CHAPTER XV.
SKETCHES OF MINISTERS—continued.
"Thus bravely live heroic men,
A consecrated band;
Life is to them a battle-field,
Their hearts a holy-land."
Tuckerman.
A HIGHLY-esteemed minister of our faith, and a vigorous and stirring advocate of Christian reform, was Rev. Elhanan W. Reynolds. Although his career as minister and author was not long, the most valuable years of his life were given to the work of promulgating the Gospel. He was settled as pastor in Java, Sherman, Buffalo, Jamestown, Watertown, and Lockport, N. Y.; in Norwich, Conn.; and Lynn, Mass. He was a highly acceptable preacher, and wielded a fruitful and facile pen. His little volume, "The Records of Bubbleton Parish," is one of much interest in showing as it does the trials of Christian ministers and parishes because of the discordant elements in them, and in the vividness with which some of the characters in the particular parish at Bubbleton are drawn. But his best work, and one that evinces unmistakably the strong qualities of the writer's intellect and the soundness of his orthodoxy in morals, is his volume entitled "The True Story of the Barons of the South; or, the Rationale of the American Conflict," issued in 1862. It is a compact but lively presentation of the origin and growth of American slavery, from its inception with the Virginian colonists to the breaking out of the war of the Rebellion. It is an unequivocal statement of facts, and an irresistible appeal to Americans for the overthrow of the gigantic abomination of slavery, and the defence and maintenance of that freedom signified in the immortal Declaration sent out by our Revolutionary fathers from this nation, to all the other nations of the earth. It is one of the trumpet-calls to duty among the many that gave inspiration and life to that desperate strife which sent American slavery to "the receptacle of things lost on earth." Mr. Reynolds is worthy of honorable remembrance as one of the heroes of that strife. A discriminating writer has said of him: "As a preacher he was strong and often brilliant; as a scholar his explorations were extensive, and his acquisitions the gold refined from innumerable heaps of dross, patiently searched out; and as a writer he was master of a style which would have been his passport to the first literary circles of America." He died at Milwaukee, Wis., August 31, 1868, aged thirty-nine years.
Rev. Nathaniel Gunnison, a native of New Hampshire, was ordained to the ministry in 1837. He had entered it through much painstaking, and was thoroughly in earnest in his work. He was pastor in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Maine, and for eight years in Halifax, N. S., in which place he met with marked success. At one time the bishop of the Episcopalian church assailed him, and, not having a correct knowledge of our doctrines, laid himself open to a searching review from Mr. Gunnison. The controversy was a prolonged one, both oral and written, and the result was that the Episcopal church lost ground and members, and the Universalist church realized a corresponding increase. The civil war in our country broke out towards the close of Mr. Gunnison's pastorate. Halifax being in strong sympathy with the South, he stood almost alone in his defence of the North, and gave offence to some of the leading members of the society by his zealous exertions for the North while acting as Deputy Consul of the United States. He subsequently removed to Maine, where he died of paralysis in 1871, while in the midst of his active labors. His son, Rev. A. Gunnison, of Brooklyn, N. Y., pays this touching tribute to his honored parent:—
"At the age of fifty-seven, the pastor of whom we speak was paralyzed. Upon the early morning of the Sabbath, the secret blow fell upon him, but yet he went to his work, and with half his body dead went through his Sabbath service. Then came the weary months of battling with death. Disease was stayed by the vigor of an unconquerable will, and dragging his heavy limb, with right arm lifeless at his side, he took up again the burden of his work.... The other day, in the lumber of a storage room, we found the old trunk which contained the sermons of this veteran preacher, and there upon the top a package of huge MSS. written in rude fashion, unlike the singularly clear penmanship of the remaining mass. These were the sermons written after the fell shock came to him, for at fifty-eight years of age, finding that never again could the accustomed hand hold the pen, the old man had with his left hand learned to write, and until the last, week by week, the fresh sermon came quick and vital from a brain which would not cease to work."