1. John Beecher gave birth to David Beecher who gave birth to Lyman Beecher who gave birth to Henry Ward Beecher.
2. His grandfather David Beecher was a blacksmith.
3. His father Lyman Beecher was a minister.
4. His father Lyman Beecher opposed the idea of man's complete moral inability and helped to give the deathblow to the doctrine of infant damnation. He stressed instead man's freedom to respond to God's lawful requirements, the possibility therefore, and the duty of immediate repentance.
5. Again his father Lyman Beecher advocated the New School Theology...was firmly convinced that Old Calvinism, as he termed it, led to fatalism, obscure moral accountability, and made man unresponsive to the evangelical appeal.
6. Dr. [Joshua] Wilson, leading Old [Divinity School] in Cincinnati [who according to Henry Ward] as stiff a man, and as orthodox as Calvin himself, and as pugnacious as ten Calvins rolled into one, greeted Dr. [Lyman] Beecher with a charge of heresy.
7. According to Theodore Parker, Lyman Beecher was the father of more brains than any man in America.... Eleven of his thirteen children survived him. All seven sons entered the ministry, and most of them were distinguished.
8. Henry ward, the seventh living child out of eight was born on June 24, 1813.
9. Henry lost his mother at the age of 3.
10. When he died, Henry had a library of ten thousand well and carefully selected volumes.
11. From the time when his soul was lifted up by these two great truths, God's nature as manifested by Jesus the Christ to love man in his sins for the sake of helping him out of them and the sustaining Christ ever present with individual man ('a real presence' of perennial spiritual influence), he sprang to his works, says John R, Howard, with an ardor that was unquenched to the end of his life.
12. [Henry Beecher] said, "I feel dissatisfied with that whole realm of theology, which I know call the machinery of all religion...I came to feel that it stood in the way of sinful men... If you want to know why I have been so fierce against theology, that is it; because I thought which Mary, and I said time and again, "They [theologians] have taken away my Lord, ad I know not where they have laid him."
13. Henry Beecher (asked in his sermons more) "What is your life?" than "What do you believe?".
14. On November 10, 1879, The New York Times quoted him as saying, "If I thought God stood at the door where men go out of life ready to send them down to eternal punishment, my soul would cry out: 'Let there be no God!' My instinct would say, 'Annihilate him!'"
15. Fundamental doctrines he defined as those which are necessary for the conviction of sin, for conversion from sin, for development of faith, for dominant love of the Lord Jesus Christ, and for the building up of a Christlike character.
16. In Beecher's ministry there is plainly apparent a movement away from Calvinism, a growing distaste for creeds, an increasing dislike for 'theology,' an evident weariness with theological disputes, a breaking down of denominational barriers, a hospitality to new currents of thoughts (such as evolutionism), in general greater breath and catholicity.
17. There was, in brief, the beginning of a transition from Calvinism to a theology of evolutionism, from overemphasis on divine transcendence to overemphasis on divine immanence, from a theology interested too predominantly in God to a theology interested too predominantly in man, from an extreme view of total depravity to a delusive trust in man's inherent goodness.
18. [As a result of his influence] increasing numbers of men were convinced that Calvinism obscured or falsified the character of God as revealed in Jesus Christ.
19. Lyman Beecher mitigated the austerity of Calvin's God; Henry Ward Beecher and his brothers and sisters transformed Him into a God of love and service...They paved the way for their successors of today to develop their God of love and service into the ideal, which shall spread the dominion of justice and brotherhood until there shall be developed a Heaven on earth.
20 "The redeeming trait in Henry Ward Beecher's theology," commented Dr. Philip Schaff, "the crowning excellence of his character, the inspiration of his best words and deeds, was his simple childlike faith and burning love of Christ, whom he adored as the eternal Son of God, the friend of the poor, and the Savior of all men."
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