Charles Francis Barnard a Sketch of His Life And Work

e born for pure enjoyment of air and sunshine, exempt by happy birthright from every call to the serious duties of life. Enough for him to live and give thanks in so beautiful a world. Pure and innocent as a maiden, no trace of vice soiled him, only so unspeakably happy was he ? a happiness he . carried with him to the latest day of life ? that his seemed the dower from heaven of eternal childhood, free to float, at the will of every passing breeze, like the clouds in the blue sky. Settled in 1801 in the ministry, in the town of Chelsea, Massachusetts, a position into which, on a simple tide of kindly and devout feeling, he had drifted with no adequate preparation for his work, he yet remained there twenty-five years, till the age of fifty, without really coming to himself and finding what he was made for. Diligent and faithful in his duties, he was none the less dull and uninspiring as a preacher. In the round of routine work necessitated by ministering to a community of well-to-do, respectable people, already constituting a sort of average, commonplace Kingdom of Heaven on earth, his high - wrought emotional nature remained a damped fire. To bring out the Jesus element in him, Joseph Tuckerman needed the appeal of the publicans and harlots, needed the awakening of the sense of the " joy among the angels in heaven over one sinner that repenteth more than over ninety and nine just men that need no repentance." As he looked out from his study windows in Chels...