certainty, one's future line of conduct for good or evil. It can hardly be denied that with a character like that of Henry Livingston Richards, the stern Calvinistic home training was in many respects an excellent preparation for the trials that awaited him. The system, if it did not crush or permanently sour the youthful character, or drive it into hypocrisy, would no doubt tend to impart to it a firm sense of duty and a determination to prefer the right to the pleasant or profitable under all circumstances. This was its effect certainly in Mr. Richards' case. He was naturally very docile, conscientious, high-minded and thoroughly unselfish, but ardent and sympathetic, and therefore perhaps inclined to follow where others led. This weaker trait, if it existed, was thoroughly corrected by the strictness of his home training, mingled as this was with the tender affection of his excellent parents and thus relieved of much of its harshness.

CHAPTER II

FIRST EXPERIENCE OF COLLEGE LIFE. KENYON

COLLEGE AND BISHOP CHASE

1829-1830

It was in the year 1829, when he was between fifteen and sixteen years of age, that Henry L. Richards entered college for the first time. One of his uncles on his mother's side, Lucius D. Mower, was the most prosperous merchant in the little village. Having no children of his own, he had taken Henry's younger brother, William, with the intention of providing for him and bringing him up as his own son. He now proposed that Henry also should enter his store as a clerk. But Dr. Richards was anxious that all of his sons should have the benefit of a liberal education, and he refused to consent to Mr. Mower's plan unless on condition that Henry should first spend some time at college. It was finally agreed that he should go to Kenyon. This institution had been opened only a year before this time, at Gambier, in Knox County, the neighboring county to Licking, in which Granville is situated, and

therefore for the young boy it was not far from home. As it was here that the first seeds of his future faith were sown in Henry's mind, though not apparently during his first stay, a somewhat detailed account of the college and the remarkable man who founded it may not be out of place. We give it from Mr. Richards' notes, only slightly supplemented from other

sources.

The institution was entirely the creation of the venerable Philander Chase, first Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Ohio. This prelate was a man of immense stature and rugged strength, and of executive ability in a measure corresponding to his size. Though his energy of character seems to have been somewhat wanting in balance and control and he was sometimes judged to be imperious and capricious, yet he was withal condescending and affable to those who confided in him. His ambition, though unbounded, was not selfish. As was remarked by one who knew him well, Bishop Chase embraced, in his immense physique, two separate and distinct individualities, the little child and the stern and vigorous man. Feeling deeply the necessity for a college and seminary where candidates for the ministry could be trained under his own eye and in a manner that would fit them for their future work under the hard conditions of his young and poor diocese,

the Bishop undertook a journey to England for the purpose of raising the necessary funds.

To his surprise and grief, he met with bitter opposition on the part of some of his brother clergymen, particularly Bishop Hobart of New York. This prelate feared the effect of the new project on the fortunes of the General Seminary of New York, which had been established by authority of the General Convention with the explicit purpose of serving the needs of the Episcopal Church throughout the United States. Notwithstanding this opposition, which followed him even to England, Bishop Chase met with entire success in his mission. Gaining access to aristocratic circles in the mother country, he impressed them deeply by his strength and sincerity of purpose, and by his accounts of the vast field of the West, with its rapidly increasing population, rude conditions and spiritual destitution. The result was that he received encouragement and substantial aid, especially from Lord Kenyon, Admiral Lord Gambier, Lady Harcourt, Lord Bexley, Lady Rosse, George W. Marriott and others, whose names he was afterward careful to affix to the various buildings and other features of his college. Returning to Ohio with some thirty thousand dollars, a large sum for those days, Bishop Chase purchased from a citizen of Pennsylvania, familiarly known as

"Old Nat Hogg," a tract of eight thousand acres of land near the centre of the state, some five miles from Mt. Vernon. Here he began the erection of a college and theological seminary, and laid out the site of a town. The whole was destined in his magnificent plans to rival the universities of the old world; but it was as yet only a dense and almost unbroken forest. Into this forest the Bishop went almost alone, camping out, living in a log cabin, in which his family was also sheltered for a time, working with his own hands and enduring hardships that would soon have disheartened men of weaker temperament. With stone quarried on the premises he erected the main building of his college, making the foundations and walls of amazing thickness. In 1828 the school was opened with some sixty-five students brought from the preëxisting school at Worthington; and when young Henry Richards arrived in the following year, conditions were still most primitive. One building sheltered the Bishop and his family, the professors and the students. A large stone kitchen stood at a short distance south of the college; but the kitchen girls were not the daintiest or most skillful cooks, and the college commons were often anything but inviting. Mr. Richards records one incident of this nature. As the waiter poured out a cup of coffee from an old