The means which lay readiest to his use for rousing the dormant spirit of the city was his social position.  And yet how hard, one would think, it must have been to make this sacrifice.  He came accredited by all the claims of finished culture, a man consecrated to the scholar’s life.[A] Then, with the sensitiveness that springs from intellectual breeding, one will look to see him shrink from conflict with the callous condition of feeling around him.  The glamour of book-lore will spread over it, and hide it from his sight.  He has a noble enough mission, at all events:  to raise the standard of educational culture in a city that hardly knows the meaning of the term; and if any glimpse should come to him of the lethargic inhumanity around him, he can afford to let it pass as a glimpse—­his look being fixed on the sacred heights which the scholar’s feet must tread.

[Footnote A:  All that I here write of my father, I write equally of his co-laborer in the same sphere of work—­Rev. W.H.  Furness; and if it is true of others whom I did not know, then to their memory also I bear this record of the two whose labors and characters it has been the deepest privilege of my life to know so well.]

Ah, how his course, so different, proves to us that the true scholar is always a scholar of truth.  No matter what element of the public sentiment he met—­the listlessness of pampered wealth; the brutal prejudice of some voting savage; the refined sneer of lettered dilettanteism; the purposed aversion of trade or pulpit fearing disturbed markets or pews;—­he beat lustily and incessantly at all the parts of the iron image of wrong sitting stolidly here with close-shut eyes.  No matter when it was, on holiday or working-day or Sabbath; at home and abroad; in the parlor, the street, the counting-room; in his school and in the Church;—­he bore down on this apathy and its brood of scorns like a west wind that sweeps through a city dying under weight of miasma.  And the wind might as well cease blowing yet not cease to be wind, as my father’s influence stop and himself live.  It scattered the good seed everywhere.  How often have I heard him say, “I know nothing of what the harvest will be; I am responsible only for the sowing.”  And bravely went the sowing on, with the broadcast largesse of love.  There was no breeze of talk that did not carry the seeds;—­to the wayside, for from those that even chance upon the truth the fowls of the air cannot take it all; to thin soil and among thorns, for no heart so feeble or choked that will not find in a single day’s growth of truth germination for eternity; to stony places, for no cranny in the rocks that can hold a seed but can be a home for riving roots;—­“And other fell on good ground and did bring forth fruit.”