Henry Ward Beecher Collection (35 vols.)
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Overview
Henry Ward Beecher was both the William Wilberforce and the Billy Graham of his day. Famed as America’s most powerful public speaker during his time and often noted for his uncompromising stance on the issues of his day, Beecher achieved social reform, led a dedicated Christ-serving congregation, and brokered international peace—all from behind the pulpit.
“The Shakespeare of the Christian pulpit.”—Charles Spurgeon
From as early as the 1840s, Henry Ward Beecher spoke out against slavery. His church was a noteworthy part of the Underground Railroad movement. Collections from his church were used to buy the freedom of many slaves, and he helped rally the Union to support Abraham Lincoln as Lincoln boldly signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
“The most influential man in America.”—Abraham Lincoln
Beecher was also outspoken for women’s voting rights—nearly half a century before the United States Legislature would introduce the Twentieth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Beecher worked with women’s rights leader Susan B. Anthony and his sister, famed writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, to convince the public of the equality of a woman’s political voice.
“The Hercules of American Protestantism.”—Walt Whitman
Now you can have his sermons, speeches, and writings accessible in your favorite Bible-study and research program. This collection contains several biographies of Henry Ward Beecher, Beecher’s famous biography of Jesus, and hundreds of his sermons, speeches, and orations—including his famous address at Fort Sumter and his eulogy for Abraham Lincoln.
The Logos advantage makes these volumes far more valuable than print copies. Seeing Beecher’s Bible references on mouseover and following his cross-references through your library make research faster and reading more fun. You can look up theological concepts and terms with just a click, or instantly search these volumes to find ideas or themes Beecher wrote or spoke on.
Key Features
- Hundreds of sermons from one of America’s most powerful and influential preachers
- Three biographies and multiple analyses of Beecher’s life works
- His popular biography, The Life of Jesus, the Christ, and his response to evolutionary theory
- His teaching on how to preach with conviction, eloquence, and charge
- A daily devotional with Scripture and meditations from Beecher, a topical book of quotations, and a book of his famous prayers
Praise for Henry Ward Beecher
His discourse sparkled with felicitous similes and metaphors (it is his strong suit to use the language of the worldly,) and might be called a striking mosaic work, wherein poetry, pathos, humor, satire and eloquent declamation were happily blended upon a ground work of earnest exposition of the great truths involved in his text. Whenever he forsook his notes and went marching up and down his stage, sawing his arms in the air, hurling sarcasms this way and that, discharging rockets of poetry, and exploding mines of eloquence, halting now and then to stamp his foot three times in succession to emphasize a point, I could have started the audience with a single clap of the hands and brought down the house. I had a suffocating desire to do it.
One of the greatest and most remarkable orators of his time was Henry Ward Beecher. I never met his equal in readiness and versatility. His vitality was infectious. He was a big, healthy, vigorous man with the physique of an athlete, and his intellectual fire and vigor corresponded with his physical strength. There seemed to be no limit to his ideas, anecdotes, illustrations, and incidents. He had a fervid imagination and wonderful power of assimilation and reproduction and most observant of eyes. He was drawing material constantly from the forests, the flowers, the gardens, and the domestic animals in the fields and in the house, and using them most effectively in his sermons and speeches.
—Chauncey M. Depew, former United States senator of New York
[President Lincoln] once remarked to the Rev. Henry M. Field, of New York, in my presence, that ‘he thought there was not upon record, in ancient or modern biography, so productive a mind, as had been exhibited in the career of Henry Ward Beecher!’
—Francis B. Carpenter, artist
Mr. Beecher revolutionized my theology by revolutionizing my life. I obtained through him a new experience of God, of Christ, of salvation, of religion: I began to see that Jesus Christ was what God eternally is . . . that salvation is life, and that Jesus Christ came into the world to give me life. . . . To Mr. Beecher I am indebted for a new interpretation of and a new impulse to the life of faith and hope and love.
—Lyman Abbot, theologian
Beecher’s influence extended far beyond religious and political matters. His irreverent and often iconoclastic opinions on science, psychology, art, entertainment, and popular culture helped liberate Americans from stifling prejudices and outworn conventions, and usher in modern patterns of thought. As one admirer wrote after his death in 1887, ‘Abraham Lincoln emancipated men’s bodies; Henry Ward Beecher emancipated their minds. The one delivered them from injustice; the other, from superstition.’
—The New York Times
One of the outstanding characteristics of Beecher, and one of the secrets of his many-sided genius, was his comprehensive, thorough-going, palpitant human quality. There were in him a tug of the cosmic, a touch of the human, a tone of the divine. . .
—Frederick F. Shannon, Homiletic Review, vol. 65
Product Details
- Title: Henry Ward Beecher Collection
- Volumes: 35
- Pages: 14,423
Partially includedAbout Henry Ward Beecher
Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) was the seventh child of Lyman Beecher, a well-respected and widely-known preacher and pastor, and of Roxana Foote Beecher, an artist and granddaughter of Revolutionary War officer General Andrew Ward. His siblings included woman’s rights activist Isabella Holmes Beecher Hooker, minister Charles Beecher, famed writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Edward Beecher, former president of Illinois College, editor of The Congregationalist, and antislavery leader.
Henry Ward Beecher studied at Amherst College and Lane Seminary. After seven years of education, he had a humble beginning as a pastor at poorer churches in Illinois until he was invited to speak at the newly-formed Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. From this pulpit, he campaigned against slavery, supported women’s suffrage, championed temperance, and drew the ear of the entire nation.
When, in 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed and the Missouri Compromise repealed, Plymouth Church paid to ship rifles to antislavery settlers in Kansas and Nebraska in crates marked “Bibles,” famously making them known as “Beecher’s Bibles.” His church was also a safe haven along the Underground Railroad, and he would regularly hold faux auctions to buy the freedom of slaves with donations from his congregation.
Beecher was a voice among many pressuring President Abraham Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Once the Civil War erupted, President Lincoln sent Beecher on a mission to Great Britain, to address the political councils to keep Great Britain out of trade with the Confederate South and out of the war.
In 1872, Victoria Woodhull accused Beecher of committing adultery with Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of his best friend, in one of America’s biggest public scandals. The result was several trials, lawsuits, and rifts in family and society. Beecher’s wife stood by his side and maintained his innocence throughout the ordeal.
Henry Ward Beecher passed away in March of 1887 after suffering a stroke. Brooklyn declared it a day of mourning, the state legislature recessed, and national figures (including President Cleveland) sent letters of condolence. He was survived by his wife and only four of his eleven children.