place among the noblest
and most exquisite of the intellectual and spiritual products of this
century. There are thousands of the best minds in this country that
owe whatever interest they have in religion [363] to Orville Dewey.
The majesty of his manner, the dramatic power of his action, the poetic
beauty of his illustrations, the logical clearness and fairness of his
reasoning, the depth and grasp of his hold on all the facts, human and
divine, material and spiritual, that belonged to the theme he treated,
gave him a surpassing power and splendor, and an equal persuasiveness as
a preacher. But what is most rare, his sermons, though they gained much
by delivery, lose little in reading, for those who never heard them.
They are admirably adapted to the pulpit, none more so; but just as
wonderfully suited to the library and to solitary perusal. I am not
extravagant or alone in this opinion. I know that so competent a critic
as James Martineau holds them in equal admiration.

"I shall make no excuse for dwelling so long upon Orville Dewey's genius
as a preacher. No plainer duty exists than to commend his example to
the study and imitation of our own preachers; and no exaltation that the
Church of the Messiah will ever attain can in any probability equal that
which will always be given to it as the seat of Dr. Dewey's thirteen
years' ministry in the city of New York. Of the tenderness, modesty,
truthfulness, devotion, and spotless purity of his life and character,
it is too soon to utter all that my heart and knowledge prompt me to
say. But, when expression shall finally be allowed to the testimony
which cannot very long be denied free utterance, it will fully appear
that only a man whose soul was haunted by God's spirit from early youth
to extreme old age could have produced the works that stand in his name.
The man is greater than his works."

[364]In the August following my father's death, an appropriate service
was held in his memory at the old Congregational Church in his native
village. It was the church of his childhood, from whose galleries he had
looked down with childish pity upon the sad-browed communicants; [see
p. 16] it was the church to which he had joined himself in the religious
fervor of his youth; from it he had been thrust out as a heretic, and
for years was not permitted to speak within its walls, the first time
being in 1876, when the town celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the
Resolution that h