t useless post, so he went on
from Sunday to Sunday, comforting himself with the reflection that no
one could think more meanly of his ministrations than he did himself. "I
am like Moses only in not being eloquent," he said, in his simplicity.
"My preaching is barren and dull, my voice is hard and harsh; but then
the Lord is a Sovereign, and may work through me. He fed Elijah once
through a raven, and he may feed some poor wandering soul through me."

The only mistake made by the good man was that of supposing that the
elaboration of theology was preaching the gospel. The gospel he was
preaching constantly, by his pure, unworldly living, by his visitations
to homes of poverty and sorrow, by his searching out of the lowly
African slaves, his teaching of those whom no one else in those days had
thought of teaching, and by the grand humanity, outrunning his age, in
which he protested against the then admitted system of slavery and the
slave-trade. But when, rising in the pulpit, he followed trains of
thought suited only to the desk of the theological lecture-room, he did
it blindly, following that law of self-development by which minds of a
certain amount of fervor _must_ utter what is in them, whether men will
hear or whether they will forbear.

But the place where our Doctor was happiest was his study. There he
explored, and wandered, and read, and thought, and lived a life as
wholly ideal and intellectual as heart could conceive.

And could _Love_ enter a reverend doctor's study, and find his way into
a heart empty and swept of all those shreds of poetry and romance in
which he usually finds the material of his incantations?

Even so;--but he came so thoughtfully, so reverently, with so wise
and cautious a footfall, that the good Doctor never even raised his
spectacles to see who was there. The first that he knew, poor man,
he was breathing an air of strange and subtile sweetness,--from what
paradise he never stopped his studies to inquire. He was like a great,
rugged elm, with all its lacings and archings of boughs and twigs, which
has stood cold and frozen against the metallic blue of winter sky,
forgetful of leaves, and patient in its bareness, calmly content in its
naked strength and crystalline definiteness of outline. But in April
there is a rising and stirring within the grand old monster,--a
whispering of knotted buds, a mounting of sap coursing ethereally from
bough to bough with a warm and gentle life; and