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LYMAN BEECHER.

THIS venerable and eloquent clergyman was born at New Haven, on the 12th of September, 1775. After going through the usual course of preparatory studies, he entered Yale College, and after graduating he studied divinity under Dr. Dwight. He entered the ministry in 1798, and in the following year was settled at East Hampton, Long Island. Here, in 1806 (two years after Hamilton was killed by Burr), he preached that admirable sermon, entitled "Remedy for Duelling," which, had he published nothing else, is enough to preserve his name to posterity. In 1810, he took charge of the First Congregational Church in Litchfield, Connecticut, where he remained about sixteen years, and preached with great success, exerting, as such a mind of course must, a commanding influence upon his ministerial brethren, and the church at large.2 During this period, he assisted in the establishment of the Connecticut Missionary Society, the Connecticut Education Society, the American Bible Society, and other associations of a similar character. In 1826, he accepted the call to the Hanover Street Church, Boston, where his labors for two or three years were most arduous and unremitted in the cause of religion, and the revival of the early Puritan faith in that great literary and commercial city. Among other labors, he assisted in establishing "The Spirit of the Pilgrims" (a monthly religious journal), and preached, and prepared for the press, "Six Sermons on the Nature, Occasions, Signs, Evils, and Remedy of Intemperance;" of the power and eloquence of which it is enough to say that, notwithstanding all that has been written and published since on this great theme, these sermons yet remain unrivalled. In 1832, he was called to the Presidency of Lane Theo

While at East Hampton, he published three other discourses-"The History of East Hampton"-"The Government of God Desirable”—and a "Funeral Sermon."

While at Litchfield, he published sermons on the "Reformation of Morals"-" Building up of Waste Places"-"A Funeral Discourse"-"The Bible a Code of Laws"-The Faith once Delivered to the Saints"-"The Designs, Rights, and Duties of Local Churches"-and "The Means of National Prosperity."

It has been well said: "Had Dr. Beecher no other distinction, his connection with the great moral movement of our age-the Temperance Reform (of which he may be considered one of the founders, if not THE founder)— would entitle him to an enviable eminence in the history of his times."

The following racy criticism upon Dr. Beecher's writings appeared in the "Bibliotheca Sacra," 1852: "His mind is thoroughly of the New England stamp; and whatever subject it touches, its constant struggle is for

logical Seminary, Cincinnati; and for ten years, in conjunction with his academic duties, he sustained the pastoral care of the Second Presbyterian Church, in that city. He then resigned his connection with the Seminary, and returned to where he now resides. Such is the brief chronological outline of Dr. Beecher's life.'

Dr. Beecher's chief publications consist of sermons and addresses, and a work on "Political Atheism." A collection of his writings, in four compact duodecimo volumes, was published in Boston, in 1852.

THE SIN OF TRAFFICKING IN ARDENT SPIRITS.

Has not God connected with all lawful avocations the welfare of the life that now is, and of that which is to come? And can we lawfully amass property by a course of trade which fills the land with beggars, and widows, and orphans, and crimes; which peoples the graveyard with premature mortality, and the world of wo with the victims of despair? Could all the forms of evil produced in the land by intemperance come upon us in one horrid array, it would appal the nation, and put an end to the traffic in ardent spirits. If in every dwelling built by blood, the stone from the wall should utter all the cries which the bloody traffic extorts-and the beam out of the timber should echo them back-who would build such a house?—and who would dwell in it? What if in every part of the dwelling, from the cellar upward, through all the halls and chambersbabblings, and contentions, and voices, and groans, and shrieks, and wailings, were heard day and night! What if the cold blood oozed out, and stood in drops upon the walls; and, by preternatural art, all the ghastly skulls and bones of the victims destroyed by intemperance, should stand upon the walls, in horrid sculpture within and without the building!-who would rear such a building? What if at eventide, and at midnight, the airy forms of men destroyed by intemperance, were dimly

definiteness, clearness, and utility. Beautiful tropes which adorn nothingness and cover up emptiness, fine language which would express a thought handsomely, if there were any thought there to be expressed by it, for such things as these you will look in vain among Dr. Beecher's works. In his style there is conciseness and pungency, brilliancy and vigor, clearness and sharpness, rhetoric and logic in remarkable combination."

In the progress of his life, he writes: "I have laid no plans of my own, but simply consecrated myself to Christ and his cause, confiding in his guidance and preservation; and meeting, as I might be able, such exigencies as his providence placed before me, which has always kept my head, hands, and heart full."-Brief Memoirs of the Class of 1797, of Yale College.

seen haunting the distilleries and stores, where they received their bane-following the track of the ship engaged in the commerce-walking upon the waves-flitting athwart the deck -sitting upon the rigging-and sending up, from the hold within, and from the waves without, groans, and loud laments, and wailings! Who would attend such stores? Who would labor in such distilleries? Who would navigate such ships?

APPEAL TO YOUNG MEN.

Could I call around me in one vast assembly the temperate young men of our land, I would say-Hopes of the nation, blessed be ye of the Lord now in the dew of your youth. But look well to your footsteps: for vipers, and scorpions, and adders surround your way-look at the generation who have just preceded you the morning of their life was cloudless, and it dawned as brightly as your own-but behold them bitten, swollen, enfeebled, inflamed, debauched, idle, poor, irreligious, and vicious—with halting step dragging onward to meet an early grave! Their bright prospects are clouded, and their sun is set never to rise. No house of their own receives them, while from poorer to poorer tenements they descend, and to harder and harder fare, as improvidence dries up their resources. And now, who are those that wait on their footsteps with muffled faces and sable garments? That is a father-and that is a mother-whose gray hairs are coming with sorrow to the grave. That is a sister, weeping over evils which she cannot arrest-and there is the broken-hearted wife-and there are the children, hapless innocents, for whom their father has provided the inheritance only of dishonor, and nakedness, and wo. And is this, beloved young men, the history of your course -in this scene of desolation, do you behold the image of your future selves is this the poverty and disease which as an armed man shall take hold on you-and are your fathers, and mothers, and sisters, and wives, and children, to succeed to those who now move on in this mournful procession-weeping as they go? Yes-bright as your morning now opens, and high as your hopes beat, this is your noon, and your night, unless you shun those habits of intemperance which have thus early made theirs a day of clouds, and of thick darkness. If you frequent places of evening resort for social drinking-if you set ont with drinking, daily, a little, temperately, prudently, it is yourselves which, as in a glass, you behold.

THE DUELLIST UNFIT For office of TRUST.

And now let me ask you solemnly; with these considerations in view, will you persist in your attachment to these guilty men? Will you any longer, either deliberately or thoughtlessly, vote for them? Will you renounce allegiance to your Maker, and cast the Bible behind your back? Will you confide in men, void of the fear of God and destitute of moral principle? Will you intrust life to MURDERERS, and liberty to DESPOTS? Are you patriots, and will you constitute those legislators, who despise you, and despise equal laws, and wage war with the eternal principles of justice? Are you Christians, and, by upholding duellists, will you deluge the land with blood, and fill it with widows and with orphans? Will you aid in the prostration of justice-in the escape of criminals in the extinction of liberty? Will you place in the chair of state-in the senate-or on the bench of justice, men who, if able, would murder you for speaking truth? Shall your elections turn on expert shooting, and your deliberative bodies become an host of armed men? Will you destroy public morality by tolerating, yea, by rewarding the most infamous crimes? Will you teach your children that there is no guilt in murder? Will you instruct them to think lightly of duelling, and train them up to destroy or be destroyed in the bloody field? Will you bestow your suffrage, when you know that by withholding it you may arrest this deadly evilwhen this too is the only way in which it can be done, and when the present is perhaps the only period in which resistance can avail when the remedy is so easy, so entirely in your power; and when God, if you do not punish these guilty men, will most inevitably punish you?

If the widows and the orphans, which this wasting evil has created and is yearly multiplying, might all stand before you, could you witness their tears, or listen to their details of anguish? Should they point to the murderers of their fathers, their husbands, and their children, and lift up their voice, and implore your aid to arrest an evil which had made them desolate, could you disregard their cry? Before their eyes could you approach the poll, and patronize by your vote the destroyers of their peace? Had you beheld a dying father conveyed bleeding and agonizing to his distracted family, had you heard their piercing shrieks and witnessed their frantic agony; would

you reward the savage man who had plunged them in distress? Had the duellist destroyed your neighbor-had your own father been killed by the man who solicits your suffrage-had your son, laid low by his hand, been brought to your door pale in death and weltering in blood-would you then think the crime a small one? Would you honor with your confidence, and elevate to power by your vote, the guilty monster? And what would you think of your neighbors, if, regardless of your agony, they should reward him? And yet, such scenes of unutterable anguish are multiplied every year. Every year the duellist is cutting down the neighbor of somebody. Every year, and many times in the year, a father is brought dead or dying to his family, or a son laid breathless at the feet of his parents; and every year you are patronizing by your votes the men who commit these crimes, and looking with cold indifference upon, and even mocking, the sorrows of your neighbor. Beware-I admonish you to beware, and especially such of you as have promising sons preparing for active life, lest, having no feeling for the sorrows of another, you be called to weep for your own sorrow; lest your sons fall by the hand of the very murderer for whom you vote, or by the hand of some one whom his example has trained to the work of blood.

THE DUTY OF VOTING.

Multitudes of Christians and patriots have long since abandoned party politics, and, not knowing what to do, have almost abandoned the exercise of suffrage. This is wrong. An enlightened and virtuous suffrage may, by system and concentration, become one of the most powerful means of promoting national purity and morality; as the suffrage from which the influence of conscience is withdrawn cannot fail to be disastrous. While then, as freemen, we remove one temptation to hypocrisy, by dispensing with a profession of religion as a qualification for office, and exclude all occasions of jealousy, by bestowing our votes without reference to Christian denomination, let all Christians and all patriots exercise their rights as electors with an inflexible regard to moral character; and let the duellist, and the Sabbath-breaker, and the drunkard, and the licentious, find the doors of honor barred, and the beights of ambition defended against them by hosts of determined freemen, and the moral effect will be great. The discrimination by suffrage will exert upon the youth of our country a most

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