1785] REV. WILLIAM SMITH, D. D. 21/ 



Dr. White was a person quite different in most respects from 

 Dr. Smith. Indeed, between the two men we may say that there 

 was an absolute contrast. Dr. White had been bred by pious 

 parents in childhood in the Church ; and every recollection of his 

 earliest life must have been associated with the very words of all 

 its liturgy.* We have no reason to think that if he could himself 

 have controlled the thing he would have had the Convention of 

 1785 make any considerable departures from the old service books 

 of the mother Church, but those required by the Revolution, 

 and by that moderate review in some of its offices suggested by 

 an obvious propriety. 



As to any further review, he desired it, so far as he desired it at 

 all, in order to satisfy weak brethren, who, he thought, might 

 otherwise at some future day triumph in numbers and make alter- 

 ations dangerous or heterodox. He foresaw even at that day what 

 two different parties in the Church are now doing : both remain- 

 ing in the fold, but both in different ways misrepresenting its doc- 

 trines, violating its rubrics, and departing from or corrupting its 

 practices ; one, in a disregard of services appointed for her saints, 

 and holy days ; in a substitution for hers of irregular prayers ; in 

 the constant violation, year after year, of a plain and positive 

 rubric, which makes it the duty of the minister of every parish 

 diligently, upon Sundays, holy days, or other convenient occa- 

 sions, openly in the Church, to catechise children sent to him in 

 the Churclis catechism ; in the low views of her great Eucharistic 

 service ; in the obliteration in all discourses from the pulpit of the 

 Church's distinctive character and high office — and in other mat- 



* The Bishop nlludes lo this affectingly in an address at the Consecration on the 

 25th of October, 1827, in Christ Church, of Bishop H. U. Onderdonk : 



"He feels the full weight of an occasion, reminding him of his near approach to 

 the end of the ministry in which he has been so long a laborer; and when during the 

 transaction in which we have been engaged, he occasionally permitted his eye to rest 

 on the spot [his paternal pew, now his own] and within the distance of a few feet, where, 

 in the days of his boyhood, he joined in religious services within these walls; when 

 from that spot his attention was transferred to the pulpit at his elbow, from which, 

 though not unfavored by domestic instruction and encouragement, there sunk into his 

 youthful mind the truths of the ever-blessed Gospel, and from which, for the space of 

 fifty-five years, he has been proclaiming the same truths — with what effect will not be 

 known until the day which shall try every man's work of what sort it is, but certainly 

 v^ with effect far short of his wishes and of his prayers — there results from these recollec- 



tions and from others, a most weighty sense of the responsibility on which he has been 

 so long acting." 



