In August, 1847, Mr. Beecher received a call to Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, which had just been founded. He promptly accepted it. Breaking up his home in Indiana, he removed to Brooklyn, and was publicly installed pastor of Plymouth Church on the 11th of November, 1847. He at once "announced in Plymouth pulpit the same principles that he had in Indianapolis, namely, his determination to preach Christ among them not as an absolute system of doctrines, not as a bygone historical personage, but as the living Lord and God, and to bring all the ways and usages of society to the test of His standards. He announced to all whom it might concern, that he considered temperance and antislavery as a part of the Gospel of Christ, and should preach them to the people accordingly."
It is no part of my purpose to consider Mr. Beecher as a politician. I deal with him here not as the partisan of a political organization, but as a minister of the Gospel. In politics he has always been a Republican of the Radical type, but has generally inclined to a conservative construction of that creed.