Excerpt from Revival Hymns
With familiar hymns, uttered in sweet melodies, the most ignorant Christian finds himself able to speak eloquently. A hymn steadies the stammering tongue to the sublimest and most equable utterance. Singing is not only the sweetest discoursing, but it is the only natural method by which multitudes may speak to gether, and give to profound truth the impulse of a thousand hearts. There is no testimony ever pub licly uttered to God's faithfulness, to Christ's help fulness, to the Spirit's illumination, to the joyfulness and peace of a Christian life, to the faith and foresight of heaven, that can be compared for fulness, for solem nity, and for grandeur, to that which a congregation makes in the singing of psalms and hymns and a church without singing is like a dwelling without fire or light.
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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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