tion, which might be styled Beecherian, if
there were not a better word. This church is simply the most
characteristic thing of America. If we had a foreigner in charge to
whom we wished to reveal this country, we should like to push him in,
hand him over to one of the brethren who perform the arduous duty of
providing seats for visitors, and say to him:

"There, stranger, you have arrived; _this_ is the United
States. The New Testament, Plymouth Rock, and the Fourth of
July,--_this_ is what they have brought us to. What the next
issue will be, no one can tell; but this is about what we
are at present."

We cannot imagine what the brethren could have been thinking about
when they ordered the new bell that hangs in the tower of Plymouth
Church. It is the most superfluous article in the known world. The
New-Yorker who steps on board the Fulton ferry-boat about ten o'clock
on Sunday morning finds himself accompanied by a large crowd of people
who bear the visible stamp of strangers, who are going to Henry Ward
Beecher's church. You can pick them out with perfect certainty. You
see the fact in their countenances, in their dress, in their demeanor,
as well as hear it in words of eager expectation. They are the kind of
people who regard wearing-apparel somewhat in the light of its
utility, and are not crushed by their clothes. They are the sort of
people who take the "Tribune," and get up courses of lectures in the
country towns. From every quarter of Brooklyn, in street cars and on
foot, streams of people are converging toward the same place. Every
Sunday morning and evening, rain or shine, there is the same
concourse, the same crowd at the gates before they are open, and the
same long, laborious effort to get thirty-five hundred people into a
building that will seat but twenty-seven hundred. Besides the ten or
twelve members of the church who volunteer to assist in this labor,
there is employed a force of six policemen at the doors, to prevent
the multitude from choking all ingress. Seats are retained for their
proprietors until ten minutes before the time of beginning; after that
the strangers are admitted. Mr. Buckle, if he were with us still,
would be pleased to know that his doctrine of averages holds good in
this instance; since every Sunday about a churchful of persons come to
this church, so that not many who come fail to get in.

There is nothing of the ecclesiastical drawing-room in the