He saw him triumphantly acquitted by one body after another, but still pursued by suspicion, and knew that a conspiracy had been formed in which some of his Eastern friends and one or more Eastern seminaries were enlisted, with the avowed intention of crushing him, and all this mostly by good men, under the strong bias of ecclesiastical prejudice and in a mistaken zeal for God’s service.
We must feel his disgust as he was compelled to go scurrying through the country, not to rescue souls from danger nor to forward any great moral end, but to anticipate the action of some presbytery or arrange for some meeting of synod; we must realize his indignation at seeing his father compelled to leave the death-bed of his mother to defend himself against these heresy-hunters, if we would understand the position which Mr. Beecher occupied towards ecclesiastical bodies in after-years.
In a letter dated “Canal Boat, Wednesday morning, Oct. 14, 1835,” Henry Ward gives an account of a meeting of Synod. After a humorous description of the eccentricities of Dr. Beecher, for which we have no space, he writes: “At length we are ready to start. A trunk tumbles out of one side as Thomas tumbles in the other. I reverse the order—tumble Tom out, the trunk in. At length all are aboard, and father drives out of the yard, holding the reins in one hand, shaking hands with a student with the other, giving Charles directions with his mouth—at least that part not occupied with an apple; for since apples were plenty he has made it a practice to drive with one rein in the right hand and the other in the left, with an apple in each, biting them alternately, thus raising and lowering the reins like threads on a loom. Away we go, Charley horse on a full canter down the long hill, the carriage bouncing and bounding over the stones, father alternately telling Tom how to get the harness mended and showing me the true doctrine of original sin. Hurrah! we thunder alongside the boat just in time. … Yesterday the Synod was constituted Old School. Moderator by a majority of seven, under his administration the system is beginning to assume form and becomes apparent. All the committees are one way, and the whole aspect of affairs shows you that there is a deep-laid, regular plan, and the elders are all drilled in. The committee give leave of absence to all New School men, and refuse all others, so that they may increase and we decrease.
“It is Tuesday morning and everybody is talking, planning, plotting—all bustle; heads together; knots at every corner; hands going up and down, and faces approaching earnestly or drawing back in doubt; one taking hold of the other’s coat, leading off into one corner for a particular argument; elders receiving drill, some bolting the collar. Here, in my room, are father, George, and Mr. Rankin. They are looking over the ground, prognosticating, arranging for the onset, or for the reception of an onset. … I never saw so many faces of clergymen, and so few of them intellectual faces. … And the elders are just what forty or fifty common farmers would be supposed to be—except that for eldership the soberest men are chosen, and, as stupidity is usually graced with more gravity than great good sense, the body of elders are not quite so acute in look as the higher class of workingmen.”
Although written in a playful mood, it is evident that he had no fancy for such work, and as he advanced his dislike increased. The broad, kindly, hospitable living, the strong, practical, sympathetic preaching, and the honest dislike of all the rattle of ecclesiastical machinery, which marked his after-life, came naturally from the training he received on the outside of Lane Seminary.
The influences of the place in which he lived as well as of the times were powerful factors in his theological education. The great West, with its boundless possibilities which had so moved the spirit of his father, lay before him, and stirred his imagination as at an earlier period the sea had done. And, as when he looked out upon the broad Atlantic from the wharves of Boston he had felt the impulse to go forth to be a sailor, command ships, and fight naval battles, so did the movement of the great streams of population Westward, and the vast field that stretched out before him like the ocean, move his spirit to go forth upon the sea of human life and conquer for Christ.
In this period of theological study, when the most of students withdraw themselves as much as possible from real life, he was brought to face it in some of its most intense forms. Cincinnati was then the central and most important city of the great West; an immense commerce was carried on from its wharves; it was the point where gathered the multitudes that were going out to occupy the new territory; it was still the rendezvous for frontiersmen; more than this, it lay upon the border-land between the free and slave States, and already felt the uneasiness and bitterness of the irresistible conflict. Chain-gangs of slaves were continually passing on the decks of the steamboats, to be sold down South, and fugitives from bondage were keeping the sympathy or the hatred of the people in continual activity. Life of high pressure and in great variety was presented to Henry Ward Beecher there in the heart of the great West in the years of 1834–1837; life that was very real, and that called not so much for fine-spun theories as for practical forces; not for dead and formal dogmas, but for living truth, for Him who is both Life and Truth.
True, he might have measurably kept himself from it and immured himself in the library and class-rooms of the Seminary, but he followed an entirely opposite course; he lectured, wrote anti-slavery editorials, joined the citizens’ body of police for the preservation of order, every way keeping himself in sympathy with the stirring times in which he lived, and they helped to make him the living, practical preacher he afterwards became.
His Bible-class, to which he gave great attention, both in preparation and in teaching the lesson, afforded him a field for the application of the truths he had learned, and for testing the methods he had adopted.
Yet for the most of the time his mind was not settled. His ideal of the Christian ministry was so high that he sometimes despaired of ever attaining it, and at times he seems to have seriously contemplated giving up his preparation for the ministry and of devoting himself to some other pursuit. Mrs. Beecher says that through these years his letters were very full of the discomforts and doubts that troubled him. “… Sometimes I think I shall not succeed in anything. If, when my course here is finished, they will not license me, suppose I go far West, enter a homestead (?), clear the wood off, build a little log hut, work during the week, and hunt up the settlers and hold conference and prayer meetings—will you come to me if that is all I can offer you?” Then, perhaps, in the next letter: “I will preach, if it is in the by-ways and hedges; but oh! for more light to see my way clear!” “During the last two years his letters had less of this depression. He would preach, whether men would hear or whether they would forbear.” “But I must preach the Gospel as it is revealed to me, not as it is laid down in the schools.”
He gives his experience in these words:
“During the latter part of my stay in college my feelings were unsettled. Sometimes they inclined one way and sometimes the other, until I went to Lane Seminary. I was then twenty years old, and there came a great revulsion in me from all this inchoate, unregulated, undirected experience in religion. My mind took one tremendous spring over into scepticism, and I said: ‘I have been a fool long enough.’ I refused to be any longer played upon in such a way. It was bitter, it was malignant, it was sad, it was sorrowful; but it was wholesale, and swept away ten thousand fictions and external observances. I said: ‘I will not stir one step further than I can see my way, and I will not stand a moment where I cannot see the truth. I will have something that is sure and steadfast.’ Having taken that ground, I was in that state of mind for the larger part of two years.
“It then pleased God to lift upon me such a view of Christ as one whose nature and office it is to have infinite and exquisite pity upon the weakness and want of sinners as I had never had before. I saw that He had compassion upon them because they were sinners, and because He wanted to help them out of their sins. It came to me like the bursting forth of spring. It was as if yesterday there was not a bird to be seen or heard, and as if to-day the woods were full of singing birds. There rose up before me a view of Jesus as the Saviour of sinners—not of saints, but of sinners unconverted, before they were any better—because they were so bad and needed so much; and that view has never gone from me. It did not at first fill the whole heaven; it came as a rift along the horizon; gradually, little by little, the cloud rolled up. It was three years before the whole sky was cleared so that I could see all around,