Religion: The Beechers

• Share

In a Brooklyn Church one Sunday in 1848, a fiery young preacher stood at his pulpit, gesturing at a handsome mulatto girl who sat near him on the platform. Cried he: ''This is a marketable commodity! Such as she are put into one balance and silver into the other. I reverence woman. For the sake of the love I bore my mother I hold her sacred even in the lowest position and will use every means in my power for her uplifting. What will you do now? May she read her liberty in your eyes? Shall she go out free?"

Amid sobs from the congregation, the collection plates were heaped high with money to free the slave girl. Thereafter Henry Ward Beecher, zealous Abolitionist, continued to bring slaves into his Plymouth Church. This congregation had been founded in 1846 by three men who broke away, from the nearby Church of the Pilgrims. Inducing Henry Ward Beecher to be their preacher, they soon heard people saying: ''If you want to hear him preach, take the ferry to Brooklyn and then follow the crowd." Preacher Beecher stayed with Plymouth Church for the remaining 40 years of his life.

The Church of the Pilgrims and Plymouth Church, oldest congregational bodies in Brooklyn ("the City of

Churches'''), remained apart for 88 years. Last week, to carry on their social work and administer more efficiently their combined properties worth $1,000,000 and their $500.000 endowment, the two congregations totaling 1,500 voted to merge. Under the name "Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims,'' with two ministers alternating in the pulpit, the new church will retain the building to which Henry Ward Beecher brought fame, dispose of the other. The name of the great preacher appeared patly in headlines. This week a full-sized portrait of him, his father and nine of his brothers and sisters is to be published by his grandnephew, Publicist Lyman Beecher Stowe. Called Saints, Sinners and Beechers* it expounds the fact that when the Beechers entered the Church they found it grimly Calvinistic and weighty with theology; by the time they left it they had shifted its emphasis to the service of this world. Says Author Stowe : "Who knows whether the Beechers were good and great? I don't, but I do know they were amusing, lovable and outrageous."

Lyman Beecher (1775-1863) was called by Theodore Parker "The father of more brains than any other man in America." From his father, a New Haven blacksmith, he inherited distinctive Beecher qualities: dyspepsia, absentmindedness, manual skill, a sense of humor, intellectual curiosity and physical strength. Thrice-married he begat 13 children of whom three died young and the rest lived an average of 81.5 years. While a student of divinity at Yale, as an orthodox Calvinist Lyman Beecher stoutly believed in predestination: man was damned from the start and could be saved only through God's agency. When he left a pulpit at East Hampton, L. I. to take one at Litchfield. Conn, he preached a farewell sermon on "The Universal and Entire Depravity of Human Nature."