From its small original nucleus, Plymouth Church expanded to be larger than any other similar body in the country, with a membership of fifteen hundred. Scores came to it from widely variant sects, and found in its broad and liberal Christianity a common ground whereon they could stand together and work shoulder to shoulder. It has often been said that nowadays churches are filled with women, almost to the exclusion of their husbands, brothers and fathers. Such was not the case with Beecher’s congregation. Men always flocked to hear him, and felt themselves irresistibly drawn toward the sunlight of his strong nature. Intense as was his interest in the growth and success of Plymouth Church, it was to him a means, and not an end in itself. He sought to make not a prominent church, but one active and powerful in all good works. The success of its schools and missions, its meetings and societies, was the outward evidence of the inspiration it received from the master mind around which it was focused. Lesser men have ventured to criticise Beecher as deficient in theology. Such criticism implies inability to understand the great preacher’s breadth. He was thoroughly grounded in theological lore by his father, who was one of the leading controversialists of the day. In Lyman Beecher’s home dogma and doctrine reigned supreme. “Of him I learned,” his son says, “all the theology that was current at that time. In the quarrels between Andover and East Windsor and New Haven and Princeton—I was at home in all these distinctions. I got the doctrines just like a row of pins on a paper of pins. I knew them as a soldier knows his weapons. I could get them in battle array.” After graduating at Amherst, he studied at the Lane Theological Seminary, of which his father had become president. He entered into Dr. Beecher’s controversy against Unitarianism in Boston, and the subsequent conflict between the so called old and new schools of Presbyterianism, of which latter his father was the protagonist. But the more he saw of these doctrinal battles, the less he believed in their real utility and importance. “I will never be a sectary,” was a resolve that he formed very early in his independent ministry. “Others,” he once said, “may blow the bellows, and turn the doctrines in the fire, and lay them on the anvil of controversy, and beat them with all sorts of hammers into all sorts of shapes; but I shall busy myself with _using_ the sword of the Lord, not in _forging_ it.” His religious sympathy was as wide as humanity, and his ardor for the good of mankind partook of the divine, for to quote his own words again—and the thought they express is a fine one—the love of God for man comes “not from a ‘law’ or ‘plan of salvation,’ but from the fullness of His great heart.” TO PRISCILLA. I know, since you my dreams are haunting— So purely fair, so winsome faced— Though Love the gift of sight is wanting, He hasn’t lost the sense of taste.