The World's Great Sermons, Volume 06: H. W. Beecher to Punshon
Religion
The World's Great Sermons, Volume 06: H. W. Beecher to Punshon
Sermons
But, on these and many like topics, this is not the time or place to
speak. It is for us to ask, as I have said, What was the good seed
which he sowed in the field of our hearts, and in what respects we
shall be, or ought to be, the better for the sower having lived and
died among us?
It was customary for those who honored him to speak of him as a
prophet. And, if we take the word in its largest sense, he truly
deserved the name. He was a prophet, in the midst of an untoward
generation: his prophet's mantle was his rough Scotch dialect, and
his own peculiar diction, and his own secluded manner of life. He
was a prophet, most of all, in the emphatic utterance of truth
which no one else, or hardly anyone else, ventured to deliver,
and which, he felt, was a message of good to a world which sorely
needed them. He stood almost alone, among the men of his time, in
opposing a stern, inflexible resistance to the whole drift and
pressure of modern days toward exalting popular opinion and popular
movements as oracles to be valued above the judgment of the few,
above the judgment of the wise, the strong, and the good. Statesmen,
men of letters, preachers, have all bowed their heads under the
yoke of this, as they believed, irresistible domination, under the
impression that the first duty of the chiefest man is, not to lead,
but to be led--the necessary conditions of success, to ascertain
which way the current flows, and to swim with it as far as it will
bear us. To his mind all this proved an insane delusion. That
expression of his, which has become, like many of his expressions,
almost proverbial in the minds of those who like them least, will
express the attitude of his mind, his answer to the question, "What
are the people of England?" "Thirty millions--mostly fools." The
whole framework and fabric of his mind was built up on the belief
that there are not many wise, not many noble minds, not many
destined by the supreme Ruler of the universe to rule their fellows;
that few are chosen; that "strait is the gate and narrow is the
way, and few there be that find it." But, when the few appear, when
the great and good present themselves it is the duty and the wisdom
of the multitude to seek their guidance. A Luther, a Cromwell, a
Goethe, were to him the born kings of men. This was his doctrine of
the work of heroes; this, right or wrong, was the mission of his
life. It is, all things considered, a fact much to be meditated
upon; it is, all things considered, a seed which is worthy of all
cultivation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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