Just this was the complaint of an old farmer who used to delight to drop into my study in northern New York, and have, as he called it, “a talk with the parson.” He was himself a relic of a past generation, a man of marked face and peculiar manner. He had been a school teacher in his earlier days, and quite a man of letters among his associates of that time, and was very fond of describing in a quaint way that was not without discrimination, the life of his youth. While fully admitting the greater advantages and easier times of the present, he would always add: “But everybody is getting to be just like everybody else now-a-days. Why, when I came into this valley every man on all these farms had something peculiar about him, some way of standing, or talking, or dressing, by which I could have described him so that you would have known him the first time you met him. I don’t know,” he would add, “but you may think it an improvement, but the men are all alike now, and I miss the differences.” And looking at the old man, and feeling that he served as a connecting link, a survival of the past into the present, I was ready to believe that what he said was true; the older men had more marked peculiarities than those of to-day. Let us look now more particularly at some of the types which were distinctive features of the life of a half century ago, but whose successors have lost much of that prominence to-day by means of that gradual tendency toward uniformity which has since then been working. First among these and foremost, as distinctive and distinguished, stands the “Country Parson” of fifty or more years ago. No such men are seen to-day; for although the ministry continue, and are always to continue, constituting a distinct class in the community, they are now in no such ways singular and distinctive as then. Dressed always in his clerical black, and in earlier times in the clerical bands also, he was known on the street and saluted with reverence as a man by himself, set apart from the rest of the community, higher and holier than they. His position was unequaled, unapproached even by any other person. He was looked up to by all, honored by all, and feared, if not by all, by all the children at least. His opinions on matters local and civil, personal, social, philosophical and religious had almost the weight of absolute and supreme wisdom, which no one might gainsay. See him enter the plain white “meeting-house” and ascend the lofty pulpit, and you recognize the height of his exaltation. In many places all the congregation were wont to rise when he came in, and remain standing till he had taken his seat; and still more commonly, not one of the congregation ever moved from place till he and his family had passed out of the church.