New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1906-02-11
A GOOD WORK DONE.

A good man is gone and great loss is sur
fered by the world in the death Of Samuel hop
kins Hadley. when our names are blotted out
and our place knows us more, SAID Huxley
1.-THE energy of each social service Will remain
like the amending stream of one or nature
forces" There is no incongruity in compar-
ing the energy of Hadley's social service with
that of even some of he greater of nature S
forces. Ii is said. probably without eXaggera-
ton. that at his meetings at the Water Street
Mission in these last twenty years no fewer
than seventy-hve thousand persons declared
their intention 70 lead better lives. There is
reason for confidence that a majority of these
were true to their resolutions. Surely, to have
rescued thousands OF lives from beggary, vice
and crime and to have made them industrious
and law abiding members Of the community is
such a service 20 the state as not many other
men have performed. To have saved large
number of souls from death is. from the spirit
ual point of view. a service of simply immeas-
urable greatness.
But that was by no means ALL 1t was di-
rectly through his influence that his brother be-
came interested in Christian benetcence and
became the leader of one large mission and the
founder of some forty others: that the three
sons OF that brother also entered the same field
of usefulness: and that many other men--most
of them converts in the Water Street Mission
became the heads of Christian and benevolent
enterprises. Thus his influence was through all
those years not only widening in its own circle
but il was establishing other centres from each
of which similarly widening circles OF good
works proceeded, and each of which in turn
created yet other centres. and so on. The sum
total of the good thus done by this one devoted
man is something that cannot be computed. II
would be impossible 10 reckon how much ii
has amounted 10 just to the present time But
now Hadley's work has only just begun. Ii
will remain like the unending stream of one
Of natures forces
There are those who lament the decline Of
faith and the decadence of the churches What
a tremendous rebuke to such does the career
Of man like Samuel Hopkins Hadley present!
For the handspring and motive of his life. its
Alpha and Omega, was Christian faith-'the
feeling that there's God. He reigns and rules"
A Methodist in technical Church membership.
purely undenominational in his mission work.
he had the same VITAL overmastering faith that
Bunyan. and Baxter. and Wesley had, and that
his own famous ancestor Jonathan Edwards.
had. He had precisely that odd fashioned re-
ligion" that so many of our churches deplore
the decline of and ftfully seek to restore. He
had 1t, and the power of it worked in and
through him as surely. as Enthusiastically and as
effectually as ever II did through any of the
canonized spiritual leaders of the past And
he himself would have been the most earnest
in denying, and in denying truthfully, that he
was any rare or unique exception to the rule.
What he did others could do. The church or
the minister lamenting the unfruitfuness of
its or his work should regard this example
and learn from it that failure to effect results
comparable with Hadley's simply argues fail
ure TO cherish the faith that he cherished and
pracdsed TO make the conservation of effort that
he made and spend the love that he spent.