It is no exaggeration to say, although it is very much to say, that James Powell had come to be the most peculiarly and widely beloved man in our denomination.  That this was so was not owing to any one quality, but must have been due to a singularly happy combination and balance of qualities.  Every one thought of him as a man having a genius for popular eloquence.  But he had also as truly unique gifts and graces for personal friendship.  Without a particle of cant, he possessed profound religious faith and devotion.  He walked with God and had no gifts which were not consciously devoted to his service.  At the same time he was intensely human.  He never affected to be ethereal.  He was a son of man, a child of nature.  And he touched life at many points.  His sympathy was immensely more than mere pity.  He was instinctively, as well as religiously generous.  Open hearted, open minded, genuine to the core, quick, sensitive, responsive, impulsive, enthusiastic; whatever he did, he did with a will and noble zest.  Happy in a certain “divine sense of victory and success,” he also delighted keenly in the successes of others; and there was that about him which made every one wish him to succeed, expect him to succeed, and apt to tell him so when he had done well.  And yet he was, to a singular degree, free from any promptings of personal vanity.  He had pride but was not proud; least of all was he conceited.  He never did poorly; he almost always did brilliantly; there was not an indolent fibre in his being.  He did well because he exerted himself to do his best.  He was happy in the power God gave him, and accepted joyously the opportunities which others eagerly offered him for doing the things that were in line with the main purpose of his life.

He had an exquisitely sure and alert sense of honor.  He could not do a mean thing.  He won friends, and never lost any; because all felt that he was not only so genuine and unselfish, so bright and full of happy humor, so deep and exuberant in affection, but that he was so perfectly to be trusted.  No one knew better his own rights, or was less wanting in any courage that might be needed to maintain them.  He was capable of high degrees of indignation, and his life work, championing the rights of wronged and depressed classes and races, furnished him with but too many occasions for holy anger.  His soul often burned with intensest indignation.  When one night the people in Quitman, Georgia, burned over their heads the seminary for colored girls, or when the Georgia Legislature was enacting the infamy of the Glenn Bill, his heart was hot as any Babylonian furnace, aflame with indignation, as though touched with the divine wrath, the anger of love.  And yet not for a moment could one detect in him any spark of bitterness or malice.

But chilled now is that heart of flame; stilled now are the mighty pulsations of that better than chivalric spirit, which up and down the land, all over the East and the West, during those fourteen years, did so much to educate the churches, and to remind the country of the “kindness and love of God our Saviour, which hath appeared toward man,” and which ought with all possible celerity to be manifested by men, by men of all races and of all classes, toward one another, and to promote which this American Missionary Association finds supremely its reason to be.