a minister's interest or duty, commanded his eager attention, and he
improved every opportunity to declare his reverence for the world's
workers in earth, and stone, and iron. In a fine passage in a lecture on
"The Earth and the Mechanic Arts," he writes:

"If we were to choose from the whole planet a score of men to represent
us on some other globe or in some other system in a great human fair of
the universe, it would not be kings, dukes, prime-ministers, the richest
men, we should appoint as ambassadors to show what our race is, and what
it is doing here, but the great thinkers, artists, and workers, the
thinkers in ink, the thinkers in stone and color, the thinkers in force
and homely matter, the men who are bringing the globe up towards the
Creator's imagination and purpose; and on this mission the leaders of
mechanic art would go side by side with Shakespeare and Milton, Angelo
and Wren, Newton and Cuvier.

"In England, now, they are preparing statues of Brunel the engineer, and
the Stephensons, father and son, to be finished and erected about the
same time with those of Macaulay and Havelock. The nation is beginning
to bow to the occupations and the genius that have added to her power
ten thousand fold, - is beginning to bow to labor, noble, glorious,
sacred labor."

Not alone in public pleas for unpopular causes but in private charity
King seemed tireless. "He had the rare facility in everything he said
and did of communicating himself; the most precious thing he could
bestow." We are told that a multitude in distress came to this
overburdened man. Ringing his doorbell they found entrance, and always
as they came back, the "step was quicker which was slow before, the head
was up which was down before, and the lips wreathed in smiles that were