The men and women who know how to comfort human sorrow, and to teach their fellows to turn it to its highest uses, are among God’s best gifts to the world.  The office and the name of Comforter have the highest and purest associations.  It is the Holy Spirit of God who calls Himself by that name, and to be a true comforter is to be indeed a co-worker with God.  But even as the word “comfort” goes deeper than those pitying commonplaces which even nature teaches us to utter to those who are in any trouble, so the office of a true comforter requires other qualifications than mere natural tenderness of heart, or even the experience of suffering.  One must know how to interpret as well as how to feel sorrow; must know its lessons as well as its smart.  Hence it is that God makes His comforters by processes of His own; by hard masters ofttimes, and by lessons not to be found in books.

It is in illustration of this truth that I bring to you to-day some memorials of the experience, character, and life-work of one widely known, deeply beloved, and greatly honored by God as an instrument of Christian instruction and of Christian comfort.  It would, indeed, be possible to strike some other keynote.  A character presenting so many points of interest might be studied from more than one of those points with both pleasure and profit; but, on the whole, it seems to me that the thought of a Christian comforter best concentrates the lessons of her life, and best represents her mission to society; so that we might aptly choose for our motto those beautiful words of the Apostle:  “Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort, who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.”

In endeavoring to depict a life which was largely shaped by sorrow, I am not going to open the record of a sorrowful life, but rather of a joyful one; not of a starved and meager life, but of a very rich one, both in itself and in its fruits; yet it may be profitable for us to see through what kind of discipline that life became so rich, and to strike some of the springs where arose the waters which refreshed so many of the children of pain and care.

The daughter of Edward Payson might justly have appropriated her father’s words:  “Thanks to the fervent, effectual prayers of my righteous parents, and the tender mercies of my God upon me, I have reason to hope that the pious wishes breathed over my infant head are in some measure fulfilled.”  She might have said with Cowper: 

  “My boast is not that I deduce my birth
  From loins enthroned and rulers of the earth;
  But higher far my proud pretensions rise;
  The child of parents passed into the skies.”