espect and deep affection."
Without a doubt, ministers of all Protestant churches regarded him as
the foremost clergyman in the city.

In 1901 Mr. Nelson was elected to membership in the Clergy Club of
Cincinnati, an organization which is composed of many of the leading
Protestant ministers. On the occasion of the club's twenty-fifth
anniversary in 1919, Dr. Dwight M. Pratt, then of the Walnut Hills
Congregational Church, wrote a witty and apt characterization of each
member. The following is his superb sketch of Mr. Nelson:

NELSON: The Apollo of the Club, equally recognized as such
whether in ecclesiastical robes and millinery or in outing
negligee; the physical having its counterpart in athletic
qualities of mind and heart; a broad-minded, tolerant Churchman,
incapable of surrendering to the artificial in form and ceremony
or to the pretentious in self-constituted human authority, even
when sanctified by tradition and usage, and aware of its historic
affinities to Rome. Fundamentally spiritual in his conceptions of
the Church and of the Kingdom; quickly alert to elements in
religion that are born of the flesh and vitiated by human pride;
unsurpassed in the Club for his exalted conception of historic
Christianity and of the glory and prestige of a spirit-filled and
spirit-guided church, having a vision of church unity impossible
of realization under the assumption and the exclusiveness of
Episcopacy; a genial democrat in spite of aristocratic training
and environment; intimately acquainted with the trend and quality
of modern critical scholarship, and in sympathetic touch with the
social movements of the day, in the church and outside of it; too
thorough and vital, however, to make the mistake, more common in
his church than any other, of substituting social Christianity
for evangelistic, thus making the care, culture and comfort of
the outer man more important than his spiritual redemption; a
student of men and books; an observant traveller, a recent and
scholarly resident of the ancient metropolis of the world:[12] a
keen interpreter of the movements of history, ancient and modern;
endowed as a preacher with homiletic skill and the spiritual art
of making life seem large and the Kingdom of God the one supreme
reality for man; and all this in spite of the fact that he is far
from being Puritan; never showing the marks of an ascetic nor any
tendency or inc