settlement of our distractions, and the removal of those bars to fellowship by which their prayers and our efforts have unhappily so long been hindered. Nothing will give me so great pleasure as to add my assistance and sympathy to the support of your advancing age and closing ministry, unless it be that may also have your counsel and confidence to assure the conscious ill desert and weakness of my own. If, then, God permits us now once more to be united in a covenant of peace, let us do it in the prayer that it may be an everlasting covenant, never to be broken.

I

"In the bonds of love and all perfections,

was kept from me several days after it was taken from the office, on account of the state of my health; and, since it was put into my hands, I have not been able, till now, to give it more than a very imperfect attention. .

“I am surely, as before intimated, not insensible to the fact, that evils many and grievous must grow out of suspended fellowship and co-operation in promoting the cause of God between ministers situated as we are, pastors of contiguous and mingled congregations; and, oppressed as I often have been with a sorrowful sense of these evils, I have been willing to do any thing I could do, consistently with

a conscientious regard to truth and duty, to put an end to them, by having confidence restored and fraternal relations established between us. I have known, too, that you have desired and sought the same. With this end in view, and knowing, more over, that you disclaim the sentiments imputed to you as taught in your first volume, - "God in Christ," - I have, as you know, repeatedly before, as more recently in my reply to your letter of March 20, expressed my willingness to pass by the teachings of that book, and let them be in my mind as if they had not been, or had been retracted, and to meet you on any presently-avowed platform of doctrine which should accord with the common faith of our Orthodox standards and churches touching the points in controversy. And happy am I to say, that in your communication of the 3d inst., now before me, you seem to me to have met the condition, to have offered such a platform. I find very little to which I feel disposed to object in the statement you make of your views of the Trinity, the work of Christ in his atonement, and justification by faith in his sacrifice.

and

"What you give as a volunteer expression or statement of your belief as to the work of Christ speaks for itself. The views presented in that statement, understood according to the common meaning of the language in which they are expressed, I have a right to assume that you wish them to be understood in no other sense, seem to me to be full and satisfactory; in accordance, in all essential points, with the views of evangelical ministers and

churches generally; and, as such, I am happy to accept them as furnishing ground for restored confidence and ministerial intercourse. And I accept the statement you offer on the several points in question as true in all essential respects: I accept it joyfully and thankfully; and am ready, as Providence may open the way, to act accordingly.

"In saying this, I deem it due to myself to add, that I am not to be understood as having changed my views as to what I have honestly believed to be the main teachings of your book. I pass them by as what I cannot accept for truth, and hasten to redeem my pledge, — to meet you on a presentlyavowed platform of truth; and I trust it will be found a platform on which we shall both be willing to stand and co-operate during the brief period brief to me at least it must be in which we may be continued in the vineyard of our Master. And sure I am that my sun will go down brighter, and I shall leave this much-loved field of my labors and my prayers with a happier mind and more cheering hopes, if, as I close my course, I may think of these dear churches of our Lord as rooted and grounded in the truth, and their pastors as happily united in fellowship and love, and contending earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints.

"Your brother in Christ,

"J. HAWES."

CHAPTER XI.

Lectures. Recollections of Hartford.

Two Theological Schools in Connecticut. Efforts at Union.

IN

N 1854, Dr. Hawes delivered a course of popular lectures on his "Recollections of Hartford." It covered the thirty-seven years of his ministry on such topics as "Hartford as it Was and Is," "Revivals in Hartford," "The Pulpit in Hartford," "The Churches in Hartford," "A Memorial of the Departed." The lectures were full of interest and information, and attracted all denominations and all classes of the citizens. It was one of the many felicitous efforts that marked the ministry of Dr. Hawes.

A few extracts from the first lecture will indicate the spirit and character of the whole :

"To one whose memory goeth not back so far as the beginning of the period under review, it is quite impossible to convey a just idea of the great change that has taken place in the general aspect and extent of the city. It was then comparatively a small village, containing less than one-fourth the number of houses and inhabitants it now has. Largesections of the city, and those not far removed

from the centre, were open fields when I came here, and used as pasture-grounds for cows and horses.

"The facilities for doing business have been augmented to a degree scarcely conceivable by those who were not on the stage at the period referred to.

"There were then no steamboats daily plying up and down our river; no railroads passing through our city, conveying passengers, and bringing trade from afar; and no telegraph for communicating with lightning-speed with distant cities and towns of our country. The modes of conveyance from one place to another were then extremely tardy and tedious. I have myself been fourteen hours in going from this city to New Haven by stage. And a journey to New York was, indeed, a serious undertaking. Our merchants usually attempted it but twice a year, in the autumn and spring, - and were commonly gone from ten days to a fortnight; and there was sometimes great rejoicing that they escaped being cast away on the Sound.

"The application of steam as a motive power had been commenced only a few years before; and the whole matter was regarded by many with great jealousy. Even President Dwight, it is said, used to declaim right eloquently before his classes against the use of steam to propel vessels, as a dangerous usurpation of Nature's power; and predicted that great disasters would result from it.

"While business and wealth have so greatly increased among us, I am happy to state it as the opinion of those who have the best means of know