Henry Ward Beecher Quotes (1813-1887)

“And when no longer we can see Thee, may we reach out our hands, and find Thee leading us through death to immortality and glory.”

“No man is born into the world whose work is not born with him. There is always work, and tools to work withal, for those who will.”

“Heaven will be inherited by every man who has heaven in his soul. "The kingdom of God is within you."”

“I long to have the children feel that there is nothing in this world more attractive, more earnestly to be desired than manhood in Jesus Christ.”

“Many men build as cathedrals were built, the part nearest the ground finished; but that part which soars toward heaven, the turrets and the spires, forever incomplete.”

“In four years he had risen, without political favor, from the bottom to the very highest command, — not second to any living commander in all the world! His plans were large, his undiscouraged will was patient to obduracy... In all this career he never lost courage or equanimity. With a million men, for whose movements he was responsible, he yet carried a tranquil mind, neither depressed by disasters nor elated by success. Gentle of heart, familiar with all, never boasting, always modest, Grant came of the old, self-contained stock, men of a sublime force of being, which allied his genius to the great elemental forces of nature, — silent, invisible, irresistible. When his work was done, and the defeat of Confederate armies was final, this dreadful man of blood was tender toward his late adversaries as a woman toward her son. He imposed no humiliating conditions, spared the feelings of his antagonists, sent home the disbanded Southern men with food and with horses for working their crops.”

“Fisk had the tradition of her Jubilee Singers, who once hid in a Brooklyn organ loft, lest pious Congregationalists see their black faces before they heard their heavenly voices. Henry Ward Beecher took them to Plymouth church where the newspaper called them "Beecher's Nigger Minstrels"; then the nation listened and the world opened its arms and the Fisk Jubilee Singers literally sang before Kings.”

“I can but hope, comparing such an audience as this with the handful who met with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in the first Convention, in a little Wesleyan church at Seneca Falls, and seeing Henry Ward Beecher for the first time on our platform, and speaking such noble words for woman, I can but hope that it will not be as our friend Frances D. Gage expressed her fear it would, that the degradation which centuries had created among us, would require centuries to remove;”

“I met the great preacher Henry Ward Beecher, whom my father, then a member of a lecture committee of the Y.M.C.A., brought to Bridgeton. Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, had been a leader in the anti-slavery struggle before the Civil War, and had remained a leader in all progressive movements of the time. At that time Henry Ward Beecher was in the midst of a lawsuit brought against him in 1875 by a man named Tilton, a former friend who accused him of intimacy with his wife. It was a tremendous scandal, and everyone took sides, Old-time friends of Henry Ward Beecher fought for him valiantly. Those who did not know him, especially in such small towns as ours, were violently against him. So it took courage on the part of my father to bring him to the Bridgeton Y.M.C.A. I was allowed to go to his lecture, although I was so young. I have no clear memory of his words, but I can remember how impressed I was by his magnetic personality, his distinguished bearing, his fresh healthy color and white hair, and his ringing voice. At our house after the lecture, I remember asking him whether he prepared his lectures beforehand, and if he wrote them out. "No, my child," he told me. "I sometimes have no idea at all what I am going to say until I look over my audience, and then I draw my inspiration from them. Other times I prepare a lecture in my mind beforehand, carefully working out points one, two and three and then something I see in my audience will change my whole train of thought, and I will make an entirely different speech from the one I had in mind." I have often remembered this, and later when I began to speak myself, I too found that my greatest inspiration always came from the people to whom I was talking.”

“The ballot is a teacher. Henry Ward Beecher, in a discourse on the subject last winter, said, in regard to woman's franchise, that the ballot is a teacher. I am glad to be able to agree with a minister, which is not often the case. Yes, it is a teacher. Yet, when a man alone has the ballot, it fails to be his teacher. It has not taught him the great lesson that the ballot is useless, that it becomes perverted and corrupt, when woman is kept from it.”

“The belief has been constantly expressed in England that in the United States, which has produced Wm. Lloyd Garrison, Henry Ward Beecher, James Russell Lowell, John G. Whittier¹5 and Abraham Lincoln there must be those of their descendants who would take hold of the work of inaugurating an era of law and order. The colored people of this country who have been loyal to the flag believe the same, and strong in that belief have begun this crusade.”

“It was here in Liverpool, by the way, where Henry Ward Beecher was mobbed when he tried to speak on anti-slavery subjects in the '40's…The feeling which developed in Liverpool during the American Civil War, was shared in large measure and for the same reason (the injury to the cotton trade) by the people of Manchester. In this city also Rev. Henry Ward Beecher fought one of his hard-won battles on the lecture platform with the mob of pro-slavery and secession sympathizers. But that is all past. The freedom of her public halls, churches, platforms and the press is cheerfully granted to those who speak for justice and fair play to the oppressed.”