has been opened to him, and he has seen the King sitting in His glory with love to him individually."'

This great experience, which shaped his whole life and teaching, was given him in Lane Seminary after the period of unrest and doubt into which he had plunged. He describes the change which transfigured his life in these other words: "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, but from that hour I felt that God had a father's heart; that Christ loved me in my sin; that while I was a sinner He did not frown upon me nor cast me off, but cared for me with unutterable tenderness, and would help me out of sin; and it seemed to me that I had everything I needed. When that vision was vouchsafed to me I felt that there

"Life of Beecher," pp. 35, 36, 37.

was no more for me to do but to love, trust, and adore; nor has there ever been in my mind a doubt since that I did love, trust, and adore. There has been an imperfect comprehension, there have been grievous sins, there have been long defections; but never for a single moment have I doubted the power of Christ's love to save me, any more than I have doubted the existence in the heavens of the sun by day and the moon by night."

Whatever may be thought of the theology suggested by some parts of these personal recitals of a great experience, there can be no doubt of the genuineness and transcendent importance of that intellectual and emotional change which had been wrought in him. He was being girded for a great mission; he was being equipped for a lifelong battle and for strange coming experiences of sorrow and trial. He was not fitted to wield the weapons of his father, but no man of his day was more eager and bold to attack evil and strengthen the Kingdom of righteousness. As Mrs. Stowe has written: "Like the shepherd boy of old he saw the giant of sin stalking through the world, defying the armies of the living God, and longed to attack him, but the armor in which he had been equipped for the battle was no help, but only an incumbrance." But his experience changed all this. "To present Jesus Christ personally as the Friend and Helper of humanity, Christ as God impersonate, eternally and by the necessity of His nature helpful and remedial and restorative; the Friend of each individual soul, and thus the friend of all society; this was the one thing which his soul

1 " Men of our Times," p. 539

rested on as a worthy object in entering the ministry. He afterwards said in speaking of his feelings at this time: 'I was like the man in the story to whom a fairy gave a purse with a single piece of money in it, which he found always came again as soon as he had spent it. I thought I knew at last one thing to preach, I found it included everything.""

CHAPTER VIII.

TESTING HIS WEAPONS.

THE years of preparation with all their strange and varied experiences are now ended, and the Christian soldier is ready to enter the field of strife. There is no gleam of romance that lights up that field. Few preachers of the Gospel have known from the outset equal hardships. At the junction of the Ohio and Miami rivers is the town of Lawrenceburg, Indiana, which, in 1837, had fifteen hundred inhabitants and four gigantic distilleries. And Mr. Beecher, having been graduated from Lane Theological Seminary and licensed by the Cincinnati Presbytery, after the usual examination and the reading of his trial lecture, was led, by the invitation of an earnest Christian Yankee woman, to go to Lawrenceburg, and, in that unattractive field, where the Presbyterian Church of twenty members consisted of nineteen women and one goodfor-nothing man, to preach his trial sermon. It was in June, 1837, that he received a unanimous call to the pastorate of this church, at a salary of two hundred and fifty dollars. The event was a momentous one in this great life, and the thoughtful Christian student finds it an event of deep interest and wide significance in the history of modern thought and modern evangelism, when this young man of twenty

four began to test those weapons of love, which he had gathered from the arsenal of the Holy Spirit, and the shining armor with which he had girded himself for the battle of the Lord.

The year 1837 marks a really remote epoch in the annals of America. The great men of that time were Jackson, Clay, Webster, and Calhoun. Abraham Lincoln had served a single term in the Illinois Legislature, but was unknown to fame. The United States was then a small nation with a big heart and an unusually big head. At the Presidential election of the previous year the whole vote of the country was only a million and a half, a vote surpassed in 1892 by the combined suffrages of two States of the Union. A great tide of Western immigration was pouring in. Arkansas was admitted as a State in 1836 and Michigan in 1837. But the present metropolis of the Northwest was then a mud-hole at the foot of Lake Michigan, and her first census, taken that year, showed a population of 4,170. The New World's commercial capital, New York, was then the residence of less than three hundred thousand people.

American literature was scarcely born in 1837. The anti-slavery agitation had been launched by William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips had enlisted in the battle for the slave. The most prominent event of that year was the financial panic. Before Van Buren had been two months in the chair of Jackson the mercantile failures in New York alone amonnted to a hundred millions of dollars. During the year 1837 occurred the division of the Presbyterian Church into the Old and New School Assemblies. While Henry Ward Beecher was still an obscure young man, though bear