Henry Ward Beecher, a nineteenth-century American Congregationalist pastor and journal editor, was a renowned public speaker active in campaigns against slavery and for social reform. He was an advocate of the theory of evolution and firmly believed that Christianity should adapt itself in the face of change. In Evolution and Religion (published in two volumes in 1885, two years before his death) he first discusses the implications of the 'new' evolutionary philosophy for various key Christian doctrines such as the divine nature, human sinfulness, the inspiration of the Bible, and divine providence, and then explores how evolutionism might affect the ethics and practice of Christianity. Beecher's charisma, enthusiasm and flamboyant oratory is evident even in print, and this book stands as a lasting testimony to this influential activist and thinker. It provides rich and enjoyable source material for historians of nineteenth-century science, religion and society.
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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