as from envy on the other. Lyman Beecher as Lyman Beecher had no existence. Lyman Beecher as God's servant was the verity. He rejoiced in the prosperity of the sacred cause: if it was Beecher's hand that furthered it, he exulted; if another than Beecher's, it was all the same. There was no room in his mind for any petty personal jealousy. He stood in nobody's way. He enjoyed every man's success. So the building rose, it was of small moment who wielded the hammer. Ever on the watch for indications of the mind and will of God, it was from zeal, not ambition, that he waited for no precedence, but pushed through the opened door, opened it never so narrowly. In doubt as to what is the true meaning of some "providence," he advises "to take hold of the end of the rope that is put into your hand, and pull it till we see what is on the other end." Yet, with all his electric enthusiasm, he was wise in his generation and beyond his generation, and in some respects beyond our own. He watched for souls as one that must give account. He adapted means to ends. He was careful not by fierce opposition to push doubt into error. When a drunkard died, he remembered that "his mother was an habitual drinker, and he was nursed on milk-punch, and the thirst was in his constitution"; so he hoped "that God saw it was a constitutional infirmity, like any other disease." He reduced the dogma of Total Depravity to the simple proposition, "that men by nature do not love God supremely, and their neighbor as themselves." He stoutly resisted the attempt to overawe belief, either his own or another's. He refused to expend his strength in contending with the friends of Christ, when there was so much to be done against his foes. Yet he was as far as possible from that narrow sectarianism, which sees no evil in its own ranks and no good in those of its adversaries. He denounced the faults of the Orthodox as heartily as those of the Unitarians. Standing in the forefront of Calvinism, he did not hesitate to say, "It is my deliberate opinion that the false philosophy which has been employed for the exposition of the Calvinistic system has done more to obstruct the march of Christianity, and to paralyze the saving power of the Gospel, and to raise up and organize around the Church the unnumbered multitude to behold and wonder and despise and perish, than all other causes beside.... Who of us are to suffer the loss of the most wood and hay by the process [of purging out this false philosophy] I cannot tell; but all mine is at the Lord's service at any time; and if all which is in New England should be brought out and laid in one pile, I think it would make a great bonfire."