letter, from
childhood's imperfect imaginations, and from our crude Occidental
fancies. Many a passage of Scripture, long held in our minds as the
hand holds an unlighted lantern, was often turned into an immediately
helpful lamp to our path by one touch of his light-giving torch.

For many years, Carleton was a Bible-class teacher, excelling in
understanding, insight, explanation, and application of the divine
Word. Many to-day remember his teaching powers and their enjoyment at
Malden; but it was in Boston, at Shawmut Church, that Mr. Coffin gave
to this work the fullness of his strength and the ripeness of his
powers.

Counting it one of the noblest ambitions of a man's life to be a good
teacher, I used to admire Carleton's way of getting at the heart of
the lesson. His talent lay in first drawing out the various views of
the readers, and then of harmonizing them,--even as the lens draws all
rays to a burning-point, making fire where before was only scattered
heat. Carleton was one of those superb teachers who believe that
education is not only putting in, but also drawing out. In his class
were lawyers, physicians, doctors of divinity, principals of schools,
heads of families, besides various specimens of average humanity.
Somehow, he contrived, within the scant hour afforded him, often
within a half hour, to bestow not only his own thought, but, by
powerful spiritual induction, to kindle in others a transforming
force. After the teaching had well begun, there set in an alternating
current of intensity that wrought mightily for the destruction of dead
prejudices, and the building up of character.

In his use of helps and commentaries he had a profound contempt of
those peddlers of pedantry who try to make the words of eternal truth
become merely the lingo of things local and temporary. He was fond of
utilizing all that the spade has cast up and out from the earth, as
well as of consulting what the pen of genius has made so plain. He
believed heartily in that interpretive, or higher criticism, which has
done so much in our days to open the riches of holy Scripture. From
the very first, instead of fearing that truth might be injured by an
examination of the dress in which it was clothed, or the packages in
which it was wrapped, Carleton was in hearty sympathy with those
scholars and investigators who, by the application of literary canons
to the Hebrew and Greek writings, have put illuminating difference
between