It was the inevitable condition of his strong and deep convictions that he should not always or easily understand or make due allowance for men of different opinions.  It was—­God and you will bear me witness that this is true!—­one of the noblest characteristics of his fifteen months’ episcopate that, as a bishop, men’s rightful liberty of opinion found in him not only a large and generous tolerance, but a most beautiful and gracious acceptance.  He seized, instantly and easily, that which will be forever the highest conception of the episcopate in its relations whether to the clergy or the laity, its paternal and fraternal character; and his “sweet reasonableness,” both as a father and as a brother, shone through all that he was and did.

For one, I greatly love to remember this,—­that when the time came he himself, with the simple naturalness which marked all that he did, was brought to reconsider his earlier attitude toward the episcopal office, and to express with characteristic candor his readiness to take up its work if he should be chosen to it; he turned to his new, and to him most strange, task with a supreme desire to do it in a loving and whole-hearted way, and to make it helpful to every man, woman, and child with whom he came in contact.  What could have been more like him than that, in that last address which he delivered to the choir-boys at Newton, he should have said to them, “When you meet me let me know that you know me.”  Another might easily have been misunderstood in asking those whom he might by chance encounter to salute him; but he knew, and the boys knew, what he had in mind,—­how he and they were all striving to serve one Master, and how each—­he most surely as much as they—­was to gain strength and cheer from mutual recognition in the spirit of a common brotherhood.

And thus it was always; and this it was that allied itself so naturally to that which was his never-ceasing endeavor—­to lift all men everywhere to that which was, with him, the highest conception of his office, whether as a preacher or as a bishop,—­the conception of God as a Father, and of the brotherhood of all men as mutually related in Him.

In an address which he delivered during the last General Convention in Baltimore to the students of Johns Hopkins University, he spoke substantially these words: 

    “In trying to win a man to a better life, show him not the
    evil but the nobleness of his nature.  Lead him to enthusiastic
    contemplations of humanity;”

in its perfection, and when he asks, ’Why, if this is so, do not I have this life?’—­then project on the background of his enthusiasm his own life; say to him, ’Because you are a liar, because you blind your soul with licentiousness, shame is born,—­but not a shame of despair.  It is soon changed to joy.  Christianity becomes an opportunity, a high privilege, the means of attaining to the most exalted ideal—­and the only means.’