Henry Ward Beecher died aged seventy-four, having preached since he was twenty-three. During that time he was pastor of three churches--two years at Lawrenceburg, Indiana, six years at Indianapolis, and forty-three years in Brooklyn. It was in Eighteen Hundred Thirty-seven that he became pastor of the Congregational Church at Lawrenceburg. This town was then a rival of Cincinnati. It had six churches--several more than were absolutely needed. The Baptists were strong, the Presbyterians were strenuous, the Episcopalians were exclusive, while the Congregationalists were at ebb-tide through the rascality of a preacher who had recently decamped and thrown a blanket of disgrace over the whole denomination for ten miles up the creek. Thus were things when Henry Ward Beecher assumed his first charge. The membership of the church was made up of nineteen women and one man. The new pastor was sexton as well as preacher--he swept out, rang the bell, lighted the candles and locked up after service. Beecher remained in Lawrenceburg two years. The membership had increased to one hundred six men and seventy women. I suppose it will not be denied as an actual fact that women bolster the steeples so that they stay on the churches. From the time women held the rope and let Saint Paul down in safety from the wall in a basket, women have maintained the faith. But Beecher was a man's preacher from first to last. He was a bold, manly man, making his appeal to men. Two years at Lawrenceburg and he moved to Indianapolis, the capital of the State, his reputation having been carried thither by the member from Posey County, who incautiously boasted that his "deestrick" had the most powerful preacher of any town on the Ohio River. At Indianapolis, Beecher was a success at once. He entered into the affairs of the people with an ease and a good nature that won the hearts of this semi-pioneer population. His "Lectures to Young Men," delivered Sunday evenings to packed houses, still have a sale. This bringing religion down from the lofty heights of theology and making it a matter of every-day life was eminently Beecheresque. And the reason it was a success was because it fitted the needs of the people. Beecher expressed what the people were thinking. Mankind clings to the creed; we will not burn our bridges--we want the religion of our mothers, yet we crave the simple common-sense we can comprehend as well as the superstition we can't. Beecher's task was to rationalize orthodoxy so as to make it palatable to thinking minds. "I can't ride two horses at one time," once said Robert Ingersoll to Beecher, "but possibly I'll be able to yet, for tomorrow I am going to hear you preach." Then it was that Beecher offered to write Ingersoll's epitaph, which he proceeded to do by scribbling two words on the back of an envelope, thus: "Robert Burns."