Dr. Kirk was born in New York City, was graduated from Princeton College, and pursued legal studies for a year and a half, living a life which he characterizes as profligate. His conversion, after a severe struggle, was complete, and the purpose of his life was utterly changed. He immediately devoted himself to preparation for the ministry of the gospel.
Handsome, gifted and ardent, he at once took a leading position. His two pastorates, at Albany and in Boston, were full of fruitfulness. While yet a pastor, he did the work of an evangelist, with a power and success which has been seldom paralleled. He was a direct and pungent preacher, sometimes, as in Albany, stirring up opposition, and yet wonderfully tender and conciliating in his manner, and so gaining friends even from those who antagonized him.
He was always a reformer, but a radical only in the best sense. He spoke manfully of the slave, and of the possibilities of the African race, in 1820, when only in his eighteenth year, a student at Princeton. Not until much later was he in sentiment an Abolitionist. He was never a denunciator. In opposing a false system, he made all charitable allowance for those involved in it, and was careful to recognize the fact that there were slaveholders who became or continued such that they might protect and benefit the slave. In the summer of 1860 and in the spring of 1861, when the South was peculiarly sensitive, Dr. Kirk was traveling in Virginia, North Carolina and beyond, expressing his sentiments frankly, and yet so courteously and wisely that he was always met with kindness.
In 1865, when the emancipation of the slaves had opened to the A. M. A. the work of their instruction and Christianization, Dr. Kirk was chosen its President, as a man representing its aim and spirit most fully. His sympathy with its work was deep and earnest, and continued to the end.
But this was not a specialty. He was equally earnest in the cause of Foreign Missions, of work among the Roman Catholics, of Education (as shown by his interest in Amherst College and the Mount Holyoke Seminary), of Temperance, and of evangelistic work at home.
So far as the memoir reveals the secret of his power, it seems to have been a rare combination of fearlessness and tact—the courage which comes from deep conviction, and the tact which comes from a loving sympathy with men, and a real sweetness of disposition. But more than all, it shows him as a man who walked with God in reverential yet familiar intercourse—who realized that the Lord Jesus was indeed with him always, and whose prayers were in accord with the resolution of his early life—“I intend hereafter, in my prayers, to converse with God, and not make speeches before Him.”
Such lives are powerful in their influence while they are with us, and profitable in their instruction when we have only the record of them to read.
NEWS FROM THE CHURCHES.
Sand Mountain, Ala.—This church has no pastor. Sunday services kept up by the reading of sermons; does not sustain a prayer-meeting or Sunday-school. The church is composed of white people, all from the North. A day-school, numbering fifteen, is sustained in connection with the church.