THE REV. MR BEECHER AS A MIMIC.

Evening Star, Issue 3655, 9 November 1874, Page 3

THE REV. MR BEECHER AS A MIMIC.

The other clay, says a New York paper, Beecher preached upon the difficulty of acquiring correct religious habits, and the comparative ease of maintaining them when once they have become second nature. “ Many look upon religion,” he said, l< as an insurance policy against final loss by fire.” He described that sort of religion so funnily that the congregation laughed outright. “ They go to church every Sunday,” he said, pulling his coat close around him, drawing his face down dolorously, and rolling up his eyes ; “ the hymns are doled out to them, a good, sound, dry sermon is preached to them, and the most elegant passage of all is their going out. They attend prayer nieetings, too—most dismal prayer meetings.” Here his lower jaw dropped, more of the whites of his eyes showed, and his hands were clasped before him. “Ihere are some comforting things in Greenwood, but none in one of those prayer meetings. They go through the exercise solemnly, and the brethren try to say something—they do say the same things that they have been saying twenty years. Then the services are cut mercilessly short, and they go gloomily home.” After describing true religion as something independent of forms and catechisms, Beecher illustrated the process of its practical acquirement. He held an invisible fiddle, fingering the strings with one hand, drawing the bow with the other, and adjusting the imaginary instrument under his chin, while he said “ Have you ever seen a boy trying to learn the fiddle 1. I don’t wonder that they call those strings catgut. I should siy that the spirits of all the dead old cats were in them. But when the boy masters it—” stopping short, lie commenced to fiddle gracefully, like a good violinist. Then he showed how a man learns to set typo, the desk furnishing the case from which he slowly and awkwardly carried the letters to a suppositious composing spelling out audibly s-h-a-d "'When the com gregation had stopped laughing, he | gave the rapid motions of the same | man after his trade had been learned, j “ I was taught elocution,” he said j “ although you might not think it. I was drilled in all its gestures.” He made the prescribed gestures, and struck the attitudes in rapid and awkward succession, and then did them

gracefully, in the style of a speaker to whom they had become habitual and unrestrained. “ When we try to be graceful,” he said, “ we can’t be. All those things come by long and persistent usage, and then without thought. In the country, where a bare board six inches wide is laid in the mud, a man will walk it Avithout effort and never step off.” Taking his place at one side of the platform, he walked easily in an exact line to the other side, with his hands in his pockets and his eyes wandering carelessly.- “ Now,” he went on, “put that board at a height of fifteen feet, and not one man in a dozen can walk the length of it without falling off.” Taking Ins position as before, he fixed his eyes in front of him as though on the elevated board, looked sea" d, and commenced the imaginary passage. Wavering and balancing, with bis arms extended, he with difficulty got half way across and then stumbled as though falling. The people la ughed out loud a t the elaborately perfect pantomime. The greatest hit, however, Avas the droll mimicry of a miser who resolves upon reform, and began by releasing a mortgage on a poor man’s farm. The counterfeit severity of the miser in demanding payment, the fright of the debtor, the blandness of the miser in presenting the cancelled document, and the joyous antics of the debtor’s wife and children, were all produced with the skill of a trained comedian. Finally, when Beecher, as the reformed miser, with a benevolent smile on his face, mounted his horse and rode off, bending his parted knees and swaying his body in exact imitation of a rider, and cutting behind with an imaginary whip, everybody laughed until the tears came.