480 APPENDIX. 



It was in the midst of scenes like these that Dr, Blackwell, with his 

 fearless rector and associate, Bishop AVhite, was most active. Advising 

 their parishioners everywhere to flee to places of safety, neither was 

 willing himself to leave Philadelphia for a day. Dr. Blackwell was not 

 unfamiliar with spectacles of terror. For a long and dreadful winter he 

 had made his daily and nightly rounds through the hospitals of the 

 Valley Forge, ministering to the souls and bodies alike of ^he six thou- 

 sand sick and wounded soldiers who were there, without blankets or 

 clothes, freezing and dying in the wards. He saw, in the new scenes 

 of plague and pestilence, only new work which his Divine Master put 

 now before him. Clergy, not the Church's, might leave the city. The 

 Church, by solemn rubric, forbade any minister of Hers to do so; and 

 though, "for fear of the infection," the whole residue of the jjarish 

 should flee, and no neighbor be near, he was to remain, and, "upon 

 special request of the diseased, alone to communicate with him." In 

 his combined character of physician, priest and man, rich in this 

 world's goods, the entry of his house was filled night and day with ap- 

 plicants for aid; and, so long as he remained unattacked himself, few 

 went away without some benefit from their application. On the 20th 

 of October, 1793, having endured the rage of the pestilence unharmed, 

 at a moment when it seemed to exhibit some signs of approaching de- 

 cline, he was, in the midst of his active efforts to relieve others, himself 

 suddenly stricken down. Fortunately, he was taken at once to a 

 country residence, near Gloucester, and his restoration, for some time 

 despaired of, ultimately took place; though his constitution never re- 

 covered perfectly from the shock of this attack. 



Dr. Blackwell's sermons were characterized by solid sense, abundant 

 scholarship, pious feeling, and a pervading tone of purity and sweet- 

 ness. On occasions and in passages they rose to high solemnity. 

 He uttered nothing crude, questionable or jejune. In conversa- 

 tion with the writer of this sketch, the late Horace Binney, who had 

 known him from childhood, and was for many years one of his parish- 

 ioners, spoke of them "as to him never uninteresting; " a higher tribute 

 than which, to the solidity of their merits, no sermons could receive. 

 Their structure had little of the arts of rhetoric. His voice was agree- 

 able and well modulated, but neither in it nor in his gestures was there 

 much elocutionary display. He addressed himself to the understand- 

 ings, the consciences and the hearts of his hearers; and the effects 

 which he produced were effects which endured, and to this day bring 

 forth good fruit. 



Dr. Rufus Wilmot Griswoid, in his "Republican Court," refers to 

 him more than once as a conspicuous person of society in the days of 



