the word of truth.' May I be enabled to preach and to pray and to exhort, to comfort and to console with the spirit and feeling of my religion, and so may I be a living exemplification of the Universalism I believe, and in which I glory.” Was this desire of the earnest young neophyte fulfilled? Let the life-record of Elbridge Gerry Brooks stand in attestation.

In the last anniversary sermon which he lived to preach, forty-three years after the above entry that stands on the pages of that youthful journal, this battle-scarred warrior, almost ready to lay aside forever his well-worn armor, said:

Only one who has himself tried to be a faithful minister knows or can know what is the burden that rests all the time on such a minister's heart. But it is for me to say that after the apostolic model-' as ministers of the New Testament, not of the letter but of the spirit '—I have tried during all the years I have been a minister to shape my ministry. Fallible as I am, like all men I have doubtless fallen into mistakes. My one aim, however, has been to be to my people a leader, pastor, preacher, by trying first of all to be a man; then by always preaching Christ in spirit whatever I might preach in form; and then by preaching the truth given me never as a mere dogma, but always as a quickening power, summoning souls to penitence and faith in consecration to God and the discipleship of the Redeemer. Christ to me is no mere name, but a Divine fact essential to every soul, and I have tried as His minister so to preach Him in the pulpit and so to live Him in my walk and conversation."

It was the desire to consecrate himself thus utterly and entirely to the service of the great Captain of his Salvation that actuated his entire life-labors, from the crude expressions in the journal of the boy to the last utterance of the man. "The requisite for an entrance into the ministry," he says in 'Our New Departure," "should be a chivalrous sinking of self in consecration to Christ and the Church.

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Self

as a ruling force has no rightful place in the minister's life. To minister means to serve, and in the very act of becoming a minister, one at all conscious of what he is doing consecrates himself to service, abdicating all right to consider himself or his own ease or his own will.

Every

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ELBRIDGE GERRY BROOKS.

minister, so far as he is a true minister, merges himself in Christ and the Church, and the service to which he is pledged --as of old every knight lost his own will in that of the lady whose plume he bore. I am nothing –Christ and His cause are everything, is the feeling that becomes uppermost in every heart that has with any earnestness or sincerity dedicated itself to the minister's work. It is the heroic spirit that is demanded; and on this account every man fitted to be a minister is to this extent a hero."

Verily, the centuries are not so far removed from each other, and soldier, martyr, priest clasp hands in the one kindred heart-beat of self-abnegation, across the circles of the ages. Not stout Sir Richard Grenville, dying in calm serenity under the golden flag of his enemy; not Brébeuf the Jesuit, slowly scorching at the stake of the Iroquois, more concerned for his converts than for himself; not the patient, yearning, faithful pastor of these later days--are so greatly separated one from the other as each, with the love of his queen and his country, his mission and his order, his Master and his brother, strong above the pains of death or the petty but grinding annoyances of daily life, shines out upon the paths of men "a flowing light-fountain. of manhood and heroic nobleness, in whose radiance all souls feel that it is well with them."

CHAPTER III.

"Give us ministers of the right stamp-earnest, chivalric, full of love for Christ and the truth, and all else will come right."—Our New Departure.

Overrunning the old Servian

IT is summer in Rome. wall and teeming with busy millions, the giant city sits enthroned upon her seven hills-the Empress of the World, robed in all the glittering grandeur of seeming prosperity, far-reaching in power and might, but fast tottering to decline and decay. All is life and hurry as the hum of traffic and the noise of moving multitudes fill the air. Here with measured tread, eagles fluttering and trumpets pealing, pass the real masters of Rome, a cohort of imperial legionaries, bronzed with the sun of distant Armenia or scarred with the battlemarks of Boadicean revolt in farthest Britain; there, clientguarded and slave-encircled, rolls the chariot of some wealthy noble who glances with arrogance upon the throngs that press his chariot-wheels or crowd the narrow way; yonder the Tiber, sparkling in the sunlight, flows onward to the sea; on every hand, in all the stately beauty of column, arch, and capital, rise the proud structures of the Imperial City, while its myriad roofs gleam and glisten under the brightness of an Italian sky. Withdrawn from all this outward beauty—alone, a prisoner, and condemned to die—in his gloomy cell in the dark caverns of the Mamertine Prison, sits a time-worn and venerable man, bent with the weight of years and exhausting labors, but with an eye clear and truthful, and with the old fire of his soul unsubdued. It is Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, condemned to death by the corrupt judges of a corrupter Cæsar. Chained and humiliated as a criminal, but wearing the regal dignity of a hero and the spiritual serenity of a saint, undaunted by the fear of death, secure in his sublime and manly trust, he waits with calmness the fatal day which shall close his earthly labors,

when the dark tragedy of the Ostian Way shall raise the hero to the martyr, the apostle to the saint. With a tenacity

of intellect that no torture can disturb, and a wealth of love for his brethren that separation and imprisonment cannot lessen, he endures heroically the rigors of persecution, while as he waits for death the dark and cavernous cell is for him bright with the same marvellous glory, the same "great light" that long years before "shone about him" and changed the unrelenting persecutor of Jerusalem into the stricken penitent of Damascus. And now as the flickering light shows in dim outline the scant appointments of the felon's cell, so soon to be transfigured to the pilgrim's shrine, read, as with firm and loving hand he traces his last words to Timothy, his well-beloved son: "I charge thee, therefore, before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom, Preach the Word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long-suffering and doctrine. Watch in all things; endure affliction ; do the work of an evangelist; make full proof of thy ministry.”

In the decade stretching from 1830 to 1840, the Universalist Church of America may be considered to have been in a condition of transition between the state of mere negation and that of positive assertion. The epic of "the sad-hearted stranger of Good Luck" had long been a thing of the past. De Benneville and Mayhew, Murray and Winchester, pioneers of Truth, breaking ground for the sowers who followed them, had passed to their higher glory; and Hosea Ballou and Walter Balfour, Edward Turner, and Sebastian Streeter and their contemporaries were in the vigor and strength of their manhood, planting deep and scattering wide those seeds for Christian life and work which, under the fostering care of their successors, have developed into that mighty tree toward whose grateful shade all Christendom is even now approaching.

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Of these seed-sowers, none occupied so advanced or commanding a position as Hosea Ballou, that grand old hero of our Church, whose memory as theologian, reformer, preacher, and man I will never fade from the hearts which cherish it, one of the few whose names never die, and the results of whose lives flow on a perpetual power of enlightenment and regeneration." Next to him possibly in power and influence stood Sebastian Streeter, of unstained and unimpeachable integrity—a man "full of the Holy Ghost, thoroughly permeated and vitalized with the unction and spiritual power of the truth he proclaimed." Both these revered Fathers-Ballou and Streeter-had during their ministry been settled over the society in Portsmouth, which was also one of the original parishes founded by Murray (November, 1773), and their precepts, teaching, and doctrine had grown into the lives and opinions of the advancing sect throughout eastern New England. The unanswerable logic of Ballou, 'simple as the talk of a child, strong as the tramp of a giant," as it has been aptly characterized, and the fervor, the piety, the affectionate sympathy and sterling good sense of Father Streeter had made of Oliver and Susan Brooks consistent and conscientious Universalists; and their son, coming under the same influences, and further strengthened by a careful home training, was thereby rooted and grounded in the faith of which he afterward became so devoted and earnest a minister. It is natural, therefore, that with his early training based upon the teachings of these patriarchs of our Church, a close observer of their words and work in later years, and thus brought constantly into intimate relations with them, he should have learned to esteem and respect them. He had, indeed, for them both a veneration amounting almost to reverence, and this warm affection tempered by the judicial fairness which he brought to the consideration of every matter or question, enabled him to make, after their lives on earth had closed, a careful and unbiassed analysis of their characters and influence. Concerning one of them he writes: Ballou, with nothing but the