Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Life Thoughts: Gathered From the Extemporaneous Discourses of Henry Ward Beecher
Was that Mr. Beecher was at one and the same time the-most imaginative; the most impassioned, and the most rational of preachers. Therefore, as he used now one and now another power to give expression to a truth which his whole nature had laid hold was differently estimated by different critics, by some as a rationalist, .by-others as a sentimentalist. Therefore he never retailed truths which he had picked up from books, yet was always g1vrng in the pulpit expression to truths the raw material of which, so to speak, he had gathered from awide range of reading and an even wider range of conversation. He was the most original of preachers, because he never gave expression to a. Truth until it had been born within him and become by meditation his own; he never could give the opinion of others - not even of the Scripture writers - except by 'reading them in their own words; because all that he read was straight way combined in the laboratory of his own ever-active mind with other materials, and issued in forms which the original author would not have recognized and very' probably would have disowned. Therefore he was always at his poorest in endeavoring to interpret the views Jof others, whether his object was to com mend or to criticise. Therefore these paragraphs of thoughts, ?ashes of humor or pathos, pictures of imagination, resistless appeals to feeling, condensed arguments, ?ashing like the condensed carbon in the diamond, give, on the whole, a better picture of his iridescent and ebullient nature than anysingle sermon or series of sermons can p0351b ly.
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