Recollections of a Long Life: An AutobiographyCuyler, Theodore L. (Theodore Ledyard)
Religion
Recollections of a Long Life: An Autobiography
Cuyler, Theodore L. (Theodore Ledyard)
Clergy -- United States -- Biography; Cuyler, Theodore L. (Theodore Ledyard), 1822-1909
camel; it was my constant guide book."
Three years afterward, on my arrival in London, from Palestine I learned
that Stanley was dangerously ill. On the door of the Deanery a bulletin
was posted: "The Dean is sinking." That night the good, great man, died.
On the 25th of July the august funeral service took place in
Westminster Abbey. Outside the Abbey thousands of people were assembled,
for the Dean was loved by all London. From a small gallery over the
"Poets' Corner" I looked down on the group, which contained Gladstone,
Shaftesbury, Matthew Arnold, and scores of England's mightiest and best.
After the "Dead March," began a long procession headed by Stanley's
lifelong friend, Archbishop Tait, of Canterbury, and the Prince of Wales
(his pupil), and followed by Browning, Tyndall, and a long line of
bishops, and poets and scholars moved slowly along under the lofty
arches to the tomb in Henry VII.'s Chapel. A fresh wreath of flowers
from the Queen was laid on the coffin. Many a tear was shed on that sad
day beside the tomb in which the Church of England laid her most
fearless and yet her best beloved son. I never have visited the Abbey
since, without halting for a few moments beside the chapel in which the
Dean and his beloved wife are slumbering. Greater than all his books or
literary achievements was Arthur Penryn Stanley, the modest,
true-hearted, unselfish, childlike, Christian man.
Soon after I had begun my pastorate in New York, I became a member of
the Young Men's Christian Association, which was one of the first that
was organized in this country. Since that time I have delivered more
than one hundred addresses, in behalf of this institution, in my own
country and abroad. In June, 1857, the New York organization honored me
with what was then a novelty in America--a public breakfast, and
commissioned me as a delegate to the original parent association in
London. I there met that remarkable Christian merchant, Mr. George
Williams, who was the founder of the Association, and who had got much
of his first spiritual inspiration from reading the writings of our
American, Charles G. Finney. He is now Sir George Williams, my much
loved friend, and I do not hesitate to say that there is not another man
living who has accomplished such a world-wide work for the glory of God
and the welfare of young men. The President of that first organized
London Association was the celebrated philanthropist, the Earl of
Shaftesbury, a man whom I had long desired to meet. My acquaintance with
him began in Exeter Hall, at a Sabbath service held to reach the
non-church going classes. With one or two others we knelt together in a
small side room to invoke a blessing on the service in the great hall,
and he prayed most fervently. The Earl of Shaftesbury was not only the
author of great reformatory legislation in Parliament, and the
acknowledged leader of the Low Church Party in the Established Church.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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