To you I owe more than to any other living being. In childhood you were my Parent, in later life my Teacher, in manhood my Companion. To your affectionate vigilance I owe my principles, my knowledge, and that I am a minister of the Gospel of Christ. For whatever profit they derive from this Book the young will be indebted to you.”

Our space forbids any attempt at reproducing or analyzing these lectures.

The evils that he attacked were real, and he did not mince matters in the assault. In the course of his lectures some of his good people, including one or two of the elders, thought that he was too plain and outspoken in his description of the temptations and dangers that beset the young, and undertook to advise him, suggesting that he should be more prudent in the forms of his expressions. He expressed regret that he should differ with them, but he proposed, he said, to treat the subject as he thought he ought, without regard to any instructions given. He did not propose to fight a mad dog with a handful of straw. Notwithstanding the timidity of his advisers, it appears, from the universal testimony of those who heard them, that they did great good, awakening the community to the dangers he exposed.

He was earnestly urged to revise and print them, “that their usefulness may be extended beyond the place of their delivery.”

His first attempts at their revision were not at all satisfactory to him, for he said afterwards:

“I remember, when I was reading over my lectures to young men, with the intention of printing them, that I took down a volume of Dr. Barrow’s sermons and read two on the subject of ‘Industry and Idleness.’ I had two lectures on similar subjects that I thought of publishing, but they seemed to me so mean in the comparison that I took up the manuscript and fired it across the room and under the book-case, where it lay I do not know how long, and said: ‘I am not going to put those lectures into print and make an ass of myself.’ I thought that I would be a fool to think there was anything in them worth publishing. Afterwards, however, a volume of lectures to young men was lent to me, and when I read them they seemed so thin and weak that I said: ‘If these are acceptable to the public and will do good I think I can print mine.’”

The many editions published in this country and England justified his final conclusion.

Although his salary had been doubled on coming to Indianapolis, had he received it all it would hardly have kept pace with his necessities. Many little necessities incident to their new surroundings called for expense. In the State capital two rooms over a stable would hardly meet the requirements of his social surroundings. It became necessary to hire an entire house, the spare rooms of which were devoted to boarders whose rent helped out the slender family purse. The house needed painting; why hire a painter? He could do it himself. Was he not born and brought up in sturdy old New England, where every lad was expected, almost from the day he was weaned, to take care of himself and add his labor to increase the common good; where a man was thought wanting in ordinary “cuteness” who could not turn his hand to any job and do anything he had seen another do?

Off he starts to the paint-store with his old horse and wagon, entering so enthusiastically upon the work in hand that he wholly forgot an engagement, made for that morning, to marry a couple. As the paints were being put up, he suddenly recalls his engagement, abruptly turns on his heel, rushes from the store, jumps into his wagon, and goes clattering down the street, leaving the astounded storekeeper in anxious solicitude for his sanity. Returning shortly, with a merry laugh he explained the cause of his precipitate outgoing. He found the couple waiting, married them, and then returned for his paint. Getting his supplies, he goes to work. He said:

“I wanted to economize in every way I could, and meant to paint the house myself; and I did. I got along well enough until I came to the gable end, which was two and a half stories high. When I began to paint there I was so afraid that I should fall off from the platform that I nearly rubbed out with my vest what I put on with the brush, but in the course of a week I got so used to climbing that I was as nimble as any painter in town.”

Here three more little ones came to swell the family circle, adding new joys to the heart of one who loved almost with a mother’s devotion every little child he saw. But these joys brought three more mouths to feed, three more little bodies to clothe.

Fortunately food was abundant and very cheap. In the fall and early winter game abounded, so that pigeon, quail, and ducks were bought for almost nothing, and at times were literally given away.

We remember the story oft told by him of the man bringing six dozen pigeons to town. He tried to sell them, and was laughed at. He then offered to give them away; no one wanted them. “Well,” he said, “I won’t take them home; perhaps if I leave them in my wagon in the street some one will steal them.” Returning a half-hour later, he found that some other hunter equally anxious to get rid of his game had dumped eight dozen more into his wagon.

His people would sometimes donate food or clothing. The best suit of clothes he owned was made over from a discarded suit donated by one of his parishioners.

Yet these were among the happiest years of his life.

For he found joy in his work. He loved his people and was beloved. Above all, his teaching was bearing rich harvest, and many, many souls found rest and peace through his words. His success was very gratifying, and urged him on to greater effort.

Among the young his influence was especially marked. A genial playfellow and companion, entering with hearty zest into all their sports, helping them out of their little difficulties, he gained their confidence and love. He guided the feet of many into the paths of a higher and nobler life.

One of these friends writes:

“He had a class of young girls, and I do not think that any one that recited to him could ever forget his original way of teaching. There were eight in the class, and we enjoyed the hour spent with him. He developed our originality. He first attracted us toward Milton. We studied, for he inspired in us the desire to know. In after-years, in his visits to Indianapolis, the surviving scholars were looked up and called upon, and the children of those who were gone were asked after. With some of these scholars he was thrown more intimately than with others, for all were not in his church. In these he naturally took much interest and directed them in their reading. I remember his telling me to ‘let Bulwer alone and the French novels,’ which were then first being translated. At a company, a church social, or the singing-school he had a merry word to say to one and another. All felt at home with him.

“My brother tells this story: When he was nine years old he had with great labor made a kite, at least what he thought would serve as one. In those days there were no toy-shops here, and, indeed, it was with difficulty material could be found out of which to manufacture a kite. But, as I said, he and his little sister had succeeded in shaping a thing which they called a kite. So, on a spring day, they set forth to fly it. My brother held the string and the little sister kept the kite off the ground. He ran, and she after him; but run as they would, coax as they might, their efforts availed nothing. Finally, disappointed, footsore, and covered with dust, they stopped to take breath. While thus brooding over their failure they saw Mr. Beecher standing near, looking down upon them with an amused but sympathetic expression on his face. ‘What do you call that?’ ‘A kite,’ was the melancholy response. ‘Well! well!’ the kind heart fully taking in the situation. ‘Come to my house to-morrow afternoon.’ There was hope in the tone, and the boy’s heart bounded. The next day he went to Mr. Beecher’s. He was shown a kite bigger than himself. He could scarcely believe his senses. Why, the tail even was long enough to set him wild. ‘Where’s your string?’ asked Mr. Beecher. Out of his well-worn pocket, where all a boy’s treasures are hidden, he drew forth a cotton string neither long nor strong. ‘This will not do; have you any money?’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘Come, let’s go and get a string.’ To the nearest grocery-store, where in early times everything was kept, from pins up to ploughs, they went. A ball of twine was bought for a ‘bit’; one was not enough—two for a quarter. Out into the street they went, and the kite was a success. Away it flew over their heads, the heart of the happy boy flying with the kite far into the heavens, and won to his pastor for all time by this simple, kindly act.”

Like all mankind, he had to taste the bitter with the sweet and pass under the shadow of the dark cloud of sorrow.

First his brother George, who had been a kind of guardian brother to him, and deeply loved, was killed. The news came with the shock of a lightning-bolt.

“I was called to go to Jacksonville to deliver an address,” he said, speaking of his brother’s death. “The journey was a long one, across two States (or one and a half). I took my wife and child with me, and we were gone some two weeks. When, on returning, we had got within two miles of Indianapolis, and were as elated and songful and merry as one can imagine anybody to be, we met one of the elders of my church riding out from the city, and he said, after stopping to greet us: ‘Have you heard the news?’ ‘No,’ said I; ‘what is it?’ ‘Your brother George has killed himself.’ I did not say a word, my wife did not say a word, and he did not say one word more. We rode on, and as we rode I could not help thinking, ‘Killed himself! killed himself! killed himself!’ It was nearly an hour before we got home, and then I learned that my brother’s death was caused by an accident with a double-barrelled gun while he was shooting birds in the garden; and it was a great relief to me to know that ‘killed himself’ did not mean suicide.”

Later came the death of his little boy George, the first loss in his own immediate family. He wrote, a few years later, to his sister, Mrs. Stowe:

“I was in a missionary field, enduring hardships, and thinking in myself always how to stand up under any blow, even if it were a thunder-stroke, with Paul’s heroism at once firing me and putting me to shame. Our noble boy suddenly sickened. Our people did not know how to sympathize. Few came while he lived; fewer yet when, on a bleak March day, we bore him through the storm, and, standing in the snow, we laid his beautiful form in his cold, white grave. Eunice was heart-broken. My home was a fountain of anguish. It was not for me to quail or show shrinking. So I choked my grief and turned outwardly from myself to seek occupation.”

In later years this sorrow had hardly lost its acuteness:

“I remember, to-night, as well as I did at the time, the night that my eldest-born son died. That was my first great sorrow. I remember the battle of hope and of fear, and I remember the victory of submission. The child revived in the night. I went to Indianapolis (I lived on the edge of that city), and I shall never forget the amazing uplift of soul that I had, nor that one unspoken, universal thought of prayer, which seemed to me to fill the whole hemisphere, for the life of my child. I think that if one ever came near throwing his soul out of his body, I did. And yet before the morning dawned the child had found a brighter world. This was a double sorrow because I had given him up and then taken him back again. Then came the sudden wrench.

“It was in March, and there had just come up a great storm, and all the ground was covered with snow.

“We went down to the graveyard with little Georgie, and waded through it in the snow. I got out of the carriage, and took the little coffin in my arms, and walked knee-deep to the side of the grave, and looking in I saw the winter down at the very bottom of it. The coffin was lowered to its place, and I saw the snowflakes follow it and cover it, and then the earth hid it from the winter.

“If I should live a thousand years I could not help shivering every time I thought of it. It seemed to me then as though I had not only lost my child, but buried him in eternal snows. It was very hard for faith or imagination to break through the physical aspect of things and find a brighter feeling.”

The attachment which his people felt for him was more than reciprocated. He always loved to recall these early years and in memory live over again their joys and sorrows, their struggles and triumphs.

In the early winter of 1877, in the course of a Western lecture trip, revisiting Indianapolis, he wrote back:

“I went to Indianapolis in the fall of 1849 with a sick babe in my arms, who showed the first symptoms of recovery after eating blackberries which I gathered by the way. The city had then a population of four thousand. At no time during my residence did it outreach five thousand. Behold it to-day with one hundred and ten thousand inhabitants! The Great National Road, which at that time was of great importance, since sunk into forgetfulness, ran through the city and constituted the main street. With the exception of two or three streets there were no ways along which could not be seen the original stumps of the forest. I bumped against them in a buggy too often not to be assured of the fact.

“Here I preached my first real sermon; here, for the first time, I strove against death in behalf of a child, and was defeated; here I built a house and painted it with my own hands; here I had my first garden and became the bishop of flowers for this diocese; here I first joined the editorial fraternity and edited the Farmer and Gardener; here I had my first full taste of chills and fever; here for the first and last time I waded to church ankle-deep in mud and preached with pantaloons tucked into my boot-tops. All is changed now.

“In searching for my obscure little ten-foot cottage I got lost. So changed was everything that I groped over familiar territory like a blind man in a strange city. It is no longer my Indianapolis, with the aboriginal forest fringing the town, with pasture-fields lying right across from my house; without coal, without railroads, without a stone big enough to throw at a cat. It was a joyful day and a precious gift when Calvin Fletcher allowed me to take from the fragments of stone used to make foundations for the State Bank a piece large enough to put in my pork-barrel. I left Indianapolis for Brooklyn on the very day upon which the cars on the Madison Railroad for the first time entered the town; and I departed on the first train that ever left the place. On a wood-car, rigged up with boards across from side to side, went I forth.

“It is now a mighty city, full of foundries, manufactories, wholesale stores, a magnificent court-house, beautiful dwellings, noble churches, wide and fine streets, and railroads more than I can name radiating to every point of the compass.

“The old academy where I preached for a few months is gone, but the church into which the congregation soon entered still is standing on the Governor’s Circle. No one can look upon that building as I do. A father goes back to his first house, though it be but a cabin, where his children were born, with feelings which can never be transferred to any other place. As I looked long and yearningly upon that homely building the old time came back again. I stood in the crowded lecture-room as on the night when the current of religious feeling first was beginning to flow! Talk of a young mother’s feelings over her first babe—what is that compared with the solemnity, the enthusiasm, the impetuosity of gratitude, of humility, of singing gladness, with which a young pastor greets the incoming of his first revival? He stands upon the shore to see the tide come in! It is the movement of the infinite, ethereal tide! It is from the other world! There is no color like heart color. The homeliest things dipped in that for ever after glow with celestial hues. The hymns that we sang in sorrow or in joy and triumph in that humble basement have never lost a feather, but fly back and forth between the soul and heaven, plumed as never was any bird-of-paradise.

“I stood and looked at the homely old building, and saw a procession of forms going in and out that the outward eye will never see again—Judge Morris, Samuel Merril, Oliver H. Smith, D. V. Cully, John L. Ketcham, Coburn, Fletcher, Bates, Bullard, Munsel, Ackley, O’Neil, and many, many more! There have been hours when there was not a hand-breadth between us and the saintly host in the invisible church! In the heat and pressure of later years the memories of those early days have been laid aside, but not effaced. They rise as I stand, and move in a gentle procession before me. No outward history is comparable to the soul’s inward life; of the soul’s inward life no part is so sublime as its eminent religious developments. And the pastor, who walks with men, delivering them from thrall, aspersing their sorrow with tears, kindling his own heart as a torch to light the way for those who would see the invisible, has, of all men, the most transcendent heart-histories. I have seen much of life since I trod that threshold for the last time; but nothing has dimmed my love, nor has any later or riper experience taken away the bloom and sanctity of my early love. And I can truly say of hundreds: ‘For though ye have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers; for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the Gospel.’

“But other incidents arise—the days of sickness, chills and fever, the gardening days, my first editorial experience, my luck in horses and pigs, my house-building; and not a few scrapes—being stalled in mud, half-drowned in crossing rivers, long, lonely forest rides, camp-meetings, preachings in cabins, sleepings in the open air.

“I was reminded of one comical experience as I was seeking on Market Street to find the old swale or shallow ravine which ran between my cottage and Mr. Bates’s dwelling. It had formerly been a kind of bayou in spring when the stream above town overflowed, but dried off in summer. To redeem it from unhealth a dike had been built to restrain the river and turn the superfluous freshets another way. But one year the levee gave way in the night; and when the morning rose, behold a flood between me and my neighbor! There was sport on hand! It was too deep for wading, but I could extemporize a boat. I brought down to the edge my wife’s large washing-tub, and intended with a bit of board to paddle about. No sooner was I in than I was out. The tub refused to stand on its own bottom. Well, well, said I, two tubs are better than one. So I got its mate, and, nailing two strips across to hold them fast together, I was sure that they were too long now to upset. So they were, in the long line; but sideways they went over, carrying me with them with incredible celerity. Tubs were one thing, boats another—that I saw plainly.

“I would not be baffled. I proposed a raft. Getting rails from the fence, I soon had tacked boards across—enough of them to carry my weight. Then, with a long pole, I began my voyage. Alas! it came to a ludicrous end.

“A rail fence ran across this ravine in the field, just above the street. One end of the fence had loosened, and the water had floated it round enough to break its connection with its hither side. A large but young dog belonging to a friend had walked along the fence, hoping to cross dry-footed, till he came to the abrupt termination, and, his courage failing him, he had crouched down and lay trembling and whining, afraid to go back or to venture the water. I poled my raft up to the rescue; and, getting alongside, coaxed him to jump aboard, but his courage was all gone. He looked up wistfully, but stirred not. ‘Well, you coward, you shall come aboard.’ Seizing him by the skin of the neck, I hauled him on to the raft, which instantly began to sink. It was buoyant enough for a man, but not for a man and a lubberly dog. There was nothing for it—as the stupid thing would not stir, I had to; and with a spring I reached the fence just abdicated by the dog, while he, the raft now coming to the surface again, went sailing down the pond and was safely landed below, while I was left in the crotch of the fence. One such experiment ought to serve for a life-time, but alas!

“There is no end of things gone by. They rise at every point; and one walks encompassed with memories which accompany him through the living streets like invisible spirits.”