John Bright told me that Henry Ward Beecher was the greatest orator who spoke the English tongue. When Beecher came to Plymouth Church, in 1847, he was thirty-four years of age, strong and rugged in health, unconventional in manners, but never ungentlemanly. In his free, brusque address and direct approach he was different from more polished clergymen, and no man ever lived more directly under the public gaze than did Mr. Beecher for forty years; his life was seen and read by all men,--his public life,--but few have known of his domestic gentleness and invariable sweetness of nature. He was the centre of loving hearts. Strong and powerful as he knew he was, to those he loved he was as gentle as a mother. As to enmities, he had none, and he hardly knew he had enemies. He was the most joyous, radiantly happy man that ever lived. I remember saying to him one day after I had seen him walking arm in arm with a man who had injured him, who had been abusing him: “I think you are carrying the doctrine of forgiveness too far.” He said: “Pond, can we go further than to bless those who curse us, and pray for those who despitefully use us? Ah, there is so little known of the spirit of Christ in the world that when a man is trying feebly and afar off to follow Him, even Christians do not understand it.” No answer could be made to such reasoning, and friends knew and learned from him what was meant by being a Christian. His theory was that as a son of God and in unison with his Father, he had a right to happiness, and this right he would allow no man or set of men to take from him. He had, as I can bear witness, the power of abstraction, by which he could put away all thoughts of care and trouble, and rise to a higher atmosphere where the heavens were blue and unclouded, while his eyes and ears seemed closed to all lower considerations. To those nearest to him at these times this power seemed almost superhuman. From my earliest recollection, in our log cabin on the frontier of Wisconsin, the name of Dr. Lyman Beecher was a household word. One day--I think it was in the summer of 1846--my mother was reading a paper that some friend had sent from the East containing a sermon by Henry Ward Beecher, a young son of Lyman Beecher, pastor of a new church in Indianapolis, in which the young man had dared to denounce slavery. Garrison, Thurlow Weed, Phillips, Beecher, Theodore Parker, Finney, were names as familiar to me in boyhood as those of my own relatives. Then came the Kansas conflict, Captain John Brown, and Sharp’s rifles (known as Beecher Bibles).