Excerpt from A Treasury of Illustration
It does not follow that mere seeing of visions is the proof of a true poet, or that every utterer of views is a true prophet. Scripture itself mentions more false prophets than true ones, and tells us more than once of false prophets who were sincere. The great prophets of Judah were thinkers and statesmen as well as seers. And the prophets of every age have stood upon facts, while they discerned principles; have recognized their immediate surroundings, while they scanned far horizons.
To the test of this conception, thus incompletely and imperfectly stated, let us bring the genius of Henry Ward Beecher.
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Henry Ward Beecher was an American preacher and reformer, born in Litchfield, Connecticut. He was the eighth child of Lyman and Roxana Foote Beecher, and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Reared in a Puritan atmosphere, he has graphically described the mystical experience which, coming to him in his early youth, changed his whole conception of theology and determined his choice of the ministry.
It was in the pulpit that Beecher was seen at his best. His mastery of the English tongue, his dramatic power, his instinctive art of impersonation, which had become a second nature, his vivid imagination, his breadth of intellectual view, his quaint humor alternating with genuine pathos, and above all his simple and singularly unaffected devotional nature, made him as a preacher without a peer in his own time and country.
He was stricken with apoplexy while still active in the ministry, and died at Brooklyn on the 8th of March 1887, in the seventy-fourth year of his age.
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