XLVII.
HENRY WARD BEECHER’S TESTIMONY.
First impressions are always most lasting. We may not recognize or understand it at the time, but the boys and girls, the very young people, whom God has committed to our care in the home or the Sunday-school or the public school, gather in their early days, in the formative and impressionable period of their lives, the inspirations and impulses which shall guide them in after years either on the road to good or on the road to ruin. I happen to have high testimony on this point. It is the testimony of the grandest preacher who ever stood in an American pulpit. I mean Henry Ward Beecher. The following testimony is taken from a sermon of his preached in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, on Sunday, January 18, 1874. The subject of the sermon was “Soul Power.” Among other things, Mr. Beecher said:
“In reading the life of Goethe, written by himself, you will notice how he marks the various stages of his self-culture, and says, ‘At this point I met such a man, and he was of great use to me in such and such respects.’ Goethe’s educators were living men, active and powerful, around about him.
“I can look back upon my own early life, and see how one and another took me, and how one prepared me for another. I can see how the largest natures did not always get access to me. It was late in life before my father influenced me very much. I think it was a humble woman who was in our family that first gained any considerable control over me. I feel the effects of her influence to this day.
“I next came under the influence of a very humble serving-man. He opened up new directions to me, and gave me new impulses. He was a colored man; and I am not ashamed to say that my whole life, my whole career respecting the colored race, in the conflict which was so long carried on in this country, was largely influenced by the effect produced on my mind when I was between eight and ten years of age, by a poor old colored man named Charles Smith, who worked on my father’s farm. He did not set out to influence me; he did not know that he did it; I did not know it until a great while afterwards; but he gave me new impulses, and impulses which were in the right direction; for he was a Godly and hymn-singing man, who made wine fresh every night from the cluster. He used to lie upon his humble bed (I slept in the same room with him) and read his Testament, unconscious apparently that I was in the room; and he would laugh and talk about what he read, and chuckle over it with that peculiarly unctuous throat-tone which belongs to his race. I never had heard the Bible really read before; but there, in my presence, he read it and talked about it, to himself and to God. He turned the New Testament into living forms right before me. It was a revelation and an impulse to me.”
What noble testimony this is! And from what a noble source! All of us have what is called influence, and, consciously or unconsciously, we are all influencing others, especially the young. It is a matter worth our deepest and most prayerful thought. If Charles Smith, “a poor old colored man;” if Charles Smith, “the very humble serving-man;” if Charles Smith, “the Godly and hymn-singing man,” was used of God to give impulses—and impulses which were in the right direction—to a little boy who was afterwards to become the greatest preacher that America has ever known, may not some of us be likewise used of God for the glory of our Common Master, even Christ, and for the good of our fellow-men? I tell you, friends, we may. And when we think of the great friend of humanity, Henry Ward Beecher, let us not forget to think of Charles Smith, who had so much to do, according to Beecher’s own testimony, with giving this great man a right start.