more than a week, failed to agree upon a verdict, nine being for acquittal of defendant and three for conviction. In 1878 Mr. Beecher announced that he did not believe in the eternity of punishment, believing that all punishments are cautionary and remedial, and that no greater cruelty could be imagined than the continuance of suffering eternally, after all hope of reformation is gone. He is understood to hold both to the annihilation of the miserable and the restoration of all others. In 1882 he formally withdrew from the Association of Congregational Churches on account of this change in belief.