her great happiness,
tempered by great sorrows.

The man who was to share her happiness and her sorrows was Rev. Henry
Ware, Jr., then the almost idolized minister of the Second Church, in
Boston. Mr. Ware was the son of another Henry Ware, professor of
theology at Harvard, whose election to the chair of theology in 1806
opened the great Unitarian controversy. Two sons of Professor Ware
entered the ministry, Henry and William, the latter the first
Unitarian minister settled in New York city. Rev. John F. Ware, well
remembered as pastor of Arlington St. Church in Boston, was the son
of Henry, so that for more than half a century, the name of Ware was a
great factor in Unitarian history.

After Dr. Channing, Henry Ware was perhaps the most popular preacher
in any Boston pulpit. One sermon preached by him on a New Year's eve,
upon the Duty of Improvement, became memorable. In spite of a violent
snow storm, the church was filled to overflowing, a delegation coming
from Cambridge. Of this sermon, a hearer said: "No words from mortal
lips ever affected me like those." There was a difference between
Unitarian preaching then and now. That famous sermon closed like this:
"I charge you, as in the presence of God, who sees and will judge
you,--in the name of Jesus Christ, who beseeches you to come to him
and live,--by all your hopes of happiness and life,--I charge you let
not this year die, and leave you impenitent. Do not dare to utter
defiance in its decaying hours. But, in the stillness of its awful
midnight, prostrate yourselves penitently before your Maker; and let
the morning sun rise upon you, thoughtful and serious men." One does
not see how the so-called 'Evangelicals' could have quarreled with
that preaching.

Mr. Ware had been in his parish nine years, his age was thirty-two, he
was in the prime of life, and at the climax of his power and his
popularity. Three years before, he had been left a widower with three
young children, one of whom became Rev. John F. Ware. That these two
intensely religious natures, that of Mary Pickard and that of Henry
Ware, should have been drawn together is not singular. In writing to
his sister, Mr. Ware speaks tenderly of his late wife and says, "I
have sought for the best mother to her children, and the best I have
found." Late in life, one of these children said, "Surely God never
gave a boy such a mother or a man such a friend."

Miss Pickard engaged to be a very docile wife. "In