The earnest seeker and hopeful discoverer of this new world always haunts the outskirts of his or her time. Our history is written in the lives of such individuals.

Edward Beecher was the second son of Lyman and Roxana Beecher, a brilliant scholar whose promise was recognized early. Though he left home early, in many ways he was a second father to several of the Beecher children. Edward is the first Beecher son to carry out his mother’s deathbed wish that all her sons should become ministers. He earns his way through Yale—Lyman Beecher’s old alma mater—in part, by working at Catharine’s Hartford seminary.

EDWARD : I always employ at least seven hours in the schook besides this I sleep seven hours, and in order to preserve my health I exercise one hour every day—this I do by cutting wood. Of course to balance all this I must take someothing to eat but I make my meals as short as possible, but I will allow 45 minutes for the three. Besides this I allow one and a half hours for reading the Bible and for prayer. This leaves six hours and 45 minutes. I have in the first place the translations and Latin compositions of my scholars to correct, and a thousand little things that occur every day, and I forgot to mention washing and dressing which takes me about 20 minutes every day.

NARRATOR : Edward reached Yale the year fter the fire-breathing Timothy Dwight died—but Dwight’s imprint had made Yale into a Calvinist stronghold ever since Lyman had attended 20 years before. Dwight’s successor was his secretary, Nathaniel Taylor, Lyman Beecher’s closest associate in church affairs; Edward too became close to Taylor. He also studied mathematics with the brilliant Alexander Metcalf Fisher, who was later his sister Catharine’s beau, and with Benjamin Silliman, Yale’s Professor of Natural Science, who saw no problems reconciling science and religion.
Edward was valedictorian of his graduating class—but it wasn’t until his senior year that he had a religious experience, the one thing that Lyman Beecher most anxiously awaited for each of his children. It came about after reading certain passages of the Bible, ‘‘representing Christ as the bridegroom, and the church as the bride.’’

EDWARD : I felt that the exciting cause of such love must be the knowledge of his love to me and of his infinite desire to communicate his Essence to me in full and overflowing communication of love such as should affect me as should affect my whole frame until I could feel that the love of God is strong as death, that the coals thereof are coals of fire. Yea, so intensely did I desire the love of God that I felt willing that it should burn me up if it were but love, and I could rejoice to die by such a death.

NARRATOR : On Unitarianism, which was in his father’s current view the enemy, Edward took a different, more demanding approach. He was, in fact, beginning his work of developing a new theology to resolve the inner conflict of the times.

EDWARD : Though obliged to defend the divine character from the charges of the Unitarian system, it must be without violation of charity. In pursuing an education of peculiar severity, I have felt it necessary to read everything bearing on the subject, ancient and modern; to be resolutely honest in conceding to antagonists whatever elements of truth they possess.

NARRATOR : Jonathan Edwards and other Prostestant theologians had long concerned themselves with good and evil, and the ways that an individual might seek the one while avoiding the other; saving souls, and revivals in particular, were of the utmost importance to this school of thinking, and to Lyman Beecher. But Calvinism gave no room for discussing or solving social problems, for reform movements or change. Awareness of these came with the new principles of honor and right, democratic principles, principles of the Enlightenment—even God was required to act honorably and justly. Edward was willing to entertain these new notions, and if possible, to put them to work in a form more orthodox then Unitarianism, more reasonable than Calvinism. Dr. Channing, the Unitarian champion, threw down the challenge.

CHANNING : Calvinism is giving place to better views. It has passed its meridian and is sinking to rise no more. It has to contend with foes more formidable than theologians; with foes from which it cannot shield itself in mystery and metaphysical subtleties—we mean with the progress of the human mind, and with the progress of the spirit of the gospel. Society is going forward in intelligence and charity, and of course is leaving the theology of the 16th century behind it.

NARRATOR : On graduation, Edward was offered the headmastership of Hartford Academy at $500 a year—at which he spent two fulls years, including tutoring George, writing, teaching, studying. But then he decided to go to Andover Theological Seminary—he would become a minister, and also a theologian. He lasted less than a year, then accepted tutorship at Yale, which Catharine urged him to accept. Edward found the students too lax for his liking and so he organized Bible classes and lectured until his lecture room was filled with boys who later became known as the Yale Band, and who would subsequently invite him out to Illinois to become president of a new college. His younger brother Charles, also a formidable intellect, emulated Edward in many ways.

CHARLES : Edward is a resolute, earnest, practical man, who is determined to do his duty, and do it as perfectly as possible to humanity. His faith was so absolute, that there was never any wish to be skeptical, or to raise cavils.

NARRATOR : In 1826, Lyman Beecher conseled Edward to refuse a professorship at Dartmouth, and instead encouraged and promoted him toward Park Street Church, ‘‘Brimstone Corner,’’ in Boston. Dr. Beecher himself had just recently been installed in a post at Hanover Street Church.
But Edward ws more than a model son—he was perhaps the first and certainly not the last Beecher to exhibit a tendency toward unorthodoxy that some were simply to call Beecherism. And Lyman himself contributed to it, not only with his own Taylorist New School Calvinism, but also with the remarkable family debates at dinner table or cutting wood.

LYMAN : Receive no opinions upon trust. Dare to think for yourself. Let no creed bind you because it is reputed orthodox, until you perceive its agreement with the Scriptures; but then, though everywhere spoken against it, adopt it.

NARRATOR : These principles had not helped Catharine when her fiance, Alexander Fisher, died—rather than offering consolation, Lyman offered a moral lesson. Edward made the same mistake in his letters. Catharine responded to theology with theology.

CATHARINE : The difficulty originates in my views of the doctrine of original sin. I feel that I am guilty, but not guilty as if I had received at birth a nature pure and uncontaminated. Is there any satisfactory mode of explaining this doctrine, so that we can perceive its consistency while the heart is unrenewed?

NARRATOR : Edward wasn’t to let this question go unanswered, though it was 30 years later that he made public his doctrine of the pre-existence of souls. But for Catharine, Edward did provide sympathy, he served as executor of Fisher’s effects and debts at Yale, and he provided some practical advice—Catharine should rebuld her life around service, and spend her talents in doing good for others. In fact, Edward helped her set up the Hartford Female Seminary, tutored her in sciences, and when Catharine wanted to create a course in Mental and Moral Philosophy, Edward wrote out original theological definitions for her.
Harriet came down to the Hartford Seminary at 14, and later, in Boston, Edward tried the same process with her that he had tried with Catharine—talks and letters helping her toward a conversion experience. Now, his answers were a little more sophisticated and less conventional than his correspondence with Catharine.

HARRIET : August 1828       Edward, many of my objections you did remove that afternoon we spent together. After that I was not as unhappy as I had been. I felt, nevertheless, that my views were very indistinct and contradictory, and feared that if you left me thus I might return to the same dark, desolate state in which I had been all summer.
I cannot say exactly what it is makes me reluctant to speak of my feelings. It costs me an effort to express feeling of any kind, but more particularly to speak of my private religious feelings. If anyone questions me, my first impulse is to conceal all I can.
It appears to me that if I could only adopt the views of God you presented to my mind, they would exert a strong and beneficial influence over my character. But I am afraid to accept them for several reasons. First, it seems to be taking from the majesty and dignity of the divine character to suppose that his happiness can be at all affected by the conduct of his sinful, erring creatures. Secondly, it seems to me that such views of God would have an effect on our own minds in lessening that reverence and fear which is one of the greatest motives to us for action. NARRATOR : Mary Beecher also struggled with the Calvinist dogmas. She worked at Catharine’s chief assistant and teacher in the Hartford school until she married a Hartford lawyer, Thomas Perkins. But Harriet was slowly forming her own conception of God, a conception that would become one of the most characteristic parts of her writing.

HARRIET : March 27, 1828
Dear Edward, I think that those views of God which you have presented to me have had an influence in restoring my mind to its natural tone. But still, after all, God is a being afar off. He is so far above us that anything but the most distant reverential affection seems almost sacrilegious. It is that affection that can lead us to be familiar that the heart needs. The language of prayer is of necessity stately and formal, and we cannot clothe all the little minutiae of our wants and trouble sin it.
I wish I could describe to you how I feel when I pray. I feel that I love God—that is, that I love Christ—that I find comfort and happiness in it, and yet it is not that kind of comfort which would arise from free communication of my wants and sorrows to a friend. I sometimes wish the the Savior were visibly present in this world, that I might go to Him for a solution of some of my difficulties. Do you think my dear brother, that there is such a thing as so realizing the presence and character of God that He can supply the place of earthly friends? I really wish to know what you think of this. Do you suppose that God really loves sinners before they come to Him?

CATHARINE : When the young man came to Jesus, is it not said that Jesus loved him, though he was unrenewed?

HARRIET : Somehow or another, you have such a reasonable sort of way to saying things that when I come to reflect I almost always go over to your side. Oh, Edward, you can feel as I do; you can speak of Him There are few, very few, who can.

NARRATOR : Edward in these yeas was evolving his picture of God, too. But the image was not that of the Calvinist God, the God of justice—rather, it was a suffering, pitying God.

EDWARD : There is a line between the true character of God, as revealed in Christ, and the Absolutist character as conceived of by even the best of men under corrupt or partially reformed systems. To deny the possibility of suffering in God is to deny that Jesus ‘‘man of Sorrows’’ is the express image of his person. In his pity, in his sympathy, in his agony in the garden, yea in his suffering on the cross, he expressed to us all that could be expressed of the pity, sympathy and grief of a father’s heart.

NARRATOR : The doctrine of total depravity bothered Edward—how could it be that a good God had created evil or the propensity for evil?

EDWARD : Pain, sickness and death come on the human race before the development of reason. Such a constitution resembles punishment applied in anticipation of a crime. There seems to be something morally odious in the nature of every human being which is the certain cause of Sin. This, one would think, is a calamity and not a crime, a ground of pity and not of condemnation. To call total depravity voluntary seems like removing a difficulty to language only. In short, original, native, entire depravity is a hard doctrine to be explained. Why all men should tend so constantly to wickedness, against the light of Nature, and against the Christian revelation, is mysterious except on the ground that such a cause exists. And to come into being with a certainty of becoming miserable, and voluntarily so, is a great calamity.       The question is, is not the present system a malevolent one? if it reduces all things to a system of mere machinery, and of pain attached to conduct which seems voluntary, and pleasure to conduct which seems good, we land in a universe of skepticism, yet, if such is the natural consequence of reasoning, we cannot help it. Evil exists. If it does prove malevolence in God we are lost, or else must love a partial being. We cannot analyze the thing. Why has God so made men tht a conviction of depravity, the most essential thing to a sense of mercy, is so hard to be obtained?

NARRATOR : Even Charles, doubting Charles, contributed to the debate in Edward’s mind.

CHARLES : The system our father defends, does it not impugn the honor, and rectitude of God? Does it not stain the beauty of that being?

NARRATOR : The early 19th century brought to light a spirit of reform—for temperance, in education, prisons, treatment of the insane, the deaf, the blind, a peace movement, women’s rights, anti-slavery, and utopian colonies. All of them were expressions of a new spirit that had also been the engine for the American and French Revolutions, romanticism, and the modern age.

EDWARD : I had been groping in some vast cathedral, in the gloom of midnight, vainly striving to comprehend its parts and relations, and suddenly before the vast arched window of the nave a glorious sun had suddenly burst forth, filling the whole structure with its radiance, and showing in perfect harmony the proportions and beautites of its parts.

NARRATOR : This revelation of Edward’s was his doctrine of the pre-existence of souls—like Wordsworth’s famous Ode on Intimations of Immortality:
            Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting             The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,             Hath had elsewhere its setting,                   And cometh from afar:             Not in entire forgetfulness,             And not in utter nakedness
But Edward did not also feel that we come ‘‘trailing clouds of glory’’—rather we come out of a dark cloud, our fall from grace, and the world we know is a kind of ‘‘moral hospital’’ in which we have a chance to make up for our pre-existent crime. So, humans are depraved but God is not to blame.

CHARLES : Thenceforward there was something akin in Edward’s experience to that of the apostle when he was caught up to the third heaven and heard things which it was not lawful to mutter. Like Moses descending from the mount—must he needs draw a veil over his countenance. Dr. Beecher had no place in his system for this new revelation—Edward must be silent, as became his youth. He must be ‘‘dead and his life hid with Christ in God.’’ He must yield to his father’s request to postpone utterance of his new views. He became, as he himself said, ‘‘Shut up to God.’’
Despite his two new doctrines, Edward, a young man of 23, fresh from academic life, stood side by side with his father, the leader of his denomination in the zenith of influence. He was already much honored by older men, leaders of the host; and stationed conspicuously in the focus of New England thought, intense but narrow and provincial.

NARRATOR : After two years at Park Street Church, Edward went on a much-needed vacation to Maine—but while there he gave 28 revival sermons in 26 days. Then in mid-1829, Edward made a nostalgic tour of his childhood towns—East Hampton, New Haven, Hartford. At Hartford, he poured forth his problem to Catharine, and received this reply.

CATHARINE : Your ‘‘explaining and expounding’’ was quite satisfactory, and I hope your inward man will soon be taught how to behave himself in all circumstances and emergencies. I wish I could catch my inward woman, and give her such an inspection and exposition, but she is such a restless thing that I cannot hold her still long enough to see her true form and outline. I am however a little afraid that in the millennium your peculiar notion not to be mentioned about a pre-existent state, will not be found in the elementary works of mental philosophy of theology.

EDWARD : How do we know that things are as they seem to be? How be certain that if God seems to be good, he really is so? Can the human imagination create ideas of glorious displays of God forever, which seem real, when there is no such reality?

NARRATOR : Edward married Isabella Porter Jones in 1829. Their first son was a congenital idiot, a fact that Edward never got over.
On July 4, 1829, William Lloyd Garrison, a young member of Lyman Beecher’s church, gave an address on slavery in Edward’s Park Street Church. At this time, Garrison was anti-slavery but still a moderate; he spoke of gradualism and he supported colonization, that is, the removal of blacks to Liberia.

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON : The free states are constitutionally involved in the guilt of slavery. Slavery is a national sin. But the emancipation of all the slaves of this generation is most assuredly out of the question. We have not the right to use coercive measures. Moral influence, vigorously applied, is irresistible in the long run. Immediate and complete emancipation is not desirable; no rational man cherishes so wild a notion.

NARRATOR : Dr. Beecher was not far from this position, and Garrison had approached him in Boston, urging him to take a public stand. Lyman Beecher saw the question as peripheral to the business of saving souls.

LYMAN : I will make use of the current human fears, and passions, and interests, when they may be made to set in our favor, instead of attempting to row upstream against them.
I would press the consciences, so far as they have any, of the Southerners, and shake their fears, and press their interests, as the Abolitionists are doing; but then, that the pressure might avail, I would not hermetically seal their hearts by cutting off the facilities of emancipation, which might tempt them to delay it till insurrection should do the work, but offer them an easy, practicable way of doing their duty, as the Colonizationists are doing; and I can perceive no need that the two classes of philanthropists should fall out by the way.

NARRATOR : Two months later, Garrison changed his mind, and made a public disavowal of his Park Street Church address.

GARRISON : I admit that I had unreflectingly assented to the popular but pernicious doctrine of gradual abolition. I seize this opportunity to make full and unequivocal recantation, and thus publicly to ask pardon of my God, of my country, and of my brethren the poor slaves, for having uttered a sentiment so full of timidity, injustice, and absurdity.
I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard.

CHARLES : These two men, Edward and Garrison, like the pith balls on an electrical machine seemed for a time to fly apart. But for both the electricity was the same, positive.

NARRATOR : At Park Street Church, Edward Beecher showed that he was not another Lyman Beecher, not a fire-eater but an egghead. He was 23. Sentiment in the church against him grew.
He and his father worked out on gymnastic equipment in the Beecher backyard, and together they shoveled sand from one side of the cellar to the other—simply for exercise—while plotting to frustrate the opposition to Edward. They succeeded—but when he was invited by the Yale Band—a group of friends from his class at Yale—to become president of tiny Illinois College, he accepted. He left Park Street Church for Jacksonville, Illinois, in 1830. He would stay for 13 years.
In Jacksonville, Edward worked three years to secure a charter from the Illinois legislature, a body which included a young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln.
With Thomas H. Skinner of Philadelphia, Edward wrote a vigorous little revivalist book called Hints Designed to Aid Christians in Their Efforts to Convert Men to God, full of moral directives but not much theology. ‘‘Avoid everything polemic,’’ he writes, though he himself did otherwise.
Much of Edward Beecher’s energies as college president were spent in raising funds, mostly in the East. Beecher and Theron Baldwin told their audiences that the Mississippi Valley was four times larger than New England, with almost four million people, doubling every 11 years. But the role of academic beggar began to wear him down, and when the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education at the West was founded in 1843, Edward willingly turned to other pursuits.
The veteran editor William Cullen Bryant had occasion to stay in Jacksonville, Illinois; here is his impression:

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT : Jacksonville is a horridly ugly village, composed of little shops and dwellings stuck close together around a dingy square, in the middle of which stands the ugliest of possible brick courthouses, with a spire and weather-cock on its top.

NARRATOR : Edward and Isabella were community leaders in Jacksonville, one of three population centers in Illinois. A friend described him as ‘‘a great-brained and great hearted man—of earnest devotion and with the guilelessness of a child.’’ By 1835, Edward remembered William Lloyd Garrison’s statements with a more favorable eye.

EDWARD : After a careful examination of the history of experiments in abolition, I have come to agree that the doctrine of gradual emancipation is fallacious, and that of immediate emancipation is philosophical and safe. It is true that I have not participated at all in the public discussion which was so deeply exciting the nation, but have been merely an attentive and thoughtful spectator. I am dissatisfied with the spirit of much which has been written on the subject; and with the disposition so common, of pushing true principles to an extreme.

NARRATOR : Then Edward Beecher met the abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy at the commencement at Illinois College in 1834. Most clergymen had rejected Garrison’s call for immediate abolition, as did Lovejoy.

ELIJAH LOVEJOY : We only propose that measures shall now be taken for the abolition of slavery, at such distant period of time as may be thought expedient, and eventually for ridding the country altogether of a colored population. Gradual emancipation is the remedy we propose.

NARRATOR : Meanwhile, Edward Beecher’s Six Sermons was published—he talks of ‘‘reorganizing human society,’’ and ‘‘certain great crises or turning points’’ of history. And he criticizes ‘‘the unchristian feeling exhibited in some of the great movements and discussions of the day, alike humiliating and surprising.’’ And in 1835, a number of the clergy also were changing their minds about Garrison’s principles, if not his practice.