Henry Ward Beecher

“ At length the measure is filled up, and the malignant power of debt is known. It has opened in the heart every fountain of iniquity; it has besoiled the conscience; it has tarnished the honor; it has made the man a deliberate student of knavery; a systematic practitioner of fraud; it has dragged him through all the sewers of petty passions,—anger, hate, revenge, malicious folly, or malignant shame. When a debtor is beaten at every point, and the law will put her screws upon him, there is no depth in the gulf of dishonesty into which he will not boldly plunge. ”

“ Northern ideas must become American, or Southern ideas must become American, before there will be peace. If the North gives to the Nation her radical principles of human rights and democratic Governments, there will be the peace of an immeasurable prosperity. If the South shall give to the country a policy derived from her heathen notions of men, there will be such a peace as men have overdrugged with opium, that deep lethargy just before the mortal convulsions and death! ”

“ But when business is dull, and health delicate, many a professional man, many a clerk or unsuccessful merchant, concludes to buy a “snug farm,” and retire from the cares of the town or city, to lead the joyous life of a farmer. He has no knowledge of farming; but it requires none! Farming is simple. You rise with the dewy morn; you go forth to your prodigal acres; you rest under the trees bending with fruit; you eat from your bountiful table the food that sprung from your own soil,—and ever so much more romance of the same sort. ”

“ When men hear him confess that his career is a hideous waking dream, the race vexatious, and the end vanity, they wonder that he clings to it; but he knows that nothing but the fiery wine which he has tasted will rouse up that intense excitement, now become necessary to his happiness. For this reason, great men often cling to public office with all its envy, jealousy, care, toil, hates, competitions, and unrequited fidelity; for these very disgusts, and the perpetual struggle, strike a deeper chord of excitement than is possible to the gentler touches of home, friendship and love. ”

“ The theory of the North is, that every man has the right, on every subject, to the freest expression of his opinions, and the fullest right to urge them upon the convictions of others. It is not a permission of law; it is the inherent right of the individual. Law is only to protect the citizen in the use of that right.
It is the theory of the North that society is as much a gainer by this freedom of discussion as is the individual.
It is a perpetual education of the people, and a safeguard to the State. There is the utmost latitude of speech and discussion among our citizens. ”

“ One might as well hang a dictionary around a child’s neck by way of ornament, as to impose on flowers such outrageous and outlandish names as now defend the science of botany from all approach, as a fort is defended by a line of chevaux-de-frise.
But blessings on those cheery children of the sun! They are born of brightness; their whole life is like a smile of love. They are not a flower for the hand; they are not to be worn in the bosom. They do not love the house, or the pressure of a close bouquet. Their life is in the free open air. They shine out on you along your daily walk. ”

“ General suffering has made us tolerant of general dishonesty; and the gloom of our commercial disaster threatens to become the pall of our morals.
If the shocking stupidity of the public mind to atrocious dishonesties is not aroused; if good men do not bestir themselves to drag the young from this foul sorcery; if the relaxed bands of honesty are not tightened, and conscience intoned to a severer morality, our night is at hand,—our midnight not far off. Woe to that guilty people who sit down upon broken laws, and wealth saved by injustice! ”

“ The surgeon must know his tools and how to handle them, but he must know, too, the system on which he is going to use them. And shall a man, charged with the care of the soul, sharpen up his understanding with moral distinctions and learned arguments, and know all about the theories of theology, from Adam down to our day, and yet know nothing of the organism upon which all these instrumentalities are to be used? Shall he know nothing about man himself? The student who goes out to his work with a wide knowledge of theology, and no knowledge of human nature, is not half fitted for his duty. ”

“ He is a being upon whom is rolled the responsibility of character and eternal destiny! Of such a creature it were as foolish to take an estimate, by what he is and what he can do in this life, as it would be to estimate by an eagle's egg, what the old eagle is worth, with wings outspread far above the very thunder, or coming down upon its quarry as the thunder comes! It is the Future that gives value to the Present. It is Immortality only that reaches down a measure wherewith to gauge a man. ”

“ Shall we pretend to virtue, and purity, and religion, and yet make partners of our social life, men whose heart has conceived such damnable deeds, and whose hands have performed them? Shall there be even in the eye of religion no difference between the corrupter of youth and their guardian? Are all the lines and marks of morality so effaced, is the nerve and courage of virtue so quailed by the frequency and boldness of flagitious crimes, that men, covered over with wickedness, shall find their iniquity no obstacle to their advancement among a Christian people. ”

“ Insects are more to be dreaded than birds. They elude our vigilance, they work secretly, they swarm in such numbers as to defy man’s power. But birds keep them down. They destroy myriads of eggs, of grubs, of tender worms, and of fruit-loving insects. To destroy birds for the sake of saving fruit is like throwing down the fence about one’s garden to keep the pigs out! Even admit, as some do and we do not, that blackbirds and crows deserve to be shot for destroying the planter’s seed. We claim that the robin does not belong to their company. He preserves a hundred-fold more than he destroys. ”

“ Which shall he choose, honesty and mortifying exclusion, or gaiety purchased by dishonesty? The severity of this choice sometimes sobers the intoxicated brain; and a young man shrinks from the gulf, appalled at the darkness of dishonesty. But to excessive vanity, high-life with or without fraud, is Paradise; and any other life Purgatory. Here many resort to dishonesty without a scruple. It is at this point that public sentiment half sustains dishonesty. It scourges the thief of Necessity, and pities the thief of Fashion.
The struggle with others is on the very ground of honor. ”

“ Oh ye! who have thought the way to hell was bleak and frozen as Norway, parched and barren as Sahara, strewed like Golgotha with bones and skulls reeking with stench like the vale of Gehenna,—witness your mistake! The way to hell is gorgeous! It is a highway, cast up; no lion is there, no ominous bird to hoot a warning, no echoings of the wailing-pit, no lurid gleams of distant fires, or moaning sounds of hidden woe! Paradise is imitated to build you a way to death; the flowers of heaven are stolen and poisoned ”

“ And as is Nature, so in the North, is law, and the distributive benefits of society. They bathe society from top to bottom! The rich, the learned, the refined, the strong, may know how to make a better use of the air, but they have no more air of privilege to breathe, than the poorest wretch.
In the South, exactly the reverse is true, not by stealth, not by neglect of a recognized principle, but as the result of men's ideas, and by organized arrangements. Touch a hireling's wages, in the North, and the Law stands to defend him and beat you down! ”

“ A single leaf sometimes will begin to wag, and not another on the whole tree will move. Sometimes a hidden breath will catch at a lower branch, then, shifting, will leave that still, while it shakes a topmost twig. Though the air may move so gently that your cheek does not feel it, this sensitive tree will seem all a shiver, and turn its leaves upward with shuddering chill. It is the daintiest fairy of all the trees. One should have an aspen on every side of his house, that no window should be without a chance to look upon its nods and becks, and to rejoice in its innocent witcheries. ”

“ All is fair in politics. If any hoary professor, drunk with the mingled wine of excitement, shall tell our youth, that a Christian man may act in politics by any other rule of morality than that of the Bible; and that wickedness performed for a party, is not as abominable, as if done for a man; or that any necessity justifies or palliates dishonesty in word or deed,—let such a one go out of the camp, and his pestilent breath no longer spread contagion among our youth. No man who loves his country, should shrink from her side when she groans with raging distempers. ”

“ The whole mind is excited to the utmost, and concentrated at its extreme point of excitation for hours and days, with the additional waste of sleepless nights, profuse drinking, and other congenial immoralities. Every other pursuit becomes tasteless; for no ordinary duty has in it a stimulus which can scorch a mind which now refuses to burn without blazing, or to feel an interest which is not intoxication. The victim of excitement is like a mariner who ventures into the edge of a whirlpool for a motion more exhilarating than plain sailing. ”

“ The glowing comb, the haughty carriage, the resplendent tail-feathers, and ostentatious crowing of the lord of the barn-yard creation, reveals to the sagacious reasoner either the origin or destination of many other “lords of creation.”
Nor can one mistake the resemblances traceable in the gentler sex of hens. Some there are industrious only in scratching and cackling, but nervous, gadding, restless; never content at home, never so happy as when at work in a new-made garden, and sagacious always of the very spots which are most precious in the owner’s eyes. ”

“ There will be inequality enough as soon as men get into life. Some shoot ahead; some, like dull sailors in a fleet, are dropped behind, and men are scattered all along the ocean. But the Common School gathers up their children and brings them all back again to take a new start together. Thus our schools are not mere whetstones to the intellect; they are institutions for evening up society; they resist the tendency to separation into classes, which grows with the prosperity of a community; they bind together, in cordial sympathy, all classes of citizens. ”

“ Nor does the parent blossom into its final beauty until the exquisite silk hangs from the nascent ears of corn to feed upon the parent’s life, and in that find its own.
No sooner do the new-born kernels swell, than the parent bequeaths itself and all its inward stores to its offspring. The long leaves swing idly in the air, as things that have nothing more to do. Every day the winds evoke a shriller sound from their motions. ”

“ In the North, first in order of consideration is man, the individual man; next the family, made of those of common blood, and by far the strongest, as it is the most sacred of all institutions. Then comes the township, which presents the only spectacle of an absolute political democracy. For, here only, do citizens assemble in mass and vote, directly and not by representation. Next comes Society at large, or the mass of citizens grouped into States. And in Society, in the North, there are no classes except such as rise out of spontaneous forces. ”