When the so-called "spiritual manifestations," through mediums and séances, were a novelty in this community, several of his friends engaged very earnestly in efforts to win his interest and attention to them. One friend, as he told me, even assured him that he would doubtless make a most effective medium himself, and was bound to use his latent capacities of that sort for the benefit of his fellow-men. Others could not but feel that he was rather an unpromising subject for any thing of the kind. But he found amusement in the reports brought and in the importunity engaged to enlist him. I went with him on three occasions to such séances, in no more hopeful a mood than he was. One could see, by a sort of roguish expectancy, but ill-disguised by the gravity of his brow, that he was looking rather to the fun of the thing than for any Pythian illumination. The manifestations," indeed, stood a poor chance when scanned by the eyes that were set in his forehead and by the thinking which went on behind it. The "spirits" made a marked failure of it on each occasion, and I must say that he rather enjoyed their discomfiture. Indeed, any delineation of the character of this most genial man would be defective that failed to recognize the deep and rich spirit of humor, almost of a boyish rollicking, that was in him. How radiant and delightful he was in his private confidences, and often in the social group! What a wonderful range and variety of expression could play over the features and motions of his countenance and mien! He was never subject to moodishness or depression. He had no melancholy retrospects, except as sadness tinged the vacancies that multiplied with his lengthening years. With all his thinkings and reasonings, he had studied himself into, and not out of, that strong and cheerful religious faith which is the best blessing of life as it passes, and the only welcome and sufficient solace at its close. The Chairman next called upon President ELIOT of Harvard College, whose relations to Dr. Walker for the last few years had been most intimate. He spoke of his exalted wisdom, his great administrative qualities as President of the College, and his interest in young men. Mr. Eliot was followed by Dr. PEABODY, who said, MR. PRESIDENT,It was not my happiness to be, at any time, officially associated with Dr. Walker; and I, therefore, shall speak of him solely as a preacher. The early portion of his ministry was a season of theological controversy, in which, though by nature and principle a lover of peace, he was com pelled to bear a part; and it was a bold, manly, and honorable part, in reasoning, not in invective, in logical and forceful statements of his own views, not in personal attack or rejoinder,and, especially, in the vigorous maintenance of the duty, even more than the right, of free inquiry, and the right of unmolested utterance and profession. Yet services of this sort were not his chosen work. His preaching was, for the most part, practical; not, however, in the sense in which that much abused word is frequently employed, to denote the exhibition of feeble commonplace and stale sentimentality, a hash of Poor Richard's Almanac, with a slight seasoning of Christianity. With him, practice was inseparable from belief and conviction; and practical preaching was that which drew its precepts and sanctions from the very bosom of God, from the absolute, immutable, and eternal right, and which addressed itself to the infallible conscience, the God in man. He thus probed the hearts of his hearers; instead of propounding maxims, he implanted principles, and laid the foundation for Christian morality in Christian piety. Trite truths were thus made by him intensely impressive, because his hearers had never before traced them to their source and followed them to their issues. It was his wont, not infrequently, to select for his subject some principle so obvious as to be doubted by none, and yet so familiar as to have lost its place in men's serious regard; to state it in a paradoxical form, thus drawing attention to it as to what had never been heard before; to vitalize it with all the energy of his profound thought and earnest feeling, and thus to deposit it as a moral force, thenceforth constant and efficient in the hearts and lives of his receptive hearers. Ethical preaching like his has been heard from no one else in his generation. Very many there are who have owed to him the sovereignty of law and right over their whole lives; and many have been his single discourses which have been rehearsed years and years afterward, as having created epochs in the moral history of their listeners. This pre-eminence he attained at a very early period in his ministry, and it remained his to its close. I well remember him, when, in my boyhood, he often exchanged pulpits with the minister of my native parish. There were then the simplicity of statement, the closely compacted argument, the profound solemnity of appeal, the forceful majesty of utterance, and the air of one who forgets not for a moment that he stands as an ambassador from God to man, which have been so deeply felt by those who have listened to him in later years. |