It was the week of the May Anniversaries. He attended and highly- enjoyed the meetings of most of the benevolent societies which were held in the day-time. He was earnestly solicited to take some part in the public exercises, but he uniformly declined, except in a single instance. He did consent to act as President pro tempore, at the business meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society. He was influenced in this case to deviate from his established plan, on the ground that the circumstances in which he was then placed would speak an important language. The flame of liberty which was kindled in our Revolutionary struggle continued to bum in his aged breast. He knew that the sacred cause of freedom had recently been assailed in New York by a lawless mob ; and that its few friends were now struggling, not only with the deadly hostility of slaveholders themselves, but with that unnatural sympathy which these slaveholders were receiving from many professed friends of freedom. It was interesting to notice the workings of his patriotic mind, when he received the invitation to attend this AntiSlavery meeting. Some of his friends who were present, advised him to accept, and others to decline the invitation. He heard them both with candor and kindness, but made no decisive reply until one of tho party said to him, " This may be the last public act of your life." He then immediately arose and said, " I must go." '

It would be a fit study for an artist, to exhibit on the canvas the old friend of Hopkins and Bellamy, as he sat erect in the last decade of his century on earth, and helped to initiate a new era of freedom in the land of the free.

He returned to his parsonage after an absence of eleven days, in as good health and as elastic spirits as the most robust of the friends who accompanied him. The tour gave him new courage to sally forth on lengthened journeys. In 1837, when ninetytwo years old, he took a second steamboat excursion to Hallowell, Maine, the residence of his son, Hon. Williams Emmons. Returning to his old study he remarked with his wonted buoyancy, that he " might yet cross the Atlantic and make the tour of Europe." In April, 1838, when he was ninety-three years old, be took his last journey on earth, attended the ordination of his parishioner, Rev. A. R. Baker, at Mcdford, Mass., and visited Salem, Boston, Dorchester, and the neighboring towns. Politicians, as well as divines, came out to welcome him during these excursions, and received from him such racy, terse lessons as they afterwards loved to repeat in household

§ 5. His New Popularity.

" He buffeted a strong current all his days, both in Church and State." He concealed no truth because it was distasteful, he proclaimed no opinion because it was flattering to men. He resisted the clergy as well as the laity, his own denomination as well as " sectarians " when he deemed them wrong. His frank avowal of dissent from friends and foes, his independent and stern reprimand of rulers and people, theologians and infidels, high and low, made him for a time obnoxious to public censure. His meditations under the cloud of popular ill-will, were philosophical as well as Christian. " In. the end, and on the whole, the evil will bow down to the good :" "A faithful minister will be honored at last by the men who receive his reproof, and by the men who reject it; and he enjoys all the benefit which he does confer upon the former.

and all which he strives to confer upon the latter:" — such were his prophecies of the reward that awaited him. He lived to see the cloud of his unpopularity roll away. Seldom has an author been loved with more enthusiasm by the considerate opponents of his doctrine. In an oration delivered by Judge Theron Metcalf, before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Brown University, September 4,1832, eight years before the death of Emmons, a tribute which friends and foes welcomed with a loving heart, was paid by the erudite jurist to the pastor of his youth, in the following chaste and memorable words:

" It might occur, one would think, to the discretion of all men, and especially to clerical men, that the only way in which lasting respect can ever be acquired, is in the pursuit of worthy ends by worthy means. Indeed, as a matter of immediate popularity, a clergyman would find his account in the bold and faithful discharge of his sacerdotal functions, without anxious regard to applause or censure. I need not refer to Massillon, and Obcrlin, and other honored dead, in proof of thus suggestion. But I cannot resist the impulse which incline* mo to allude to an eminent living divine, personally known to many of you ; whose plain and unshrinking enforcement of hit own views of truth, whose fearless reprehension of wickedness in high places awl in low, and whose entire devotion, for more than fifty years, to the duties of his profession, have secured for him a most extensive and reverent respect, no less sincere and profound in the many who reject his peculiar opinions, than in the few who adopt them. I desire to be grateful, that in the place of my nativity, such an example of clerical dignity, fidelity, and contempt of the popularity ' which is run after,' was constantly before my youthful eyes; and that such an example of ' the popularity which follows,' is still before the eyes of the public."

CHAPTER XVIII.

SOURCES OF THE GENERAL INTEREST IN DR. EMMONS.

No sooner had he been called to his home, than the community were anxious to read his Memoir. His prudent associates were the most importunate for its immediate publication. This fact, of itself, is a biography. Those who were most familiar with him, felt that it was safe to expose his inner life, and that his biographer need not lie in ambush until his contemporaries were locked up in their tombs. His friends knew that many of bis published writings give no adequate idea of himself as a man. They were written in the style of a secluded student, with somewhat of the severity which is natural to one living aloof from and above his race ; but no one exhibition of his character exhausted him. His aspect, in the pulpit, and in the controversial treatise, will not display the whole of him. He had enough of material for five or six different portraitures; enough of manhood to fill out several quite notable personages. Not but that he had faults of mind and heart; he not only had them, but could afford that others should know them. " No man's character," he used to say, " will bear examining;" and again, " Everybody has something about him to spoil him." But his faults did not prevent him from receiving attentions which he never courted, or from finding honors which he never sought. "While he disdained to run after the world, many wise men of the world went on a pilgrimage to him. What were the sources of the general interest felt in the Franklin metaphysician ? The greater part of the following answer to this question was published by the writer of this Memoir, in his " Reflections of a Visitor," etc.