departure' taken by the Southern Presbyterian Review, at Columbia. Adger writes me that the brethren at Hampden-Sydney, Va., have ageed to unite with those at Columbia, as co-editors. It is proposed further, that a few others shall be solicited to pledge at least one article a year; and amongst those, I understand that you and myself and Girardeau and Miller of Charlotte are placed. I presume therefore that some correspondence has been had with you on this subject. I take it for granted, too, that you will cordially co-operate in this effort to place the Review upon a broader foundation, and to make it eminently worthy of the patronage of the Church.

"My purpose in this writing is to recall to your remembrance a conversation we had together, when I was last at your house. I ventured to suggest, and I understood you as concurring with it, that a syllabus of topics should be carefully drawn up, covering a wide field of thought, and such as would be peculiarly suited to the conditions of the Church; and that these should be distributed amongst those who could best handle them, securing thereby a continuous discussion, and that not specially polemic, of the great principles which we desire to see prevail in the Church.

"In preparing Thornwell's life for the press, I have been greatly convinced of one practical error which he and Dr. R. J. Breckinridge committed. It was that they sprung grave issues upon the Church, calling for immediate legislative action. The result was that, on each separate point-Boards, the elder question, the quorum question, et al. they were floored, in the outset, by an adverse decision. The Church had not been prepared for these issues by antecedent discussion; voted blindly and wrongly; and these able men were placed at disadvantage in all the discussions afterwards, in that their opposition seemed to be a fractious one.

"I am pretty sure that you agree with me in thinking that, taking the whole country through, the Church tends to drift away from the Standards, both of Doctrine and Order. These great principles require to be fundamentally discussed again; and we now have a grand opportunity of doing it. We have an organ already established, just suited for the purpose, and we have the writers, if they can only be combined. "If I have your sympathy in what I have written, which I do not doubt, as you see from the perfect freedom with which I pen these lines, will you not assist with your suggestions, in getting up this schedule? It need not be perfect at first; and I would like it broad and comprehensive, so as to cover all kinds of error that we ought to combat. For your convenience I will sketch tentatively, on a separate sheet, some subjects that occur to me. Will you give your opinion of them, by just drawing your pen through such as you think had better be dropped; and then add as many more topics as may occur to your own fertile brain?

"Adger highly approves the thought and begs to confer with you about it, as it has been already a subject of conversation between us. "Yours as ever, in the Gospel of the Kingdom,

"B. M. PALMER."

Many other important services the Church received at his hands, as his continued labors on the revision of the Book of Church Order till the adoption of the Revised Book in 1879, the preparation and publication of the "Life and Letters of Dr. Thornwell," the production of a volume entitled "The Family in Its Civil and Church Aspects," addresses and essays, etc. of these and other things in the succeeding chapter.

CHAPTER XVI.

AT THE SUMMIT OF HIS POWERS AND PRODUCTIVITY,

Continued. (1875-1888.)

PRODUCTIONS OF HIS PEN: "LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES HENLEY THORNWELL, D.D., LL.D.,” AND THE WAY IN WHICH IT WAS RECEIVED; "THE FAMILY IN ITS CIVIL AND CHURCHLY ASPECTS." REVIEW ARTICLES AND NEWSPAPER CONTRIBUTIONS.-LAGS IN WRITING THE LIFE OF DR. STUART ROBINSON.-OCCASIONAL DISCOURSES: ON "PERSECUTION OF JEWS IN RUSSIA," 1882; ON "RABBI GUTHEIM;" ON "THE CHURCH A SPIRITUAL KINGDOM."-THE Sylvester LARNED INSTITUTE, AND HIS WORK IN IT.-PASTORAL LETTERS: TO MRS. LONSDALE, TO CAPTAIN MACFIE, TO MRS. MACFIE, TO MRS. ANDERSON.-Letter to Rev. W. C. CLARK.-LETTERS TO MRS. BIRD, AND TO MRS. ROBERT C. SHOEMAKER.-LETTER TO HIS FATHER. HIS FATHER'S LAST LETTER TO HIM.-THE WAY IN WHICH HE REGARDED HIS FATHER'S DEATH.-HIS DOMESTIC HISTORY.-THE PHYSICALLY STRONG MEMBER OF HIS FAMILY; GIVES UP THE TOBACCO HABIT; FALL AT STAUNTON, VA.; DEATH OF GUSSIE PALMER COLCOCK.

HE "Life and Letters of Thornwell" were ready for the press about the beginning of the year 1875. There was difficulty, however, in finding a publisher. Dr. Palmer approached firm after firm in the North only to be refused. February 24, 1875, he writes to Dr. J. B. Adger: "The difficulties attending Southern authorship have impressed me with a new sense of the importance of our Board or Committee of Publication." March 5, 1875, he wrote, again, to Dr. Adger: "I see no resource but in Baird's offer1 to publish by subscription. I will write to him, but not commit myself until I hear from you. On this account please answer as speedily as possible, and give your views fully. We are nothing to the North; and it is very clear to me that we must develop our own publishing interest."

He and his friends instituted vigorous and effective methods

'Dr. E. T. Baird was at that time Secretary of the Committee of Publication, Richmond, Va.

to gather subscribers. They soon secured a large list and in early December, 1876, the volume was issued.

For the production of this work Dr. Palmer possessed the amplest qualifications. For twenty years he had been intimately associated with Dr. Thornwell. They were then both laboring together in the same town, "and the utmost freedom and cordiality of intercourse existed between them." Their friendship was fervent. Palmer knew Thornwell in the intimacies of his home life-enjoyed his "bosom friendship;" and he knew him as a fellow presbyter on the floors of Presbytery, and Synod, and Assembly. He was gifted with the capacities to appreciate and to reproduce his life. He had that degree of sympathy with his subject without which a good biography cannot be written. He was at the same time a man of judicial and impartial temper.

He had a noble subject. It was his to tell how genius rose superior to obstacles, "how Divine grace prepared and trained it for the sublime mission of subsequent life," how it shone in sunshine and shadow. It was his to sketch the historic arena on which Thornwell ran his career, and show how his life was interwoven with the life of his age, how he was affected by it, and it by him. He did all in a most masterful way.

The literary style of the work demands the highest praise. It has been well said, that, "No reader can fail to be struck by the rhythmical flow and musical cadence of the sentences, the graceful elegance of expression, the copiousness and yet appropriateness and vigor of diction, the graphic vividness of portraiture, and the transparent clearness and masterly ability of didactic statement and exposition which characterize the book."

The "Life and Letters" received universal and unstinted praise throughout the South-praise which he felt he hardly deserved but which occasioned thanks to God as he writes in this letter to Mrs. Edgeworth Bird:

"NEW ORLEANS, LA., March 9, 1876. "MY DEAR SISTER SALLIE: It is worth the labor of writing a book to receive such an overflowing letter as that which I have just perused from your pen. Really, I must accept these encomiums as the reflection of your own goodness simply. It would be an inordinate self-love that could construe them as a testimony to one's own merit. It is the privilege of friendship to look through magnifying glasses; and I es

cape from a sense of shame only by remembering that you read my book through the strong lens of your own partiality.

"Still I will not deny that your praise gives me pleasure. In one respect I am like the friend whose character I have portrayed-not that I would in any other particular 'compare my little Mantua with his great Rome.' The genuine praise of friends, in whose sincerity we fully confide, ought to please. It is a healthy tonic to a healthful spirit. To the general applause of the world I am about as indifferent as I am to its censure-and it must be a shallow person who can be intoxicated by the one or greatly depressed by the other.

"You are kind enough to think me in no danger of being 'spoiled.' My precious sister, there is one most effective preventive. Do you not suppose that a truly earnest nature must always fall so far below his own ideal, as to forestall self-complacency? And the interval which lies between the desire and the achievement must always fill the soul with a sense of failure. It may not be safe to generalize too far. But I can truthfully say that I never have laid my hand upon a single performance of my own, with the feeling that it was a success. Often, often, when congratulations have been poured into my ear the inward mortification has been so great that I could creep through a keyhole. In the wonder they excite I simply yield myself in gratitude to God, and in thankfulness to the human kindness which is willing to accept what appears to me so worthless.

"Much of this, perhaps, is due to the fact that I commenced my public life by the side of the greatest intellects in the Church-and continued to be associated with them long enough to be impressed with the disparity betwixt me and them. To some extent this did not serve as a stimulus. My own ambition became chilled in the shadow of their superiority. The standard of 'excellence was so lofty as to appal rather than to encourage. And I have been painfully conscious, all through life, of undeveloped power-and shall go to the grave with the feeling that I have never achieved all of which I was really capable. This is the mortifying part-the recognition of the melancholy fact as a proof of inherent weakness. But the moral effect has been salutary, in the repression of vainglory and of pride. I must, however, arrest this train of thought lest you discover in the self-depreciation itself the evidence of too much self-love. Yet, it lets you down a little deeper into my experience than you have ever before explored.

"In regard to the 'Life of Dr. Thornwell"-if I have comparatively succeeded, it is because I always love hard; and in this case my heart held the pen-diffusing a glow over the composition which the head alone could not have imparted. It is an immense satisfaction, that the work has received the cordial approval of Dr. Thornwell's own personal friends. I undertook the task with trepidation, knowing how difficult it would be to meet the expectations of those whose love for