The American Missionary — Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888

by Various

It is no exaggeration to say, although it is very much to say, that James Powell had come to be the most peculiarly and widely beloved man in our denomination. That this was so was not owing to any one quality, but must have been due to a singularly happy combination and balance of qualities. Every one thought of him as a man having a genius for popular eloquence. But he had also as truly unique gifts and graces for personal friendship. Without a particle of cant, he possessed profound religious faith and devotion. He walked with God and had no gifts which were not consciously devoted to his service. At the same time he was intensely human. He never affected to be ethereal. He was a son of man, a child of nature. And he touched life at many points. His sympathy was immensely more than mere pity. He was instinctively, as well as religiously generous. Open hearted, open minded, genuine to the core, quick, sensitive, responsive, impulsive, enthusiastic; whatever he did, he did with a will and noble zest. Happy in a certain "divine sense of victory and success," he also delighted keenly in the successes of others; and there was that about him which made every one wish him to succeed, expect him to succeed, and apt to tell him so when he had done well. And yet he was, to a singular degree, free from any promptings of personal vanity. He had pride but was not proud; least of all was he conceited. He never did poorly; he almost always did brilliantly; there was not an indolent fibre in his being. He did well because he exerted himself to do his best. He was happy in the power God gave him, and accepted joyously the opportunities which others eagerly offered him for doing the things that were in line with the main purpose of his life.

He had an exquisitely sure and alert sense of honor. He could not do a mean thing. He won friends, and never lost any; because all felt that he was not only so genuine and unselfish, so bright and full of happy humor, so deep and exuberant in affection, but that he was so perfectly to be trusted. No one knew better his own rights, or was less wanting in any courage that might be needed to maintain them. He was capable of high degrees of indignation, and his life work, championing the rights of wronged and depressed classes and races, furnished him with but too many occasions for holy anger. His soul often burned with intensest indignation. When one night the people in Quitman, Georgia, burned over their heads the seminary for colored girls, or when the Georgia Legislature was enacting the infamy of the Glenn Bill, his heart was hot as any Babylonian furnace, aflame with indignation, as though touched with the divine wrath, the anger of love. And yet not for a moment could one detect in him any spark of bitterness or malice.

But chilled now is that heart of flame; stilled now are the mighty pulsations of that better than chivalric spirit, which up and down the land, all over the East and the West, during those fourteen years, did so much to educate the churches, and to remind the country of the "kindness and love of God our Saviour, which hath appeared toward man," and which ought with all possible celerity to be manifested by men, by men of all races and of all classes, toward one another, and to promote which this American Missionary Association finds supremely its reason to be.

The Society has had, has, and will have, other men in its service of splendid personal characteristics and having peculiar fitness for the signally providential parts assigned them in this great work, which ought to fire the heart of every Christian in the land. One we have, thank God, still among us, equally loved and revered, who has long stood at the front in this mighty and benignant enterprise—may the day be slow in coming when his great heart shall be missed from these yearly councils! And still we may be sure that the resources neither of our humanity nor of the grace of God are in any danger of being exhausted.

James Powell's Welsh blood was in his favor. His American boyhood and training helped fit him for what was to come. That whispered word of a Christian lady to a young man whose conversion, in turn, led to the conversion of young Powell, proved to be a word of destiny. And his experience abroad with the Jubilee Singers, in whose tones was voiced the pathos of three silent centuries, had, also, not a little to do in fitting him for the work God had in store for him.

It is, therefore, easy to see how fortunate this society was in having such a man for its personal representative; and, how fortunate the churches also were in having the most characteristic spirit and motive and aim of the cause he stood for so fittingly impersonated. That fond mother of the famous English missionary who is reported to have said, that "as for her son, the race of God could find but little to do in him," did not speak for James Powell. God had given him splendid gifts to begin with, but it was the grace of God in him that first saved him from making shipwreck of those gifts, and then taught him how to use them so exhaustively in his service.

This Society represents above all things an educational enterprise. It has many schools, chartered and unchartered, throughout the South and West. We can never admire too much this far-reaching educational undertaking. But, the Society is itself, in certain most fundamental respects, the very "head-master" in the school of the churches, in the school of the nation. And how beautifully, how superbly, how effectively did this brother of ours shine and burn among the churches of our land, as one commissioned of heaven to help teach us the reality of meaning there is in this word of our Lord, how he said, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

His memory we shall all, and always, affectionately cherish. For the service which he rendered to the cause which we also love, we will be devoutly thankful. If we have gotten any good from the life which he lived before us, we can show it by the growing warmth and completeness of our own enlistment in the same cause. Cries Mrs. Browning at Cowper's grave:

O Poets, from a maniac's tongue was poured the deathless singing;
O Christians, at your cross of hope a hopeless hand was clinging;
O men, this man in brotherhood your weary paths beguiling
Groaned inly while he taught you peace and died while ye were
smiling.

But not in that way was Powell the teacher of hope and of peace and of joy to us. He showed the way of the cross and all the morning light of hope, because he himself had found it! And how lustrous and mighty and winning did his own way of life serve to make all this way appear to be.