pledge is gone, that an avenue of benediction has been closed, and that the world is darker than it was? And is the feeling of such loss ever deeper, or stronger than when a holy and a sanctified old age, around which gathered the gentlest ministries of earth, and the most precious ones of heaven, and which glowed in the high place where God had set it with the calm, mild glory of the evening star, has been taken away from us, transformed, though our eyes can not behold it, into the freshness of eternal youth?

My Brethren, it is with this feeling of vacancy, and loss, and bereavement pressing on my heart that I come to you to-day, to speak of our dear and honored Bishop and Father whom God has taken from us. I utter no idle word of ordinary custom when I say, that it entails a task from which, for reasons which you know without their statement, I shrink. Not least among these reasons is the feeling that it almost seems presumptuous to add one word to those so fitly spoken, so leaving nothing to be said or even wished, when the mourning multitude that gathered round our departed Father's bier, made an Abel-mizraim indeed, of this House of God. Still, duty has seemed to demand this service at my hands, and I have tried to nerve myself for its discharge. And here, surely, is where any such words should be spoken; here, where he once held pastoral charge;[B] here, where he came with the faithful to worship God; here, where all that remained on earth was brought, when life was ended. May God be with us all, that our communing here, may be for good!

I will not weary and chill you, Brethren, with those ordinary biographical details with the chief of which you are already familiar, and which in another way and place will all be gathered and preserved. The thought that is uppermost in all our minds to-day, is that of the godly man whose serene old age has passed into the heavenly life; of the honored Prelate, oldest in consecration in all our now widely spread communion, who has laid down his earthly mitre, that he may receive "a beautiful crown from the Lord's hand."

His early life was full with the promise of the later; the youth was the fair pledge of the coming manhood. Two things, as it seems to me, stand out from these early years with a prominence that challenges attention. There was, first, the same gentle, thoughtful kindness, smoothing difficulties and restoring harmony and peace, that developed into so marked an element of the later character. He was known among his fellows, even then, as a peacemaker; and the very appellation which boyish affection, with the keen instinct that it often shows, bestowed upon him, marks the way in which this characteristic forced itself on the attention.

But there was, besides, that capacity for rapid and ready acquirement and adaptation, which we trace so clearly in after years. At the age of fifteen, when as yet he had received no other education than that afforded by a common country school, he took charge of a school himself, and as he says,—with characteristic modesty—"succeeded in securing the respect of his former schoolmates." Who can doubt that the same marked qualities, the same wonderful balance, that made his Episcopate all it was, worked the same result in this so difficult and so contracted field of duty? Who does not believe that he might have spoken of affection as well as of respect? Who does not see the foreshadowing of