Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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[214] pulpit at Easthampton, Long Island, next the Congregational pulpit at Litchfield, and lastly that of the Park Street Church in Boston; until in 1832 he became President of the newly established Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. He is best known, perhaps, for his Six sermons on intemperance, but he was a dogmatist as well as a moralist, staunchly supporting the Calvinism of his native tradition.

His son Henry, graduating at Amherst in 1834 in no doubt as to his vocation, at once entered the Lane Theological Seminary, and studied under his father and under Calvin Stowe (1802-86), an Oriental scholar of real attainment, who in 1836 married Beecher's sister Harriet. Beecher served his apprenticeship in the pulpit at Lawrenceburg and Indianapolis, whence in 1847 he was called to the new Brooklyn congregation of Plymouth Church. The liberal movement of his thought paralleled his geographical wanderings from the region of orthodoxy, through the region of culture, to the practical West, and back to the metropolitan East. He had had his fill of dogmatic theology in youth, and never took much further interest in it. He became more and more a minister, looking rather to the needs of humanity than to the theory of divinity. In the West, under the stress of primitive conditions, he soon threw overboard a system of doctrines in which, he found, plain people were not interested; so that by the time he took the Brooklyn pulpit, which soon became a national platform, he was preaching straight at human nature, and touching it with a more and more liberating hand as he advanced in years.

From his Seven lectures to young men (1844) to his Evolution and religion (1885) he came a long way. The Lectures are addressed apparently not to young men in general, but to young employees—clerks, mechanics, salesmen, and apprentices. Hence their flavour of Poor Richard and the Industrious Apprentice. Guided to his audience by Franklin and Hogarth, Beecher combines allegory with vivid eighteenth-century realism; bigoted invective against the theatre and novels, with ‘characters,’ the Sluggard, the Busybody, the Dandy, the Pleasure-Loving Business Man, the Cynic, the Libertine. This antique literary material explains the excessively oldfashioned flavour of the book. Though Beecher grew immeasurably