Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/273

 music should play, during which all should pray in silence according to the wants and the inspirations of their souls. Of a truth then would prayers ascend more pure and fervent than any prescribed by human tongues and forms. A worship of God in spirit and in truth, a vital expression of the life and truth of Christianity—should we then have on earth.

But I must yet say a few words about that young disciple of Calvin, Henry Beecher, but who has left far behind him whatever is hard and petrified in the orthodoxy of Calvin, and breaking away from that has attached himself to the true Christian doctrine of mercy to all. He was with us last evening, and told us how as a missionary he had preached in the West beneath the open sky to the people of the wilderness, and how during his solitary journeys amid those grand primeval scenes, and during his daily experience of that most vitalising influence of Christianity upon the fresh human soul, he had by degrees introduced order into his own inward world, had solved hitherto difficult religious questions, and had come forth from the old dead church into one more comprehensive, and more full of light. He described also, in the most picturesque manner, the nocturnal camp-meeting of the West; the scenes of baptism there on the banks of rivers and streams, as well in their poetical as in their frequently comic aspects. There is somewhat of the power of growth peculiar to the great Western wilds in this young man, but somewhat of its rudeness also. He is a bold, ardent young champion of that young America, too richly endowed and too much acknowledged as such, for them not to be quite conscious of their own I. And even in his sermon this I was somewhat too prominent. But only more and more do I feel how great an interest I shall take in visiting that great West where “growth” seems to be the only available watchword; where, in the immeasurable valley of the Mississippi, between