XXXIII THE BLIND CHAPLAIN
DR. MILBURN'S SOLEMNITY IN PRAYER—HIS VENERABLE APPEARANCE—HIS CONVERSATIONAL POWERS—HIS CUSTOM OF PRAYING FOR SICK MEMBERS.
No Senator who ever sat under the ministrations of Dr. Milburn, the blind chaplain, can ever forget his earnest and solemn invocation. When rolling from his tongue, each word of the Lord's Prayer seemed to weigh a pound. His venerable appearance and sightless eyes gave a tinge of pathetic emphasis to his every utterance. He was a man of rare gifts; in early life, before the entire failure of his sight, he had known much of active service in his sacred calling upon the Western circuits. He had been the fellow-laborer of Cartwright, Bascom, and other eminent Methodist ministers of the early times.
Dr. Milburn was the Chaplain of the House during the Mexican War, and often a guest at the Executive Mansion when Mr. Polk was President. He knew well many of the leading statesmen of that period. He possessed rare conversational powers; and notwithstanding his blindness, poverty, and utter loneliness, he remained the pleasing, entertaining gentleman to the last.
It was the custom of the good Chaplain, with the aid of a faithful monitor, to keep thoroughly advised as to the health of the senators and their families. The bare mention, in the morning paper, of any ill having befallen any statesman of whom he was, for the time, the official spiritual shepherd, was the unfailing precursor of special and affectionate mention at the next convening of the Senate. Moreover, in the discharge of this sacred duty, his invariable habit was to designate the object of his special invocation as "the Senior Senator" or "Junior Senator," carefully giving the name of his State. It is within the realm of probability that since the first humble petition was breathed, there has never been an apparently more prompt answer to prayer than that now to be related.
The Morning Post contained an item to the effect that Senator Voorhees was ill. During the accustomed invocation which preceded the opening of the session, an earnest petition ascended for "the Senior Senator from Indiana," that he might "soon be restored to his wonted health, and permitted to return to the seat so long and so honorably occupied."
A moment later, the touching invocation being ended, and the Senate duly in session, the stately form of "the Senior Senator from Indiana" promptly emerged from the cloak-room, and quietly resumed the seat he had "so long and so honorably occupied."