FRANCIS CHARLES SESSIONS.*

BY WASHINGTON GLADDEN, D. D., LL. D.

Blessed are they that dwell in thy house;

They will be still praising thee.

Blessed is the man whose strength is in thee;

In whose heart are the highways to Zion.

Passing through the Valley of Weeping they make

it a place of springs;

Yea the early rain covereth it with blessings;
They go from strength to strength;

Every one of them appeareth before God in Zion.

- Ps. lxxxiv, 4 - 7.

This poet has found a happy man. Such men are not rare; even in these unquiet times it is not needful to search for them by day with lanterns. Yet it may well be questioned whether in the days when cares were fewer and life was simpler, there were not more who took time to be happy-more who found out, before it was too late, that it was worth while to be happy.

This poet's happy man was one who spent his life in the Lord's house. Possibly the poet was some dweller on the slopes of distant Hermon, or among the vales of rugged Gilead, who only two or three times a year was permitted to stand in the portals of the Lord's house. From the time of the establishment of the one central sanctuary at Jerusalem, the hearts of the people turned with increasing attachment to its stately courts

* Mr. Sessions was elected First Vice President of Ohio Archæological and Historical Society at its annual meeting February 18, 1886. At its annual meeting February 24, 1887, he was chosen President, succeeding the Hon. Allen G. Thurman, the society's distinguished first president. Mr. Sessions held the office of president continuously till his death March 25, 1892. He discharged the duties of his position with great zeal and ability. He was ever ready, by his counsel, his means and his influence, to advance the interests of the society and to his generous and enthusiastic efforts are largely due the growth and prosperity of the organization. The memorial address herewith published was delivered by Dr. Gladden in the First Congregational Church of which Mr. Sessions was a most active member. E. O. R.

and its solemn services; the temple held within itself the consummation of their hopes, and the expression of their highest thoughts; it was the memorial of their life in the desert, and of their deliverance from Egypt; it was the symbol of all that made their national life memorable and sublime; it was the place where was manifested to them with peculiar power the presence and the glory of the God of their fathers. All the religious enthusiasm of this deeply religious people was focussed upon these hills of Zion. This was the only place where sacrifices could be offered; the only place where the solemn ritual of their worship could be performed. It was a thrilling moment when the boy, coming up to one of the feasts, first set his foot within. these sacred enclosures; and the time never came in the life of the loyal Hebrew when his heart did not turn with longing to the house of the Lord. Going to church is a very commonplace matter with us who have from one to a dozen church spires almost always in sight. It was a very different thing to the Hebrew who dwelt in some remote town of Palestine, and to whom the one Holy City with its one temple was only now and then the goal of a long pilgrimage. Such an one might naturally think the man to be happy who could spend his life within sight of its pillared porches and its golden pinnacle. And this poet seems also to have learned that there was something in the influences of that house which gave to life added cheerfulness and benignity. The men who found their inspiration in its worship were men who made the world in which they lived a happier world. "Passing through the valley of weeping," he cries, "they make it a place of springs." The meaning is somewhat obscure, but he seems to say that the good man, whose delight is in the service of the house of God, is one who helps turn the vale of tears into a place of fountains-into a genial region where joy springs forth unstinted and perennial. That, surely, is the scriptural conception of the man whose life is fed from the eternal hills. The Old Testament saints and prophets never lose their hold upon this thought. The notion of some modern religionists that the godly man is one who makes himself and his neighbors as doleful as he can while he lives-who goes about singing,

"I'm but a stranger here,

Heaven is my home;
Earth is a desert drear,

Heaven is my home"

and spends all his energies in getting people ready for life in some other world-never entered the heads of the men who wrote the Psalms and Prophecies. To them the chief function of the godly man was to make a better world of this. They tested his piety by proofs of his power to brighten the acres that surrounded his dwelling, and to send forth the streams of his bounty "to fatten lower lands;" it was a sign that he was a saint, if the wilderness and the solitary place were glad for him and the desert, where the feet touched its arid waste, rejoiced and blossomed as the rose.

If all the people who think that the Old Testament is obsolete would get some of these ruling ideas of the Old Testament revelation into their heads, this would soon be a better world for all of us.

It has been my duty to-night to speak of a happy life which has just ended. It is not an easy task to speak fittingly and adequately of any man's life. There are very few people whom we know well enough to be able to judge them justly. We are not omniscient, and our reading of other men's motives is often at fault. Most of us are swift enough to form and utter our estimates of other men's characters; very often in doing so, we only reveal our own. "Judge not that ye be not judged," is a maxim of tremendous import. How often a man, in pronouncing judgment upon his neighbor, lays bare his own narrowness, meanness, jealousy, pusillanimity. What he has said about his neighbor does his neighbor no harm at all, for nobody heeds it; but it does him far more damage than any slander that other lips could utter about him. Wise men are therefore slow to judge their fellows. Yet, since the life is always the light of men, the study of human lives is always the most inspiring of studies, and our study must involve some estimate of the qualities revealed in the lives that we are studying. That I must attempt tonight. I would fain speak truthfully and temperately. I desi to avoid over-praise. I would rather that my words should