About this time Mr. Staples made an arrangement with Mr. Mumford, then at Detroit, which enabled him to go West and preach for several Sundays. He left Lexington on the 31st of July. On Sunday, August 17th, he preached for the first time in Milwaukee, to an audience of about two hundred persons. The following Sunday he preached there again. Measures were immediately taken to secure his services, but he gave the people no encouragement, though he was deeply drawn to them. August 31st finds him again in his own pulpit, and glad enough to see his own beloved people.

"September 15th.-Have received a letter from the Milwaukee society, asking me to become their minister. It is a beautiful letter. It is hard to bring my mind to contemplate it.”

"September 17th.-The call from Milwaukee keeps floating before my mind like the memory of a dream. I somehow feel, without knowing why, that I shall go."

"September 20th.-The Milwaukee phantom haunts me still. grow thin thinking of it. What will become of me when I come to decide?"

I

"October 23d.-This Milwaukee matter makes us all sick at heart. I have concluded to resign next Sunday."

"October 25th.-It seems as if I cannot resign."

66

Sunday, October 27th.—The day is fine; the air soft and genial; the streets so dry, it does not seem so late in the year. Resigned this afternoon. It was awfully solemn. I could hardly endure it. God bless my people and strengthen me."

The last days at Lexington were painful in the extreme, A month before his departure his journal breaks off in the middle of a sentence, and thereafter testifies by its silence what bitter thoughts were passing in his mind, how full of tears was his great heart. Never had the people seemed so kind, so lovable. Had not the most influential of them

agreed with him that it was his duty to go, it would have been even harder than it was to part with them. His throat, too, came to the assistance of his judgment, with an intimation that the East was no place for it. Thus, before leaving Lexington, he had seen the beginning of the end. The troubles in his head and throat were both well under way, and afterward were to alternate in persistent inroads on his health and vigor.

took for The ques

His two years at Lexington were rich in culture and experience. There he decided the great question between love and duty, as presented to him by the political and social problems of the time. It is very easy for some men to say all they think on these problems, because they are men of little feeling, who take a profound enjoyment in stamping upon other people's toes. Mr. Staples was not of this sort. He was himself very sensitive, and granted that others were pretty much the same. tion with him was not, as with many, between duty and popularity. It was between duty and love. He hated to wound any one. He deserves then the greater praise that at the risk of wounding his best friends he did his duty. There was never any more hesitation about that. In Milwaukee and in Brooklyn he declared unto his people "the whole counsel of God" without a moment's wavering, though oftentimes it hurt him more to do it than it hurt those who kicked against the pricks most furiously.

Of the progress he had made in his theology, Mr. Staples was not himself aware till he looked back from the vantageground of a new position. But even more than in theology, in ecclesiastical matters he had deeply changed. At Meadville, it will be remembered, he went to the Episcopal church, and thought that about half as much form he

should like very much. At Lexington, church methods had for him at first no little fascination, and it was no lack of outward success with them that suggested their poverty. It was their lack of harmony with the rational and secular spirit of the age, of which he had become a quiet and sincere disciple. In his theology, Mr. Staples grew more radical until his death. But in leaving Lexington he left all his ecclesiasticism behind him, all his formalism. After that he might stand a few times more at the communion-table, but it would be as a man, not as a priest; he might baptize little children, but it would be in a purely personal and original, not in any ecclesiastical or sacramental way. Henceforth society is to be his universal church; all its great moral forces its ministers, and he a fellow-laborer with these in regenerating individual and social life. Some one who knew him well has said of him, "He did not grow into radicalism; he stepped into it all at once on going West." But I take it that this only means that he stepped all at once into clear consciousness of what had taken place in his convictions. The path was difficult, and he walked with his head down to find it, not knowing that he was ascending, even by the weariness. And now it was as if he had suddenly emerged from the clouds, and, on the summit, heaven with all its stars lay over him.

"With aching hands and bleeding feet

We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;
We bear the burden and the heat

Of the long day, and wish 'twere done;
Not till the hours of light return,

All we have built do we discern."

IV.

MILWAUKEE AND THE ARMY.

THE Western campaign began in December, 1856. The records of it are far less complete than those of his previous and subsequent life; or, perhaps I should say, they are more sacred and less reportable, being contained for the most part in daily letters to his wife, who was away from him in Meadville, St. Louis and Stapley Furnace, in the aggregate, a good deal. There is no journal to speak of until January, 1860, three years after the beginning of his new ministry, and this continues only four or five months, and is more a record of his outward than of his inner life. In 1859 began his friendship and correspondence with Robert Collyer, a friendship he deeply prized, a correspondence that was to both a source of boundless culture and delight. Their first meeting was in Chicago, where Mr. Collyer was then minister at large. Mr. Staples went in company with Mr. Brigham to hear Mr. Collyer preach, and when the service was over went up with both hands extended to thank him for preaching so well. The extended hands were met and clasped, and held ever tighter and tighter, until death came and severed them. Never did a young girl with her first lover wait for his letters more impatiently than Mr. Staples waited for his friend's. That one of them should arrive just in time to lie in the office over Sunday was the one piece of Sabbatarianism with which he

had no patience whatever. The letters once begun grow more and more frequent. In Brooklyn Mr. Staples wrote regularly every week. But this was far from being a sufficient outlet for sympathy and affection, and sometimes letter follows letter day after day. On both sides the correspondence was characterized by an admirable frankness and sincerity. If there is mutual praise, there is also mutual criticism. Each loves the other so devotedly that he hates his faults. The motto of their friendship might have been in Thoreau's words:

"Let such pure hate still underprop

Our love, that we may be
Each other's conscience,
And have our sympathy
Mainly from thence.

"We'll one another treat like gods,
And all the faith we have

In virtue and in truth, bestow
On either, and suspicion leave
To gods below."

But this friendship and correspondence were not in full bloom until after Mr. Staples left Milwaukee and went into the army, where, meeting Collyer in Washington, their conversation was in heaven, and the sturdy shoot struck down its roots and up its branches, and became a tree whose grateful shade afforded them full many an hour of shelter from the glare and heat of this almost too busy work-day world.

The enthusiasm and earnestness that attended the forming of the Milwaukee society will always be remembered by the few most earnest souls that were at the time Mr. Staples's constant counselors and coadjutors. Mr. Staples