Hooker was settled, during his sojourn in the Bay plantation, at Cambridge.[799] He was a man “of vast endowments, a strong will, and an energetic mind. Ingenuous in temper, he was open in his professions. He had been trained to benevolence by the discipline of affliction, and to tolerance by his refuge from home persecution in Holland. He was choleric in temper, yet gentle in his affections; firm in faith, yet readily yielding to the power of reason; the peer of the reformers, without their harshness; the devoted apostle to the humble and the poor, severe only to the proud, mild in his soothings of a wounded spirit, glowing with the raptures of devotion, and kindling with the messages of redeeming love. His eye, voice, gesture, and whole frame, were animated with the living vigor of heart-felt religion; he was public-spirited and lavishly charitable; and ‘though persecution and banishment had awaited him as one wave follows another,’ he was ever serenely blessed with ‘a glorious peace of soul’—fixed in his trust in Providence, and in his adhesion to the cause of advancing civilization, which he cherished always, even while it remained to him a mystery. “This was he whom, for his abilities and services, his contemporaries placed ‘in the first rank’ of men; praising him as the one rich pearl with which ‘Europe more than repaid America for the treasures from her coast.’ The people to whom Hooker had ministered in England had preceded him in exile; as he landed, they crowded about him with their cheery welcome. ‘Now I live,’ exclaimed he, as with open arms he embraced his flock, ‘now I live if ye stand fast in the Lord.’”[800] Hooker was an apostle of great boldness and of singular charity. He had fine tact and a habit of discrimination. He had a saying that “some were to be saved by compassion, others, by fear, being pulled out of the fire.” He knew how to reach the heart; once, when a settlement twenty leagues from his habitation was suffering from hunger, he sent a ship-load of corn to relieve the sufferers, thus demonstrating his Christianity by what Chrysostom calls “unanswerable syllogisms.”[801] Whitfield once said of him: “Hooker is one in whom the utmost learning and wisdom are tempered by the finest zeal, holiness, and watchfulness; for, though naturally a man of choleric temper, and possessing a mighty vigor and fervor of spirit, which as occasion served was wondrous useful to him, yet he had as much government of his choler as a man has over a mastiff dog in a chain; he could let out his dog or pull him in, as he pleased.”[802] Mather records that some one once, seeing Hooker’s heroism and persistent goodness, said: “He is a man who, while doing his Master’s work, would put a king in his pocket.”[803]