And such a use was his.  A bishop-elect, walking with him one day in the country, was speaking, with not unnatural shrinking and hesitancy, of the new work toward which he was soon to turn his face, and said among other things, “I have a great dread, in the Episcopate, of perfunctoriness.  In the administration, especially, of confirmation, it seems almost impossible, in connection with its constant repetition, to avoid it.”

He was silent a moment, and then said, “I do not think that it need be so.  The office indeed is the same.  But every class is different; and then—­think what it is to them!  It seems to me that that thought can never cease to move one.”

What a clear insight the answer gave to his own ministry.  One turns back to his first sermon, that evening when, with his fellow-student in Virginia, he walked across the fields to the log-cabin where, not yet in holy orders, he preached it, and where afterward he ministered with such swiftly increasing power to a handful of negro servants.  “It was an utter failure,” he said afterward.  Yes, perhaps; but all through the failure he struggled to give expression to that of which his soul was full; and I do not doubt that even then they who heard him somehow understood him.  We pass from those first words to the last,—­those of which I spoke a moment ago,—­the address to the choir-boys at Newton,—­was there ever such, an address to choir-boys before?  He knew little or nothing about the science of music, and with characteristic candor he at once said so.  But he passed quickly from the music to those incomparable words of which the music was the mere vehicle and vesture.  He bade the lads to whom he spoke think of those who, long ago and all the ages down, had sung that matchless Psalter,—­of the boys and men of other times, and what it had meant to them.  And then, as he looked into their fresh young faces and saw the long vista of life stretching out before them, he bade them think of that larger and fuller meaning which was to come into those Psalms of David, when he,—­was there some prophetic sense of how soon with him the end would be?—­when he and such as he had passed away,—­what new doors were to open, what deeper meanings were to be discerned, what nobler opportunities were to dawn, as the years hastened swiftly on toward their august and glorious consummation!  How it all lifts us up as we read it, and how like it was to that “one sermon” which he forever preached!

And in saying so I do not forget what that was which some men said was missing in it.  His, they tell us—­who hold some dry and formalized statement of the truth so close to the eye that it obscures all larger vision of it,—­his, they tell us, was an “invertebrate theology.”  Of what he was and spoke, such a criticism is as if one said of the wind, that divinely appointed symbol of the Holy Ghost, “it has no spine nor ribs.”

A spine and ribs are very necessary things; but we bury them as so much chalk and lime when once the breath has gone out of them!  In the beginning we read, “And the Lord God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.”