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The Theological And Political Evolution Of Henry Ward Beecher, Tim Hutchinson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Henry Ward Beecher [1813-1887] "was the most influential minister in America and one of the leading molders of public .opinion of his day." A romantic, a progressive, an idealist, "Beecher was as much the embodiment of nineteenth century America as Walt Whitman..." He was one of the great orators of his time or any time. With his background firmly rooted in American Puritanism, it is ironic that he would be praised as a leader of liberal thought in America. Years after Beecher's death, Harry Emerson Fosdick would comment that whenever we preach freely to sympathetic audiences the social gospel..., we …