upon his character from boyhood, he was such a being as people could afford to reverence, respect, and love. Through the whole of his long and active career, Mr. Ballou never once turned aside from the one great object and purpose of his heart, that of promulgating God's fatherly and impartial love to all mankind, as evinced in the holy Scriptures and the dispensations of Providence. In a poem, ending with the two following verses, he has himself expressed his devoted zeal better than we can do. "Not all thy foes on earth can say Can turn my heart from thee away; And yet my heart is free; These wounds and scars, that men despise, Are jewels precious in thine eyes, And this is all to me. "Had I ten thousand years to live, Had I ten thousand lives to give, All these should be thine own; And that foul scorn thy foes bestow Still prove a laurel to my brow, And their contempt a throne." In this service he never wrote or uttered a single sentence that was not peculiar to himself for its plainness of purpose, yet depth of thought, and for strong logical reasoning to this grand end. He possessed for his purpose a large share of ready, manly eloquence, not nervous and startling, but cool and convincing; and this, coupled with a natural quickness in discovering the strength or weakness of an argument, ever insured him victory in religious controversy. No sarcasm, no reflection, no imputation could throw him off his guard for one moment. He was ever unruffled, yet forcible, evincing the spirit of the doctrine which he advocated at all times. It was perfectly impossible to so excite him in controversy as to lead him to say the least ungentlemanly, or even abrupt thing. He stood for years as a target for the poisoned arrows of malice, bigotry and envy, and bore all with a serene dignity of spirit, which a firm reliance in Heaven could alone have given. In his public teachings he never indulged in abstractions, never ran away from his theme, upon abstruse and visionary ideas. He was in this respect, as in all others, eminently natural, eminently practical, eminently _original_. We do not find nature teaching us by adducing vague notions of facts, but rather by a display of the facts themselves. Abstractions and transcendentalisms are but thick fogs to cloud the mental vision, while plain matter-of-fact is the clear, bright view of truth, with the soft, rich perspective of wisdom. It is exceedingly questionable, when we hear a minister dilating upon the arts and sciences, or leading his hearers off in a vein of visionary philosophy, whether that man has a religion worth preaching, or that is congenial to his own heart.