The New Yorker:

A classic New Yorker account of the Henry Ward Beecher adultery trial recalls a time in America that seems both incomprehensible and familiar.

By Louis Menand

On an elegant residential block in Brooklyn Heights stands what once may have been the most famous church in America. Plymouth Church, on Orange Street, was founded in 1847 with just twenty-one members. The New York businessmen who established the church, practicing Congregationalists, wanted it to grow, so they offered the job of minister to Henry Ward Beecher, whose preaching prowess had made Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis one of the largest congregations in that city. Beecher accepted the offer. He would preach at Plymouth Church for the next forty years, eventually to full houses of two thousand worshippers of the Christian God.

In nineteenth-century America, sermons were a widely diffused entertainment medium. People bought print collections of sermons, but the sermon itself was essentially performance art. Sermons were designed to excite, to thrill, to move. Reading sermons in a book therefore gives us little idea of the kind of effect they had on their listeners. In Beecher’s day, the sermon was increasingly ad-libbed. He would bring notes onto the stage, but he treated them as props. He would toss them onto the floor or a table, and hold forth as he strode back and forth before the congregation. Beecher became a legend in his own time. Manhattanites took special ferries, referred to as Beecher’s Boats, across the East River to hear his sermons.

Beecher’s father, Lyman, himself a noted preacher, was a Calvinist, but Henry preached what became known as the Gospel of Love, a theology that might be encapsulated in the question “Is it a sin to feel that I am sinless?” Beecher asked parishioners to receive God’s love through Jesus Christ and taught that this form of religious belief was consistent with the enjoyment of life. Today, this seems a standard form of Christian evangelism, but in the nineteenth century it was revolutionary. The Gospel of Love helped transform popular Protestantism from a religion obsessed with sin and salvation into what is essentially a mode of self-help. Love God and do what you like. The Word will set you free.

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