Indiana, where he remained for eight years, 1839 to 1847, and where his preaching soon won for him a reputation throughout the State, and his occasional writing a reputation beyond its boundaries; thence was called in 1847 to be the first pastor of the newly organized Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, where he remained with an ever increasing reputation as preacher, lecturer, orator, and writer, until the day of his death, March 8th, 1887.

Such is the outline of a life, the complete story of which would be the history of the United States during the most critical half-century of the nation’s existence.  Living in an epoch when the one overshadowing political issue was pre-eminently a moral issue, and when no man could be a faithful preacher of righteousness and not a political preacher; concerned in whatever concerned humanity; believing that love is the essence of all true religion, and that love to God is impossible without love to man; moral reformer not less than gospel preacher, and statesman even more than theologian:  throwing himself into the anti-slavery conflict with all the courage of a heroic nature and all the ardor of an intensely impulsive one,—­he stands among the first half-score of writers, orators, reformers, statesmen, and soldiers, who combined to make the half-century from 1835 to 1885 as brilliant and as heroic as any in human history.

The greatness of Henry Ward Beecher consisted not so much in a predominance of any one quality as in a remarkable combination of many.  His physique justified the well-known characterization of Mr. Fowler, the phrenologist, “Splendid animal.”  He was always an eager student, though his methods were desultory.  He was familiar with the latest thought in philosophy, had studied Herbert Spencer before his works were republished in the United States, yet was a child among children, and in his old age retained the characteristic faults and virtues of childhood, and its innocent impulsiveness.

His imagination might have made him a poet, his human sympathies a dramatic poet, had not his strong common-sense kept him always in touch with the actualities of life, and a masterful conscience compelled him to use his aesthetic faculties in sterner service than in the entertainment of mankind.  The intensity of his moral nature enhanced rather than subdued his exuberant humor, which love prevented from becoming satire, and seriousness preserved from degenerating into wit.  His native faculty of mimicry led men to call him an actor, yet he wholly lacked the essential quality of a good actor,—­power to take on another’s character,—­and used the mimic art only to interpret the truth which at the moment possessed him.