A Sermon Preached in Christ Church, Hartford, January 29th, 1865 / In Commemoration of the Rt. Rev. Thomas Church Brownell, D. D., LL. D., Third Bishop of Connecticut, and Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States by his Assistant and Successor

BY HIS ASSISTANT AND SUCCESSOR.
PUBLISHED BY REQUEST OF THE VESTRY OF CHRIST CHURCH.
HARTFORD: BROWN & GROSS. 1865.

PROVERBS, xi: 11.
By the blessing of the upright the city is exalted.
It is a law of the Divine government of the world, that the temporal blessings granted to the righteous, and the temporal punishments sent upon the wicked, are shared in by others than the individuals specially concerned. We realize this perhaps, more distinctly, and it comes home to us more solemnly, in the latter case than in the former. For so it is, that the punishments of the Almighty always impress us more than his mercies. The occasional thunder-bolt awes us as the daily sunlight does not; the sweeping storm we wonder at as we do not at the gentle rain and dew; death is more solemn to us than the continued life. We feel God's hand in the first-named of all these things, we are apt to forget it in the last.
And yet the progress of the world gives us as many proofs that the blessings given to the righteous are shared in by others than themselves, as that the punishments sent to the wicked extend beyond those on whom, especially, they come. And God's word is as full of instances illustrating the one truth, as it is of those illustrating the other.
These instances, and there are many like them, illustrate and prove the law of God that the temporal blessings which are sent upon the righteous flow over, as one may say, upon others besides themselves. And, Beloved, do not the very instincts of our nature respond to, and recognise this law? Do we not rejoice in the presence among us of a godly man, even if our eyes rarely behold him; and is there not sorrow of heart and a more than ordinary feeling of vacancy when such an one is taken from us? And in either case, whether we joy or sorrow, is there not more in our hearts than a mere recognition of the value of example, counsel, guidance, which is given in the one case, and in the other is taken from us? Do we not on the one hand feel, that we have among us a herald and a pledge of the blessings from the Lord, blessings which shall light our pathway, as they have on his? or, on the other hand, is there not the feeling that such a herald, and such a pledge is gone, that an avenue of benediction has been closed, and that the world is darker than it was? And is the feeling of such loss ever deeper, or stronger than when a holy and a sanctified old age, around which gathered the gentlest ministries of earth, and the most precious ones of heaven, and which glowed in the high place where God had set it with the calm, mild glory of the evening star, has been taken away from us, transformed, though our eyes can not behold it, into the freshness of eternal youth?