Asbury University. The anecdotes of his pulpit and platform triumphs would make a volume in the annals of sacred oratory. Wherever he appeared crowds gathered about him, and he would preach with such wondrous influence that it was not uncommon for the great multitudes to be wrought up to the highest pitch of ecstasy or anguish. His name became a household word throughout the State. He moved eastward to Ohio, and in Cincinnati, as well as in all the regions round about, the same remarkable effects followed. Called farther east, by his election to the episcopacy, and going up and down the Atlantic States from Maine to Maryland, whether he stood before the cold and philosophical New Englanders, the versatile descendants of the Knickerbockers of New York and New Jersey, the plain and quiet Friends of Pennsylvania, or the thoughtful and emotional Baltimoreans, it was all the same; every-where triumphs awaited him. All classes heard him gladly, and he was by common consent ranked with the first preachers of the nation. The rank then assigned him was never afterward disputed. Such success must have been based on solid merits. Many western meteors have flashed across the eastern horizon only as quickly to disappear in darkness; but this man, a star of the first magnitude, when he had once risen steadily, shone on in his place till the final setting in death. There may be, here and there, a few who never felt, and consequently never admitted, his transcendent power, but they must be regarded as exceptions to the rule. As common sense is the best sense, so the common judgment of mankind is the best test of excellence in preaching.

In attempting to account for Bishop Simpson's pre-eminence as a preacher, it must be considered, first of all, that he recognized preaching as the great business of his life. He was called of God to be a preacher long before he was called of the Church to be a Bishop. This call was, like his conversion, radical and abiding. It so possessed him that it left nothing in him unappropriated. Hence preaching could never be treated as secondary, or accessory to something else, much less as an accident of his vocation. It was the one thing of all others to be done with his might. This was the grand absorbent which drew in, dissolved, and assimilated all the resources of his affluent mind. God converted his soul and said to him, "Go,

tell it;" and he began to tell it, and he went on telling it. There was to him no fact, with its correlations, so important as this; not alone was it fresh when it first took place, but the freshest of all truths to his latest day; and to proclaim it was the necessity and joy begotten of its irresistible impulse. Though he grew in intelligence, station, fortune, and fame, he never grew away from his early conviction of the supreme dignity and importance of preaching. When, therefore, he stood before the people "to speak the words of this life," whether in the backwoods or the metropolis of the land, he did the best of which he was capable. His estimate of the pulpit he has himself indicated in the Yale lectures: "It seems to me that the possibilities connected with preaching have been only partially realized, and that a bright and more glorious day will dawn upon the Church." This thorough absorption not only led him to bring all his acquirements to the pulpit, but it impressed his audience with such a sense of his moral and professional earnestness as predisposed them to a favorable hearing.

This view of the work of preaching as the one grand engagement of his life led him uniformly to preach for the highest results. "If you would be eloquent," said the venerable Dr. Tyng, "preach always as if you were in a revival." Thus, by both a spiritual and artistic instinct, Bishop Simpson, brushing aside all trivialities, seized upon, as the staple of his discourses, the great fundamental truths of the Gospel. Such themes as sin, atonement, salvation, the harmony of natural and revealed law, the final triumph of Christianity, and kindred topics, were those he usually discussed with all his energy of mind and heart. This sort of selection as to his subjects guaranteed an order of discussion which could not fail to be worthy the attention of the most cultivated among his hearers. He never failed to impress an audience by the quality of his thought as well as by the sincerity of his purpose.

The subject-matter of his discourses owed much of its impressiveness to the mode of its expression. It might possibly be affirmed that no one can be an original thinker who has not imagination, for imagination is the faculty by which old truths are seen in new lights, by which relations between a well-understood order and an order not so well understood, or hitherto

not at all, are brought to view. It is the creative faculty that clothes dead things with life, and makes the tame and commonplace facts of existence fresh, realistic. This faculty Bishop Simpson possessed to a wondrous degree. Fancy, too, he had. He could describe a scene or a thing with great accuracy and with the delicate touches of a landscape painter. But his forte was original perceptions-that all-seeing imagination before whose blaze hidden things fall open as the quartz dissolves into its elements before the blow-pipe. The mind of the hearer likes this mode of putting thought. It excites wonder and secures assent; it entertains while it instructs. There was in all his sermons marks of a great intellect. The effect produced by them was not that which results merely from exciting the emotions, but rather that which comes of a thorough conviction of the understanding. Beginning with a statement of truths held in common by the natural and spiritual man, upon these as a foundation he builded the superstructure, carrying the judgment of the hearer with him in every step of the ascent until he reached the conclusion; a culmination in which not only the harmony of natural and revealed religion was seen, but the infinite superiority of the latter was triumphantly vindicated. Thus in every sermon, whether by design or instinct, there was unity, movement, cumulation. One leading idea gathered about it all subordinate ones, and grew by their contributions until it expanded into one magnificent whole of evangelical truth. And usually when this grand finale was reached his hearers were captured-the spiritual man rejoiced and the natural man assented.

And yet with all these qualities-his devout piety, honesty as a man, logical precision, affluence of imagination, and his single purpose to save men-the core of his preaching is not quite. touched, nor the hidden springs of his power detected. To understand what it was that gave his preaching its charm you must go back of its subject-matter, and its merely intellectual and religious character, to the genius of the man. He was by nature an orator. Heaven had endued him with the gift of thinking, feeling, and speaking eloquently. What this means who can define? If asked what is beauty, one may reply that it is unity in variety, fitness, the evolution of forces, etc., but none of these will fully answer; and yet we all feel beauty when

we see it in an object or a thought. It is alike difficult to tell what poetry is, though we say many things helpful to a correct understanding of it. So eloquence has never been satisfactorily explained. One man gets up before us with a physique as perfect as that of Apollo Belvidere, his head and face of classic mold, his voice attuned like that of an organ, his ideas original and grand, and his action faultless-and we feel his power, we are entranced as by the spell of a magician. We say this is eloquence. So it is. But another comes without a single feature in his bodily appearance to recommend him, and claims a hearing. He is under size, or tall and ungainly, his head defiant of the acknowledged rules of phrenology, his eye rather expressionless than otherwise, his voice squeaky or harsh, his ideas at first are commonplace and his action violates all grace, and yet, as the man speaks, he gradually gains your attention, disarms your prejudices, wins your favor, until he penetrates you as with a flame of fire, and you melt before him, or he sweeps you away as with a whirlwind, and, regardless of the question as to whether he is logical or graceful, you are borne down. Here, too, is eloquence; you feel it. Sharp as is the contrast between the two men, there is one thing in which they are the same. They possess the strange power of transfusing their hearers with their own personality, so that the hearers think and feel as they do. It is something a spark-which inheres in the original structure of the mind. It is born in a man, and not acquired.

Such was the endowment of Bishop Simpson. This spark lightened with its flame the whole man, soul and body. Every thing he did, he did eloquently. He thought, wrote, spoke, moved as an orator. In scanning the files of the "Western Christian Advocate" for the four years he was editor, one will find the same essential features in his editorials which all

along distinguished his spoken discourses. They are suffused with a warmth which puts the soul aglow with the vitality of the man who is behind the pen. In all his words, looks, and actions, whether he talked familiarly with a friend or two, or looked calmly upon an audience before rising to speak, or stooped to kiss a child or to grasp a brother's hand in passing, there was a gleam of the inward light. Men will say it was sympathy with mankind, earnestness, a losing of

himself in his subject and for others. All true; it was all this, and something besides. To Bishop Simpson's oratory may be felicitously applied the language which Mr. Curtis uses in his oration on Wendell Phillips: "Unconsciously and surely the ear and heart were charmed. How was it done? Ah, how did Mozart do it, how Raphael? The secret of the rose's sweetness, of the bird's ecstasy, of the sunset's glory—that is the secret of genius and of eloquence. Like an illuminating vase of odors, he glowed with concentrated and perfumed fire. The divine energy of his conviction utterly possessed him and his.

"Pure and eloquent blood

Spoke in his cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
That one might almost say his body thought.'"

Thousands who have listened to Bishop Simpson will recall many illustrations of this singular power. A leading educator of our Church heard him soon after his election to the episcopacy on his first visit to New England. The theme was "The Victory of Faith." He says: "I stood in the aisle of the church during the entire time, from one hour and a half to two hours, wholly insensible of the flight of time.” On another occasion, this gentleman himself had preached on Sunday morning at one of the Bishop's Conferences, the Bishop being unable to preach. After the ordination, the Bishop began to exhort, and in a few minutes the whole audience was convulsed with emotion; preachers and people laughed and wept as though beside themselves. Those who attended the reunion of the Ohio and Cincinnati Conferences at Chillicothe, O., during the war (1864, perhaps) will never forget the scene. Bishop Simpson had been addressing the joint bodies upon the issues before the country, and in his peroration he turned to the "Stars and Stripes" above him, and, taking hold of its folds, he burst into a thrilling apostrophe to the old flag. The effect was electrical; the ministers shouted, wept, stamped, embraced each other, and, it was afterward reported, some even rolled over on the floor. The scene was simply indescribable.

It was our privilege to hear Charles Sumner and Bishop Simpson in New York about the same week, during the exciting presidential campaign of 1864. Mr. Sumner spoke in