championing the rights of wronged and depressed classes and races,
furnished him with but too many occasions for holy anger. His soul
often burned with intensest indignation. When one night the people in
Quitman, Georgia, burned over their heads the seminary for colored
girls, or when the Georgia Legislature was enacting the infamy of the
Glenn Bill, his heart was hot as any Babylonian furnace, aflame with
indignation, as though touched with the divine wrath, the anger of
love. And yet not for a moment could one detect in him any spark of
bitterness or malice.

But chilled now is that heart of flame; stilled now are the mighty
pulsations of that better than chivalric spirit, which up and down
the land, all over the East and the West, during those fourteen
years, did so much to _educate the churches_, and to remind the
country of the "kindness and love of God our Saviour, which hath
appeared toward man," and which ought with all possible celerity to
be manifested by men, by men of all races and of all classes, toward
one another, and to promote which this American Missionary
Association finds supremely its reason to be.

The Society has had, has, and will have, other men in its service of
splendid personal characteristics and having peculiar fitness for the
signally providential parts assigned them in this great work, which
ought to fire the heart of every Christian in the land. One we have,
thank God, still among us, equally loved and revered, who has long
stood at the front in this mighty and benignant enterprise--may the
day be slow in coming when his great heart shall be missed from these
yearly councils! And still we may be sure that the resources neither
of our humanity nor of the grace of God are in any danger of being
exhausted.