success which it accomplishes should be the work and success of the churches as directly and manifestly as the results of councils are the acts of the churches. It is due to the self-preservation and efficient action of Congregationalism that it have a Tract and Book Department in its own interest, and under its own management. It should be a society of itself by which to carry Congregationalism to the Freedmen and to all the South. It should in due time become both a Home and Foreign Missionary instrumentality for carrying the policy, faith and life of Puritan power through all our broad national domain, and to the nations that lie beyond.

With such views and experience of Congregationalism as we possess, how can we justify ourselves in furnishing funds to be employed in such unions as utterly shut out Congregationalism, if not also in building sectarian engineries to resist our own future progress, and to stand in the way of laying broadly the only possible basis of ultimate Christian union? Have we not learned by the past that Congregationalism must take care of itself, or it will not be cared for? And it may be that the rapid multiplication of voluntary societies, and their management for their own interests rather than for ours will soon compel us to decided action. How shall a stand be made against the duplicating and multiplying of societies not responsible to the churches, and the consequent confusion and waste, unless it be by the churches taking their own work into their own hands?

ARTICLE II.

LYMAN BEECHER.

Autobiography, Correspondence, etc., of Lyman Beecher, D.D. Edited by CHARLES BEECHER. With Illustrations. In Two Volumes. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1865.

AMONG the distinguished names of our most brilliant forensic period was that of Lyman Beecher. To indicate the singular opulence of that period in this respect, it is sufficient to refer to such men as Judge Story, Thomas H. Benton, the

Masons lawyer and divine, John Quincy Adams, Levi Woodbury, Ichabod Bartlett, Rufus Choate. It included also the illustrious chiefs, Webster, Clay, Calhoun. God made these men great, and he seldom makes such great men. We were young when they were at the zenith of their great fame, but still think we would go further to look at Daniel Webster as he was in 1830, than to hear the best eloquence of Brougham, O'Connell, Sir Robert Peel, Emile Girardin, Bouvet, or Victor Hugo. In the full, resplendent vigor of his manhood there was a more than kingly majesty in his aspect. Had he lived in that day, the apotheosis of the old Romans would have made him the rival of Jupiter. It was not the massive head on the Platonic shoulders, nor the dark, lustrous eye, looking forth serenely from that heavy brow, like a star beaming from under the fringes of a black cloud, nor yet the mouth, whose very outline was a grand argument, or like the record of a great history; but a certain indescribable character of grandeur which sat so royally upon them all, that commanded our homage, almost as to a superhuman presence, making us feel that there was the hiding of a wondrous power.

If Lyman Beecher "attained not unto the first three," he was not the last among the "thirty and seven." God made him out of a noble stock, physically as well as intellectually. His great-grandfather could lift a barrel of cider and drink at the bung-hole. His grandfather, who was a stalworth blacksmith of six feet, could lift it into a cart. His father, who worked on the same anvil on the old oak stump at New Haven, could lift it and carry it into the cellar.

As God meant Lyman Beecher for an orator he put three nationalities into him, Scotch metaphysics, English rhetoric and Welsh fire and unction. The circumstances of his birth supply a striking illustration of God's government of the world in the smallest things. He was the only child of his mother, who gave birth to him prematurely October 12, 1775, and died. Puny and feeble, like General Marion, of whom it is written that he might have been put in a quart pot, he was laid aside for dead; but the nurse casually looking to be quite sure, gave utterance to her sorrow to find that he was living. She was no prophetess; saw not that in that tender, frail life were sus

pended such events as the Beechers and the Beecher Stowes: Edward and Charles and George and Henry and Catharine and Harriet. Can anybody tell us how God could have a hand in any of the events in which the Beechers have acted a part, and not direct that look of the unprophetic nurse? He had other narrow escapes, moreover, at a very early age. stumbled into a dye-pot; sat down in a kettle of scalding water, and was only saved from being crushed by a falling tree through its lodging in its descent directly over his head.

God ordered his childhood and made it pleasant, notwithstanding his early orphanage, in the house of "aunt Benton," sister to the dead mother, in the beautiful town of North Guilford, Ct. What a noble creature was the girl Annis, who brought Lyman Beecher up by hand, and of whom he says that she was nurse, mother, sister and all"; who quieted his fears when the northern lights a "blood-red arch". made him think the day of judgment was come, and talked to him, kindly and at suitable times, of his soul.

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His constitution was hardened by labor on the farm, and the heroic events of the revolution made their impression on him. The occasional military air of his oratory must have owed something to such an event as seeing his "uncle Benton, startled by the sound of cannon toward New Haven, stop the team in mid furrow, fling off harness, mount old Sorrel, bareback, shoulder the old musket, and away with all practicable speed to the scene of conflict," and still more to that grand firing at the close of the war, when a cannon was brought down from New Haven and fired thirteen times, one for every State, being filled the last time with stones and "let drive into the top of a great oak tree." Fishing and hunting, of which he was passionately fond, also did their part in his early development, and so did the magnificent thunder storms, which excited him like wine, and made him wish they might last all day. Who that ever heard him do battle from the pulpit or the platform could doubt that his oratory took something from those black thunderclouds which he used to watch with so much interest as they approached each other from opposite points above the mountains of North Guilford, and the sudden explosion and prolonged reverberating roar produced by the fierce encounter?

Uncle Benton meant him to stay among those mountains and listen to that grand thunder always, and to inherit the farm and grow in stoutness till he too could lift the barrel of cider as his fathers had done before him. But God meant him to translate that thunder to other regions, and to make it play in new forms around prouder mountains than those of North Guilford, until they should tremble on their weak foundations. That huge, heavy, cumbrous, old plough, patched all over with old hoes and pieces of iron, to preserve its precious identity, with which uncle Benton ploughed three several times a fifteen acre lot he was clearing, young Lyman driving the oxen, brought a crisis and furnished a pivot. The triple ploughing of the fifteen acre lot— all joy to uncle Benton, who saw already the fine crop it would produce, sickened him beyond measure and past all endurance with the whole business of farming. It was, moreover, just the fitting opportunity for his strategy. His airy castle-building, while driving the team, sent him frequently ahead of his work, leaving the oxen to drag the old plough along quite out of the furrow, to the immense annoyance of uncle Benton, but to the rapid working out of Lyman's destiny. A few days later, walking with his uncle over the same rough and steep hill-sides, he fell into a brown study and kept saying "Whoa!" "Haw!" Gee!" as if still by the oxen. This settled the matter, as he no doubt meant it should, and he was soon on the road to college.

It is curious to note that at this early period he began to pick up the theology of which he subsequently became so redoubtable a champion. He pursued his preparatory studies with Parson Bray. Parson Bray was his aunt's minister, and Parson Bray came to talk with his aunt about her soul, and Lyman heard him speak of "inability," and he had to sit and listen to Parson Bray's preaching on the Sabbath, and could not understand a word of his sermon, and Parson Bray was no genius, no orator; and moreover he taught his young pupil very imperfectly in arithmetic, a circumstance to which he attributed his failure in mathematics in Yale College, and so altogether inabil ity had but a poor chance. To the very end of his days inability was associated in his mind with Parson Bray's heavy, unintelligible sermons, and his own mortifying inability in mathematics.

He entered Yale at eighteen, when the college was but a dim foreshadowing of its present high character. But he had an intellect as active as it was brilliant and keen, and moreover, "uncle Williston," who was also a preacher at West Haven, and whose treatment of a subject in the pulpit he compared to a hen with an ear of corn, scratching and pecking at it till nothing is left but the cob; this poor, prosy uncle Williston had, nevertheless, at the outset, before Parson Bray took him in hand, drilled him in a Latin Latin Grammar, making him study, parse and write every thing in Latin, so that he called it "a deadly trial; but the best fortune he ever had." That old plough, which he calls "the most horrible memorial of the time," had contributed not a little to the vigor as well as the agility of both body and mind. He made his mark before the end of Freshman year, and that in a characteristic way. The fagging system was then in full play at Yale, as also at Harvard, members of the upper classes being allowed to make servants or "fags" of the Freshmen, and to exercise great tyranny over them. Young Beecher was initiated by being sent for to a room full of Sophomores, and so full of tobacco-smoke that it was impossible to see across it. There he was questioned and cross-questioned in English and Latin, and plied with solemn advice, at the conclusion of which ceremony, Forbes, a big Sophomore, took him for his fag, and sent him every day on errands, till the thing became even more insufferable than the old plough had been. There were classmates, of course having their own peculiar trials of a like kind, in whose breasts the sorrows of Beecher awakened sympathy. At the still hour of midnight on a moon-light night, some hard bricks entered Forbes' room rather unexpectedly, with little regard to sash or glass, and to the imminent endangering of the Sophomore's head. Thereafter Freshman Beecher went on no more errands for Forbes, and the system of fagging soon disappeared from the precincts of Yale forever.

Two things of interest enter into the history of Beecher's Sophomore year. One was his failure in mathematics, which in his old age he still attributed to poor Parson Bray, who did not teach him arithmetic. It is little to be doubted that the inability in that direction whether natural, or moral, was innate. A treatise