lly, of confirmation,
it seems almost impossible, in connection with its constant
repetition, to avoid it."

He was silent a moment, and then said, "I do not think that it need be
so. The office indeed is the same. But every class is different; and
then--think what it is to them! It seems to me that that thought can
never cease to move one."

What a clear insight the answer gave to his own ministry. One turns
back to his first sermon, that evening when, with his fellow-student
in Virginia, he walked across the fields to the log-cabin where, not
yet in holy orders, he preached it, and where afterward he ministered
with such swiftly increasing power to a handful of negro servants.
"It was an utter failure," he said afterward. Yes, perhaps; but all
through the failure he struggled to give expression to that of which
his soul was full; and I do not doubt that even then they who heard
him somehow understood him. We pass from those first words to the
last,--those of which I spoke a moment ago,--the address to the
choir-boys at Newton,--was there ever such, an address to choir-boys
before? He knew little or nothing about the science of music, and with
characteristic candor he at once said so. But he passed quickly from
the music to those incomparable words of which the music was the mere
vehicle and vesture. He bade the lads to whom he spoke think of
those who, long ago and all the ages down, had sung that matchless
Psalter,--of the boys and men of other times, and what it had meant to
them. And then, as he looked into their fresh young faces and saw the
long vista of life stretching out before them, he bade them think of
that larger and fuller meaning which was to come into those Psalms of
David, when he,--was there some prophetic sense of how soon with him
the end would be?--when he and such as he had passed away,--what new
doors were to open, what deeper meanings were to be discerned, what
nobler opportunities were to dawn, as the years hastened swiftly on
toward their august and glorious consummation! How it all lifts us
up as we read it, and how like it was to that "one sermon" which he
forever preached!

And in saying so I do not forget what that was which some men said was
missing in it. His, they tell us--who hold some dry and formalized
statement of the truth so close to the eye that it obscures all larger
vision of it,--his, they tell us, was an "invertebrate theology." Of
what he was and spoke, such a criticism