I knew Reverend Thomas K. Beecher intimately for a good many years. He came from Connecticut to Elmira in his early manhood, when he was a theological fledgling, to take charge of a Congregational church there whose chief financial support was Jervis Langdon, my to-be father-in-law, and he continued in that charge until he died, a few years ago, aged seventy-four. He was deeply versed in the sciences, and his pulpit eloquence fell but little short of that of his great brother, Henry Ward. His was a keen intellect, and he was brilliant in conversation, and always interesting—except when his topic was theology. He had no theology of his own, any more than has any other person; he had an abundance of it, but he got it all at second-hand. He would have been afraid to examine his subject with his own fine mind lest doubts should result, and unsettle him. He was a very frank, straightforward man, and he told me once, in the plainest terms, that when he came on from Connecticut to assume the pastorship of that Elmira church he was a strenuous and decided unbeliever. It astonished me. But he followed it with a statement which astonished me more; he said that with his bringing up he was aware that he could never be happy, or at peace, and free from terrors, until he should become a believer, and that he had accepted that pastorate without any pangs of conscience for the reason that he had made up his mind to compel himself to become a believer, let the cost be what it might. It seemed a strange thing to say, but he said it. He also said that within a twelvemonth or two he perfectly succeeded in his extraordinary enterprise, and that thenceforth he was as complete and as thorough a believer as any Christian that had ever lived. He was one of the best men I have ever known; also he was one of the best citizens I have ever known. To the end of his days he was looked up to in that town, by both sinner and saint, as a man whose judgment in matters concerning the welfare of the town was better and sounder than any one else’s, and whose purity and integrity were unassailable. He was beloved and revered by all the citizenship.