Two years ago, we celebrated the memory of that illustrious divine [Dr. Channing] whom we regard as our father in the faith. Today, we commemorate the disciple and brother by whose organizing genius that faith has been made to take to itself a body as compact as our unformulized theology and the right to differ, which we all claim, will allow.

He was our Bishop, our Metropolitan. The dignity is unknown by name in our communion: the office has no place in our acephalous, isocratic polity. But this once in our history, by this one man in our brotherhood, the function was exercised, and that by no robbery but by universal consent of the brethren. It was no rape of clerical ambition, but a lot which fell to him by native gift. He took possession of his see by supreme right of natural leadership and self-evident vocation — a see extending from the Bay of Fundy to the Golden Gate. An ecclesiastical Centurion, “set under authority,” he said to this man, “Go,” and he went; to another, “Come,” and he came. He ordered us hither and thither, and we surrendered ourselves to his ordering. One day, he summoned us to New York, and founded the National Conference of Unitarian Churches. Another day, he summoned us to Springfield, and established the Ministers' Institute. These organizations, which we trust will survive him and last as long as our communion shall maintain its specialty and continue a separate fold in universal Christendom, testify of his far-seeing sagacity as well as his far-reaching zeal. They are his monument, had he no other. They are his "epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men,” — “written not with ink, but with the spirit of the living God."

St. Paul, enumerating the trials and triumphs of his mission boasts that he was “in journeyings often.” Our Unitarian missionary, in journeys not less frequent, exceeded, if journeys be estimated according to their length, by many a meridian the apostolic mark. When Starr King died, he hastened to San Francisco, while as yet no rail had pierced the Rocky Mountains, comforted the orphaned diocese, with counsel and ordinance confirmed the church, and established a pastor in the vacant pulpit. This was one among many of the generous impromptus of his alert and enterprising spirit.

His qualifications for the office he assumed were, first of all, faith in the cause and fervent love of the cause he espoused. With the heart, and not with the understanding only, he believed in the liberal gospel of our Church. With the heart he desired to see it prevail and extend its beneficent influence in the land. He was not content to hold the beliefs he cherished as a private estate. The doctrine by which he had been enlightened and cheered and inspired he burned to impart to others for their enlightenment, encouragement, and inspiration. He believed in its final triumph, but not without adequate efforts devoted to that end. Those efforts, so far as he was concerned, should not be wanting.

To these moral incentives we must add a felicitous tact and extraordinary power of adaptation. He discerned two hostile forces at work: on the one hand, a headlong, radical spirit tending to Nihilism; on the other, a timid, conservative temper threatening arrest in the past and captivity to dogma and the letter. He set himself to mediate between the two. His own theological proclivities inclined to the conservative side, but his convictions were not very exigent. He could practice a tolerant frankness, which by conciliating dissent might limit the aphelion of denial, while it shamed stagnation and loosened the bands of custom.

He craved popularity, he needed it for the end he had at heart. And he was popular. Innocent of duplicity, by virtue of a never-failing suavity, he could be all things to all men, conciliating the self-willed, humoring the weak, noticing the obscure, acknowledging the claims of the eminent, paying tribute where it was due, and collecting it from all. Always the man he talked with deemed him his particular friend. There was no falsity in this and no hypocrisy: it was pure affability, the easy libation of a fluent nature and a brimming cup.

I note in this man the rare combination of the consecrated soul with the boon companion, the enthusiast with the man of the world. He was not one of those of whom it could be said, as Wordsworth said of Milton, “His soul was as a star, and dwelt apart.” He was not one of the bloodless hermit saints, who seem not to belong to this world, attached to it by only the slenderest thread of animality, whose soul

“Scarce touching where it lies,

But gazing back upon the skies,

Shines with a mournful light.”

He was no ghost, no lank ascetic, but an honest, wholesome son of earth, at home in the flesh, who without being in the least a sensualist, not living by bread alone, yet lived by bread in the widest sense, — a boon companion who enjoyed the feast and the jest, could give as well as take of that coin, was quick at repartee, met the worldling on his own ground, and charmed the table with the brightness of his wit. Yet he never unfrocked himself, nor pained his friends with any sense of incongruity between his discourse and his calling. As in Philip Neri, the jester was the foil of the priest.

Withal, as I said, a consecrated soul. If he shone as a man of the world in worldly converse, he had none the less his conversation in heaven. His supreme aim in life, embracing and subordinating all secondary aims, was in one or another way, by this or that ministry, to fix and extend the kingdom of heaven on the earth, everywhere rooting out evil and planting good. For this and in this he lived and moved and had his being. Time, money, and pen were at the service of every good cause. In what charity was he not active? In what philanthropic movement did he not lead? As champion and advocate of all the humanities, that great and populous city of his abode had no citizen more honored and called for, no voice more prompt and commanding. Remember that shining episode of his public life, the Sanitary Commission! Who of us, brother ministers, his survivors, can be named whose record contains a chapter like that, so replete with laborious, needful, beneficent service? Few who were not intimate with our brave brother can know what toil and cares, what runnings to and fro, what appeals to the indifferent, what wrestlings with officials, what liberal expenditure of private means that enterprise involved. And he was the soul of it all. It is not too much to say, that, although without him it would doubtless have originated, and in the bands of Olmsted and other willing and able coadjutors have done a good work, it could not without him have been the power and the success which it was. We learned from his example that the age of chivalry was not past, as Burke complained, when this new Hospitaller and Knight of St. John took the field in the cause of mercy. I visited not long since the cemetery at Arlington, where thousands upon thousands of the soldiers who fell in the war of the Rebellion are interred. As I wandered among those mostly nameless graves, I reflected that perhaps not one of that mighty host had perished without having experienced, directly or indirectly, some alleviation of his sufferings through the band of that great charity of which our brother was the head.

And all the while, through all the years of the war, he retained his cure of All‑Souls Church, preached in his pulpit, and fulfilled the duties of his pastorate.

I recall with wonder his indefatigable diligence, his amazing activity. The steam was always up in that fierce engine that was in the body of him, of which his life was the fuel. The driving-wheel was never still. Even in his dreams, I think he must have been at work. Minister of a cultivated, intelligent, and, as one might suppose, exacting congregation, he satisfied their demands with his preaching; and yet preaching was but a small part of his activity. Often, his sermons were written at one sitting. But haste was not apparent in them. The same sermons would have cost some of us whole days in the preparation. Then, he found time for other writing in many kinds and various interests, literary and practical, spiritual and temporal, and conducted a correspondence that might have taxed the ability of a statesman. He never neglected a letter due. Indeed, writing was as natural to him as breathing. It seemed as if the pen were a part of him, a supplementary organ which Nature, foreseeing his needs, had attached to his finger-joints, and which could be sheathed or unsheathed at will. At houses where I have visited with him in his vacations, he would sit up late after the rest of us had retired, and rise before we woke, to write. It was thus that he composed his history of the Union League Club.

You will say that with all this activity, with this excessive giving out, there could be no time to take in, no time for study and reflection. As to reflection, I cannot say. Long, deep, silent, patient brooding, I suppose, was not in his nature. But this I know, he was a diligent reader. Scarcely a book of special importance in the province of history, or popular philosophy, or even fiction, was uttered by the press but he somehow found time to acquaint himself with its contents.

The one talent denied him was that of repose. He could not do nothing; he could not lie by. Of leisure he had no experience, no relish, scarcely knew what it meant. His health breaks down from overwork and he goes abroad, undertakes a grand tour for its recovery. But the tour is turned to new toil. Half the night is spent in bringing to protocol the observations and events of the day. From the railway, from the saddle, from rounds of sight-seeing, straight to the ink-stand. The written sheets are sent home, are committed to the press; and when the journey is ended, behold! it is a book. I say this not by way of commendation, but of characterization. I do not think it is the way to get the full benefit of travel. It is not even the best way to see what we “went out for to sec.” What we inspect only to describe on the spot we do not see to much advantage: the impression escapes with the report. To see well, one must have no ulterior end, must be passive, must let one's self be acted upon by the thing seen, — must be one's self (so to speak) the Object, and the thing seen the Subject.

But such passivity was not in Bellows's make: he must see with the will, if at all. He could not be intellectually passive and active at the same time, except occasionally in the sense in which

                            “The passive master lent his hand

              To the vast soul that o'er him planned."

Occasionally. Here, I come to speak of a master-trait of our friend, a ground principle in his mental constitution, not to mention which would be a grave omission. I am at a loss by what term to express it. If I cared to be pedantic, I would say, in the Greek sense of the word, daemmonic. I will call it, in plain speech, an extraordinary capacity of pure inspiration. No one has really heard Bellows, no one really knew him, who has not heard him at his best on the platform. He was not always at his best, though never prosy. But when he was! We talk of extempore speech. In my experience there are two kinds: one that is good, but is not really extempore; and one that is extempore, and is not good. And there is another which is miraculous, — incomparably better than anything the speaker could have possibly compassed by careful preparation or conscious effort.

“Take no care how or what ye shall speak, for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak." One must be an exceptional nature for whom this shall be a safe rule. For ordinary mortals it is a very unsafe one. I have known but two preachers in whose case it was ap­proved; but two who could be effectively beside themselves, who could trust their good genius to bear them better and higher than their own wit; but two whose wings were di­vinely assured to them. One of these was the late Father Taylor, and the other was our Brother Bellows. With other men, their best things come to them by lonely mus­ing; his, in the torrent and storm of public speech. It was wondrous to listen to him in those exalted moments when fully possessed by his Daemon, —

              “Filled with fury, rapt, inspired.”

You could not report those flashes with anything like a reproduction or justification of their effect, any more than you could write the aurora or stereotype the lightning. It was not so much the words themselves which he uttered as the spirit which gleamed in them and through them that thrilled you.

Of the moral qualities of this hero of our homage I need not descant to you. It might be safely assumed, did we not otherwise know it from personal acquaintance with the man and his record, that such power as he exercised and the influence that went forth of him must have had their source in great virtues. But it needs no assumption. All who knew him can testify of a moral courage which quailed at nothing, which braved all risks and defied all consequences; a generosity which took no counsel of selfish prudence, and exceeded, as other, richer men would have reckoned, his pecuniary ability; a tender sympathy with distress, which affliction never appealed to in vain; a loyalty which made his friendship a prize; a kindliness of nature which made sunshine where he came.

Such was our brother in his life and work. We do not claim for him the vision of the seer; we do not claim for him the penetration of the great original thinker, nor the erudition of the deep‑read scholar, nor even the insight of the emancipated critic. What we do claim for him is a transcendent power of beneficent action. He has left no written word which, like that of Channing, has secured for itself a wide acceptance and a long future; none which will worthily represent him to posterity. But the spirit in which he wrought, is it not immortal? His work, shall it not survive in its fruits? The lesson of his life, shall it not abide with us, though his place in our ranks can know him no more? Will that place ever be filled again by one so brave and strong? The best that can be said of any man may surely be said of him, ‑ that he was one of those who passing through the valley of Baca make it a well." It is good to celebrate such. It is better, so far as our meaner gifts and feebler will may suffice, to follow them.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.