illars of Orthodoxy,--in no wise from
vanity, but in the simplicity of truth. He spoke of his own feats with
an openness that could proceed only from a guileless heart. The work of
the Lord was the one thing that absorbed him, to the oblivion of all
lesser interests. He was as absolutely free from vanity on the one side
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 don