In Pulpit and Parish

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ADDRESS Rev. Dr. E. P. PARKER, OF HARTFORD, CONN. It has been my privilege to live in an intimacy of both ministerial and personal fellowship with Dr. Burton for more than a quarter of a century. Nevertheless I find it difficult to describe him, nor does my heart-ache at his loss diminish the difficulty. He was a great, good, dear soul, but strange and mysterious. He was so large and manifold in his manhood, so unique in many respects, so rich in a diversity of gifts whose exercise was strangely limited here and there, so reticent and reserved concerning much that was fundamental in his personality, so abundant in resources lying back in the unexplorable interior of his nature, and so paradoxical at certain points of mind and character that any account of him given here must be inadequate. But we are not here for nice discriminations, least of all for that result of analysis which gives us for the real Caesar the ashes of Caesar's urn. Nearly twenty-eight years ago I first met him and was at once drawn to him as if magnetically. He had already made some stir in Hartford and many good people in the churches regarded him with suspicion and alarm as being an eccentric and heretical genius. It is true that he had changed since then, but chiefly in the way of growth and development. But what a change in the atmosphere of Hartford since he was classed by prominent church members with Theodore Parker ! and this change is in great measure due to that same Nathaniel J. Burton. More than manyhave suspected, his fragrance of character, his luminous life, and the breadth and wisdom of his teaching have operated to expand and ennoble the religious thought, and faith, and fellowship of our people. Dr. Burton's physical form in these latter years symbolized about as well as fle...