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 BEECHER 461 gave instruction. Mr. Beecher soon became one of the foremost preachers of his day. A sermon which he preached in 1804, upon occa- sion of the death of Alexander Hamilton in a duel with Aaron Burr, excited great attention. Finding his salary wholly inadequate to sup- port his increasing family, he resigned the charge, and in 1810 was installed pastor of the Congregational church at Litchfield, Conn. Here he remained for 16 years, during which he took rank as the foremost clergyman of his denomination. The vice of intemperance had become a common one in New England, even the formal meetings of the clergy being not nnfrequently accompanied by gross excesses. Mr. Beecher resolved to take a stand against this vice, and about 1814 preached and published his famous six sermons on intemperance, which contain passages the eloquence of which is hardly exceeded by anything in the English language. During his residence at Litchfield arose the Unitarian controversy in New Eng- land, in which he took a prominent part. Litchfield was at this time an educational cen- tre, being the seat of a famous law school and of several other institutions of learning. Mr. Beecher (now a doctor of divinity) and his wife undertook to supervise the training of a number of young women, who were received into his family. Here too he found in time his salary, $800 a year, inadequate to the neces- sities of his large family. In 1826 he received a call to become pastor of the Hanover street church in Boston, where he remained for six years, which were the most active and labo- rious of his life. The religious public had be- come impressed with the growing importance of the grea^; west; a theological seminary was founded at Walnut Hills, near Cincinnati, Ohio, and named Lane seminary, after one of its principal benefactors. In 1832 Dr. Beecher accepted the presidency of this institution, which he retained for 20 years, being at the same time for 10 years pastor of the second Presbyterian church in Cincinnati. In 1838, during the absence of Dr. Beecher, the trus- tees of the seminary prohibited the open dis- cussion of slavery by the students, a large majority of whom withdrew. In 1835 Dr. Beecher, who has been styled "a moderate Calvinist," was arraigned before his presbytery on charges of hypocrisy and teaching false doctrine ; he was acquitted, and an appeal was taken to the synod, which decided that there was no foundation for the charge. When the disruption took place in the Presbyterian church, he adhered to the New School branch. In 1852 he resigned the presidency of Lane seminary, and returned to Boston, proposing to devote himself mainly to the revisal and publication of his works, though not unfre- quently preaching, and for a time with much of his former eloquence. But his intellectual powers began to decline, while his physical strength remained unabated. Memory first failed, then the capacity for expression. The last ten years of his life were passed in Brook- lyn, N. Y., the residence of his son Henry Ward Beecher. Dr. Beecher was a man of great intellectual power, though not a profound scholar. His sermons were usually extempore as fur as form was concerned, but were care- fully thought out, often while engaged in active physical exercise ; but his writings were elaborated with the utmost care. He had some striking personal peculiarities. He was pro- verbially absent-minded, and after having been wrought up by the excitement of preaching was accustomed to let himself down by playing "Auld Lang Syne" on the fiddle, or dancing the " double shuffle " in his parlor. His auto- biography and life has been prepared by some of his children, the autobiographical part oc- cupying only a subordinate place. Three vol- umes of his collected works, revised by himself, were published in 1852. He was three times married, in 1799, 1817, and 1836, and was father of 13 children, of whom 11 are living (1872). One died in infancy, and another, George, a promising clergyman, died in 1843 from the accidental discharge of his own gun. Of the remainder, the following have attained distinction. II. Catherine Esther, born at East Hampton, Long Island, Sept. 6, 1800. When quite young she was betrothed to Prof. Fisher of Yale college, who perished by shipwreck off the coast of Ireland while on a voyage to Europe, and she has remained unmarried. In 1822 she opened a school in Hartford, Conn., which she continued for ten years, during which she prepared some elementary books in arithmetic and mental and moral philosophy. In 1832 she accompanied her father to Cincin- nati, where she opened a female seminary, which she was obliged to discontinue after two years on account of ill health. She thence- forth devoted herself to the development of an extended plan for female education, physical, social, intellectual, and moral. In this she has labored more than 30 years, organizing so- cieties for training teachers and sending them to the new states and territories, and for other related objects, writing much for periodicals, and publishing the following books: "Do- mestic Service," "Duty of American Women to their Country," "Domestic Receipt Book," " The True Remedy for the Wrongs of Woman," " Domestic Economy," "Letters to the People on Health and Happiness," "Physiology and Calisthenics," " Religious Training of Children," " The American Woman's Home," " Common Sense applied to Religion," and " Appeal to the People, as the authorized Interpreters of the Bible." Apart from the books relating to her special educational purpose, she has written memoirs of her brother George Beecher, and " Truth Stranger than Fiction," an account of an infelicitous domestic affair in which some of her friends were involved. III. Edward, D. D., born at East Hampton, L. I., in 1804. He graduated at Yale college in 1822, studied the- ology at Andover and New Haven, and was