"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 had marked its Revolutionary ardor, and called upon him, as one of its most distinguished citizens, to preach upon the occasion; and now the old church opened wide its doors in affectionate respect to his memory, and his mourning townspeople met to honor the man they had learned to love, if not to follow. It was a lovely summer day, full of calm and sunny sweetness. The earlier harvests had been gathered in, and the beautiful valley lay in perfect rest,-"Like a full heart, having prayed."