"O Lord, we view with terror the approach of the enemies of thy holy religion. Wilt thou send storm and tempest to toss them upon the sea, and to overwhelm them upon the mighty deep, or to scatter them to the uttermost parts of the earth? But, peradventure, should any escape thy vengeance, collect them again as in the hollow of thy hand, and let thy lightnings play upon them. We do beseech thee, moreover, that thou do gird up the loins of those thy servants who are going forth to fight thy battles. Make them strong men, that one shall chase a thousand, and two put ten thousand to flight.' Hold before them the shield with which thou was wont, in the old time, to protect thy chosen people. Give them swift feet that they may pursue their enemies, and swords terrible as that of the destroying angel, that they may cleave them down. Preserve these servants of thine, Almighty God! And bring them once more to their homes and friends, if thou canst do it consistently with thy high purposes. If, on the other hand, thou hast decreed that they shall die in battle, let thy Spirit be present with them, and breathe upon them that they may go up as a sweet sacrifice into the courts of thy temple, where are habitations prepared for them from the foundation of the world."

The writer of this lyric had not long passed away when Beecher was called to Litchfield. There survived those who had gone forth to battle under its inspiration, soldiers and civilians who for the crisis had been improvisatored into soldiers, and who had drawn the sword in the War of Independence. With the choicest and best spirits of this circle the family of Beecher mingled. He was himself its soul, from the activity and versatility of his powers, and from the delight he had in drawing on the sympathy of all around on behalf of the great controversies, and questions of those times, the unitarian controversy and the temperance movement, in both of which he took a leading part. The family, during many years of the father's ministry at Litchfield, and before its members began to scatter, was itself a society possessing more of genius and diversified gifts and accomplishments than usually fall to the lot of a much wider community. Mrs Stowe's "Early Remembrances " of the Litchfield home is a chapter that has seldom been written, and presents a family circle to partake of the privilege of passing through the natural culture and Christian training and joys of which it were worth becoming a child again.

Into that united and happy circle death entered during the fifth year of the Litchfield ministry, Mrs Beecher, after some months of weakness, dying of consumption. So little had her husband been accustomed to think or act alone during the period of their union, that when the stroke came, his sensation, as he describes it, was a sort of terror like that of a child suddenly shut out alone in the dark. So oppressed were his spirits by the bereavement, in consequence of the constant turning

Mrs Stowe's Picture of the Second Mrs Beecher. 567

towards her, of thought and feelings which he had been in the habit of speaking to her, that merely to relieve himself he once sat down and wrote to her a letter in which he poured out all his soul. But there was no post-office then known in America to undertake its delivery. Henry Ward, too little to go to the funeral, being told by some of the family, when he asked after his absent mother, that she had gone to heaven, and by others that she had been laid in the ground, putting the two things together, resolved to dig through the ground and go to heaven to find her. Being discovered one morning, under his sister Catherine's window, digging with great zeal and earnestness, she called him to know what he was doing, when, lifting his curly hair with great simplicity, he answered, "Why, I'm going to heaven to find ma."

Within two years another mother presided over the family at Litchfield, whom Mrs Stowe describes as so fair, so delicate, so elegant, that the children on her advent were almost afraid to go near her. "I remember," she says, "I used to feel breezy, and rough, and rude, in her presence. We felt a little in awe of her, as if she were a strange princess rather than our own mama; but her voice was very sweet, her ways of moving and speaking very graceful, and she took us up in her lap and let us play with her beautiful hands, which seemed wonderful things, made of pearl and ornamented with strange rings." Better than her sylph-like delicacy and grace of figure, she had an affectionate, motherly, and true Christian heart, and shared with her husband in his solicitude for the work of God both in his family and flock.

The correspondence that has been published in the first volume of the Autobiography between Beecher and his sons, whilst they were at college, gives great insight into the depths of his own religious character, and is highly characteristic of his power of sagacious advice, and of homely, forcible, racy utterance. We could not do justice to the man, the Christian, or the father, were we to omit all reference to these letters. They are amongst his best self-portraits. Having learned from his son Edward that a religious revival had appeared amongst the students of Yale College, he hastens to remind him of his greater consequent responsibility, and to plead with a touching parental yearning for the soul of his son:

My heart is pained, is terrified, at the thought that you should be left. Think not, Edward, that mind can be a substitute for moral excellence, for love to God, or faith in the Redeemer, or that learning and human estimation can balance one hour of that miserable eternity in which all is lost. My heart overflows with grief and fear, and my eyes with tears, while I write to you. You must not continue stupid. Now pre-eminently is with you the ac

cepted time and the day of salvation. Trust not to my prayers; that would be to hinder their efficacy by making them the occasion of a deadly security. Let nothing interfere now with the care of your soul. Balance not between study and reputation and an interest in Christ. Study, if it is no impediment to seriousness, as usually it may not be; but if it is, give all up till you feel you are raised from the horrible pit, and your mouth is filled with a new song; and fail not to let me meet you and greet you as a child of the Redeemer when I come down. . . . . I shall not cease to pray, my dear son, for your conversion, nor to deplore the mighty ruin which all your capacities and improvements will constitute in another world, should they continue under the dominion of a heart unsanctified and unreconciled to God."

Writing to the same on his method of study, he, in a few graphic sentences, advises what volumes have been written to express:

"You must avoid two things: first, never pass over a difficulty, make thorough work and dig up science by the roots; second, never puzzle too long before you ask assistance if you need it. You will confound your mind. There is nothing which cannot be learned in the whole course of your study, and if you cannot find the end of the rope, the tutor's lips must keep knowledge, and you must not be afraid or ashamed to go to his room and ask his assistance. Leave no post in the land untaken. . . . . Every subject, like a tree, has a root. If you find the root and follow it up, you will find by an easy and natural process all the branches, and will be able to pursue a subject in all its ramifications, whereas, if you lay hold and pull by the branches first, it will be like pitching into the top of a tree and cutting your way through brush and thorn to the root. One thing more I must say. There are often in the freshman class many sage opinions broached as to the utility of this or that study. One thinks languages useless, and becomes a poor lazy dog in the languages. Another despises algebra, and can see no use in mathematics. Now let no such vain imaginations enter your head. The system of study is relatively good. It has for its object mental vigour as well as practical utility, and all parts are necessary and wise in the prescribed course; and the sciences also, bound up, as Cicero says, by such common bonds that the possession of one aids in the attainment of the others, and he is most perfect in each who is most perfect in all. . . . . You ask me to advise you what to read in leisure hours. I am of opinion you had better study history and chronology. As to history, if I were to go over life again, I would study history more extensively and thoroughly, chiefly as it furnishes a public speaker with illustrations and matter of fact argument, which is the most knocking-down argument in the world."

In the hints on needful thrift and economical expedients that run through the weightier counsels of these letters, we have a peep into the family ways and means that reminds one of the

Home Life in America, Past and Present.

569 home letters of some careful Scotch father to his lads at St Andrews or Aberdeen. There is a wonderfully vivid life in such directions as the following, occuring in the postscripts of these letters, or suddenly interjected at the moment of recollection amongst their graver matters: "Your clothes you will please tie up in a pocket-handkerchief, and send home to be washed and returned the same week. I have contracted with Parks the stage driver to bring and return them. This arrangement will save four dollars and more." "Your Latin letter came safe to hand. As money was the most urgent point of concern, and I had none and can get none, I was in no haste to reply. . . . I shall send money as soon as I can get any, until which those you owe must do as I do, want, and you must do as I do, endure the mortification of telling them so." "I cannot buy the most necessary books for my own use; and our economy must be absolutely close and constant, or I shall be obliged to take you from college. I say not this because you are prodigal, but because it is literally true, as you must know from knowing what my resources are and what my expenses.' "The books you need you may get at H's, second-hand books if you can find them in good preservation.'

A true New England father of the highest type, Beecher grudged no sacrifices for the education of his children, though these passages tell he had often to bid them wait for needed remittances, and to put the young students on their economical shifts. They farther shew how close was the identity in habit, feeling, and laudable ambition between the New England and the Scottish parents of that period. In the hearts of both lay deep the sense of the value of learning to their children-a sense not to be overborne by the straitness and struggles of their comparatively narrow lot. But we must bring our notice of this volume, and the times to which it relates, to a close.

In the social habits, Christian culture, and home scenes into which it introduces us, lie the enduring strength of any people. They constitute the interior life of a nation, its life within a life, in antagonism with which no public and political manifestation of itself can permanently prevail. The harmony of the two is the normal condition of every country. The law that demands that the public represents the private life and virtues of a people must be ultimately obeyed. All departures from it are essentially temporary and spasmodic. If the private life of the American people, thrown open along the fifty years' track of Beecher, be still in its characteristic features the life of its village and rural population, of its quiet homesteads and family circles, we can wait with the certainty with which we look for the operation of a law of nature for some truer manifestation of its public life, and one more in harmony with itself than can be

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gathered amidst the strife of factions and the din of arms, when for the hour self-interest, revenge, and hate have, in so many minds, consecrated themselves by the new names of duty and patriotism. Of this result we should not be long disappointed, if to his other virtues the American added the courage to dare to be independent, the fortitude to give utterance to his individual convictions. Let the noble advice of Lyman Beecher to his son be accepted by her citizens, and they will not long have to mourn over the calamities of their country. He foresaw the grave that was digging for American liberty in the tyranny of public opinion, and thus forewarns against it: "My son, there is no living in this world and doing right if you cannot meet public opinion, and resist it when arrayed on the side of evil."

ART. VII.—The Genuineness of the Fourth Gospel.*

Bleek's Einleitung in das N. T., 1862. Meyer's Com. über das Evang. des Johannes, 3 A., 1856. Schneider's Aechtheit des Johann. Evang., 1854. Mayer's Aechtheit des Evang. nach Johann., 1854. Ewald's Jahrb. III. s. 146 scq., v. s. 178 seq., x. s. 83 seq.

THE

HE Gospel that bears the name of John is one of the main pillars of historical Christianity. Christianity would indeed remain were the apostolic authorship and the credibility of this gospel disproved; for before it was written, Jesus and the resurrection had been preached by faithful witnesses over a large part of the Roman world. Christianity would remain ; but our conception of Christianity and of Christ would be materially altered. The profoundest minds in the church, from Clement of Alexandria to Luther, and from Luther to Niebuhr, have expressed their sense of the singular charm and surpassing value of this gospel. In recent times, however, the genuineness of the fourth gospel has been impugned. It was denied to be the work of John by individual sceptics at the close of the last century; but their attack was not of a nature either to excite or to merit much attention. Not until Bretschneider published (in 1820) his Probabilia did the question become the subject of serious discussion. But the assault, which has been renewed by the critics of the Tübingen school, with Baur at their head, has more lately given rise to a most earnest and important controversy. The rejection of John's Gospel by these

By Prof. George P. Fisher, Yale College. From the Bibliotheca Sacra, Andover. April 1864.