We must now turn from the perusal of his journal to note other influences than those already referred to—those of the Seminary, of home and books—that were at work upon him at this time. There were some that had a very important influence in shaping his ecclesiastical bearing through life. These were days of heresy-hunting; days when Albert Barnes was arraigned before presbytery for unsoundness because of some kind of heterodoxy (?) discovered in his notes upon Romans, and when the conflict between the two parties in the Presbyterian Church was rapidly advancing to a division of that great body into Old and New School. “Dr. Beecher,” so writes Mrs. Stowe, “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 the bringing to the rendering of the declarations of the Scriptures and of the standards the lights of modern modes of interpretation.” This battle soon assumed the character of an assault upon Dr. Lyman Beecher for the purpose of his destruction. His son knew it to be wholly without justification and as senseless as it was wicked. He knew his father’s earnestness, devotion, and unselfishness, the sacrifices he had made to take up this work, felt how greatly he deserved the gratitude of all Christian men; and when he saw that father attacked for heresy and brought before every tribunal of the Presbyterian Church, except the highest, for trial, and all because his construction of the Presbyterian Confession was not according to the views of one or two of the leaders of that Church in the West, he was not more indignant than disgusted. He saw him triumphantly acquitted by one body after another, but still pursued by suspicion, and knew that a conspiracy had been formed in which some of his Eastern friends and one or more Eastern seminaries were enlisted, with the avowed intention of crushing him, and all this mostly by good men, under the strong bias of ecclesiastical prejudice and in a mistaken zeal for God’s service. We must feel his disgust as he was compelled to go scurrying through the country, not to rescue souls from danger nor to forward any great moral end, but to anticipate the action of some presbytery or arrange for some meeting of synod; we must realize his indignation at seeing his father compelled to leave the death-bed of his mother to defend himself against these heresy-hunters, if we would understand the position which Mr. Beecher occupied towards ecclesiastical bodies in after-years.