ENTERED, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1860, by THE REV. WILLIAM CROSWELL DOANE, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the District of New Jersey. PREFACE. THE contents of this volume need no preface. They set forth in writing, what is impressed in the characters of faithful men and earnest women, over all our land, the thoroughness and reality of my father's plans of education. "While most among us are dreaming about Christian nurture,' and quietly building castles in the air," writes an English Reviewer, "Bishop Doane is awake and hard at work. There is an earnestness of zeal, a fearlessness of determination, a disregard of popular whims, a comprehensiveness of plan, a straightfor ward, undeviating fidelity of execution in the Bishop's purpose, which, with God's blessing, will not be in vain." They have had God's blessing. They have not been in vain. Though the author of them has "dug" his "grave under the foundations of a College;" and that grave now "holds the dust of him whom God employed to found St. Mary's Hall." The two sides of my father's life presented here, were most prominent in his character: the Scholar and the Teacher, and the Patriot; the Christian Scholar and Teacher, and the Christian Patriot; throwing into all these relations, the sacredness and the authority of his Episcopal office. I have only added to the writings that illustrate this, one or two of his memorial sermons, as proofs of the appreciative earnestness of his love, and of his power as a portrait-painter. It occurs to me, to remind those who may be struck with a want of uniformity in punctuation throughout this volume, that many years elapsed between the earlier and later writings; -years, during which, my father's critical work as a teacher, developed and systematized his own peculiar and thorough system of pointing; and I have left them, as I found them in his MSS., or in the printed copies, corrected by himself. BURLINGTON, October 1, A. D. 1860. |