words, there comes, I am sure, to your minds as there does to mine, the picture of that domestic life which for more than half a century brought to our departed Father, a happiness that rarely falls to the lot of man; that affection of wife and children which gladdened his manhood, and watched with such lavish wealth of tenderness over his declining years. We all saw it living in and lighting up the household, and meeting love with answering love; and I saw it as it watched the dying bed, and showered such constant ministries, that it seemed to almost anticipate on earth the reunion of those homes in heaven, where death and pain may never come, and where God wipes away all tears forever. But I may not dwell on this—enough, too much, perhaps, to touch it—and I return to other things.

The new companionships awoke old thoughts and convictions, not so much forgotten as laid aside under the pressure of instant and weighty duties. And now the thread was taken up once more, and the result of prayer and study was, that in 1813, in that ancient Church[C] where for some time he had been a worshipper, a Church with which are associated the dearest and most cherished memories of my own ministerial life, our Father was made in Holy Baptism "a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of Heaven." His confirmation followed at an interval of scarce a week; and then all his leisure time was given to the study of Theology. Three years later, he knelt to receive at the honored hands of Hobart, his warrant to serve in the lowest of the Holy Orders, and in the same year was advanced to the "good degree" of the Priesthood.

And now he has gained the condition of life to which God had so clearly called him; though of the field where labors, responsibilities and honors shall gather round him he can not even dream. His earliest ministerial labors were among scattered, feeble parishes in the neighborhood of his collegiate duties; and here—another instance it seems to me of providential ordering—he learned much that was to be of use in coming years.

For one year the venerable parish of Trinity Church, New York, was the scene of his pastoral work,—he thought, he has often told me, it was to be his resting place for life—and then he was transferred hither; and on the 27th day of October, 1819, a day long to be gratefully remembered in this Diocese, he was consecrated third Bishop of Connecticut, and the life work was reached at last.

Comparatively few can go back to that day now. To most of us it emerges dimly from the past as something we know about, only by the hearing of the ear. Our oldest living Prelates come no nearer to it than 1832. It long stood the bright spot that seemed to connect us with the earlier days. And now that its living light is gone, history claims the years down to a period so near us, that we are startled as we think of it.

The Church in this Diocese needed, then, the very man whom God in his gracious goodness sent to it. The Episcopate had been vacant six years from the death of the second Bishop. Not all the evils, indeed, that must accompany so long a vacancy were felt; for the provisional charge exercised by Bishop Hobart, whose services and sacrifices were gratefully acknowledged then, and are gratefully remembered now, had guarded the Diocese from as many evils as any such charge could. Still, the necessity was