WARD-BEECHER AND PLYMOUTH CHURCH.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4385, 9 April 1875, Page 3

WARD-BEECHER AND PLYMOUTH CHURCH.

(From the Aryus, March 29.) One good result will follow what Mr. Tilden, the newly-elected Governor of New York, calls "the unroofing of Plymouth Church;" and that is the divesting of Mr. Beecher and his friends of the enormous political power which they formerly exercised in the State. For ten years that church is described as having intruded itself into all the political questions of the hour. The two religious papers, edited by Messrs. Bowen and Tilton respectively, and controlled by the sovereign pontiff of Plymouth Church, who characterised the seats occupied by those two gentlemen as "the proudest • editorial chairs in the universe," enjoyed an immense influence, and many of the minor Republican journals took their tone from them ; while the utterances of Mr. Beecher from his pulpit could not have been more dogmatic if they had emanated from the Vatican itself. When he met his congregation at the Friday evening prayer meetings, reporters were present to note down his casual observations on the current topics of the day, and these were printed in the New York papers, and circulated far and wide, as if an oracle had spoken. The iVi'io York World asserts that " Ultramontanism never claimed much more for the Church of Rome than Plymouth Church impudently arrogated for itself. During these ten years and more there has scarcely been a question of politics or private or public law that Plymouth Church has not undertaken to dogmatically expound, either by praying or preaching, or lecturing or writing. It has meddled, and meddled superficially, with war, finance, diplomacy, agriculture, and everything else, with a sort of pinchbeck Papal infallibility. On Democrats and the Democratic party Plymouth Church has assumed to sit in supreme and absolute judgment since the latter had being, and we have been condemned as disloyal, immoral, and altogether violators of the Ten Commandments as interpreted by -Plymouth Church." Whatever'may be the upshot of the trial now pending in Brooltlyn, the belief in Mr. Beeeher's infallibility will have been dissipated by the vacillation and weakness of mind which he has exhibited in Iris correspondence with Messrs. Moulton and Tilton ; while the plaintiff in the case has shown himself to be thoroughly despicable and ferociously vindictive. Whether he win or lose, nothing that Theodore Tilton may hereafter subscribe his name to in a public print will command one-thousandth part of the attention which it would have commanded when Plymouth Church and its newspaper organs were .a power in the State.