Robert R. Roberts,

LATE A BISHOP OF THE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH.

"THE grandfather of all the missionaries!" Such was the expressive designation by which the red men of the Far West were wont to speak of him whose benignant features beam upon the reader from the opposite page. For many years the senior superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal Church, an apostolic bishop, deriving his title and his authority from the highest source, and ever exercising his functions with gentleness and diligence, with meekness and yet with firmness and decision, he was esteemed and beloved by the clergy and the laity-honoured in life and lamented in death by the refined and the wealthy no less than by the poor and the uneducated. Simple in his manners, and yet gracefully dignified,-unobtrusive and diffident, but never forgetful of the responsibilities devolving upon him, eloquent, and of course always plain and intelligible in his public ministrations, he was equally at home in the wigwam of the savage, on the rough stand of the camp-meeting, or when proclaiming the unsearchable riches of Christ from the pulpits of metropolitan cities. His memory is precious, and it is a pleasant thing to trace the successive steps of a life so simple and so honoured, and to mark therein the all-sufficiency of the Saviour's grace.

He was a native of Maryland, the son of a poor farmer, who, at the call of his country, shouldered his musket in the war of the Revolution, and was engaged in the battle of the Brandywine with Lafayette, and at Germantown and White Plains with Washington. The patriot-farmer was enabled to give his children but little education, and he left them no patrimony save the legacy of his good name. Robert's early training devolved mainly upon his mother. By her he was taught to read the Scriptures, to say his prayers night and morning, and to recite from the Catechism of the English Church. Some six or eight months schooling from an Irish pedagogue, by whom he was instructed in penmanship, the rudiments of English grammar, and the first rules of arithmetic, completed his scholastic course. As in the case of the two most eminent disciples of the Saviour, at whose bold eloquence the people marvelled, knowing them to be ignorant and uneducated men, so, frequently, after listening to words of power from the lips of the farmer's boy, men were wont to account for the marvel by taking knowledge of him that he "had been with Jesus." His whole ministerial life was an illustration of the glorious verity, that God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.

When about ten years of age he removed with his parents into Westmoreland County, in the State of Pennsylvania, and here, with his mother, he went soon after to hear one of the pioneer heralds of the sect everywhere spoken against. The Methodist preacher brought certain strange things to their ears. His word was with power. The little boy, for the first time, felt himself to be a sinner. He wept and trembled. His father had indeed denounced