River Falls journal. [volume] (River Falls, Pierce County, Wis.) 1872-2019, 1917-07-12
Tribute 10 Rev. ThOrSen
Delivered at Continents Reunion
June II, BY Atty. N. B. Hanson
Of GAINESVILLE, MINI.
concluded from last week.

Our venerable friend and pastor.
we have a great many things for
which we want to thank you if time
would permit but we want to men
ton few things in particular. We
thank you for the ripe scholarship,
the mental endowment and your
skill and enthusiasm which we have
enjoyed in your work, not only in
your later years, but even in the pi-
oneer days when learning was not as
accessible as now. We thank you
also for the good sense, judgment,
stability and fine manliness. You
came here in a day of small things,
but to communities that were stable
in character.
You adjusted yourself to condi-
tlons. You were stable and con-
servative yourself. You struck deep
root, and there was that quality
about your work from the beginning
that showed permancy. You have
never cheapened your calling by re-
sorting to any snowy. shallow or
temporary expedients to gain you
notoriety or popularity. You have
never allowed personal ambition to
tempt you to use these congrega.
tions as stepping stones to higher
places for yourself. You have never
been soured, envious, disappointed
and disgruntled to the damage of
your calling because you have felt
that you were not rising rapidly
enough in worldly way.
believe that it is true that all of
your confirmants are working in a
time when the dollar looms too large,
that we are pressed upon from every
hand through experience, circum-
stances, suggestion and association
to look upon men and mems work
as important and desirable chiefly
in proportion to the dollars they can
produce. That was not Christ S
standard. We thank you that you
have stood as an example for us in
our youth and maturity as one who
has taught Us that man can live a
long, useful, honorable, contented
life, based not upon money but up
on manhood and a conservation to
ideals.
We thank you, and with you. Mrs.
Thorsen, for your open hospitality
and in this connection we want to
say that we are not unmindful OF
the fact that the lifelong influence
of a good woman has been expressed
not only directly by her but through
you as we'll for our good. Yes, we
want to thank you both for your op-
en- home that so many of US have en-
| joyed. We saw there exemplified a
fine family spirit, mutual affection,
and helpfulness, the infence Of ed
ucation and refinement, the domes-
tic virtues; in short, the ideal Christ
ian home. Those were happy days
for all of US; for us because we had
Respondent youth and everything
seemed to be reckoning and calling;
and for you because your children
were all gathered around you ano
were fast fulfilling the promise and
hope that you with all parents look
forward to in their children.
Speaking for myself, personally,
am glad to say that | am oft re-
minded of, and shall always CRATE
fully remember your many kindness
es, and pleasure of the social inter-
course | mad under the roof of this
old parsonage. And lastly, but not
least, we thank you for your great
conservation to your work and for
your love for your fellow-men.
Back of every consecrated life is a
motive to carry it forward. Your
Master loved mankind. When we
look back over the beginning at how
you have had to work under adverse
conditions, at how you have seen the
miserliness and meanness of men,
their leaden heartedness, their ap-
parent Indifference to the great
truths with which you have been
affiame, their contentiousness and
quickness to criticise, their slowness
to praise: athow you have with sad
ness seen year by year large num-
bers of your young people go out
and away into the world, young men
and young women that you would
have been so glad to have had here
with you to sustain you in your