KING, THOMAS STARR, Unitarian minister, son of Rev. Thomas F. King, was born in New York City, December 17, 1824; died in San Francisco, Cal., March 4, 1864. His father, who had been pastor of a Universalist church in Charlestown, Mass., died when he was fifteen years old, and he was not only thrown upon his own resources, but was obliged to assist in the support of the family. He became successively clerk in a dry-goods store, teacher in a grammar-school, and clerk in the Charlestown Navy Yard. While engaged in these pursuits he devoted all the time he could get to study, especially the study of languages, as he realized that the knowledge of a language "opened the door to an acquaintance with its literature." He studied theology with Rev. Hosea Ballou, and preached his first sermon at Woburn, Mass., in the fall of 1845. For a short time after this he preached to a small Universalist Society in Boston during the absence of its minister. In 1846 he accepted a call to the Universalist church in Charlestown, Mass., the same pulpit which his father had filled at the time of his death. Mr. King's immediate predecessor was the gifted pulpit and platform orator, Edwin H. Chapin. He remained in this church two years and then accepted a call from the Hollis Street Unitarian Church in Boston, a church whose

history dates back to the year 1732. While in this church he became very popular as a lecturer. His first lecture was on Goethe, and the subjects of other lectures were Substance and Show, Socrates, Sight and Insight, and The Laws of Disorder. He spent his summer vacations in the White Mountains, and published a series of letters in the Boston Transcript describing their scenery, which was the beginning of his book The White Hills (1859). In 1860 he accepted a call to a church in San Francisco. This church was an obscure and struggling one, but within a year after he became its pastor it was one of the most prominent church organizations in the city, and in 1862 the corner-stone of a costly building was laid. Here, as in the East, he was in demand as a lecturer. On the breaking out of the Rebellion he began a series of lectures, which he delivered in all parts of the State and which were assaults on Secession. His subjects were Washington, Daniel Webster, The Constitution of the United States, and Lexington and Concord. These lectures were received with enthusiasm, and to these and to his political sermons is due, it has been said, the preservation of California to the Union. When the War began he was active in the work of the sanitary commission.

His new church was completed at the close of 1863, and on January 10, 1864, he preached his first sermon in it. On February 26th he was attacked with diphtheria, and died on March 4th. His publications, which, with the exception of The White Hills (1859), were issued after his death, include

Patriotism and Other Papers (1864); Christianity and Humanity, sermons (1877), and Substance and Show, lectures (1877).

His friend and biographer, E. P. Whipple, says of him: "Both as a thinker and as a reformer he was brave almost to audacity; but his courage was tempered by an admirable discretion and sense of the becoming, and his quick self-recovery from a mistake or error was not one of the least of his gifts. He seemed to have no fear, not even the subtlest form which fear assumes in our day -the fear of being thought afraid. No supercilious taunt, or imputation of timidity, could sting him into going farther in liberal theology and reforming politics than his own intelligence and conscience carried him. Malignity was a spiritual vice of which I have sometimes doubted if he had even the mental perception. His charity and toleration were as wide as his knowledge of men."

THE FUTURE LIFE.

To my mind one of the sublimest records of history is the reply of old heathen Socrates to his judges, when they condemned him, at seventy years old, to die. "If death," said he, "be a removal from hence to another place, and if all the dead are there, what greater blessing can there be than this, my judges? At what price would you not estimate a conference with Orpheus and Musæus, with Hesiod and Homer? I go to meet them, and to converse with them, and to acquaint myself with all the great sages that have been the glory of the past, and that have died by the unjust sentence of their time." That is what we need,-to think of the future, not as the dungeon where the wicked are locked up forever in an arbitrary doom, and the good shut apart from the evil to enjoy forever the consciousness of

being saved from perdition, but with vigorous imagination to regard it as the great sphere of life, filled with society amid whose myriads we must rank according to quality, overarched with all the glory of God's wisdom, and flooded with the effluence of His holiness and love, with continual occupations for the exploring mind of Newton, for the massive understanding of Bacon, for the genius of Shakespeare, for the reverent intellect of Channing, for the saintly heart of Fénélon,with duties for every faculty and every affection, and with joys proportioned exactly to our desire of truth, our willingness of service, and the purity of love that makes us kindred with Christ and God.

I have spoken of the great faculties of our nature as passing into the future to be educated, but I have not ranked them. Of course the highest is love, and the order of the future seems most clear and most impressive to my mind, when I think that we shall go to our places there according to our love rather than our wisdom. It will be part of our business to become acquainted with God outwardly by the intellect; but the great law of life will be more fully manifest there than even here, that our joy shall consist in the quality of our affections, in our sympathy and our charity. Though we have the gift of prophecy and understand all mystery and all knowledge, and though we have all faith so that we could remove mountains, and have not charity, we shall be nothing. Glorious will it be, no doubt, in that world of substance to be surrounded with the splendors of God's thought, to have the priv ilege of free range whithersoever taste may lead through the domains of infinite art, to enjoy the possibilities of reception from the highest created intellects; but our bliss, the nectar of the soul, will flow from our conse cration, our openness to the love of God, and our desire of service to his most needy ones.

For, brethren, let us associate also with the future, the business and the glory of practical service. All degrees of spirits float into that realm of silence. Ripe and unripe, mildewed, cankered, stunted, as well as stately and strong and sound, they are garnered for the eternal state by death. Is Christ, whose life was

sympathy and charity upon the earth, busy in no ministries of instruction and redemption there? Has Paul no missionary zeal and no heart of pity for the Antiochs and the Corinths that darken and pollute the eternal spaces? Has Loyola lost his ambition to bring the heathen hearts to the knowledge of Jesus? Will not the thousands of the merciful who have found it their joy here to collect the outcasts under healthier influence, to kindle the darkened mind, to clothe the shivering forms of destitution, to carry comfort to sick beds, and cheer into desolate homes-will not the divine brothers and sisters of charity, who are the glory of this life, find some call and some exercise for their Christlike sympathy in that world-in that world which is colonized by millions of the heathen and the unfortunate, the sin-sick, the polluted, and the ignorant, every year? Oh, doubt not, brethren, that the highest in Heaven are the helpers, the spirits of charity, the glorified Samaritans who penetrate into all the abysses of evil with their aid and their hope.-Christianity and Humanity.