Henry Ward Beecher was a prominent, theologically liberal American Congregationalist clergyman, social reformer, abolitionist, and speaker in the mid to late 19th Century.

Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, he was the son of Lyman Beecher, an abolitionist Congregationalist preacher from Boston, and Roxana Foote. Roxana died when Henry was three. He was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Catharine Beecher a noted educator. He had two other prominent and activist siblings, a brother, Charles Beecher, and a sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker.

The Beecher household was exemplary of the orthodox ministry that Lyman Beecher preached. His family not only prayed at the beginning and end of each day but also sang hymns and prepared for other rigorous church obligations. The family members were expected to participate in prayer meetings, attend lectures and other church functions. "Undue frivolity was discouraged, so they did not celebrate Christmas or birthdays. Dancing, theater, and all but the most high-toned fiction were forbidden."

Henry was especially close to his sister Harriet, two years his senior, according to the web site of the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights, New York City. "This friendship with Harriet continued throughout their lives, and she was still listed on the membership rolls of Plymouth Church when she died in 1896.”

In 1847, he was appointed the first minister of the new Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, New York. That fall, Beecher and his wife, the former Eunice Bullard, and their three surviving children moved to Brooklyn.

Beecher's fame on the lecture circuit led to his becoming editor of several religious magazines, and he received large advances for a novel and for a biography of Jesus.

An advocate of women's suffrage, temperance and Darwin's theory of evolution, and a foe of slavery, Beecher held that Christianity should adapt itself to the changing culture of the times. He was also passionately anti-Catholic and was contemptuous towards Irish-Americans in an age that was anti-Irish Catholic due to the waves of Irish immigrants coming to America because of the potato famine.

He raised funds to buy weapons for those willing to oppose slavery in Kansas and Nebraska, and the rifles bought with this money became known as "Beecher's Bibles". Politically active, he supported first the Free Soil Party and later the Republican Party.

During the American Civil War, his church raised and equipped a volunteer infantry regiment. Early in the war, Beecher pressed Lincoln to emancipate the slaves through a proclamation. The preacher later went on a speaking tour in England to undermine support for the South by explaining the North's war aims. Near the end of the war, when the Stars and Stripes were again raised at Fort Sumter in South Carolina, Beecher was the main speaker.

Thousands of worshipers flocked to Beecher's enormous Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. Abraham Lincoln (who said of Beecher that no one in history had "so productive a mind") was in the audience at one point, and Walt Whitman visited him. Mark Twain went to see Beecher in the pulpit and described the pastor "sawing his arms in the air, howling sarcasms this way and that, discharging rockets of poetry and exploding mines of eloquence, halting now and then to stamp his foot three times in succession to emphasize a point."

Beecher himself had this to say of his preaching style: "From the beginning, I educated myself to speak along the line and in the current of my moral convictions; and though, in later days, it has carried me through places where there were some batterings and bruisings, yet I have been supremely grateful that I was led to adopt this course. I would rather speak the truth to ten men than blandishments and lying to a million. Try it, ye who think there is nothing in it! try what it is to speak with God behind you,--to speak so as to be only the arrow in the bow which the Almighty draws."

"He obtained the chains with which John Brown had been bound, trampling them in the pulpit, and he also held mock 'auctions' at which the congregation purchased the freedom of real slaves," according to the Web site of the still-existing Plymouth Church. The most famous of these former slaves was a young girl named Pinky, auctioned during a regular Sunday worship service at Plymouth on February 5, 1860. A collection taken up that day raised $900 to buy Pinky from her owner. A gold ring was also placed in the collection plate, and Beecher presented it to the girl to commemorate her day of liberation. Pinky returned to Plymouth in 1927 at the time of the Church's 80th Anniversary to give the ring back to the Church with her thanks. Today, Pinky's ring and bill of sale can still be viewed at Plymouth.”

Plymouth Church Of The Pilgrims is a church in Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, New York City. It was a station of the Underground Railroad, and the pulpit of Henry Ward Beecher, its first pastor. There is a fragment of Plymouth Rock in the church.

The church was named a National Historic Landmark in 1966.

Today the church is a member of the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches.

On the grounds of the church, located at 75 Hicks Street, there is a statue of Beecher by sculptor Gutzon Borglum.

This rare book is in very good condition. It is clean and tight with no marking or underlining. It shows a little bit of shelf wear and there is some separation at the top of the front end paper next to the title page.

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