d the right kind even in
church reports and statistics, but they must bear some great likeness
to the words used in the Acts of the Apostles. I do not know how to
describe them, but every man knows them when he hears them, for the
language of Christianity is the one language that never changes. It
gets a new translation now and then, but it is always informed with the
same spirit, the same lofty pilgrim-phrases and prayer-sounding verbs.
And the minister learns them because he needs them in the world where
he moves.

I make an exception here of those preachers who develop a gift for
church enterprise, for getting up funds for "improvements" of one sort
and another. The account they give of their stewardship is not very
different from that of any other business man. And they are needed.
They do the greater part towards keeping the church housed,
conspicuously steepled and visible to the world that passes by. They
are the preachers in every Conference who are sent to "works" where a
new church or a new parsonage is needed. And some of them have heroic
records in collecting for these purposes. I would not take a single
dollar from the sum of their renown. But this is a memorial to
William, and he was not one of these. He was really an excellent
preacher, a devoted pastor, but he had more spiritual intuitions than
common sense about managing the practical details of the pastorate. I
recognized this deficiency in him as we went along together in the
itinerancy, and feeling that it was important for the Presiding Elder
to have a good opinion of him in every way, I must have perjured myself
to every one of them year by year, singing William's praises as a
business man when I knew he was as innocent of business as the angels
in Heaven. If he had been the kind of man I represented him to be, he
would have been a sort of hallelujah cross and crisscross between
Daniel Webster, John D. Rockefeller and St. Paul. And I remember the
genial patience with which the gray-headed elders used to listen to my
Williamanic paeans. But they could not have believed me, for he was
never sent to a place where visible mortar and stone work had to be
accomplished for the advancement of the church. And now, when it is
all over, when the violets are blooming so much at home above his dear
dust, I feel at last that I can afford to confess his beautiful
limitations.

After you are dead it doesn't matter if you were not successful in a
b