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Lyman Beecher was a graduate of Yale, and Henry Ward would have been, had he been able to pass the preparatory examinations. But he couldn’t, and finally he was bundled off to Amherst, very much as we now send boys to a business college when they get plucked at the high school. But it matters little–give the boys time–some of them ripen slowly, and others there be who know more at sixteen than they will ever know again, like street gamins with the wit of debauchees, rareripes at ten, and rotten at the core. “Delay adolescence,” wrote Doctor Charcot to an anxious mother; “delay adolescence, and you bank energy until it is needed. If your boy is stupid at fourteen, thank God! Dulness is a fulcrum and your son is getting ready to put a lever under the world.”

At Amherst, Henry Ward stood well at the foot of his class. He read everything except what was in the curriculum, and never allowed his studies to interfere with his college course. He reveled in the debating societies, and was always ready to thrash out any subject in wordy warfare against all comers. His temper was splendid, his good-nature sublime. If an opponent got the best of him he enjoyed it as much as the audience–he could wait his turn. The man who can laugh at himself, and who is not anxious to have the last word, is right in the suburbs of greatness.

However, the Beechers all had a deal of positivism in their characters. Thomas K. Beecher of Elmira, in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-six, declared he would not shave until John C. Fremont was elected President. It is needless to add that he wore whiskers the rest of his life.

When Henry Ward was nineteen his father received a call to become President of Lane Theological Seminary at Cincinnati, and Henry Ward accompanied him as assistant. The stalwart old father had now come to recognize the worth of his son, and for the first time parental authority was waived and they were companions. They were very much alike–exuberant health, energy plus, faith and hope to spare. And Henry Ward now saw that there was a gentle, tender and yearning side to his father’s nature, into which the world caught only glimpses. Lyman Beecher was not free–he was bound by a hagiograph riveted upon his soul; and so to a degree his whole nature was cramped and tortured in his struggles between the “natural man” and the “spiritual.” The son was taught by antithesis, and inwardly vowed he would be free. The one word that looms large in the life of Beecher is Liberty.

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Henry Ward Beecher died aged seventy-four, having preached since he was twenty-three. During that time he was pastor of three churches–two years at Lawrenceburg, Indiana, six years at Indianapolis, and forty-three years in Brooklyn. It was in Eighteen Hundred Thirty-seven that he became pastor of the Congregational Church at Lawrenceburg. This town was then a rival of Cincinnati. It had six churches–several more than were absolutely needed. The Baptists were strong, the Presbyterians were strenuous, the Episcopalians were exclusive, while the Congregationalists were at ebb-tide through the rascality of a preacher who had recently decamped and thrown a blanket of disgrace over the whole denomination for ten miles up the creek. Thus were things when Henry Ward Beecher assumed his first charge. The membership of the church was made up of nineteen women and one man. The new pastor was sexton as well as preacher–he swept out, rang the bell, lighted the candles and locked up after service.

Beecher remained in Lawrenceburg two years. The membership had increased to one hundred six men and seventy women. I suppose it will not be denied as an actual fact that women bolster the steeples so that they stay on the churches. From the time women held the rope and let Saint Paul down in safety from the wall in a basket, women have maintained the faith. But Beecher was a man’s preacher from first to last. He was a bold, manly man, making his appeal to men.