● ● ● its cost.”120 Again, in Henry Ward Beecher’s The Life of Jesus, the Christ, part one, published in 1872, she marked a passage which echoed her own conviction that the age of science could both receive light from and bring insight to the age of faith:
But far more important is it to observe the habits of thought, the whole mental attitude of the Apostolic age, and the change which has since come upon the world. Truths remain the same; but every age has its own style of thought. Although this difference is not so great as is the difference between one language and another, it is yet so great as to require restatement or, as it were translation. . . . If merely reading the text as it was originally delivered were enough, why should there be preachers? It is the business of preachers to re-adapt truth, from age to age, to men’s ever-renewing wants. . . . Has this world no lore of love, no stores of faith, no experience of joy unfolded from the original germs, which shall fit it to go back to the truths of the New Testament with a far larger understanding of their contents than they had who wrote them?121
After reading and marking Beecher’s book carefully up to page 53 she evidently decided that it was little to her purpose and merely skimmed it from that point on. From her reading at this period she drew confirmation, encouragement, useful illustrations, but nothing that modified or changed her own direct insights into the Bible.122 Every age has its own “style of thought,” Beecher wrote, and her necessity ● ● ●
120 [E. de Pressensé, The Early Years of Christianity, vol. 1, The Apostolic Era, trans. Annie Harwood (New York: Carlton and Lanahan, 1870), pp. 101, 109, B00165, MBEL.]
121 [Henry Ward Beecher, The Life of Jesus, the Christ, part 1, Earlier Scenes (New York: J. B. Ford, 1872), pp. 6–8, B00126, MBEL.]
122 This statement is based on a careful reading of the books she read and marked during this period. John S. C. Abbott’s History of Christianity, published in Boston in 1872, was not read by her at that time. An 1877 edition of this book, with an 1881 calendar sheet in it as a marker, was part of her later library and was the apparent source of some of her allusions to Christian history and tradition, e.g., her references to Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Luther, and Melancthon. But her interest, in these cases, was evidently in finding examples to illustrate or embellish a point she was making rather than in the author’s conventional Christian theme. [ John S. C. Abbott, The History of Christianity (Boston: B. B. Russell, 1877), B00100, MBEL.]