lope" I discovered last year that Methodism has outgrown even the
formidable proportions of my old friend Dr. Peck.

At Saratoga I first met the eloquent Apollos of American Methodism,
Bishop Matthew Simpson. Those who ever heard Henry Clay in our Senate
chamber, or Dr. Thomas Guthrie in Scotland, have a very distinct idea
of what Simpson was at his flood-tide of irresistible oratory. He
resembled both of those great orators in stature and melodious voice, in
graceful gesture, and in the magnificent enthusiasm that swept
everything before him. Like all that type of fascinating speakers--to
which even Gladstone belonged--he was rather to be heard than to be
read. It is enough that a Gospel preacher should produce great immediate
impressions on his auditors; it is not necessary that he should produce
a finished and permanent piece of literature. Bishop Simpson was the
bosom friend of Abraham Lincoln, and on more than one occasion he knelt
beside our much harassed President and prayed for the strength equal to
the day of trial.

Among all the guests there was none to whom I was more closely and
lovingly drawn than to Bishop Gilbert Haven. None shed off such splendid
scintillations in our evening colloquies on the piazzas. Haven was not
comparable with his associate, Bishop Simpson, in pulpit oratory, for he
was rarely an effective public speaker on any occasion, but in
brilliancy of thought, which made him in conversation like the charge of
an electric battery, and in brilliancy of pen, that kindled everything
it touched, he was without a rival in the Methodist Church--or almost in
any other church in the land. Consistently and conscientiously a
radical, he always took extreme ground on such questions as negro
rights, female suffrage, and liquor prohibition, and he never retreated.
Underneath all this impulsive and impetuous radicalism he was thoroughly
old-fashioned and orthodox in his theology--as far from Calvinism as any
Wesleyan usually is. He did delight in the doctrines of grace with his
whole heart, and it is all the more grateful to me, as a Presbyterian,
to pay this honest tribute to his deeply devout and Christ-like
character. I knew him when he was a student in the Wesleyan University
at Middletown--somewhat rustic in his ways, but a bold, bright youth
hungry for knowledge. In 1862 he published a series of foreign letters
in the _New York Independent_, which Horace Greeley told me he regarded
as most remarkabl