The Society has had, has, and will have, other men in its service of splendid personal characteristics and having peculiar fitness for the signally providential parts assigned them in this great work, which ought to fire the heart of every Christian in the land.  One we have, thank God, still among us, equally loved and revered, who has long stood at the front in this mighty and benignant enterprise—­may the day be slow in coming when his great heart shall be missed from these yearly councils!  And still we may be sure that the resources neither of our humanity nor of the grace of God are in any danger of being exhausted.

James Powell’s Welsh blood was in his favor.  His American boyhood and training helped fit him for what was to come.  That whispered word of a Christian lady to a young man whose conversion, in turn, led to the conversion of young Powell, proved to be a word of destiny.  And his experience abroad with the Jubilee Singers, in whose tones was voiced the pathos of three silent centuries, had, also, not a little to do in fitting him for the work God had in store for him.

It is, therefore, easy to see how fortunate this society was in having such a man for its personal representative; and, how fortunate the churches also were in having the most characteristic spirit and motive and aim of the cause he stood for so fittingly impersonated.  That fond mother of the famous English missionary who is reported to have said, that “as for her son, the race of God could find but little to do in him,” did not speak for James Powell.  God had given him splendid gifts to begin with, but it was the grace of God in him that first saved him from making shipwreck of those gifts, and then taught him how to use them so exhaustively in his service.

This Society represents above all things an educational enterprise.  It has many schools, chartered and unchartered, throughout the South and West.  We can never admire too much this far-reaching educational undertaking.  But, the Society is itself, in certain most fundamental respects, the very “head-master” in the school of the churches, in the school of the nation.  And how beautifully, how superbly, how effectively did this brother of ours shine and burn among the churches of our land, as one commissioned of heaven to help teach us the reality of meaning there is in this word of our Lord, how he said, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

His memory we shall all, and always, affectionately cherish.  For the service which he rendered to the cause which we also love, we will be devoutly thankful.  If we have gotten any good from the life which he lived before us, we can show it by the growing warmth and completeness of our own enlistment in the same cause.  Cries Mrs. Browning at Cowper’s grave: 

    O Poets, from a maniac’s tongue was poured the deathless singing;
    O Christians, at your cross of hope a hopeless hand was clinging;
    O men, this man in brotherhood your weary paths beguiling
    Groaned inly while he taught you peace and died while ye were
      smiling.