Men of Our Times; Or, Leading Patriots of the Day: Being narratives of the lives and deeds of statesmen, generals, and orators. Including biographical sketches and anecdotes of Lincoln, Grant, Garrison, Sumner, Chase, Wilson, Greeley, Farragut, Andrew, Colfax, Stanton, Douglass, Buckingham, Sherman, Sheridan, Howard, Phillips and Beecher.Stowe, Harriet Beecher
History
Men of Our Times; Or, Leading Patriots of the Day: Being narratives of the lives and deeds of statesmen, generals, and orators. Including biographical sketches and anecdotes of Lincoln, Grant, Garrison, Sumner, Chase, Wilson, Greeley, Farragut, Andrew, Colfax, Stanton, Douglass, Buckingham, Sherman, Sheridan, Howard, Phillips and Beecher.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
United States -- Biography; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Biography
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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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