The same thing was manifest in his rendering of hymns. He was extremely fond of poetry, and searched far and wide for the best hymns. Our first hymn book was a little one known as Temple Melodies. Mr. Beecher could not get along with this, and with the aid of his brother, Rev. Charles Beecher, and the organist, John Zundel, compiled and published the Plymouth Collection. This long held its place at the head of church hymnals and really worked a revolution in church music. To many the feature of the whole service was the "long prayer," as it was called. Many who could not quite agree with all the conclusions and statements of the sermons found these prayers of wonderful help. The same sympathy that made his rendering of Scripture so effective became very apparent when he took up the problems of daily life, the perplexities, doubts, temptations, successes. Probably no preacher has ever had such wide publication of his prayers as Mr. Beecher, and the Book of Prayers from Plymouth Pulpit became a source of spiritual strength to many who could not attend the services. They were taken down in shorthand, as were his sermons, and published, appearing first in the _Christian Union_ and then in book form. The sermon needs no description from me--even if I could give it. It seemed the very expression of the man, his interpretation of himself. Mr. Beecher was to all appearance well-nigh reckless in the vigour with which he made statements that seemed to him to be true, with little or no regard to their relation to other truths. The result was that he was charged with being grossly inconsistent. One day he would preach a sermon that would have delighted the old New England divines. The next Sunday he seemed an out-and-out Unitarian, while Quakers, Swedenborgians and all sorts of beliefs claimed him. The explanation was that he saw very clearly the element of truth in any system, whether he agreed with it in full or not, and in his effort to state it plainly and give due credit to it, often left the impression that the particular statement he made was all there was to it. One result was that the independent forming of opinions was encouraged and helped in Plymouth Church as in few churches. Those who imagined that Mr. Beecher dominated the thought of his people to an extent which made them mere echoes of himself were very far from the truth. It was an intellectual stimulus to sit under him, not merely in the effort to keep up with his thought, which poured forth like Niagara, but in the compulsion to form an independent personal opinion. Men loved to hear him, not so much because they always agreed with him as because he had the faculty of stimulating the best there was in them, arousing their highest ambitions.