'THIS little book is issued with a double intent.
Complete in itself, it comes to the public most
appropriately as a Christmas offering. And yet it
bears reference to other topics and broader views than
those of which it treats, and gives evidence of being, as
it is, a fragment from a larger work. It is that portion
of Mr. Beecher's "Life of Jesus, the Christ," which
depicts the scenes and events clustering about the birth
of our Lord. And the Publishers not only hope that
it will be accepted as peculiarly harmonious with the
happy Advent season, but believe that the mode in
which it presents the record of those holy and precious
scenes will arouse a still deeper interest.
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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