doctrines to empty opera houses, and those sorrowing lambs of the Ministerial Union had to get out their sackcloth and ashes and stand responsible for it.  He had such a comfortable thing of it!  But he went too far.  In an evil hour he slaughtered the simple geese that laid the golden egg of responsibility for him, and now they will uncover their customary complacency, and lift up their customary cackle in his behalf no more.  And so, at last, he finds himself in the novel position of being responsible to God for his acts, instead of to the Ministerial Union of Elmira.  To say that this is appalling is to state it with a degree of mildness which amounts to insipidity.

We cannot justly estimate this calamity, without first reviewing certain facts that conspired to bring it about.  Mr. Beecher was and is in the habit of preaching to a full congregation in the Independent Congregational Church, in this city.  The meeting-house was not large enough to accommodate all the people who desired admittance.  Mr. Beecher regularly attended the meetings of the Ministerial Union of Elmira every Monday morning, and they received him into their fellowship, and never objected to the doctrines which he taught in his church.  So, in an unfortunate moment, he conceived the strange idea that they would connive at the teaching of the same doctrines in the same way in a larger house.  Therefore he secured the Opera House and proceeded to preach there every Sunday evening to assemblages comprising from a thousand to fifteen hundred persons.  He felt warranted in this course by a passage of Scripture which says, “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel unto every creature.”  Opera-houses were not ruled out specifically in this passage, and so he considered it proper to regard opera-houses as a part of “all the world.”  He looked upon the people who assembled there as coming under the head of “every creature.”  These ideas were as absurd as they were farfetched, but still they were the honest ebullitions of a diseased mind.  His great mistake was in supposing that when he had the Saviour’s indorsement of his conduct he had all that was necessary.  He overlooked the fact that there might possibly be a conflict of opinion between the Saviour and the Ministerial Union of Elmira.  And there was.  Wherefore, blind and foolish Mr. Beecher went to his destruction.  The Ministerial Union withdrew their approbation, and left him dangling in the air, with no other support than the countenance and approval of the gospel of Christ.

Mr. Beecher invited his brother ministers to join forces with him and help him conduct the Opera House meetings.  They declined with great unanimity.  In this they were wrong.  Since they did not approve of those meetings, it was a duty they owed to their consciences and their God to contrive their discontinuance.  They knew this.  They felt it.  Yet they turned coldly away and refused to help at those meetings, when they well knew that their help, earnestly and persistently given, was able to kill any great religious enterprise that ever was conceived of.