s church. So, in an
unfortunate moment, he conceived the strange idea that they would
connive at the teaching of the same doctrines in the same way in a
larger house. Therefore he secured the Opera House and proceeded to
preach there every Sunday evening to assemblages comprising from a
thousand to fifteen hundred persons. He felt warranted in this course by
a passage of Scripture which says, "Go ye into all the world and
preach the gospel unto every creature." Opera-houses were not ruled out
specifically in this passage, and so he considered it proper to regard
opera-houses as a part of "all the world." He looked upon the people
who assembled there as coming under the head of "every creature." These
ideas were as absurd as they were farfetched, but still they were
the honest ebullitions of a diseased mind. His great mistake was in
supposing that when he had the Saviour's indorsement of his conduct
he had all that was necessary. He overlooked the fact that there
might possibly be a conflict of opinion between the Saviour and the
Ministerial Union of Elmira. And there was. Wherefore, blind and foolish
Mr. Beecher went to his destruction. The Ministerial Union withdrew
their approbation, and left him dangling in the air, with no other
support than the countenance and approval of the gospel of Christ.

Mr. Beecher invited his brother ministers to join forces with him and
help him conduct the Opera House meetings. They declined with great
unanimity. In this they were wrong. Since they did not approve of those
meetings, it was a duty they owed to their consciences and their God to
contrive their discontinuance. They knew this. They felt it. Yet they
turned coldly away and refused to help at those meetings, when they well
knew that their help, earnestly and persistently given, was able to kill
any great religious enterprise that ever was conceived of.

The ministers refused, and the calamitous meetings at the Opera House
continued; and not only continued, but grew in interest and importance,
and sapped of their congregations churches where the Gospel was preached
with that sweet monotonous tranquillity and that impenetrable profundity
which stir up such consternation in the strongholds of sin. It is a pity
to have to record here that one clergyman refused to preach at the Opera
House at Mr. Beecher's request, even when that incendiary was sick and
disabled; and if that man's conscience justifies him in that refusal
I do not.