Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87) was an American Congregational clergyman and a prominent advocate of social reform. He was one of the most influential Protestant ministers in the United States from 1850–87.
Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, Beecher was the son of the Presbyterian minister and temperance movement leader Lyman Beecher. Henry was educated at Amherst College, Massachusetts. He initially preached at Indianapolis and, in 1847, became the first pastor of Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, New York City. He remained there for the rest of his life and made it one of the most influential American pulpits, attracting crowds of 2,500 every Sunday.
Increasingly outspoken after the Civil War, Beecher supported a moderate Reconstruction policy for the South and advocated woman suffrage, evolutionary theory, and scientific biblical criticism.
For many years, Beecher wrote for The Independent and edited The Christian Union Oater Outlook after 1870. His 40 published volumes included Seven Lectures to Young Men (1844,) Summer in the Soul (1858,) Yale Lectures on Preaching (1874,) and Evolution and Religion (1885.)
Beecher was the brother of the abolitionist and novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)) and the educationalist Catharine Beecher.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Henry Ward Beecher
The moment an ill can be patiently handled, it is disarmed of its poison, though not of its pain.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Pain
Through the week we go down into the valleys of care and shadow.—Our Sabbaths should be hills of light and joy in God’s presence; and so as time rolls by we shall go on from mountain top to mountain top, till at last we catch the glory of the gate, and enter in to go no more out forever.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Not that which men do worthily, but that which they do successfully, is what history makes haste to record.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Success
Defeat is a school in which truth always grows strong.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Defeat
If a man can have only one kind of sense, let him have common sense.—If he has that and uncommon sense too, he is not far from genius.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Common Sense
Never be afraid because the community teems with excitement.—Silence and death are dreadful.—The rush of life, the vigor of earnest men, and the conflict of realities, invigorate, cleanse, and establish the truth.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Excitement
There’s not much practical Christianity in the man who lives on better terms with angels and seraphs, than with his children, servants, and neighbors.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Christianity
I never knew an early-rising, hard-working, prudent man, careful of his earnings, and strictly honest who complained of bad luck.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Luck, Work, Character
The prouder a man is, the more he thinks he deserves, and the more he thinks he deserves, the less he really does deserve.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Riches
There are many persons who look on Sunday as a sponge to wipe out the sins of the week.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Theology is but the science of mind applied to God. As schools change, theology must necessarily change. Truth is everlasting, but our ideas of truth are not. Theology is but our ideas of truth classified and arranged.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Religion
If Christ is not divine, every impulse of the Christian world falls to a lower octave, and light and love and hope decline.
—Henry Ward Beecher
The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Common Sense, Common Sense, Philosophy
The real man is one who always finds excuses for others, but never excuses himself.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Humankind, Excuses, Humanity
To that in men which is secular and animal, Sunday says, “Rest”; to that which is intellectual, moral, and social, “Grow.”
—Henry Ward Beecher
God made the human body, and it is the most exquisite and wonderful organization which has come to us from the divine hand.—It is a study for one’s whole life.—If an undevout astronomer is mad, an undevout physiologist is madder.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Body
Self-denial does not belong to religion as characteristic of it; it belongs to human life.—The lower nature must always be denied when you are trying to rise to a higher sphere.—It is no more necessary to be self-denying to be a Christian, than it is to be an artist, or an honest man, or a man at all in distinction from a brute.—Of all joyous experiences there are none like those which spring from true religion.
—Henry Ward Beecher
So it is that men sigh on, not knowing what the soul wants, but only that it needs something.—Our yearnings are homesicknesses for heaven.—Our sighings are sighings for God, just as children that cry themselves asleep away from home, and sob in their slumber, not knowing that they sob for their parents.—The soul’s inarticulate moanings are the affections yearning for the Infinite, and having no one to tell them what it is that ails them.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Art
Prayer, as the first, second, and third element of the Christian life, should open, prolong, and conclude each day. The first act of the soul in early morning should be a draught at the heavenly fountain. It will sweeten the taste for the day. A few moments with God at that calm and tranquil season, are of more value than much fine gold. And if you tarry long so sweetly at the throne, you will come out of the closet as the high priest of Israel came from the awful ministry at the altar of incense, suffused all over with the heavenly fragrance of that communion.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Prayer
All words are pegs to hang ideas on.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Words
You cannot teach a child to take care of himself unless you will let him try to take care of himself. He will make mistakes; and out of these mistakes will come his wisdom.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Children
A fortune is usually the greatest of misfortunes to children. It takes the muscles out of the limbs, the brain out of the head, and virtue out of the heart. In this world, it is not what we take up, but what we give up, that makes us rich.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Wealth, Balance, Riches, Philanthropy, Sacrifice, Rich, Benevolence, Love
A man ought to carry himself in the world as an orange tree would if it could walk up and down in the garden, swinging perfume from every little censer it holds up to the air.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Manners
Nothing dies so hard, or rallies so often as intolerance.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Tolerance
Our gifts and attainments are not only to be light and warmth in our own dwellings, but are to shine through the window, into the dark night, to guide and cheer bewildered travellers on the road.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Influence, Selfishness
Love is the river of life in the world.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Love
Books are the metempsychosis; the symbol and presage of immortality.—The dead are scattered, and none shall find them; but behold they are here.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Books
Any man can work when every stroke of his hand brings down the fruit rattling from the tree to the ground; but to labor in season and out of season, under every discouragement, by the power of truth … that requires a heroism which is transcendent.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Perseverance, Resolve, Endurance, Truth
A man in old age is like a sword in a shop window. Men that look upon the perfect blade do not imagine the process by which it was completed. Man is a sword; daily life is the workshop; and God is the artificer; and those cares which beat upon the anvil, and file the edge, and eat in, acid-like, the inscription on the hilt—those are the very things that fashion the man.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Discipline
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