ers do; and the evidence seems to be rather against
it, does it not?

As ever, yours,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

In connection with this letter, and with his own frank but moderate
estimate of his gift as a preacher, it is interesting to read the
following extract from a paper in his memory, read before the annual
meeting of the American Unitarian Association by Rev. Dr. Briggs, May
30, 1882:

"I remember well the way in which he seemed to me to be a power in the
pulpit. He was the first man who made the pulpit seem to me as a throne.
When he stood in it, I recognized him as king. I remember how eager I
was to walk in from the Theological School at Cambridge to hear him when
there was an opportunity to do so in any of the pulpits of Boston. I
remember walking with my classmate, Nathaniel Hall,--when the matter
of the expense of a passage was of great concern to me,--to Providence,
where Mr. Dewey was to preach at the installation of Dr. Hall. My
Brother Hall was not drawn there simply for the sake of his brother's
installation, I, not from the fact that Providence was the home of my
boyhood; but both of us, more than by anything else, by our eager desire
to hear this preacher where he might give us a manifestation of his
power. And, as he spoke from the text, I have preached righteousness in
the great congregation,' we felt that we were well repaid for all our
efforts to come and listen to him.

"I have heard of some one who heard him preach from the text on dividing
the sheep from the goats, and as he came away, he said, I felt as if I
were standing before [209] the judgment-seat.' I remember hearing him
preach from the text, Thou art the man,' and I felt that that word was
addressed to me as directly as it was by the prophet to the king. His
was a power scarcely known to the men of this later generation.

"It would be difficult, I think, to analyze his character and mind, and
to say just in what his power consisted. He did not have the reasoning
power that distinguished Dr. Walker; he did not have the poetic gift
that gave such a charm to the sermons of Ephraim Peabody; he did not
have that peculiarity of speech which made the sermons of Dr. Putnam so
effective upon the congregation, and yet he was the peer of any one of
them. It was, I think, because the truth had possession of his whole
being when he spoke. It was because he always had a high ideal of the
pulpit, and was striving to come up to it, and because he went t