EZRA ABBOT. 491 



The satiety of the fully fed hearers became hunger. He closed too 

 soon for his audience ; and his address was, to all who heard him, the 

 one event of the eveninjj. 



Dr. Abbot wrote much on the text and interpretation of the New 

 Testament, but principally in periodicals read chiefly by Biblical 

 scholars. Whatever he wrote was thoroughly matured; and he seems 

 never to have published an article till he had completed, so far as his 

 materials permitted, the study of its subject in all its relations and 

 bearings. A collection of these articles would comprise essays on 

 not a few of the most difficult and most warmly controverted topics of 

 discussion as regards the text of the New Testament. Second to none 

 of his writings is his essay on the Authorship of the Fourth Gospel, 

 in which he demonstrates — if there can be demonstration outside of 

 mathematics — that Justin Martyr used that Gospel, and that it can 

 have been written by no other man than the Apostle John. In a 

 somewhat extended range of reading on that question, we have found 

 nothing that can be compared with this treatise as regards affluence 

 and precision of authorities, clearness of statement, and cogency of 

 reasoning. It is understood that Dr. Abbot had made some progress 

 in a treatise on the internal evidence of the Joliannine origin of the 

 Fourth Gospel. We earnestly hope that this work will be found in a 

 sufficently advanced state to be given to the public ; for no man can 

 have had a finer appreciation than he of the thick-sown tokens of the 

 authorship of that Gospel by an eye and ear witness. 



Dr. Abbot would have done more for his own reputation had he 

 been less generous. That he gave freely of the money which was not 

 his own self, was but a small part of his beneficence. His own mind 

 and culture, his time and his best services, were at the command of 

 every one who sought his aid. Some of the best work done by others 

 in his department owes its worth, and especially its thoroughness and 

 accuracy, to his suggestions, contributions, and revision, sometimes 

 gratefully acknowledged in preface or foot-note, sometimes unrecog- 

 nized. He did, also, all that was in his power to sustain and encour- 

 age independent labor in his chosen field. The last work of his life 

 was to solicit funds, in addition to his own liberal benefaction, in aid 

 of Dr. Gregory in his search for Biblical manuscripts in Eastern 

 Europe and in Asia ; and his correspondence in this behalf must have 

 been nearly the latest, probably the very latest, letters that he wrote. 

 But his beneficence was not confined to scholarly enterprise. For 

 many years a Sunday-school teacher, he taught his successive classes 

 with as painstaking care and thoroughness as if they had been pro- 



