olute and sustained exertion on the part of young Baird; but so earnest was he in his purpose to make it thorough, that he reviewed and perfected his elementary studies with great completeness, and thus succeeded in deriving from his college studies the highest advantage. He is recorded to have been particularly persevering in his endeavors to perfect himself in the art of composition. It was only with great labor that he supplied the defects of his original training, and laid the foundation during his college course of that correctness and ease of style which made him afterwards so ready and useful in the various departments of authorship. Here too, as with so many of our educated young men, that deepest and happiest of changes took place which sanctified all his talents and attainments to the service of Christ. In connection with the Sabbath-school instruction of a class of negro boys, which he had been persuaded to undertake, his sense of his spiritual necessities became so deep that he was led to cast his soul in faith on the Redeemer of sinners.

Soon after his graduation, Mr. Baird commenced his preparation for the ministry of the Gospel in the Theological Seminary at Princeton. He supported himself in great part by teaching, and numbered among his pupils James, and Addison, the subsequently distinguished sons of Rev. Dr. Archibald Alexander. He moreover acted for a year as a tutor in the College, with great acceptance and approval.

His success as an instructor naturally suggested the function of teaching as one for which he was peculiarly fitted; and to the adoption of it he was further impelled by an unusual diffidence which seriously embarrassed him in his attempts to preach. This will not seem strange to those who recollect the singularly modest and shrinking manner of Dr. B.'s early years. The secluded life of his boyhood, joined with great natural diffidence, had given him a timidity which led him to shrink from appearing in public. He accepted therefore the charge of an academy in Princeton, and remained for five years a teacher.

But the earnest counsels of a friend and devoted young minister who died at this time in Princeton, Rev. Mr. Gibson, reawakened his convictions in behalf of the more active duties of the ministry, and impelled him to very serious and successful endeavors to overcome this obstacle; and he now engaged in the important work of preaching the Gospel as the great occupation of his life.

Mr. Baird was never settled in the pastoral office over any particular church; but from the beginning of his pulpit labors was engaged in religious enterprises of wide and general utility to the cause of Christ. The period was one in which many great movements for the interests of religion were shaping themselves in the counsels of the Church; and to several of these in succession Mr. Baird gave himself with all the quiet energy of his character.

He was first engaged in an effort to circulate the Scriptures. He traversed the State of New Jersey in every direction, till the moral wants of every portion of it had been explored, and ten thousand copies of the Word of God had been dropped into as many destitute homes. His labors in this enterprise disclosed to him the great destitution of public education in the State, and his ready pen was at once enlisted to bring the want to notice. A series of articles from his pen on this subject, contributed greatly to the subsequent adoption of the present school system of New Jersey.

He next devoted himself to the religious education of the young, and in the employ of the American Sunday-School Union, visited almost every part of our extended country. His efforts displayed an uncommon tact, and were attended with great success. He spoke but little himself, but organized public meetings, enlisted the co-operation of able speakers and influential persons, and thus developed an interest in the public mind that greatly strengthened the Society, and was fruitful of much good.

But the great work of his life consisted in the effort to awaken religious interest on the Continent of Europe. Circumstances had early directed his attention to the history and condition of France; and he could not but become painfully alive to the neglected condition of that and other European countries, in a period when almost every other portion of the globe, not already evangelized, had become the theatre of active religious operations. France was the key of Europe, and to the introduction of evangelical agencies into France, and so into Europe, he now directed an attention which had already been disciplined by many similar studies to promptness and justness of appreciation.

It was in great part through his agency that a small circle of friends of religion, termed the French Association, had been formed as early as 1834, under the direction of which he sailed for Europe early in 1835. Taking up his residence in Paris, he commenced a most active course of labor for the revival of religion throughout the continent.

During the three years which he now spent abroad, Dr. Baird was the center of a vast circle of religious agencies which reached to almost every portion of Europe.

In Paris itself he maintained, with the assistance of Rev. Dr. Wilks, a benevolent clergyman of England, a religious service in the chapel of the Rue Taitbout, which became a center of religious influence for all the Americans visiting that city, and a medium of communication between the religious minds of our country and those of France, hitherto entirely unknown to each other. The influence of the worship there maintained, and of the pastoral supervision, kindly and modestly exercised over the hundreds of Americans constantly in Paris, has been

deeply felt, and gratefully acknowledged by many of them. A new interest in the vital and evangelical movements of our country was diffused among all those enlightened Frenchmen who sympathized with our religious ideas.

Nor was Dr. Baird's influence confined to France. He spent the first summer in Switzerland, and succeeded in awaking there a similar interest, and drawing the friends of the Redeemer there into sympathy and communication with those in America. As investigation disclosed the religious wants of Europe, specific arrangements were suggested for the supply of them, to all of which the ready pen of Dr. Baird was promptly devoted. A history of the Temperance Reformation was soon proposed which advocated in Europe that great American movement. Published first in French, it was subsequently translated into nearly all the languages of Europe; and accomplished a most useful work in inaugurating this benevolent reform upon that continent.

A series of journeys was next undertaken, in the first of which Dr. Baird exerted a wide and happy influence in behalf of morals and piety upon the leading men of the North and West of Europe. During the next year he traversed the South of France and Italy, consulting for the religious development and religious freedom of those countries. Subsequently he renewed his journey to the North, and extended it to the East as far as St. Petersburgh and Moscow. In these extended efforts now becoming generally known and appreciated, he penetrated to the highest places of authority and exerted his kind and happy influence over even the ministers and monarchs of Europe. When in 1837 he at length returned to America, it was in possession of an amount of information relating to the spiritual necessities of Europe which perhaps no other living man possessed, and which speedily developed in the "Foreign Evangelical Society" an efficient agency of relief.

In the service of this Society, which was formed in great part through his personal agency, Dr. Baird now engaged upon a most extended series of labors for the spiritual benefit of France. He returned to Europe, and by his personal and most laborious exertions, set on foot a most extended and active Temperance movement in Sweden. He traversed a great part of that country, appealing to the leading minds in behalf of a reform, in what was then perhaps the most intemperate portion of the world; and inaugurating a movement the progress of which has since been constant, and its results happy and blessed in a high degree. Having established agencies of communication with the Protestants in France and Sweden, he returned to America; and by many journeys and discourses, spread throughout all parts of this country, the wants and prospects of religion in Europe. The interest heretofore

felt by the few who were particularly acquainted with the subject, now became both deep and wide throughout our country; and the great idea of the religious regeneration of Europe took firm hold of the American church.

The more recent labors of Dr. Baird are so well known to his countrymen that we need not here describe them in detail. His kindly and intelligent face, beaming with interest in the fate of the nations for whose welfare he labored, has become familiar through his many visits and lectures, through the length and breadth of our land. His numerous works, all breathing a chastened, but deep and intelligent interest in the progress of religion throughout Europe, and a most unusual acquaintance with its history and prospects in our own country, have been read, translated, and diffused, to a vast extent. And still with each new year, new journeys were undertaken, by land and by sea; new works were planned, and executed; new methods were devised of aiding the cherished cause of Christ at home and abroad; and new appeals were made with ever growing information, in behalf of those that were ready to perish.

Amid such labors as these, death overtook him at last. The long journeys-still repeated, the ceaseless endeavors, the responsibility of directing and sustaining so largely efforts as varied and extended as those of the Society had now become, began to tell on his marvellous constitution, and to exhaust even his enduring vitality. Yet still he persevered. His intimate acquaintance with the wants of the world would not let him rest; and though admonished by repeated infirmities and sicknesses during the later years of his life, that his strength was no longer adequate to these ceaseless and severe exertions, he no sooner gained some partial recovery than he again resumed his beloved work. At last the hour came that was to terminate his labors. He returned home from a visit to Elizabeth, N. J., where with all his wonted fullness of interest and information he had been pleading for the evangelization of Europe, to be smitten down by disease, no more to rise. A few days of painful struggle, and the crisis was over. He knew that his end was at hand. He asked as was his custom that one of the Epistles of St. Paul might be read to him; and then-with all his wonted modesty and self-distrust-cast himself once more upon the Redeemer whom he had so long trusted and served; and then God took him to his rest and his reward.

In briefly reviewing the course of his public life, it is impossible not to see that he had the happiness to find the field to which his talents were peculiarly adapted. In no other department of Christian labor could he have accomplished so much; in no other could all his talents and attainments have been brought so fully into use. In this fiied he

labored too, with a most exemplary fidelity and zeal.-No efforts were too extended, too protracted, or too constant, to exhaust his activity. All Europe, and all America, became familiar with that quiet but earnest voice, and learned to respond to its affectionate appeals. No man of his generation more widely reached his fellow men by personal interview and public address; none devised more liberal things for the welfare of the world, or set on foot more agencies of Christian benevolence. His labors were but a sowing of seed which shall long bear its fruit to the honor of the Redeemer; and many a soul shall at the last rise up and call him blessed.

Rooms of the American & Foreign Christian Union, }

17,

Ar a special meeting of the Board of Directors of the American and Foreign Christian Union, the following preamble and resolutions were unanimously adopted:

WHEREAS, the Rev. ROBERT BAIRD, D. D., Corresponding Secretary of this Society, departed this life on Sunday, the 15th inst., in great peace and comfort of mind, arising from a firm and unwavering faith in the righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ-And whereas during his entire ministry he has been identified with all the great objects of Christian benevolence and philanthropy-especially with our own Society from its first organization, manifesting the deepest interest in its work of spreading a pure Christianity in our own and foreign lands, cheerfully employing in its service his time, his talents, and his influence

Resolved, 1. In the removal by death of our beloved and distinguished Secretary, the Rev. Robert Baird, D. D., we recognize, with profound sorrow and a humble resignation to the Divine will, the irreparable loss which the Church, the Society, and the world have been called so suddenly to mourn.

2. That in the life and example of our departed associate and friend we have a legacy of imperishable value; his early consecration of himself to the active service of Christ in the extension of the Redeemer's kingdom; his indefatigable labors at home and abroad, traversing oceans and continents in the prosecution of the great cause of Christian benevolence and philanthropy; his cultivated manners and address, giving him easy access to the society and sympathy of the high and the lowly to whom he ministered alike in his Master's work; his earnest and humble piety sustaining him through all the years of his foreign and domestic service; his large-hearted, Catholic Christianity, identifying him in Christian union with Christ's people of every name, in every land-all combining to make Dr. Baird one of the most useful men while he lived, and therefore most lamented when called away from his field of labor to his rest and glorious reward. 3. That our tender sympathies and affectionate condolence are with the surviving family of our deceased associate; and in their affliction we commend them in faith to the care and comforting grace of their and our heavenly Father. 4. That a copy of the above resolutions be sent to the family of Dr. Baird.