The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth
in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
Spite of all the truculence of his language, and through all his
strenuous thrust and parry, Dr. Beecher's sincerity, integrity, and
piety shine forth unclouded. Looking at this memorial in one aspect, he
seems to have assumed a charge which Mr. Lincoln has professed himself
unable to undertake, namely, to "run the churches." He evidently
believed that the Lord had committed to the clergy, of whom he was
chief, the building up of a great ecclesiastical edifice, whose
foundation should be laid in New England, but whose wings should
presently cover the whole land. Individual churches were the pillars of
this edifice. Now in Boston, now in New Haven, now at Cincinnati, he
watched its progress, noting a fault, praising an excellence, repairing
mistakes, strengthening weaknesses. It was the business and the delight
of his life. He had his agents throughout the country. The churches
might be many, but the cause was one. Ever watchful, ever active, he
spoke of his measures and his plans in just such terse, homely phrase as
any house-carpenter would use. Doubtless the fragile reverence of many a
clerical cumberer of the ground was shocked by his familiar use of their
sacred edge-tools. One can imagine the thrill of horror with which the
Reverend Cream Cheese, of the Church of the Holy (Self-) Assumption,
would hear the assertion, that "it was as finely organized a church as
ever trod shoe-leather." Our elegant Unitarian friends have probably
quite forgotten, and will hardly thank us for reminding them, that there
ever was a time when they "put mouth to ear, and hand to pocket, and
said, _St-boy!_" Our decorous Calvinistic D.D.s would scarcely recognize
their own dogmas at the inquiry-meeting, where "language of simplicity
came along, and they'd see me talking 'way down in language fit for
children.... And then the language of free agency and ability came along
... and they'd stick up their ears.... But next minute came along the
plea of morality and self-dependence, and I took them by the nape of the
neck and twisted their head off." There must have been great inertness
in New England at the time of his first visit to Boston, when "nobody
seemed to have an idea that there was anything but what God had locked
up and frozen from all eternity. The bottom of accountability had fallen
out. My first business was to put it in again." The coldness and
indifference of the Church, which ministers usually employ the vivid
language of the Bible regarding the ways of Zion to portray, he
described in the equally vivid, but less dignified New England
vernacular. "What did I do at Litchfield but to 'boost'? They all lay on
me, and moved very little, except as myself and God moved them. I spent
sixteen of the best years of my life at a dead lift in boosting." And we
greatly fear that the reverend seigniors in Synod and Presbytery,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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