The doctor replied, “The promise is, that when he is old, he will not depart from it.  My son is not old enough yet.”  He grew old, and his faith returned.  The Rev. Doctor Hall made the statement that he discovered in the biographies of one hundred clergymen that they all had sons who were clergymen, all piously inclined.  There is no safe way to discuss religion, save from the heart; it evaporates when you dare to analyse its sacred element.

I received multitudes of letters written by anxious parents about sons who had just come to the city—­letters without end, asking aid for worthy individuals and institutions, which I could not meet even if I had an income of $500,000 per annum—­letters from men who told me that unless I sent them $25 by return mail they would jump into the East River—­letters from people a thousand miles away, saying if they couldn’t raise $1,500 to pay off a mortgage they would be sold out, and wouldn’t I send it to them—­letters of good advice, telling me how to preach, and the poorer the syntax and the etymology the more insistent the command.  Many encouraging letters were a great help to me.  Some letters of a spiritual beauty and power were magnificent tokens of a preacher’s work.  Most of these letters were lacking in one thing—­Christian confidence.  And yet, what noble examples there were of this quality in the world.

What an example was exhibited to all, when, on October 8, 1885, the organ at Westminster Abbey uttered its deep notes of mourning, at the funeral of Lord Shaftesbury, in England.  It is well to remember such noblemen as he was.  The chair at Exeter Hall, where he so often presided, should be always associated with him.  His last public act, at 84 years of age, was to go forth in great feebleness and make an earnest protest against the infamies exposed by Mr. Stead in London.  In that dying speech he called upon Parliament to defend the purity of the city.  As far back as 1840, his voice in Parliament rang out against the oppression of factory workers, and he succeeded in securing better legislation for them.  He worked and contributed for the ragged schools of England, by which over 200,000 poor children of London were redeemed.  He was President of Bible and Missionary Societies, and was for thirty years President of the Young Men’s Christian Association.  I never forgave Lord Macaulay for saying he hoped that the “praying of Exeter Hall would soon come to an end.”  On his 80th birthday, a holiday was declared in honour of Lord Shaftesbury, and vast multitudes kept it.  From the Lord Mayor himself to the girls of the Water Cress and Flower Mission, all offered him their congratulations.  Alfred Tennyson, the Poet Laureate, wrote him, “Allow me to assure you in plain prose, how cordially I join with those who honour the Earl of Shaftesbury as a friend of the poor.”  And, how modest was the Earl’s reply.

He said:  “You have heard that which has been said in my honour.  Let me remark with the deepest sincerity—­ascribe it not, I beseech you, to cant and hypocrisy—­that if these statements are partially true, it must be because power has been given me from above.  It was not in me to do these things.”