Empty Crib” I have referred to in a previous chapter.  When we reached the burial lot he got out of the carriage, and in the driving wind, of a raw November morning, spent some time in examining the marble medallion of the child, and in talking with my wife most sweetly about him.  I could have hugged the man on the spot.  It was so like Stanley.  I do not wonder that everybody loved him.  We then drove to the tomb of Dr. Edward Robinson and the Dean said to us:  “In all my travels in Palestine I carried Dr. Robinson’s volume, ‘Biblical Researches,’ with me on horseback or on my camel; it was my constant guide book.”

Three years afterward, on my arrival in London, from Palestine I learned that Stanley was dangerously ill.  On the door of the Deanery a bulletin was posted:  “The Dean is sinking.”  That night the good, great man, died.  On the 25th of July the august funeral service took place in Westminster Abbey.  Outside the Abbey thousands of people were assembled, for the Dean was loved by all London.  From a small gallery over the “Poets’ Corner” I looked down on the group, which contained Gladstone, Shaftesbury, Matthew Arnold, and scores of England’s mightiest and best.  After the “Dead March,” began a long procession headed by Stanley’s lifelong friend, Archbishop Tait, of Canterbury, and the Prince of Wales (his pupil), and followed by Browning, Tyndall, and a long line of bishops, and poets and scholars moved slowly along under the lofty arches to the tomb in Henry VII.’s Chapel.  A fresh wreath of flowers from the Queen was laid on the coffin.  Many a tear was shed on that sad day beside the tomb in which the Church of England laid her most fearless and yet her best beloved son.  I never have visited the Abbey since, without halting for a few moments beside the chapel in which the Dean and his beloved wife are slumbering.  Greater than all his books or literary achievements was Arthur Penryn Stanley, the modest, true-hearted, unselfish, childlike, Christian man.

Soon after I had begun my pastorate in New York, I became a member of the Young Men’s Christian Association, which was one of the first that was organized in this country.  Since that time I have delivered more than one hundred addresses, in behalf of this institution, in my own country and abroad.  In June, 1857, the New York organization honored me with what was then a novelty in America—­a public breakfast, and commissioned me as a delegate to the original parent association in London.  I there met that remarkable Christian merchant, Mr. George Williams, who was the founder of the Association, and who had got much of his first spiritual inspiration from reading the writings of our American, Charles G. Finney.  He is now Sir George Williams, my much loved friend, and I do not hesitate to say that there is not another man living who has accomplished such a world-wide work for the glory of God and the welfare of young men.  The President of that first organized