No mask, no shrinking modesty can hide the individuality.

Every man knows from whom it comes, and hails it as a special message to himself.

The message may be read by a million eyes and reach a million souls.

He has never been a builder of partition walls.

But still, without making proclamation, he has been the founder of a school which has enlarged and broadened the Church into the Congregation, and which has brought the whole Congregation into the Church.

It was an assertion of the great doctrine, never till of late perfectly comprehended anywhere, that the Saviour of men came into the world inspired by the love of sinners, and not for an elect and an exclusive brotherhood of saints.

Edward Everett Hale has been the interpreter of a pure, simple loving and living faith to thousands and thousands of souls.

He has taught us that the fatherhood and tenderness of God are manifested here and now in this world, as they will be hereafter; that the religion of Christ is a religion of daily living; that salvation is the purifying of the soul from…

He does not fancy that he loves his country, while he dislikes and despises his countrymen and everything they have done and are doing.

The history he loves and has helped to write and to make is not the history of a base and mean people, who have drifted by accident into empire.

It is the history of such a nation as Milton conceived, led and guided by men whom Milton would have loved.

He will have a high and a permanent place in literature, which none but Defoe shares.

He possesses the two rarest of gifts, that to give history the fascination of fiction, and that to give fiction the verisimilitude of history.

He has been the minister of comfort in sorrow and of joy in common life to countless persons to whom his friendship is among their most precious blessings, or by whose fireside he sits, personally unknown, yet a perpetual and welcome guest.

He may be a warrior or a statesman, or reformer, or philanthropist, or prophet or poet, if he careth not first for his own household, he is worse than an infidel.

So the first duty of a Christian minister is still that of a pastor to his own flock.

He has never stood aloof from the great battles for righteousness or justice.

When men were engaged in the struggle to elevate the race for the good of their fellow men, no word of discouragement has ever come from his lips.

He has never been found outside the ranks railing at or criticising the men who were doing the best work, or were doing the best work they knew how to do.

He has never been afraid to tackle the evils that other men think hopeless.

Poverty and war and crime and sorrow are the enemies with whom he has striven.

I do not know another living man who has exercised a more powerful influence on the practical life of his generation.

He has taught us the truth, very simple, but somehow nobody ever got hold of it till he did, that virtue and brave living, and helping other men, can be made to grow by geometrical progression.

To me he has been a friend and father and brother and counsellor and companion and leader and instructor; prophet of good hope, teacher of good cheer.

But when his time shall come, what will be the desolation of the country without the man?