Гарриет Бичер-Стоу
Men of Our Times. Or, Leading Patriots of the Day

The stand he took in college, was from the first that of a reformer. He was always on the side of law and order, and being one of the most popular fellows in his class, threw the whole weight of his popularity in favor of the faculty, rather than against them. He and his associates formed a union of merry good fellows, who were to have glorious fun, but to have it only by honorable and permissible means. They voted down scraping in the lecture rooms, and hazing of students; they voted down gambling and drinking, and every form of secret vice, and made the class rigidly temperate and pure. Mr. Beecher had received from family descent what might be called a strictly temperance organization. In no part of his life did he ever use, or was he ever tempted to use tobacco or ardent spirits in any shape. All his public labors, like those of his father before him, have been performed by the strict legal income of ordinary nervous investment; they have not been those deep ruinous drafts on the reserved principal of vital force, which are drawn by the excitements of extra stimulants.

He also maintained the character of a Christian student, by conscientious attention to the class prayer meetings, in which he took his part, as well as by outside religious and temperance labors in the rural population in the neighborhood. He very early formed an attachment to a beneficiary in the college, a man, as he says, of the Isaiah type, large-souled, and full of devotion, who took the boy round with him on his tour of religious exhortation, insisting with paternal earnestness that it was his immediate duty to begin to practice for the work of the Christian ministry. Having brought him once or twice to read and pray, in a little rural meeting, held in a school-house in the outskirts of the village, he solemnly committed the future care of the meeting to the young disciple, and went himself to look up another fold. This meeting Henry religiously kept up among his others, with varying success, during his college career.

The only thing which prevented him from taking the first rank as a religious young man, was the want of that sobriety and solemnity which was looked upon as essential to the Christian character. Mr. Beecher was like a converted bob-o'link, who should be brought to judgment for short quirks and undignified twitters and tweedles, among the daisy heads, instead of flying in dignified paternal sweeps, like a good swallow of the sanctuary, or sitting in solemnized meditation in the depths of pine trees like the owl.

His commendation from the stricter brethren generally came with the sort of qualification which Shakspeare makes, —

"For the man doth fear God, howbeit it doth not always appear, by reason of some large jests which he will make."

In fact, Mr. Beecher was generally the center of a circle of tempestuous merriment, ever eddying round him in one droll form or another. He was quick in repartee, an excellent mimic, and his stories would set the gravest in a roar. He had the art, when admonished by graver people, of somehow entrapping them into more uproarious laughing than he himself practiced, and then looking innocently surprised. Mr. Beecher on one occasion was informed that the head tutor of the class was about to make him a grave exhortatory visit. The tutor was almost seven feet high, and solemn as an Alpine forest, but Mr. Beecher knew that like most solemn Yankees, he was at heart a deplorable wag, a mere whited sepulchre of conscientious gravity, with measureless depths of unrenewed chuckle hid away in the depths of his heart. When apprised of his approach, he suddenly whisked into the wood-closet the chairs of his room, leaving only a low one which had been sawed off at the second joint, so that it stood about a foot from the floor. Then he crawled through the hole in his table, and seated meekly among his books, awaited the visit.

A grave rap, is heard: – "Come in."

Far up in the air, the solemn dark face appears. Mr. Beecher rose ingenuously, and offered to come out. "No, never mind," says the visitor, "I just came to have a little conversation with you. Don't move."

"Oh," says Beecher innocently, "pray sit down sir," indicating the only chair.

The tutor looked apprehensively, but began the process of sitting down. He went down, down, down, but still no solid ground being gained, straightened himself and looked uneasy.

"I don't know but that chair is too low for you," said Beecher meekly; "do let me get you another."

"Oh no, no, my young friend, don't rise, don't trouble yourself, it is perfectly agreeable to me, in fact I like a low seat," and with these words, the tall man doubled up like a jack-knife, and was seen sitting with his grave face between his knees, like a grass-hopper drawn up for a spring. He heaved a deep sigh, and his eyes met the eyes of Mr. Beecher; the hidden spark of native depravity within him was exploded by one glance at those merry eyes, and he burst into a loud roar of merriment, which the two continued for some time, greatly to the amusement of the boys, who were watching to hear how Beecher would come out with his lecture. The chair was known in college afterwards, by the surname of the "Tutor's Delight." This overflow of the faculty of mirthfulness, has all his life deceived those who had only a shallow acquaintance with him, and men ignorant of the depth of yearning earnestness and profound strength of purpose on which they rippled and sparkled.

But at the time that he passed for the first humorist of college, the marks along his well worn volumes of the old English poets show only appreciation of what is earnest, deep and pathetic. He particularly loved an obscure old poet of whom we scarcely hear in modern days, Daniel, who succeeded Edmund Spenser as poet laureate, and was a friend of Shakspeare.

Some lines addressed by him to the Earl of Southampton, are marked by reiterated lines in Mr. Beecher's copy of the old English poets, which showed enthusiastic reading. He says, "This was about the only piece of poetry I ever committed to memory, but I read it so much I could not help at last knowing it by heart:"

"TO THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON

 
"He who hath never warred with misery,
Nor ever tugged with fortune in distress,
Hath no occasion and no field to try
The strength and forces of his worthiness.
Those parts of judgment which felicity
Keeps as concealed, affliction must express,
And only men show their abilities
And what they are, in their extremities.
 
 
"Mutius the fire, the tortures Regulus,
Did make the miracles of faith and zeal;
Exile renowned and graced Rutilius.
Imprisonment and poison did reveal
The worth of Socrates, Fabricius'
Poverty did grace that common weal
More than all Sylla's riches got with strife,
And Cato's death did vie with Cæsar's life.
 
 
"He that endures for what his conscience knows
Not to be ill, doth from a patience high
Look on the only cause whereto he owes
Those sufferings, not on his misery;
The more he endures the more his glory grows,
Which never grows from imbecility;
Only the best composed and worthiest hearts
God sets to act the hardest and constant'st parts."
 

Such an enthusiasm shows clearly on what a key the young man had set his life purposes, and what he was looking for in his life battle.

Another poem which bears reiterated marks and dates, is to Lady Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, of which these lines are a sample:

 
"He that of such a height hath built his mind,
And reared the dwelling of his thoughts so strong
As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame
Of his resolved powers; nor all the wind
Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong
His settled peace, or to disturb the same;
What a fair seat hath he! from whence he may
The boundless wastes and wilds of man survey!
 
 
"And while distraught ambition compasses
And is compassed; whilst as craft deceives
And is deceived; while man doth ransack man,
And builds on blood, and rises by distress;
And the inheritance of desolation leaves
To great expecting hopes; he looks thereon,
As from the shore of peace, with unwet eye,
And bears no venture in impiety."
 

These verses are so marked with Mr. Beecher's life habits of thought, with his modes of expression, that they show strongly the influence which these old poets had in forming both his habits of thought and expression. His mind naturally aspired after heroism, and from the time that he gave up his youthful naval enthusiasm he turned the direction of the heroic faculties into moral things.

In the course of the sophomore year, Mr. Beecher was led, as a mere jovial frolic, to begin a course of investigation which colored his whole after life. A tall, grave, sober fellow had been reading some articles on Phrenology, on which Spurzheim was then lecturing in Boston, and avowed himself a convert. Quick as thought, the wits of college saw in this an occasion for glorious fun. They proposed to him with great apparent earnestness that he should deliver a course of lectures on the subject in Beecher's room.

With all simplicity and solemnity he complied, while the ingenuous young inquirers began busily arming themselves with objections to and puzzles for him, by reading the scoffing articles in Blackwood and the Edinburgh. The fun waxed hearty, and many saw nothing in it but a new pasture ground to be ploughed and seeded down for an endless harvest of college jokes. But one day, one of the clearest headed and most powerful thinkers in the class said to Beecher, "What is your estimate of the real logical validity of these objections to Phrenology?" "Why," said Beecher, "I was thinking that if these objections were all that could be alleged, I could knock them to pieces." "So I think," said the other. In fact, the inanity of the crusade against the theory brought forth converts faster than its direct defence. Mr. Beecher and his associates formed immediately a club for physiological research. He himself commenced reading right and left, in all the works of anatomy and physiology which he could lay hands on, either in the college or village libraries. He sent and bought for his own private use, Magendie's Physiology, Combe's Phrenology, and the works of Gall and Spurzheim. A phrenological union was formed to purchase together charts, models and dissecting tools, for the study of comparative anatomy. It was even planned, in the enthusiasm of young discipleship, to establish a private dissecting room for the club, but the difficulties attending the procuring of proper subjects prevented its being carried into effect. By correspondence with his brother Charles, however, who was then in Bowdoin College, an affiliated phrenological club was formed in that institution, and his letters of this period were all on and about phrenological subjects, and in full phrenological dialect. Mr. Beecher delivered three lectures on the subject in the village lyceum, and did an infinity of private writing and study.

He read the old English dramatists, particularly Ben Jonson, Massinger, Webster, Ford and Shakspeare, and wrote out analyses of their principal characters on phrenological principles. The college text-book of mental philosophy was Browne, and Mr. Beecher's copy of Browne is marked through and through, and interlined with comparative statements of the ideas derived from his physiological investigation. With these also he carefully read and analyzed Locke, Stuart, Reid, and the other writers of the Scotch school. As a writer and debater, Mr. Beecher was acknowledged the first of the class, and was made first president of the Athenian Society, notwithstanding it had been a time-honored precedent that that distinction should belong only to the presumptive valedictorian. The classics and mathematics he had abandoned because of his interest in other things, but that abandonment settled the fact that he could never aspire to high college honors. He however, wrote for one of his papers in a college newspaper a vigorous defence of mathematical studies, which won the approbation and surprise of his teachers. It was a compliment paid by rhetoric to her silent sister.

The phrenological and physiological course thus begun in college was pursued by few of the phrenological club in after life. With many it died out as a boyish enthusiasm; with one or two, as Messrs. Fowler of New York, it became a continuous source of interest and profit. With Mr. Beecher it led to a broad course of physiological study and enquiry, which, collated with metaphysics and theology, has formed his system of thought through life. From that day he has continued the reading and study of all the physiological writers in the English language. In fact, he may be said during his college life to have constructed for himself a physiological mental philosophy out of the writings of the Scotch metaphysical school and that of Combe, Spurzheim, and the other physiologists. Mr. Beecher is far from looking on phrenology as a perfected science. He regards it in relation to real truth as an artist's study towards a completed landscape; a study on right principles and in a right direction, but not as a completed work. In his view, the phrenologists, physiologists and mental philosophers of past days have all been partialists, giving a limited view of the great subject. The true mental philosophy, as he thinks, is yet to arise from a consideration of all the facts and principles evolved by all of them.

Thus much is due for the understanding of Mr. Beecher's style, in which to a great extent he uses the phrenological terminology, a terminology so neat and descriptive, and definite in respect to human beings as they really exist, that it gives a great advantage to any speaker. The terms of phrenology have in fact become accepted as conveniences in treating of human nature, as much as the algebraic signs in numbers.

The depth of Mr. Beecher's religious nature prevented this enthusiasm for material science from degenerating into dry materialism. He was a Calvinist in the earnestness of his intense need of the highest and deepest in religion. In his sophomore year there was a revival of religion in college, in which his mind was powerfully excited. He reviewed the almost childish experiences under which he had joined the church, as possibly deceptive, and tried and disciplined himself by those profound tests with which the Edwardean theology had filled the minds of New England. A blank despair was the result. He applied to Dr. Humphrey, who simply told him that his present feelings were a work of the spirit, and with which he dared not interfere. After days of almost hopeless prayer, there came suddenly into his mind an ineffable and overpowering perception of the Divine love, which seemed to him like a revelation. It dispelled all doubts, all fears; he became buoyant and triumphant, and that buoyancy has been marked in his religious teachings ever since.

Mr. Beecher's doctrine upon the subject is that the truths of the Divine nature are undiscoverable by the mere logical faculties, that they are the province of a still higher class of faculties which belong to human nature, the faculties of spiritual intuition; that it is through these spiritual intuitions that the Holy Spirit of God communes with man, and directs through them the movements of the lower faculties. In full faith in the dependence of man on the Holy Spirit for these spiritual intuitions, he holds substantially the same ground with Jonathan Edwards, though he believes that Divine influence to be far more widely, constantly and fully given to the children of men than did that old divine.

During his two last college years, Mr. Beecher, like other members of his class, taught rural schools during the long winter vacations. In this way he raised funds of his own to buy that peculiar library which his tastes and studies caused him to accumulate about him. In both these places he performed the work of a religious teacher, preaching and exhorting regularly in stated meetings, giving temperance lectures, or doing any reformatory work that came to hand. In the controversy then arising through the land in relation to slavery, Mr. Beecher from the first took the ground and was willing to bear the name of an abolitionist. It was a part of the heroic element of his nature always to stand for the weak, and he naturally inclined to take that stand in a battle where the few were at odds against the many.

In 1832 Dr. Lyman Beecher moved to Cincinnati, two years before the completion of Henry's college course.

He graduated in 1834, and went out to Cincinnati. The abolition excitement at Lane Seminary had just ended, by the departure of a whole class of some thirty students, with Theodore Weld at their head.

Dr. Beecher was now the central point of a great theological battle. It was a sort of spiritual Armageddon, being the confluence of the forces of the Scotch-Irish Presbyterian Calvinistic fatalism, meeting in battle with the advancing rationalism of New England new school theology. On one side was hard literal interpretation of Bible declarations and the Presbyterian standards, asserting man's utter and absolute natural and moral inability to obey God's commands, and on the other side, the doctrine of man's free agency, and bringing to the rendering of the declarations of the scriptures and of the standards, the lights of modern modes of interpretation.

Dr. Wilson, who headed the attacking party, was a man in many points marvellously resembling General Jackson, both in person and character, and he fought the battle with the same gallant, headlong vigor and sincere unflinching constancy. His habits of thought were those of a western pioneer, accustomed from childhood to battle with Indians and wild beasts, in the frontier life of an early state. His views of mental philosophy, and of the modes of influencing the human mind, were like those of the Emperor Constantine when he commanded a whole synod of bishops to think alike without a day's delay, or those of the Duke of Wellington, when he told the doubting inquirers at Oxford, that "the thing to be done was to sign the thirty-nine articles, and believe them." The party he headed, were vigorous, powerful and with all that immense advantage which positive certainty and a literal, positively expressed belief always gives. With such an army and such a general, the fight of course was a warm one, and Dr. Beecher's sons found themselves at once his armor bearers in the thickest of the battle. The great number of ascending judicatories in the Presbyterian Church gave infinite scope for protracting a contest where every point of doctrine could first be discussed and voted on in Presbytery, then adjourned to Synod, then carried to General Assembly, and in each had to be discussed and decided by majorities. What scope for activity in those times! What racing and chasing along muddy western roads, to obscure towns, each party hoping that the length of the way and the depth of the mud would discourage their opponents, keep them away and so give their own side the majority. Dr. Beecher and his sons, it was soon found could race and chase and ride like born Kentuckians, and that "free agency" on horse-back, would go through mud and fire, and water, as gallantly as ever "natural inability" could. There was something grimly ludicrous in the dismay with which Dr. Wilson, inured from his boyhood to bear-fights, and to days and nights spent in cane-brakes, and dens of wolves, found on his stopping at an obscure log hut in the depth of the wilderness, Dr. Beecher with his sons and his new school delegates, ahead of him, on their way to Synod.

The study of theology at Lane Seminary, under these circumstances, was very largely from the controversial and dialectic point of view. It was, to a great extent, the science of defence of new school as against old school.

Mr. Beecher was enthusiastically devoted to his father, and of course felt interested in his success as a personal matter, but in regard to the whole wide controversy, his interest was more that of a spectator than of a partizan on either side. He had already begun his study of mental and moral philosophy on a broad eclectic basis, taking great account of facts and phenomena which he saw to be wholly ignored by the combatants on both sides. The mental philosophy of Reid and the Scotch school, on which Dr. Beecher based his definitions, he regarded as only partially true, and had set down in his own mind at a definite value. The intense zeal and perfect undoubting faith with which both sides fought their battle, impressed him as only a strange and interesting and curious study in his favorite science of anthropology.

He gave his attention to the system, understood it thoroughly, was master of all its modes of attack, fence and defence, but he did it much as a person now-a days might put on a suit of mediæval armor, and study mediæval tactics.

Mr. Beecher had inherited from his father what has been called a genius for friendship. He was never without the anchor of an enthusiastic personal attachment for somebody, and at Lane Seminary, he formed such an intimacy with Professor C. E. Stowe, whose room-mate for some length of time he was, and in whose society he took great delight. Professor Stowe, a man devoted to scholarly learning and Biblical criticism, was equally with young Beecher standing as a spectator in the great theological contest which was raging around him, and which he surveyed from still another stand-point, of ecclesiastical history and biblical criticism. It was some considerable inconvenience to the scholarly professor, to be pulled up from his darling books, and his interjections were not always strictly edifying when he was raced through muddy lanes, and rattled over corduroy roads, under the vigorous generalship of Dr. Beecher, all that he might give his vote for or against some point of doctrine, which, in his opinion, common sense had decided ages ago. He was also, somewhat of a strict disciplinarian and disposed to be severe on the discursive habits of his young friend, who was quite too apt to neglect or transcend conventional rule. The morning prayers at Lane were at conventual hours, and Henry's devotional propensities, of a dark cold winter morning, were almost impossible to be aroused, while his friend, who was punctuality itself, was always up and away in the gloaming. One morning, when the Professor had indignantly rebuked the lazy young Christian, whom he left tucked in bed, and, shaking the dust from his feet, had departed to his morning duties, Henry took advantage of his own habits of alert motion, sprang from the bed, dressed himself in a twinkling, and taking a cross-lot passage, was found decorously sitting directly under the Professor's desk, waiting for him, when he entered to conduct prayers. The stare of almost frightened amazement with which the Professor met him, was the ample reward of his exertions.

Though Professor Stowe never succeeded in making him an exact linguist, or shaping him into a biblical scholar, yet he was of great service to him in starting his mind in a right general direction in the study of the Bible. The old and the new school were both too much agreed in using the Bible as a carpenter does his nail-box, going to it only to find screws and nails to hold together the framework of a theological system. Professor Stowe inspired him with the idea of surveying the books of the Bible as divinely inspired compositions, yet truly and warmly human, and to be rendered and interpreted by the same rules of reason and common sense which pertain to all human documents.

As the time drew near in which Mr. Beecher was to assume the work of the ministry, he was oppressed by a deep melancholy. He had the most exalted ideas of what ought to be done by a Christian minister. He had transferred to that profession all those ideals of courage, enterprise, zeal and knightly daring which were the dreams of his boyhood, and which he first hoped to realize in the naval profession. He felt that the holy calling stood high above all others, that to enter it from any unholy motive, or to enter and not do a worthy work in it, was a treason to all honor.

His view of the great object of the ministry was sincerely and heartily the same with that of his father; to secure the regeneration of the individual heart by the Divine spirit, and thereby to effect the regeneration of human society. The problem that oppressed him was, how to do this. His father had used certain moral and intellectual weapons, and used them strongly and effectively, because employing them with undoubting faith. So many other considerations had come into his mind to qualify and limit that faith, so many new modes of thought and inquiry, that were partially inconsistent with the received statements of his party, that he felt he could never grasp and wield them with the force which would make them efficient. It was no comfort to him that he could wield the weapons of his theological party, so as to dazzle and confound objectors, while all the time conscious in his own soul of objections more profound and perplexities more bewildering. Like the shepherd boy of old, he saw the giant of sin stalking through the world, defying the armies of the living God, and longed to attack him, but the armor in which he had been equipped for the battle was no help, but only an incumbrance!

His brother, who studied with him, had already become an unbeliever, and thrown up the design of preaching, and he could not bear to think of adding to his father's trials by deserting the standard. Yet his distress and perplexity were so great that at times he seriously contemplated going into some other profession.

What to say to make men Christians, – how to raise man to God really and truly, – was to him an awful question. Nothing short of success in this appeared to him success in the Christian ministry.

Pending these mental conflicts, he performed some public labors. He was for four or five months editor of the Cincinnati Journal, the organ of the N. S. Presbyterian Church, during the absence of Mr. Brainard. While he was holding this post, the pro-slavery riot which destroyed Birney's press occurred, and the editorials of the young editor at this time were copied with high approval by Charles Hammond, of the Cincinnati Gazette, undoubtedly the ablest editor of the West, and the only other editor who dared to utter a word condemnatory of the action of the rioters. Mr. Beecher entered on the defence of the persecuted negroes with all the enthusiasm of his nature. He had always a latent martial enthusiasm, and though his whole life had been a peaceful one, yet a facility in the use of carnal weapons seemed a second nature, and at this time, he, with a number of other young men went to the mayor and were sworn in as a special body of police, who patroled the streets, well armed. Mr. Beecher wore his pistol, and was determined, should occasion arise, to use it. But as usual in such cases, a resolute front once shown dissolved the mob entirely.

In his last theological term he took a Bible class in the city of Cincinnati, and began studying and teaching the evangelists. With the course of this study and teaching came a period of spiritual clairvoyance. His mental perplexities were relieved, and the great question of "what to preach," was solved. The shepherd boy laid aside his cumbrous armor, and found in a clear brook a simple stone that smote down the giant, and so from the clear waters of the gospel narrative, Mr. Beecher drew forth that "white stone with a new name," which was to be the talisman of his ministry. To present Jesus Christ, personally, as the Friend and Helper of Humanity, Christ as God impersonate, eternally and by a necessity of his nature helpful and remedial and restorative; the friend of each individual soul, and thus the friend of all society; this was the one thing which his soul rested on as a worthy object in entering the ministry. He afterward said, in speaking of his feelings at this time: "I was like the man in the story to whom a fairy gave a purse with a single piece of money in it, which he found always came again as soon as he had spent it. I thought I knew at last one thing to preach, I found it included everything."

Immediately on finishing his theological course, Mr. Beecher married and was settled in Lawrenceburg. He made short work of the question of settlement, accepting the very first offer that was made him. It was work that he wanted, and one place he thought about as good as another. His parish was a little town on the Ohio river, not far from Cincinnati. Here he preached in a small church, and did all the work of the parish sexton, making his fires, trimming his lamps, sweeping his house, and ringing his bell. "I did all," he said whimsically, "but come to hear myself preach – that they had to do." The little western villages of those days had none of the attractions of New England rural life. They were more like the back suburbs of a great city, a street of houses without yards or gardens, run up for the most part in a cheap and flimsy manner, and the whole air of society marked with the impress of a population who have no local attachments, and are making a mere temporary sojourn for money-getting purposes. Mr. Beecher was soon invited from Lawrenceburg to Indianapolis, the capital of the State, where he labored for eight years.

His life here was of an Arcadian simplicity. He inhabited a cottage on the outskirts of the town, where he cultivated a garden, and gathered around him horse, cow and pig; all that wholesome suite of domestic animals which he had been accustomed to care for in early life. He was an enthusiast on all these matters, fastidious about breeds and blood, and each domestic animal was a pet and received his own personal attentions. In the note-books of this period, amid hints for sermons, come memoranda respecting his favorite Berkshire pig, or Durham cow. He read on gardening, farming, and stock-raising, all that he could lay hands on; he imported from eastern cultivators all sorts of roses and all sorts of pear trees and grape vines, and edited a horticultural paper, which had quite a circulation.