m the consequences of sin. He
is the representative and the incarnation of the best and
loftiest Americanism. He knows the history of his country,
and knows his countrymen through and through. He does not
fancy that he loves his country, while he dislikes and despises
his countrymen and everything they have done and are doing.
The history he loves and has helped to write and to make is
not the history of a base and mean people, who have drifted
by accident into empire. It is the history of such a nation
as Milton conceived, led and guided by men whom Milton would
have loved. He will have a high and a permanent place in
literature, which none but Defoe shares. He possesses the
two rarest of gifts, that to give history the fascination
of fiction, and that to give fiction the verisimilitude of
history. He has been the minister of comfort in sorrow and
of joy in common life to countless persons to whom his friendship
is among their most precious blessings, or by whose fireside
he sits, personally unknown, yet a perpetual and welcome guest.

"Still, the first duty of every man is to his own family.
He may be a warrior or a statesman, or reformer, or philanthropist,
or prophet or poet, if he careth not first for his own household,
he is worse than an infidel. So the first duty of a Christian
minister is still that of a pastor to his own flock. You
know better than I do how it has been here in Boston; but
every one of our little parish in Worcester, man or woman,
boy or girl, has felt from the first time he or she knew him,
ever afterward, that Dr. Hale has been taking hold of his
hand. That warmth and that pressure abide through all our
lives, and will abide to the end. There are countless persons
who never saw his face, who still deem themselves his obedient,
loving and perpetual parishioners.

"I knew very well a beautiful woman, left widowed, and childless,
and solitary, and forlorn, to whom, after every other consolation
seemed to have failed to awake her from her sorrow and despair,
a friend of her own sex said: 'I thought you were one of
Edward Hale's girls.' The appeal touched the right chord
and brought her back again to her life of courage and Christian
well-doing.

"He has ever been a prophet of good hope and a preacher of
good cheer. When you have listened to one of his sermons,
you have listened to an evangel, to good tidings. He has
never stood aloof from the great battles for righteousness