He began life well, sacrificing fair interests as a member of the legal profession in Jersey, with the Island Bar in view, and was soon preparing for the Christian ministry at Stepney College. His preaching was attractive, and at the termination of his academic course, he became the pastor of the influential church at South Parade Chapel, Leeds. Four years later, he removed to Watford, and from thence, in 1864, to Cross Street, Islington, where his ministry may be said to have approached, if it did not actually reach, its maturity. In 1870 he relinquished the pastorate for Secretarial work at the Baptist Mission House, into which he threw all the steady, quenchless enthusiasm of his nature, and upon which the blessing of God conspicuously rested. Discharging his duties with a fidelity and a skill which were as effective as they were modest, he was equally beloved by the Missionaries abroad, and by his colleagues and the constituencies at home; and he had the satisfaction of knowing that, notwithstanding many difficulties, he was contributing in various ways to the advancement of the great enterprize. The toil and anxiety entailed upon him were onerous in the extreme, and after a time it became obvious to his friends that his multifarious exertions were undermining his strength. He went to the Baptist Union meetings in Leeds in the October of 1878, when he ought to have been taking repose; and, though seriously ill, he there preached what proved to be his last Sermon, in the chapel of his first pastorate--the Sermon on "Immortality" in this volume--and read his last paper, on "Our Missionary Principles and Motives." It is remarkable that he should thus have finished his public course in the town of his first ministerial settlement, and that he should have there spoken his last public words on behalf of that great department of Christian work which had engaged his best thoughts and his warmest sympathies for many years, and to his holy zeal for which it may be truly said that he sacrificed his life. At those Leeds meetings, he was "already within the shadow of death," and returned home to sink gradually but surely beneath the distressing malady which took him to heaven on the 13th of the following December.