How well he understands the ministry of grief!
“A Christian man’s life is laid in the loom, of time to a pattern which he does not see, but God does; and his heart is a shuttle. On one side of the loom is sorrow, and on the other is joy; and the shuttle, struck alternately by each, flies back and forth, carrying the thread, which is white or black, as the pattern needs; and in the end, when God shall lift up the finished garment, and all its changing hues shall glance out, it will then appear that the deep and dark colors were as needful to beauty as the bright and high colors.”
He loves children, and the boy still fresh in his manhood.
“When your own child comes in from the street, and has learned to swear from the bad boys congregated there, it is a very different thing to you from what it was when you heard file profanity of those boys as you passed them. Now it takes hold of you, and makes you feel that you are a stockholder in the public morality. Children make men better citizens. Of what use would an engine be to a ship, if it were lying loose in the hull? It must be fastened to it with bolts and screws, before it can propel the vessel. Now a childless man is just like a loose engine. A man must be bolted and screwed to the commnnity before he can begin to work for its advancement; and there are no such screws and bolts as children.”
He has a most Christ-like contempt for the hypocrite, whom he scourges with heavy evangelical whips,—but the tenderest Christian love for earnest men struggling after nobleness.
Read this:—
“I think the wickedest people on earth are those who use a force of genius to make themselves selfish in the noblest things, keeping themselves aloof from the vulgar and the ignorant and the unknown; rising higher and higher in taste, till they sit, ice upon ice, on the mountain-top of eternal congelation.”
“Men are afraid of slight outward acts which will injure them in the eyes of others, while they are heedless of the damnation which throbs in their souls in hatreds and jealousies and revenges.”
“Many people use their refinements as a spider uses his web, to catch the weak upon, that they may he mercilessly devoured. Christian men should use refinement on this principle: the more I have, the more I owe to those who are less than I.”
He values the substance of man more than his accidents.
“We say a man is ‘made.’ What do we mean? That he has got the control of his lower instincts, so that they are only fuel to his higher feelings, giving force to his nature? That his affections are like vines, sending out on all sides blossoms and clustering fruits? That his tastes are so cultivated, that all beautiful things speak to him, and bring him their delights? That his understanding is opened, so that he walks through every hall of knowledge, and gathers its treasures? That his moral feelings are so developed and quickened, that he holds sweet commerce with Heaven? Oh, no!—none of these things! He is cold and dead in heart and mind and soul. Only his passions are alive; but—he is worth five hundred thousand dollars!
“And we say a man is ‘ruined.’ Are his wife and children dead? Oh, no! Have they had a quarrel, and are they separated from him? Oh, no! Has he lost his reputation through crime? No. Is his reason gone? Oh, no! it’s as sound as ever. Is he struck through with disease? No. He has lost his property, and he is ruined. The man ruined? When shall we learn that 'a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things he possesseth” ’?
Mr. Beecher’s God has the gentle and philanthropic qualities of Jesus of Nazareth, with omnipotence added. Religious emotion comes out in his prayers, sermons, and lectures, as the vegetative power of the earth in the manifold plants and flowers of spring.
“The sun does not shine for a few trees and flowers, but for the wide world’s joy. The lonely pine on the mountain-top waves its sombre boughs, and cries, ‘Thou art my sun!’ And the little meadow-violet lifts its cup of blue, and whispers with its perfumed breath, ‘Thou art my sun!’ And the grain in a thousand fields rustles in the wind, and makes answer, ‘Thou art my sun!’
“So God sits effulgent in heaven, not for a favored few, but for the universe of life; and there is no creature so poor or so low, that he may not look up with childlike confidence and say, ‘My Father! thou art mine!’ ”
“When once the filial feeling is breathed into the heart, the soul cannot he terrified by augustness, or justice, of any form of Divine grandeur; for then, to such a one, all the attributes of God are but so many arms stretched abroad through the universe, to gather and to press to his bosom those whom he loves. The greater he is, the gladder are we, so that he be our Father still.
