Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1849, by WILLIAM H. MILNOR, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District of New York. PREFACE. As to his own part in the following Memoir, the writer desires to say, that in the use made of Dr. Milnor's diaries, journal, and letters, he has taken no other liberties than such as he supposed his friend would himself have taken, had he attempted, while living, to prepare them for the press. Written as those papers were, amid the bustle of a busy life, and with no thought of their being ever embodied in their present form, they of course needed some revision. The clearing of the meaning of some sentences, by an occasional transposition in the order of their members, and by the occasional substitution of more exactly significant words for those which had been seized in the process of rapid composition, and which but imperfectly expressed the author's thought; and the softening, here and there, of a term, which in the confidence of familiar intercourse, was safe and proper, but which with a public necessarily ignorant of minute and explanatory circumstances, might be regarded as too strong; these are the chief freedoms, which, in the execution of his task, he has felt at liberty to indulge. Generally, Dr. Milnor's expressions needed no correction. Many personal references, however, both to himself and to others, have been dropped; and as little, that could-be painful to the feelings of the living, has been retained, as was consistent with fidelity to the character and views of the dead, and to those public interests and trusts under which he was called to act. Dr. Milnor lived to see the church pass into, if not through troublous times-times during which public feeling was often most painfully alive; and he felt called to act in many stations where he became himself the occasion of much of the feeling by which the public was affected. It was therefore difficult, if not impossible, to write the life of such a man after he had left the stage, without sometimes reviving memories more or less unwelcome to not a few of his survivors. It should be borne in mind, that in the following work are virtually two memoirs: one of Mr. Milnor as a man of the world, and another of Dr. Milnor as a Christian man. The former could not with propriety be omitted, because, though a distinct life by itself, with its own principles, character, and acts in full development, yet it is important to a just appreciation of the latter. In some things, Dr. Milnor as a Christian, is very like Mr. Milnor as a worldly man; in others, quite unlike. These lights of likeness and of contrast combine, or stand out in distinctness, to give us the true idea of the whole man. Even the false and dangerous notions of religion which he entertained in his days of darkness and self-righteousness, help to set forth in stronger colors those right conceptions of divine truth to which he was led by the great crisis of his life. Those, however, to whom the details of his early history would be likely to prove uninteresting, and who have known, or wish to contemplate him as a Christian only, will find the former part of the work as brief as it could well be made, and will not have to turn over many pages before they reach what will more specially meet their wishes, and it may be, satisfy their desires. And now, all that remains is to say, that although the writer has felt that he was dealing with a character of uncommon excellence, yet he has not felt that he was writing the life of a perfect being. However much, therefore, he has found in that character to commend, he has endeavored not so to shape his commendations as to make the praise redound to the man, instead of Him from whom alone cometh every good, and to whom alone, especially in the results of Christian excellence, all praise is due. |