Lectures and Orations

New York / Chicago: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1913. First Edition. Hard Cover. Good/No Jacket. 0x0x0. First edition. Frontispiece removed, front hinge weakening, ink name and date on front endpaper, embossed owner stamp on title page, clippings from several articles mounted on endpapers. 1913 Hard Cover. 330 pp. Red cloth, gilt titles. A collection of essays by the prominent American minister. Includes: Foreword by Newell Dwight Hillis; Puritanism; The Wastes and Burdens of Society; The Reign of the Common People; Eloquence and Oratory; William Ellery Channing; Charles Sumner; Wendell Phillips; Eulogy on Grant; Abraham Lincoln; Appendix: Patriotism Above Party; The Herbert Spencer Dinner; Index. Henry Ward Beecher, (born June 24, 1813, Litchfield, Connecticut, U.S. - died March 8, 1887, Brooklyn, New York), liberal U.S. Congregational minister whose oratorical skill and social concern made him one of the most influential Protestant spokesmen of his time. He was the eighth of the Rev. Lyman Beecher's 13 children and showed little promise at various schools until he went to Amherst College in 1830. Though never distinguished as a scholar, he became a superior speaker and popular leader. After three postgraduate years in Cincinnati, Ohio, at Lane Theological Seminary, of which his father became president in 1832, Beecher in 1837 became minister to a small Presbyterian congregation at Lawrenceburg, Indiana. He gradually cultivated his pulpit technique, there and in a pastorate at Indianapolis, Indiana (1839 - 47), and came to believe that a sermon succeeds by focusing on the single objective of effecting a moral change in the hearer. A highly successful preacher and lecturer, Beecher furthered his reputation through Seven Lectures to Young Men (1844), vivid exhortations on the vices and dangers in a frontier community.