A Character Sketch
Personal appearance— Traits and characteristics— Work among poor
Home life
WHAT we are about to say of Dr. Gordon's personal
character may seem to those unacquainted with him suggestive of that method of chronicling men's lives which consists in suppressing or ignoring faults and in unduly magnifying virtues; but to those who ever shared his companionship it will seem an inadequate estimate of a personality superlative in its sweetness and saintliness. We cannot desist from applying to him what he once wrote of John Woolman, to whose " Journal " he so frequently acknowledged his indebtedness:
" We dare not indorse the verdict of one who has called him ' the man who, in all the centuries since the advent of Christ, lived nearest to the divine pattern.' It is impossible to give such solitary preeminence to any disciple of Christ. We have called him, above all whom we have known, a disciple of the Holy Ghost and the most worthy exemplar of 'the love of the Spirit.'" Qualities which we look upon in ourselves as attainments we think of here as natural and inevitable traits of one who wore so manifestly the white rose of a pure life.
In personal appearance he was of massive form and well proportioned. His hair had turned early from chestnut to silver. He seemed never to have had any long period of middle life. The transition from spring to fall, from youthfulness to the grayness and gravity of age, was direct. In meditation his face appeared to some a little severe; in relaxation none could be more gracious and genial. In his last years the light of heaven played about his features. This radiancy, which was but the symbol of the life within, was startling at times. On one occasion an Irish servant-girl opened the door for him at a house where he was calling, and on announcing him said that she had forgotten his name, but that he certainly had the face of an angel. This strange spiritual light was neither the silver shimmer of the hair nor the deep benignity of the far-shining pupil, nor the calm of the features. It seemed to be all these suffused with something else too subtle for description, something ethereal, rare, beatific.
In his daily walk he was beyond criticism. " He and his sermons are one," they were wont to say of John Tauler. It could be repeated here. " If Dr. Gordon should sin," said a Boston minister, " I should lose my faith in God." What others commit of the Scriptures to memory he committed to practice. " We now know what ' the life hid with Christ ' is," said his people of him. " It has been visibly exemplified before us."
Neither could sins of omission be well charged upon one whose whole life was spent in a round of ceaseless and selfdenying effort for others. " The man whose hands are full," he would say, " is generally found to be the one most efficient in the service of Christ. The strings of the viol must be taut in order that they may be fitted to make music. So our energies must be keyed to a pitch of activity to make us efficient Christians." His diligence was extraordinary.*
* His letters indicate this throughout. In the first of the three following extracts he refers to his labors on Monday, usually thought to be the minister's rest-day after the strain of the Sabbath
" I have just returned from my fifth service to-day. Ten o'clock at the
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Seven days each week were as full as continuous demands on his time could make them. He never refused to speak at a meeting or to act on a committee where it was possible for him to do so without conflict with other engagements. His door-bell, which he called " almost the greatest trial of my life," rang from morning till night, announcing applicants for advice or sympathy or pecuniary help. We get a suggestion of its diligent jingling in the following note, which describes his return from a summer vacation and the swarm of callers who waylaid him on his first appearance
" We reached Boston safely and speedily, and were home at 2 P.M. A royal welcome awaited us— all my clients and dependents having scented my coming from afar. Dr. A was at the house awaiting me to consult about the interests of China, and that great empire with a third of the human race was considered and its vast interests disposed of in twenty minutes. Then D came in to grapple with the affairs of the training-school and its more than a dozen applicants waiting to be attended to. While I was in consultation with him a young Scotchman came for help and counsel. Having spent his ' little all ' in search for employment, and being now penniless, he had heard of me, and had been anxiously looking for my arrival as the one ray of light in his dark prospect.
Congregational ministers' meeting, address on the Sunday question 3 P.M., Executive Committee meeting at Tremont Temple; 4 P.M., Bethel Board; 7:30, Standing Committee meeting at the church; 8:30, Sundayschool Union meeting at the church. Ought not one to get tired out and talked out.!* But I came home full of joy. Four came before us for baptism— and such conversions as I have rarely seen."
" I am wanted at two places this evening, both important, for ' no license' and for 'church extension.' Am on the fence as to which to choose."
"... Oh that I were three and could make for myself three tabernacles of usefulness— one for Boston, one for Raleigh, and one for the Missionary Union urging me to go to Pittsburg next week!"
While talking with him another edged his way into the parlor wearing that peculiar look of sanctimonious sheepishness which I can never certainly interpret whether the bearer waits to profess religion or to get married. In this case it was the latter, and the transaction awaits completion. It was nearly dark before I got through with these, and I had sat down for a hurried meditation on my Sunday's sermon when the bell rang, and I found a man panting for breath on the front steps, so exhausted that he could not get his wind sufficiently to articulate for some minutes. I recognized him as an old offender of twelve years' standing, but I did not on that ac-
count shut up my bowels of compassion against him. A tall,
lank, long-haired man with a bundle of documents under his arm was the next. He wanted me to assist in calling a great meeting to expose the iniquities of Freemasonry, and made my blood curdle by reciting the formula of initiation used in this order. Well, you see I had a royal greeting home."
His patience was, from a psychological point of view, marvelous. Such constant intrusions, such various and frequent interruptions, such unremitting labor, such continuous expenditure of vitality, would have kept most men in a chronic condition of nervous irritability. Yet no one ever reported a single outbreak of petulance, a single expression of impatience, in his whole career. His heart kept a "high, calm, spheric frame," undisturbed by the exasperating incidents which beset every one who has to deal largely with the helpless, the broken, and the weak. For it could be said of him, as Erasmus said of Sir Thomas More, that he was "patron-general to all poor devils." "Let scientific charity look after the worthy poor," he used often to say; " my mission is to the unworthy." And it must be said, in justice to him, that he had a fairly representative and numerous constituency of this class. He would laughingly speak of the two tramps, whom he overheard one evening when walking along a neighboring
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street, one of whom sententiously remarked, " It's wan eightytwo " (the number of Dr. Gordon's house); and again of a half-intoxicated wastrel who inquired of him while passing " where the institooshun on Brookhne Street " was, referring also to his home. Yet these personifications of poverty and sin who came to his lower porch for charity were treated with an unfailing courtesy and tenderness. " ' Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them,' " he was wont to say. " If you are temperate and prosperous and fortunate, you are called upon to share the sorrows of the drunkard's wife and the trial of the widow's poverty and the pain of the sick man's couch. As bound with them! ' I don't sign my name to any man's bond,' says a shrewd business man. In business that may be a right principle, but in religion we are called on to be bondsmen for any poor, suffering brother who asks it of us. If sickness has put a mortgage on his body, or poverty has fixed an attachment on his goods, the Bible tells us we must consent to be bound with him."
That he lived up to this high standard the day of his funeral attested. He doubtless knew many a face in the throng of poor that passed his coffin that morning, though they were strangers to all others. " Dr. Gordon's study," writes a wellknown pastor,* " was in the back of the church, in the second story, directly over the rear entrance. Wishing to see him one day, I shook and rattled the door. The window of the study slowly opened, his face appeared, and when I told him what I wanted, he took his key from his pocket and tossed it down with the words, ' Come up.' He lived above the rest of us, but was always ready to share the heights with any who wished, and tossed the key to his secrets to any who sought them. He always worked with door open for all who cared enough for him and his to seek, knock, and climb. A thousand might pass the silent study on the noisy street and give
* Rev. O. P. Gifford, D.D.
19° ADONIRAM JUDSON GORDON
no thought to him, but whenever a man wanted what he had, the want was met as soon as help was sought. No book in his library was too good to be loaned, no experience too deep to be shared, no hour too busy to be yielded to the life in need. With the upward look and the upper room he partook with the apostles of the baptism of the Spirit, and sought to make practical application of the truth to life."
His unwearied patience in committees, where contending opinions pulled and tugged like the four horses in Plato's fable, was often remarked. The most outrageous filibustering never ruffled his pellucid temper. The same evenness and control were conspicuous in his letters. Nothing could be more vexing than the assm-ance with which problems in eschatology, so easy to propound, so impossible to solve, were put before him by unknown correspondents in Iowa or in Texas, as if he were a new oracle holding in his breast the secrets of the age to come. These he would answer as best he could in his slow, cramped, peculiar handwriting. Sometimes, of course, such answers were necessarily concise. At one time he wrote a mere outline of his view, and added, in
closing, his regrets that he had then no time to amplify. He
received a reply some months later in which the writer remarked, " It is certainly fortunate for me that your time was so limited. I have already spent nine weeks in attempting to decipher the handwriting of your note, and am not nearly done yet!" His correspondence was extensive, and, like Molinos, he directed by this means the spiritual life of a widely distributed circle of Christians.
The same trait of patient considerateness was prominent in his estimate of others, especially of those with whom he dis-
agreed. "We believe we ought to contend earnestly for
the faith once delivered to the saints," he once said, " but in doing this we should seek to be like the saints once delivered to the faith. ^* He always aimed to keep experimental religion to
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the front and the conflicting theories of belief in the background. "Theology begets strife; salvation genders unity. The saints fight over doctrine; they weep together over sinners." In his utterances no man was ever more circumspect. His tongue was as completely subject to his will as ever Hebrew slave to Egyptian taskmaster. Exaggerations, harsh comments, misinterpretations, caricatures, distortions, rash or thoughtless statements, never fell from his lips. He never had, therefore, to retreat from the positions which his words had chosen and fortified.
Criticism and opposition he endured without recrimination.
"A Christian," he says, "should be a patient, undaunted,
undiscouraged torch-bearer for Christ. If a storm of abuse should chance to break upon him, he is to stand in statue-like indifference to it all, holding forth the Word of life. If blasts of ridicule dash him in the face, he is to take it as silently and as imperturbably as the bronze figure takes the tempest. It is the man who stands that moves the world." And again, "The opprobrium of truth identifies us with Christ in the tenderest and closest sense. It was not, surely, greediness for contempt which led Paul to glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. By it, he tells us, he was crucified unto the world, and the world unto him. That which cut him off from men joined him the more closely to the Lord; that which oppressed him from the human side liberated him toward the divine." Yet this meekness was " never to the abatement of firmness in maintaining principle. His uprightness was inflexible, and when need arose intrepid. The hand that could carry the grapes of Eshcol with a touch so delicate as not to disturb their bloom could, when occasion demanded, seize the sword of the Lord and hew Agag to pieces before him." * The unpopularity of a doctrine had nothing to do with his adhesion thereto. For him there was but one test
* Dr. Arthur T. Pierson, article in " Missionary Review," April, 1895. the will of Jesus Christ. His obedience to God was as unquestioning as that of the legionaries to Caesar. Much as he disliked controversy, the imminent probability of trouble never tempted him to curtail or conceal the least essential of his convictions. " Better the church militant battling for the truth than the church complaisant sun-endering the truth for the sake of peace. The Prince of Peace is a man of war. Let us be less afraid of contention for the truth than of communion with error."
In nothing, indeed, was he greater than in that rare grace, humility. "The way to see the divine light," says an old proverb, "is to put out thine own candle." Simeon Stylites was not more sensible of his unworthiness. Unlike him, however, Gordon never, by dwelling on his unworthiness, betrayed
a consciousness of this humility. He quietly implied it by
giving to others the precedence at all times. " Who of us is, after all, worthy, Mr. Roberts? " he once said to the superintendent of the Industrial Home, when interceding for some vagabond who had forfeited all claims on charity by his ingratitude and dishonesty. And at another time he writes "As to the absence of my kindred from church— well, I am sorry. How easy it is to backslide! I feel this myself, and wonder what I should be without the stimulus of helpful circumstances."
And again, writing from Northfield to his wife " How wonderful it all is that I, so little time ago washing wool and tending the cards in the place where you are, should be here in this mount of privilege, with such honor put upon me as teacher and co-laborer with the greatest and best! To
God be all the glory. How little could I have foreseen all
this! How little could I have brought it about!"
In a letter written to a friend in London soon after his return in '88, we find this striking sentence, " Redemption fi-om beginning to end is a problem in loss and gain, in which
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Strange paradox! — the magnitude of our gain is determined by the multitude of our losses. The highest bidder for the crown of glory is the lowliest bearer of the cross of self-denial." These maxims were adopted as a working program for his daily life. Self-renunciation became to him the primary law of conduct. In the larger and more noteworthy sacrifices of life this rule is often not so exacting as might at first appear. Signing checks for good causes, registering one's name in subscription lists, discommoding one's self for good friends— there are in all these hidden but recognizable compensations which return to us like those indemnifying benefits which politicians claim to find in indirect taxes. It is a joy to be the " servant of the servants of God." There is a perceptibly suffusing pleasure even in stripping off one's coat and handing it to the beggar, as St. Martin did, provided the act is noted by observing eyes. But the real, the crucial test comes in the little crucifixions, the unnoticed and apparently insignificant selfdenials. It is hard to be the servant of the ungrateful and the unworthy. It is hard to pay the direct, the summary assessments on one's convenience and leisure. To ride late in dreary cars that some little county conference may have the inspiration of your thought and the impulse of your words; to intervene in behalf of unpopular causes when, if your friends are not scandalized, they are at least silent; to resign the brief moment of rest at the fireside, putting on coat and hat and going out into the cold, that some man may have his bed or some woman her groceries— in short, to stand ready to be spent to the last fragment of personal comfort, to empty one's pockets of all the small change of unoccupied time, this indeed is the trial of one's unselfishness. It was in these ungrudging services that the rarer and more superlative excellences of Dr. (Gordon's character were most conspicuous. Bonhomie and kind-heartedness he had in no limited measure; but far beyond this was the high genius for self-abnegation.
As with Luther, love of music was one of his most striking characteristics. Though without a musician's training, he edited with peculiar discrimination two hymn-books, and wrote admirable and much-used tunes for fifteen or more hymns.
Hymnology was, indeed, his only diversion, a spring of refreshment and a means of relaxation after tension, as fiction is to most men. Matching in spare moments old hymns to new tunes, writing either hymns or tunes as the case required, humming into being new melodies as he went to sleep, singing the old ones with his family till all throats were hoarse and all lungs weary save his own— here was his unfailing resource. And so responsive was he to music that a few chords would often suffice to bring him downstairs to the side of the piano, as if an invisible, yet no less potent, spell were working.
His setting of the well-known words, " My Jesus, I Love Thee," is familiar wherever hymns are sung by men and women of the English tongue. It was sung by thousands in jerseys and bonnets on that sad day when the mother of the Salvation Army was laid away to rest. Many have been the interesting ncidents connected with it. On one occasion in New York, after some great meeting, he was met by a handsome and stately young woman who had been a singer of distinction in opera. Disillusioned of a career of excitement, .sick at heart of the pride of life, filled with yearning for she hardly knew what, she had sat down at the piano in the reception-room of the hotel where she was staying, and opening haphazard a hymnal which lay on the rack, had played the first number she turned to. It was " My Jesus, I Love Thee." She sang verse after verse. Before she had finished she had gone through the whole experience— tears, repentance, forgiveness, peace! For more than a year, now, she had given herself to humble mission work in the metropolis.
At another time, after he had spoken at a large meeting in a Canadian city, at which the provost of the town presided,
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this hymn was given out. It was sung with great power and fervor by the congregation. Happening to look at the chairman, he was surprised to see him giving way to emotions of uncontrollable grief. After the services were over he went with him to his home. In the quiet of his library he told Gordon how his only son had passed away some weeks before in his arms singing the same blessed hymn.
Like Luther, too, he was, above all, fond of children. None knew better than his own with what tenderness he could share their sorrows, with what almost vicarious willingness he hurried to take upon himself their difficulties and their trials.
A note to a little five-year-old nephew, printed in roman
letters and capitally illustrated, which lies before us is worthy to be placed alongside the great Reformer's singularly beautiful letter to his boy Hans. No one ever had a surer entrance into children's hearts. No one ever better knew what to say to them on all occasions. His addresses to the children of the church— so simple, so transparent, so charming— were the wonder of all. But those who knew him in his home relations understood the secret of their charm. It sprang from an acquaintance with child character which results only from long companionship and sympathy.
As a teller of marvelous tales he had few equals. What multiplex incident! What extraordinary involutions! What unexpected denouements! His art was that of the magician who draws yard upon yard of ribbon from his mouth. For these stories were nigh endless, and ran night after night, like the plays in Chinese theaters. That of " Guggles "—the name is sufficiently suggestive of its droll character— was perhaps his masterpiece. His elaborate improvisations on themes drawn from Grimm ran a close second. Never was he happier than in the nursery with a lapful of babies hypnotized by his thrilling incidents and vivid descriptions. "Tell Theodora how constantly I think of her, and that I am getting some five-story stories to tell her at bedtime when I get home," he writes from Canada in the midst of an arduous missionary campaign.
His drawings, too, were always in great requisition. With that irresistible power of enchantment which seemed to dwell in the stub of his pencil he summoned them forth from the paper—rows of sleepy listeners in church, files of bald-pated deacons, groups of fantastic faces suggestive, in their physiognomic eccentricities, of the innumerable oddities who turned up weekly at his home with bizarre theories and quaint explanations of prophecy. I have since thought, in calling to mind these sketches, that while he sat patiently drawing for a group of interested heads about him, he was all the time enjoying a mild revenge in these caricatures, and that inwardly there was much quiet satisfaction over the distorted noses and undisciplined hair.
One of his specialties in the pictorial line had to do with the escapades and activities of a little brownie folk made of straight lines and minute capital circles. The battles of these linear people, their winter sports and summer rambles, their household mishaps, their ludicrous employments, constituted a perpetual vaudeville of nonsense for children and grandchildren.
Furthermore, he possessed— oh, rare delight of youngsters! — an almost Helvetic skill in wood-carving. To recount the various amusing and play-provoking things which his deft fingers whittled out would be to give an inventory of the contents of a well-stocked toy-shop. Miniature farming tools, houses, barns, churches, animals, were released one by one from the enveloping thraldom of a pine block by his emancipating penknife, as Ariel was released from the riven oak. Besides this, he would make watering-carts out of tomato cans mounted on wheels, transparencies for campaign purposes out of old soap-boxes, and "keroogians," an invention of his own—
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bits of glass of various lengths strung on strings, and arranged in the order of the notes of the scale— on which he would play long " kinder symphonies," to the infinite amusement of litde folks.
This ingenuity was apparent even in the discipline of children. Who ever used his gift of imagination more cleverly in the unwelcome task of getting an appetiteless three-yearold to eat? This is how he managed. Froebel himself could not have done better
" Theodora is well and happy. She does not eat any better than ever, but Elsie and I manage that. To-day the milkcup was a steam fire-engine and her mouth the tenement where the conflagration was raging. I rang the table-bell violently, and as the engine rushed down the street she allowed the fire to be put out to the extent of a cupful of milk poured in."
A letter or two will illustrate these traits. In the first the Congo Mission and his last baby occupy him alternately. In the last his children in New Hampton are sent some timely advice.
" My constant thought has been of you, mother and child, ladora * and Theodora. Everybody I met, whether from the far West or frozen North, congratulated me and inquired for you both. I have really hardly waked up to the event that has taken place in our home as viewed by the great public, and wonder now that I have been so reserved and so selfcontained. I knew, or thought I knew, that we had a wellspring of joy in our house, but how far the streams thereof had flowed to make glad the great Baptist constituency, I had not taken in till, by the warm grasp of the hand from scores at every station crowding round to do us honor, I was made fully aware of it. All seemed to have known it whom I met on the train— that is, that another olive plant had sprouted about my table— and even the hackmen, as I stepped out from the cars at various points along the line, nudged and
* " I adore her," of course.
igS ADONIRAM JUDSON GORDON
winked at each other, whispering I know not what except, ' That is the proud parson.'...
" Theodora still continues to be the brightest star in the Milky Way. Give the little dairymaid my best wishes for success in her earliest occupation.... Mr. H 's son came in for a little time in the evening, and sat, with cigar in hand, and sometimes in mouth, talking of the virtues of his dead father and of his prospective departure for the beach to spend the summer. And I thought of that good father's profound interest in the Congo Mission, and wondered why he did not leave his fortune to that work instead of endowing one solitary son to smoke and saunter at summer resorts. I hope our children may be endued, but not endowed, especially Theodora now pasturing in the land of milk and honey. May she get strength and sustenance therefrom to bless the world. I believe your own temperate living and temperance lecturing will bear rich fruit in children and children's children. May it prove so especially with Theodora. May she be a living stone polished after the simihtude of a palace. On the cars the prospects of the Congo Mission were much talked of by all whom I met. Generally the voice was favorable and the sentiments strong. I am in for it, and am bound to organize a new society to carry it on unless justice is done it. With myself for president, and you for collector, and Arthur and Helen for home and foreign secretaries, we could do it. Haley, Ernest, Elsie, and Theodora will of course be on the executive committee. The last, I am sure, under the tuition of her present appetite, would be ready to vote for large supplies. I sincerely trust that the little maiden may be delivered from colic, and that the winds in her little cave of ^olus may be laid and kept at rest. I speak, of course, paregorically. Now may the God of peace be with you all, protecting, keeping, guarding you. May he cause all grace to abound in you always."
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" Dear Children: How I envy you the joy of being together in that lovely retreat. Now I send you my list of
cautions and instructions. They are as follows
" I. Give ample time for prayers each morning. Examinations are over, and there need be no hurrying off now. Sing a hymn and take turns in leading.
" 2. Do not rush too rapidly into farm work, but begin very slowly till you get inured to it, and look out for sunstroke.
" 3. Have a good solid three hours of reading aloud. " 4. Don't run any risk in going into the river. Go together if at all, and watch over each other,
" 5. Look out for the horse. "Ide rov t-nnov. Go slow with him till you find out his temper.
" Pray for us that the Word of the Lord may abound through us."
It was in his boyhood home that the geniality of his disposition came out most clearly. Relieved for a few weeks from the innumerable cares of pastoral life in the city, his spirits took on fresh sparkle and animation in the quiet and tender air of the New Hampshire country. With what enthusiasm did he enter into the simple rustic joys! What delight did he take in rambling over the rough pastures with his children for blueberries, in organizing excursions to far-away hilltops and to distant lakes, in riding homeward at dusk singing the evening hymns of Lyte and Keble, while the glow was still living in the west and the whippoorwills were beginning their chant in the hollows! In later life these intervals of rest and recreation steadily narrowed as the calls for service became more frequent and more urgent. Summer conventions broke into small fragments the short furloughs, while an enormous correspondence, the ceaseless rolls of printers' proof, and the continuous intrusion of the outer world gave to what was left the uneasy hurried character of a half-holiday. Yet, brief as they were, these 2O0 ADONIRAM JUDSON CORDON'
days were the regenerating tonic which, in anticipation, in retrospect, and in immediate enjoyment, strengthened him to accomplish the tasks of thirty years.
" The happiest and most exalted moments I have ever known in this life," he writes, " are those when I stand on some high outlook of my New Hampshire home, and gaze off upon the blue hills in the distance, and see those hills rising range upon range, as though they were the very portals of Beulah land. There is something indescribable in these mountain-top experiences, and they never fail to lift me out of myself and bring me nearer to God. I shall see the King in his beauty, and the land of far distances. ... I have just revisited many scenes of my early walks in this so familiar place. I remember a tree where I used to go as a boy to pray. Only the stump of it remains; but I could call it to witness, while kneeling there, that God had done exceeding abundantly above all that I thought or asked. What a change! Who could have dreamed it!"
In New Hampton the abstracted look disappeared, the tense determination of spirit relaxed. The mental pictures clustering about him here are so different from those of the city life as almost to suggest a double personality. One remembers him reading, with rich intonation, " High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire " to his sick child, while the butterflies came in the windows and the leaves rippled in the breeze; or standing, watch in hand, in the perspective of the long bridge over the Pemigewasset, timing his little sons as they raced to the other side after their evening's bath in the river. In later years we see him climbing a hill path, a St. Christopher of the mountainside, with his eldest grandson astride his shoulders and grasping that transiigured forehead; or, again, driving a rackful of city children to the village, complacently silent amid the clatter of tongues and the shrill singing of gospel hymns.
The coming of these children to New Hampton was during
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many years a feature of his vacations. He was not content to enjoy in selfish meditation, far from the sorrow and poverty behind him, the sweet influences of the summer hills, the quiet companionship of nature. There were white faces and puny frames which needed the regenerating touch of mountain air. There were tired mothers to whom a change of surroundings and work would mean a renewed lease of Hfe. How could he leave such in the straitened warrens of the city while he himself was drinking in the air of enlarged landscapes and of distant vistas? So for a dozen years or more he had with him, in an unoccupied farm-house not far from his own home, from fifteen to twenty-five poor children. And as to expense? Well, this was how it was met. From his own purse he contributed much; friends in the home church helped further; but for their immediate support vegetables, supplies, and cooked food were sent in by farmers from the neighboring districts in response to the requests which he always made from the pulpit of the village church. " I have ministered unto you in spiritual things," he would say; " minister ye to the temporal necessities of these little ones." And so even the vacations were unreservedly given over to good works. The local church received a vitalizing impulse on Sundays from one deep taught in the Word and ever ready to communicate, and the impulse realized itself practically in a tender and helpful charity. What a delight these children were to him! What a fatherly interest he took in them all! On one occasion, when a little girl was sent up unexpectedly, and no place could be found for her to sleep, he went to work with hammer and saw and scantling and built a bed for her, hardly finishing it before night arrived. The last summer of his life was unusually successful in this direction. In a letter to his wife he writes
" To-day there was a lawn picnic for the children on the farm. Many of the townspeople turned out, and the children appeared beautifully. The kindness of the people has been
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superabundant; more than could be eaten has been supplied. I thanked them publicly. The Dana Meeting-house people feel defrauded that they have had so little hand in the business. I promised them a chance next year."
And again " I felt this afternoon that a sight of the joy of the children on the farm, as they ran to meet me, was more than a compensation for all the trouble they have made you and the rest. It is an unspeakable treat to them, and they are already mourning the shortness of the time remaining for their stay. They are going down this evening to sing to blind Uncle Isaac. They execute ' I have a song I love to sing ' with real power."
The tenderness which exhibited itself in his relations to children extended even to the weakest animals. All things both great and small shared his kindness. Many a manumitted mouse has doubtless wondered at the good fortune which befell him on being caught in the trap of which a large man with silver hair and a kind face was the owner; for it invariably meant freedom. In an affluent home on Commonwealth Avenue there lives even now a well-fed cat bearing the name " Adoniram," who perhaps recalls that wild snowy night when a hospitable door was unaccountably opened for him by the same man with the same kind face. And to one friend at least a verse in an early chapter of Matthew recurred as he saw the same man hunting, with a palpitating, unfeathered sparrow in his closed palm, for the nest of horsehair whence the birdling had dropped.