HENRY WARD BEECHER.[A]

[Footnote A:  Life Thoughts, gathered from the Extemporaneous Discourses of Henry Ward Beecher. By a Member of his Congregation.  Boston:  Phillips, Sampson & Co. 1858. pp. 299.]

There are more than thirty thousand preachers in the United States, whereof twenty-eight thousand are Protestants, the rest Catholics,—­one minister to a thousand men.  They make an exceeding great army,—­mostly serious, often self-denying and earnest.  Nay, sometimes you find them men of large talent, perhaps even of genius.  No thirty thousand farmers, mechanics, lawyers, doctors, or traders have so much of that book-learning which is popularly called “Education.”

No class has such opportunities for influence, such means of power; even now the press ranks second to the pulpit.  Some of the old traditional respect for the theocratic class continues in service, and waits upon the ministers.  It has come down from Celtic and Teutonic fathers, hundreds of years behind us, who transferred to a Roman priesthood the allegiance once paid to the servants of a deity quite different from the Catholic.  The Puritans founded an ecclesiastical oligarchy which is by no means ended yet; with the most obstinate “liberty of prophesying” there was mixed a certain respect for such as only wore the prophet’s mantle; nor is it wholly gone.

What personal means of controlling the public the minister has at his command!  Of their own accord, men “assemble and meet together,” and look up to him.  In the country, the town-roads centre at the meeting-house, which is also the terminus a quo, the golden mile-stone, whence distances are measured off.  Once a week, the wheels of business, and even of pleasure, drop into the old customary ruts, and turn thither.  Sunday morning, all the land is still.  Labor puts off his iron apron and arrays him in clean human clothes,—­a symbol of universal humanity, not merely of special toil.  Trade closes the shop; his business-pen, well wiped, is laid up for to-morrow’s use; the account-book is shut,—­men thinking of their trespasses as well as their debts.  For six days, aye, and so many nights, Broadway roars with the great stream which sets this way and that, as wind and tide press up and down.  How noisy is this great channel of business, wherein Humanity rolls to and fro, now running into shops, now sucked down into cellars, then dashed high up the tall, steep banks, to come down again a continuous drip and be lost in the general flood!  What a fringe of foam colors the margin on either side, and what gay bubbles float therein, with more varied gorgeousness than the Queen of Sheba dreamed of putting on when she courted the eye of Hebrew Solomon!  Sunday, this noise is still.  Broadway is a quiet stream, looking sober, or even dull; its voice is but a gentle murmur of many waters calmly flowing where the ecclesiastical gates are open to let them in.  The channel of business has shrunk