As a young clergyman he ran one parish after another, with increasing brio. When he settled down in the New York parish where he stayed for most of his life, he was already editing a church-paper and writing innumerable pamphlets, in addition to his regular duties as rector. He now speeded up the staid old parish into new work of all sorts, added one mission chapel after another to the church organization, pushed out the influence of the parish further and further, especially into the outlying regions of the slums, which because of their very discouraging aspect of poverty and foreignness had been till then safe from attempts to improve them. Of course I knew my grandfather only when he was a very old man, long after he had retired from active life; but I never got from him the slightest impression that he was what is known as a “religious-minded person” or that all this remarkable expansion of church and mission work came entirely from evangelical fervor. In fact, as I remember Grandfather, you never would dream that he had been a minister at all. My guess is that he developed that church as his contemporaries developed their transcontinental systems of railways, because he was born with a clutch that never slipped, so that all the power he created by his many-cylindered motor was transmitted without loss to the wheels which sent him with extreme rapidity along the road he had chanced to follow. He not only developed the parish, he developed his own life: he bought books, unendingly bought books, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, French, English. No junk-man who ever lived has been able to free us entirely of this vast accumulation of serious-minded books of research, now quite worthless, all of them, full of the pompous and inaccurate scholarship of his day. He traveled abroad and sprang, tiger-like, upon European culture, with his formidable New-World capacity for the assimilation of Gargantuan meals of solid food. He married “well,” as the saying goes, and gave his son university life and European travel. He lived as he had wanted to live, with friends and acquaintances in three countries, dressing his vast body in fine broadcloth and white linen; his house was lined with well-bound books; he was a famous talker--in the vein of Dr. Johnson--much sought after for his brilliantly amusing conversation, though at times, I take it, he followed his prototype into rather overpowering monologue; he was a powerful and very fluent public speaker--we have chests and chests full of his sermons still in the attic--and so far as I can gather he no more doubted the ultimately satisfying value of all these things as an integral part of life than Mr. Russel Sage seems to have questioned the ultimately satisfying value of squeezing the last penny of interest out of a loan, or Barnum to have doubted the worthwhileness of running the biggest show on earth.