ART. VII. EDWARD BROC HALL. Address delivered at the Funeral of Rev. E. B. Hall, D.D. Providence, R.I., March 8, 1866. By EZRA STILES GANNETT. RESPECT, gratitude, and affection, all require that this journal should put on lasting record, in its pages, some memorial of the life and character of so worthy and useful a minister of the Unitarian faith as the late Dr. Hall. A contributor to the permanent literature of the denomination, both in the way of religious biography and controversial divinity, and an occasional writer in the pages of this journal, his name should be fairly inscribed in the oldest literary organ of our faith, where he himself, the most ardent and convinced of all Unitarians, would have loved best to see it. Edward Brooks Hall was born at Medford, Mass. He was graduated at Harvard College in the class of 1820, and from the Cambridge Divinity School in 1824. On the 16th of August, 1826,- an occasion the writer of this notice well remembers, he was ordained pastor of the Unitarian Church at Northampton. During a period of three years, when his lost health compelled him to resign his charge, and seek recovery of it in the West Indies, we listened, a boy of a dozen years, to his earnest and affectionate preaching. We recall with gratitude to-day the pleadings of his veiled voice, and the pathos of his invalid appearance; his face glowing with a half-consumptive hectic, round which a halo of light and curling hair played in delicate clusters. Tall and thin, he seemed to us preaching over his own grave, and to bring a solemnity and directness to the work which one soon to pass within the veil might naturally use. After a year given to our missionary church in Cincinnati, Ohio, Mr. Hall accepted, with serious misgivings of the strength of his own constitution, a call to the laborious pastorate of the First Congregational Church at Providence, where he was installed Nov. 14, 1832. Here, with not more than the ordinary interruptions from ill-health which the American VOL. LXXX. -NEW SERIES, VOL. I. NO. III. 33 clergy so commonly experience, and with only two short vacations from labor, one in 1837, when he went to the South, and one in 1850, when he visited Europe, — Dr. Hall pursued the even tenor of a laborious, systematic, and devoted ministry, to the close of his life, February, 1866. Harvard College conferred a Doctorate of Divinity upon him in 1848. From 1841 to the day of his death, he was a Trustee of Brown University. He was twice married: first, to Harriet, daughter of Dr. Henry Ware, senior, the revered head of the Ware family, of such historic significance in our denomination; and, second, to Louisa Jane, daughter of the late Dr. John Park, whom so many gratefully remember as among the earliest successful teachers of young women in our nascent civilization. Of the six children born to him by his first wife, one only survives, — a son. One daughter of the second marriage, with her mother, remains, to lament one of the best of fathers and husbands. Dr. Hall, an early invalid himself, requiring constant caution, passed his life in the midst of invalidism and death. Rarely without serious sickness and threatening death in his immediate family, he was a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; for familiarity did not blunt his sensibilities. Singularly warm in his household affections, he felt deeply and anxiously the sickness of his family, and buried his wife and children with a heart broken anew with every bereavement. The death of his son William, who had borne himself bravely and faithfully in the army, was perhaps a proximate cause of his own decease. He never fully recovered from the shock, and yielded the more easily to the secret malady that had long been preying at his heart. It is due to Dr. Hall to state these facts, which his calm, reserved, unmurmuring carriage, rever obtruding his private sorrows, may have concealed from many, because it was under this shadow, that he maintained, for nearly forty years, the cheerful, energetic, and persistent life of a devoted parish minister, neglecting neither his study, his pulpit, his parochial walk, nor any of the duties of a good citizen and a warm patriot. He was as laborious, devoted, and regular as if he had enjoyed unbroken health, and been surrounded only by a hale and hardy household; as attentive to the sick in his parish as if he had had no sick at home; as free in his sympathies as if he had had every thing to give, and nothing to ask. He shrank from no labor with his pen, from no extraservices, from no needed amount of parish-work. Always intent upon fitly meeting the occasion or the necessity, he allowed nothing to daunt his industry or to impair his efficiency. The pulpit, the sick-room, the firesides of his parishioners, the Bible-class, the Sunday school, all attested his fidelity to every claim of service or affection exacted by the highest ideal of the pastoral office. And the best part of this devotedness was its heartiness. It was not a mere concession to conscience, but an impulse of love. With an affection for his profession which amounted to a passion, there was not one of its duties which he did. not perform with alacrity. Nothing was strange or wearisome to his heart, which was connected with or belonged to his ministerial calling. He loved to preach, and never counted even a second service a burden. He loved to pray, and was ready always with his pertinent and reverential petition, at the family altar, the bedside of sickness, or in the public assembly. Essentially a man of prayer, neither doubts nor moods shut up the heavens to him. He raised his eyes to the eternal hills with the most childlike confidence, and was always prepared to show any needy and empty wayfarer the way to the Father's house. Time and familiarity did not in the least stale his zeal and interest in his ministry. Next to performing its functions was the pleasure of talking over its duties with his professional brethren. If ever a minister loved the ministerial fraternity, he did. Unobtrusive and willing to listen, his pleasure was not derived from any active or showy part he took in clerical gatherings, but from the pure enjoyment he found in the society of likeminded men, from the instruction and strength he drew from the conversation and communion of his brethren; a measure whose generosity was often due more to his large recipiency than to the actual amount given out by others. Never wil fully absent from any conference, local or general, where the interests of the profession were to be promoted, he, more than almost any one of the brethren, continued to the last in the full and ever-growing faith, that association and conference were vitally necessary to ministerial comfort and efficiency. The unquestioning, cordial, and conscientious devotion of Dr. Hall to his Unitarian views of Christianity was another characteristic of the man, and one of the special sources of his usefulness. He was not of those narrow sectarians who confine all the Christianity in the world to their own petty bailiwick, nor of that sort of spurious liberals who think one view of Christianity as likely to be true as another, and that there is little to choose, birth and fortuitous associations apart, between one school or denomination of faith, and any other. Owning the Church universal, gladly and sympathetically extending his fellowship to all Christians, stoutly contending against bigotry, exclusiveness, and illiberality, he was nevertheless a complete, a convinced, and an enthusiastic Unitarian. The most narrow orthodoxy could not have attached a sincerer preference to its own creed than he had for his broad and generous faith, nor felt a profounder obligation to diffuse it. He not only valued intensely the light and love and power of Unitarian Christianity; but he deplored the darkness and bigotry and unscripturality of Trinitarian and Calvinistic systems. They distressed him, as offences against truth and reason and the divine word. He could not, without a manifest effort, repress his impatience at the popular errors of theology. His doctrinal and polemical discourses were among his most truly characteristic religious and spiritual discourses; for the Christian dogmas took hold of his conscience and heart, and he knew and felt that the unscriptural theology of the popular Church seriously influenced and vitiated the life of communities. He felt, accordingly, a deep sense of accountableness for the zeal and activity of the Unitarian denomination, and was always foremost in labors for the cause of its missions, and the diffusion of its, literature. As a member of the Board of the American Uni tarian Association, he was unsparing of pains; and, as Presi dent, efficient and faithful. Dr. Gannett, in his funeral sermon, has so fully and sympathetically described his classmate and friend, as a pastor, citizen, and Christian, that it seems presuming and superfluous to add any touches to a portrait, to which candor and discrimination, as well as affection and grief, have contributed their just colors, and due proportions. Certainly faithfulness, more than any one word, describes Dr. Hall. We have known men with finer original endowments, with a more felicitous composition of qualities, but none who made a more conscientious improvement of their talents, or a more effective use of themselves. There seemed to be no waste in his nature. All his powers were available. He had himself under perfect drill. His active powers were precisely adapted to his passive. He had no greater disposition to meditation than to action, no more water in the boiler than there was fire under it. All the considerable scholarship, faculty of original reflection, and taste for reading and study he had, was turned to use, and made perfectly serviceable in his calling. Everybody remarked his prudential and practical turn of mind, and adaption to business affairs. But he had an equal, nay, a preponderating tendency to spiritual things, and never could have wisely chosen any calling but his own. Thrifty and economical by habit and principle, by a noble love of independence, and a laudable forethought for his family, he was generous to every good cause, and was able and accustomed to expend in charity, and in support of denominational and public objects, more than men of double his income always less than his claims are used to think possible. He belonged more to the men of character than the men of intellect. His personality lent a great weight to what he thought and said. Grave, sincere, without parade or sentimentality, his faith was so genuine, his piety so clear, that no intimacy diminished their dignity or changed their aspect. At home and abroad, in the pulpit and in the street, in jest or in earnest, he was the same devoted, solid, and faithful |