e more to obstruct the march
of Christianity, and to paralyze the saving power of the Gospel, and to
raise up and organize around the Church the unnumbered multitude to
behold and wonder and despise and perish, than all other causes
beside.... Who of us are to suffer the loss of the most wood and hay by
the process [of purging out this false philosophy] I cannot tell; but
all mine is at the Lord's service at any time; and if all which is in
New England should be brought out and laid in one pile, I think it would
make a great bonfire."

Unfortunately, there was something worse in the Church than false
philosophy, unless this book very grievously falsifies facts. Her
bitterest foe would hardly dare charge upon Zion such iniquity as the
friendly unbosoming in these pages reveals. Wily intrigue, reckless
perversion of language, rule or ruin, such things as we regret to see
even in a political caucus, are to be found in abundance in the counsels
of men who profess to be working only for the glory of God and the good
of souls. Insinuations of craft and cowardice are set on foot, where
direct charges fail for want of evidence. Rumor is made to do the work
which reason cannot accomplish. Private letters are surreptitiously
published, the publication defended as done with the permission of the
writer, and testimony to the contrary refused a hearing. Extracts are
taken out of their connection and made to carry a different meaning from
that which they originally bore. What cannot be put down by evidence is
to be put down by odium. There is a "cool and deliberate determination
on the part of one half the Presbyterian Church to inflict upon the
other half all the injury possible." Dr. Beecher's son, himself a
prominent clergyman, is forced to confess, that, "for a combination of
meanness and guilt and demoralising power in equal degrees of intensity,
I have never known anything to exceed the conspiracy in New England and
in the Presbyterian Church to crush by open falsehood and secret
whisperings my father and others, whom they have in vain tried to
silence by argument or to condemn in the courts of the Church." And yet,
as Dr. Beecher stands forth in this biography, in native honor clad, so,
undoubtedly, does Brother Nettleton stand forth in his biography, and
Brother Woods in his, and Brother Wilson in his, and all the brethren in
theirs,--all honorable men. We venture to say that not one of these
reverend traducers and mischief-m