Lyman Beecher, 1775-1863, a famous congregational minister of New England, was born in New Haven, graduated from Yale College in 1797, and studied theology with Dr. Timothy Dwight.  His first settlement was at East Hampton, L. I., at a salary of three hundred dollars per year.  He was pastor of the church in Litchfield, Ct., from 1810 till 1826, when he removed to Boston, and took charge of the Hanover Street Church.  In the religious controversies of the time, Dr. Beecher was one of the most prominent characters.  From 1832 to 1842, he was President of Lane Theological Seminary, in the suburbs of Cincinnati.  He then returned to Boston, where he spent most of the closing years of his long and active life.  His death occurred in Brooklyn, N. Y. As a theologian, preacher, and advocate of education, temperance, and missions, Dr. Beecher occupied a very prominent place for nearly half a century.  He left a large family of sons and two daughters, who are well known as among the most eminent preachers and authors in America. ###

We are called upon to cherish with high veneration and grateful recollections, the memory of our fathers.  Both the ties of nature and the dictates of policy demand this.  And surely no nation had ever less occasion to be ashamed of its ancestry, or more occasion for gratulation in that respect; for while most nations trace their origin to barbarians, the foundations of our nation were laid by civilized men, by Christians.  Many of them were men of distinguished families, of powerful talents, of great learning and of preeminent wisdom, of decision of character, and of most inflexible integrity.  And yet not unfrequently they have been treated as if they had no virtues; while their sins and follies have been sedulously immortalized in satirical anecdote.

The influence of such treatment of our fathers is too manifest.  It creates and lets loose upon their institutions, the vandal spirit of innovation and overthrow; for after the memory of our father shall have been rendered contemptible, who will appreciate and sustain their institutions?  “The memory of our fathers” should be the watchword of liberty throughout the land; for, imperfect as they were, the world before had not seen their like, nor will it soon, we fear, behold their like again.  Such models of moral excellence, such apostles of civil and religious liberty, such shades of the illustrious dead looking down upon their descendants with approbation or reproof, according as they follow or depart from the good way, constitute a censorship inferior only to the eye of God; and to ridicule them is national suicide.

The doctrines of our fathers have been represented as gloomy, superstitious, severe, irrational, and of a licentious tendency.  But when other systems shall have produced a piety as devoted, a morality as pure, a patriotism as disinterested, and a state of society as happy, as have prevailed where their doctrines have been most prevalent, it may be in season to seek an answer to this objection.