From Lyman Beecher's High Pulpit

"We boast of our liberties.... But our foundations rest on the heaving sides of a burning mountain, through which, in thousands of places, the fire has burst out, and is blazing around us. If they cannot be extinguished, we are undone. Our sun is fast setting, and darkness of an endless night is closing in upon us.”

-Lyman Beecher

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Lyman Beecher forecast doom from a high pulpit similar to this one in a similar building just across the street on the Litchfield Green. It was the 1820s, the church had been disestablished, and the Second Great Awakening was peaking in Litchfield and elsewhere. The cause of impending peril in Beecher’s sermon was intemperance; the abstinence he preached was absolute.  

Beecher’s sermons were popular, Litchfield was a cultural center, and by the time he left Litchfield in 1826, the flock of the Church had swelled so much that they needed a new building. Lyman Beecher went to Boston where his "Six Sermons against Intemperance" were published and brought him fame, and the current church was built with a pulpit similar to and as high as Lyman Beecher’s. 

Beecher’s first three sermons describe “The Nature and Occasions of...” “The Signs of…” and finally “The Evils of Intemperance.” He concludes with three sermons of remedy. In summing up the evils Beecher blamed “an aristocracy of bad influence,” but the doom he feared was:

“The great body of the laboring classes of the community, the bones and sinews of the nation will be contaminated; and when this is accomplished the right of suffrage becomes the engine of self-destruction. For the laboring classes constitute and immense majority, and when these are perverted by intemperence, ambition needs no better implement with which to dig the grave of our liberties, and entomb our glory.”

The restored high altar which exists today is named in his honor. Throughout his life Lyman Beecher also preached against Catholics, Unitarians, and slavery, and he promoted missionary activities throughout the world. He raised a large family of important children, loved fishing and played the violin.