NARRATOR : 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.
As the 1840s had worn on, Lyman Beecher’s life in Cincinnati grew more and more lonesome, as the youngest of his children made their way into the world. James went to sea without his father’s blessing, Isabella married in Hartford, Charles at last was ordained, and only Thomas was left.
Thomas K. Beecher in any other family would have been considered eccentric, but among Beechers he was simply another independent individual who made his own mind up, and acted on his convictions.
In 1842, he was already a young skeptic, not only about religion, but also about school. He had to be convinced by his brother Henry to return and graduate from Illinois College, where his elder brother Edward Beecher was president. Though he loved Edward as a brother, Thomas found little in common with him.

THOMAS : Edward is twenty years older and preoccupied with theology and farfetched theories.

NARRATOR : On graduation, Thomas returned to the family home at Walnut Hills outside Cincinnati, only to argue with his father, Lyman Beecher, telling him that church doctrine was ‘‘shadowy nothings.’’ Still, he had good memories of those days.

THOMAS : How unlike a student’s Father’s room always was, and what singular ways of studying! Do you remember the gun he used to keep loaded by the door ready for the passenger pigeons that in the 1830s came over by millions. Father would sit in his study-chair, deeply occupied and set me by the cocked gun to watch for game.
But he would hear the roar of wings as soon as I; and with remarkable jumps for a divinity doctor would get out the door, have his shot at the birds and then go back to his pen. His spectacles used to delay him, and I well remember his delight with a new pair which he brought home, each glass composed of a plane half and a convex half. Looking through the convex lower section he wrote metaphysics; through the upper he shot pigeons.

NARRATOR : At his own suggestion, Thomas went up to Indianapolis, to spend some time with Henry. Lyman Beecher consented, but—

THOMAS : He wrote long letters to Henry as one physician to another when he transfers a patient.

LYMAN : Henry, Thomas’s bent of mind is so strong for the natural sciences and his originality and power of mind and mechanical execution and his attained qualifications are so distinguished for a professor of chemistry and natural philosophy that my heart had let go of its favorite purpose that he should preach; and yet I feel reproved almost in giving it up, as if my faith had failed, though, as in the case of Charles, I do not give it up, and only yield to an irresistible Providence, still hoping and desire he may be a minister.

NARRATOR : Thomas worked for a year making astronomical instruments, and the next year he was assistant to a professor of chemistry and pharmacy at Ohio Medical College.
It was hard for him to finally leave Lyman Beecher, since he was the last to go. In sympathy with his plight, Harriet wrote Thomas describing her own spiritual struggles, even though she had never been under pressure from Lyman to join the ministry.
Lyman Beecher gives some evidence of an openness to new ideas, such as pre-existence, even though the same idea expressed later in Edward’s theology makes him uneasy.

LYMAN BEECHER :
July 3, 1847, to Charles Beecher:
Charles, your account of your two children, in their developments, seems as if you had got some of my old letters to Grandmother Foote, from 1808 to 1817, when a succession of young people began to give premonition of an order of mind such as Roxana and I had not seen. Their elements of language are doubtless innate knowledge, or else the dim reminiscences of their pre-existent state, fast vanishing away by the diversions and exigencies of this world.
God speed them to good scholarship, and a copious assortment of good thoughts and burning words, till they shall pass from the dialect of earth to that of heaven—the old forgotten language, I suppose. Don’t you think, if we could anyhow get a peep at the libraries above, we could make some splendid discoveries, which exist, in spite of our telescopic minds, very much not ‘‘in,’’ but ‘‘ultra nubibus’’?

NARRATOR : At last, Thomas Beecher gave in to paternal pressure; he began his study for the ministry with one year at Yale. But he was soon enlisted in one of Catharine’s speaking tours for women’s education, giving speeches that Catharine wrote, because at the time women were not considered respectable speakers.
Then he was given charge of the Northeast Grammar School in Philadelphia. The experience was not altogether edifying. Later he was offered the post of principal of the new public high school in Hartford, where he worked two years.
In Hartford, Thomas heard Horace Bushnell preach. Bushnell believed that religion was a personal experience, but also that participation in community problems was within the province of religion. Here at last was a role model that would satisfy both Thomas’s teaching and his preaching inclinations. He returned to Cincinnati for one more year with his father, before he too left the nest, eventually to settle in Elmira, New York.
At the end of his public career in Cincinnati, Lyman Beecher came East, and stayed at various times near Edward in Boston, Harriet in Andover, and in Brooklyn to live near Henry Ward Beecher, where he kept his own house on Willow Street. Off and on, he tried to write an autobiography, since he spent much of his time now remembering.

LYMAN : Our dangers in the War of 1812 were very great. People had long been divided on questions of national policy. When war was declared, a state of feeling existed most alarming. Had popular feeling once burst through restraint, no tongue can utter the woes we should have suffered.
Another danger was the loss of the liberty of speech and of the press. In the Revolutionary War the people were nearly unanimous. But now a powerful minority in Congress were opposed to the war, and nearly half the people of the nation. Yet a disposition was manifested to cut short all opposition by summary process. In many cases the thing was done; in every part of the land it was threatened; and if it had been accomplished we should have been slaves. The danger at one moment was pre-eminent.
Another peril was that of a military despotism. The militia was our only safeguard.
At the same time we were in jeopardy of national dismemberment. Party feeling inflamed by war, and made violent by calamity, had prepared the masses for desperate measures. A state of feeling was awake, and a course of things was rolling on, which threatened to burst the ties that made us a nation. Thick clouds begirt the horizon; the storm roared louder and louder; it was dark as midnight; every pilot trembled, and from most all hope that we should be saved was taken away. And when from impenetrable darkness the sun burst suddenly upon us, and peace came, we said, ‘‘Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowler. The snare is broken, and we are escaped.’’

NARRATOR : When the Civil War finally came, Lyman Beecher was barely aware of it. Harriet came to stay with him at the end. He was eighty-eight years old.

LYMAN : If God should tell me that I might choose (hesitates) —that is, if God said that it was his/her will that I should choose whether to die and go to heaven, or to begin my life over again and work once more, I would enlist again in a minute

HARRIET : Father, I always had a feleing that your prayers prevailed.

LYMAN : Did you? I am glad of it; but if they did, they met with heavy clouds between sometimes. I have been in the pulpit sometimes when all power even to pray has been taken away. Oh, I remember such times! and I remember, too, when the light broke in again.
Henry, Catharine, do you recall the cholera epidemic, not the first one? How little of the history of the heart can ever be written, and, if it were, could ever be reached by language; and, if it could, the world itself could not contain the books which should be written, and one generation would have no more than time to read the history of another.
Now what a scene was that sickness, and all but sudden death of Harriet! It was a violent attack of cholera, running for three hours without medical aid into a regular collapse, with spasms, burning, and cramps, and the stamp of death on her face. When the doctor came he was thunderstruck, and made prescriptions without any hope she would live. I did not get back till he was gone, and came into her room, and, coming to the bedside, realized her state. She was sinking. The universal languor and distress of death was upon her. I immediately took her hands in mine and began to rub them with perseverance and vigor, while the most powerful remedies were applied for an hour without any perceptible effect.
The first indication of the reversed and healthful action of the system was the excitement produced by the stimulation of the brandy, which at first I mistook for delirium. It was terrible for a moment. Dying, as I feared, she began to sing, and called on Mary, in a wandering way, to sing. But it was soon apparent that the ebbing tide was rising, and then my heart sang also and gave thanks; yet through the night she was so low that if a relapse should take place she would not live an hour.
Mary stood by her all the while with a mother’s solicitude and care. I could not leave her, and slept on the settee in the dining room, hot as an oven and thronged with mosquitoes, sleepless from their annoyance, and conscious of every noise and movement. The night of suspense passed safely, and she was better in the morning.

HARRIET : Twice before his departure, his spirit seemed for a moment to throw off the torpor that was upon it with premonitions of approaching triumph. The first was when he quoted those words of Paul, ‘‘I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith; henceforth there is laid up for me a crown, which God, the righteous judge, will give me in that day’’; and added, ‘‘That is my testimony; write it down; that is my testimony.’’
The other was still more impressive, when the veil was rent for a few hours, and a vision of transfiguration was vouchsafed. He called to his daughter, thinking it was his wife:

LYMAN : Mother, mother, come sit beside me; I have had a glorious vision of heaven.

HARRIET : His countenance was luminous, his utterance full and strong, as in his best days. He continued:

LYMAN : I think I have begun to go. Oh, such scenes as I have been permitted to behold! I have seen the King of Glory himself. Blessed God for revealing thyself! I did not think I could behold such glory while in the flesh.

HARRIET : He prayed in an inspired manner for some time, and then soliloquized.

LYMAN : Until this evening my hope was a conditional one; now it is full, free, entire. Oh, glory to God!

HARRIET : Had you any fear?

LYMAN : No, none at all, and what is wonderful, I have no pain either.

HARRIET : I then repeated the words, ‘‘I shall be satisfied when I awake in thy likeness.’’

LYMAN : How wonderful that a creature can approach the Creator so as to awake in his/her likeness! Oh glorious, glorious God!

HARRIET : I rejoice with you, father.

LYMAN : I know you rejoice as a pious woman, but you cannot enter into my experience now.

HARRIET : Father, did you see Jesus?

LYMAN : All was swallowed up in God him/herself.

HARRIET : For an hour he was in this state, talking and praying. The next day he remarked that he had an indistinct remembrance of some great joy. The last indication, on the day of his death, was a mute response to his wife, repeating,                   Jesus, lover of my soul,                         Let me to thy bosom fly. The last hours of his earthly sleep his face was illuminated with a solemn and divine radiance, and softly and tenderly, without even a sigh, he passed to the everlasting rest.

NARRATOR : For one last time, at Lyman Beecher’s funeral, the family came together. The year is 1863, the middle of the War Between the States. Everyone’s life was in ferment. Thomas served briefly as a chaplain in the war, until he uncovered a copperhead, or Southern sympathizer, plot to kill Lincoln and other Republican leaders, thereby hoping to destroy the government. James was among the first to volunteer for military duty, and he was placed in charge of training and commanding a black regiment. Thomas writes about the gathering.

THOMAS : We are having a blessed time. All are here except Edward and James. Last evening, and this morning at breakfast, the reminiscences and tone of feeling were inexpressibly rich; lively and not light, brilliant and diversified, and yet full of feeling. This morning at table, and afterward at family prayer, which was family praise, sining being our chief occupation, there was an unpremeditated outburst of memories of the most beautiful and touching character.
We feel that our dear father is not taken from us, but given back to us again. The feeling in all our hearts is more of desire for consecration to Christ’s work than I ever knew it to be—more as of old when Father was himself among us in the fullness of spirit.
May the Holy Spirit enable us to carry away the new fire in our souls, and kindle others. Charles?

CHARLES : Let me share with all of you this memory of Father. My case was prolonged by doubts, but it brought me close to the good work that Father had done for so many years in every circumstance.
In my senior year in college I read Jonathan Edwards’s Inquiry Respecting the Freedom of the Will, in the first part of which the author apparently annihilates free agency, while in the second part he proves from scripture that nevertheless men are subjects of moral obligation.
Deistical and atheistical writers, availing themselves eagerly of the abstract portions of the Inquiry, and contemning its biblical conclusions, carried on the unfinished reasoning in their own manner. This describes precisely my own course. I was neither a patient nor a thorough student of Edwards at that time.
It was by just such reasonings, consistently carried out, that I made shipwreck of the faith, and became, for a season, a confirmed fatalist. My father did all that could be done under the circumstances, to no avail. I can never forget the impression of those encounters, in which all a father’s influences were thrown back like waves from a rock. Never will memory cease to recall the look, the tone, the attitude with which he bade me farewell on my departure to New Orleans.
‘‘My son,’’ he said, with quivering lip, ‘‘eternity is long!’’ and, with a glance of anguish and a grasp of the hand, he turned away.
It was in New Orleans that I expressed my feelings in a poem published there:                Oh, must I live a lonely one,                      unloved upon the thronged earth,                without a home beneath the sun,                      far from the land that gave me birth?                Alone—alone I wander on,                      an exile in a dreary land;                the friends that knew me once are gone;                      not one is left of all their band.                I look upon the boiling tide                      of traffic fierce, that ebbs and flows,                with cill disgust and shrinking pride,                      that heartfelt misery only knows. And so on for several stanzas more. Dr. Beecher did not give up on me for six years, busy years for him as he went through his heresy trial and the breakup of much of the family.
I eventually found my way back to the fold in preparation for the ministry, albeit with grave questions of the Confession. At that time I said, ‘‘I can accept it, yet so that my liberty of differing therein, in all cases where there is question of agreement with scripture, be not diminished, but rather established.’’
This question and others, Dr. Beecher answered completely. Brother Henry, do you wish to add something?

HENRY : Yes, this one’s for you, Thomas. I want to read this letter that Father wrote when he was in Cincinnati—you may not have known how much he cared.

(LYMAN) : Henry, since your letter to Thomas, speaking of your preaching and the prospect of a revival, he began to speak about going to Indianapolis. Harriet thinks, and the same occurred to me, that he was moved to do so with the hope of becoming a true Christian; and, though I could employ him just now in assisting me, I have preferred that he should be with you. He said, when he first read your letter, ‘‘Well, I think I had better go and help Henry.’’
He has earned a high reputation in his year’s labor and study with Dr. Lock, of the Medical College of Ohio.

THOMAS : I remember an earnestness which used to betray Father into a curious repetition whenever he would bend his energy to a profitable exhortation about my waywardness: ‘‘This is the most important year of your life, my son; you have come to the turning point of your history.’’ The first time he told me so I was a lad just turned eleven years; and by many letters and words I was certified four times a year or oftener that I was at an ‘‘important,’’ ‘‘critical,’’ ‘‘decisive’’ turning point in my career, until I became a teacher at Philadelphia.
In 1846 Father was sorely exercised by the severity of my work in Philadelphia. He feared a sudden breakdown. His urgency could not abide the slowness of the mail; he must save me by telegraph—I suspect his very first telegram. Aided by Isabella, he undertook his costly ten words to save a son thus:

LYMAN : My very dear son, I have worked more—

ISABELLA : Father, father, you can’t write so much; don’t say ‘‘My very dear son.’’

LYMAN : Dear son, Trust a father’s experience, and let me tell you—

ISABELLA : No, no, father, skip all that. You can’t make love by telegraph. Tom knows your love.

THOMAS : An hour was spent learning how to suppress his exuberant affection, till at last the message came into shape thus:

LYMAN : Ease up. Rest—sleep—exercise. Cold water—rub. No tobacco.—Father.

THOMAS : Some books of health contain less than this telegram.

HARRIET : There was an example—Charles, help me find that letter to Nathaniel Taylor, Father’s old colleague—it would never do in a telegram. Yes, here we go.

(LYMAN) : Dear Taylor, I wish I had a son going to New Haven every month, and then I should write to you as often, and possibly get half as many letters from you, and make a beginning of talking things old and new.
You and I are the same as when we projected the Christian Spectator, and battled about the means of grace and episcopacy, and Hartford College, and Nettleton, and Tyler, and Woods, and Harvey, if you remember such a one. But now, like Bonaparte’s battles and marshals, have all these gone through the little end of Time’s telescope into the dim but not uninteresting distance; and how has our generation fallen off, and another and another pushed up behind us, and what things have come to pass which, had we lived in Connecticut, we should have written letters about, and held consultations and talked over so much, but have not talked about at all, and never shall till we have more time in another world.
Well, our personal identity remains, and our friendships and our children, one of whom, my son Thomas, will hand you this, whom, I doubt not, you will receive gladly for my sake and his own. He is a graduate of Illinois College, and raised under the ministration of Edward. He possesses, I think, a mind not inferior to any of my sons, and quickness, depth, and comprehension of discrimination surpassing almost any mind I have come in contact with.
Think that I am vain; I only give you the outline, to say that he would like to spend a little time in New Haven, and see and hold communion with your literati as one who will appreciate the society of literary folk, and all your literary treasure accumulated there since the time I entered Yale in 1792, when there was one rusty telescope, one air-pump, a prism, and one band and wheel to make the figure of the oblate spheroid, or the earth flattened at the poles.

THOMAS : At the end, the rest of you, even James, had left. Let me tell you how it was to be the last Beecher child.
Visiting home during one of my school vacations (1847), I found Father at last without a child to love or govern, and it seemed to me that his long-trained faculty was keeping itself fresh in training a very stubborn and active terrier called Trip. Trip had taken my place in the study and by the table.
At every interval of rest from writing, Father would talk a word or two to Trip. On the mantlepiece lay a short switch, and Trip knew where it lay. Ordinarily Trip would receive rebuke and exhortation with becoming quietness, but it was quite impossible to follow up the counsel with chastisement, for Trip had an eye ever to the mantelpiece.
If Father’s hand tended thither, Trip tended toward the door or table, and no soothing blandishment would restore his filial confidence until Father, showing both palms, would say, ‘‘There, Trip-pee, Trip-pee, I forgive you this time, but you mustn’t do so any more.’’ For myself, I protest that Trip, if he lives has memories of escape and forgiveness more gratifying than I.
Do you remember, Charles, how Father in those days used to carry a comb in his pocket for Trip, much to mother’s annoyance? and those frequent excursions down to the bridge in the woods which Father and Trip would make, Father talking to the little dog, and promising cleanliness and relief in soothing tones such as New England boys used to hear o’ Saturday nights? Trip was always grateful.
In all soberness, I declare that Father, in those days, found comfort in venting upon Trip those tender emotions which he could not suppress nor his own children longer receive.
This ‘‘staying with him’’ was, in the time of it, trying to me, yet it enriched me with my only deep knowledge of Father’s loving heart.
I was a man—graduated, and competent to work and support him; yet he insisted on my staying with him to be supported. He felt that I was unsettled in religion, and was set in his determination to keep me near him and lead me to safety. Of course, irritated by frequent reproaches from the thoughtless for ‘‘living on my father,’’ I was impatient to be gone, and many a passionate discussion came up between us on the matter.
I never gave up entirely until one morning, as I stood impatient on the south step of the study, in the sun. He came out suddenly, not knowing I was there. He sniffed the air, looked up into the maples, down upon me, put both hands upon my shoulders, looked me full in the face, and said, with broken utterance.

LYMAN : Tom, I love you; you mustn’t go ’way and leave me. They’re all gone—Jim’s at college. I want one chicken under my wing.

THOMAS : Of course I stayed by until I left with a blessing. NARRATOR : And in a private letter to his sister Isabella, Thomas confided his private feelings about the family. THOMAS : I think I like Henry the best. He is the most like Father of all his sons, and as a speaker and writer far surpasses any divine I have ever heard, that is, in my opinion. Then for versatility of talent—one moment a farmer—next a nursery man—then a horticulturist—lawyer—doctor—minister—etc. he is certainly without equal among my friends. And then for warmth of affection, and adaptation for domestic usefulness—and happiness—he is hardly second to our dear Father who on these points I feel by daily experience that he is peerless.
My dear sister, I will not disguise from you that I feel terribly unsettled in my religious constitution. ’Tis what I have long feared—and I know not, nor can anyone predict save the Omniscient, where my resting place will be. I am in darkness on the philosophy of religion—the reality of it and the practice of it. Two points stick—the authenticity of the Bible, and, I must say it, the existence of God.
Again, supposing both these points proved, I see so much in the church, and among our own family even, to give me a disrespect to religion, that I feel doubts arising as it regards embracing a system whose lights and glory appear to me so slim and faulty.
Charles’s newly recovered and painfully gained religion is rooted in self-deception. And Edward—I once almost worshipped Edward—as some of my letters to you indicate—but I am undeceived now. Either Edward is insane on some points—or else he is not a Christian, of the same kind as our father or brother Henry.
And I say without fear or hesitation that if religion were to make me another Edward—I say God deliver me from being pious. But if I could be a second Father, or Henry, untold wealth would not swerve my choice.