of enfeebling age. Yet Peirce was, like his teacher Bowditch, like his friends 

 Agassiz and Henry, and others who have recently preceded him into the 

 world of greater light, a man of the most devout Christian faith. We may say 

 of him, " he walked with God, and he was not, for God took him." He is 

 not dead, and cannot die. The immortality of fame which his works secure 

 him is but a faint penumbra of that brilliant glory into which his conscious 

 spirit has ascended. God was to him the only reality ; this world was always 

 to him God's schoolhouse, furnished with the choicest text-books and appar- 

 atus ; and he. was ever desirous of receiving the Master's approval. The 

 universe, he was accustomed to say, "is a wonderful* philosophical combina- 

 tion of ideas, a problem for science to solve. What is science but the partial 

 revelation of the harmony of those ideas, of the harmony and self-consistence 

 of God's thought ? " At other times his understanding (in the sense of my 

 text) would speak, and he would say that the universe is a poem, history a 

 drama, for the instruction and uplifting of every reader. 



Those of my hearers who enjoyed a personal acquaintance with Peirce's 

 maternal uncle, the former revered and beloved pastor of this parish, Dr. 

 Ichabod Nichols, may understand something of that swelling gratitude too 

 deep for words which struggles within me as I remember how much I have 

 owed during the past forty-one years to the influence of this nephew, partak- 

 ing as he did in so many of his uncle's noblest qualities. 



Alas ! that he shared also in some of Dr. Nichols's limitations ; notably in 

 this, that neither of them left in legible form enough to show to the next 

 generation the full reasons why, in their own day, they inspired their contem- 

 poraries with such unlimited confidence and love. 



In Peirce's case, however, enough has been published during his lifetime 

 to secure him a permanent place in the "literature of mathematics, astronomy, 

 and geodesy ; although not enough to show the exalted character of his 

 imagination, the wonderful power of his eloquence, the burning force of his 

 moral rebukes, the great versatility of his genius, the quickness of his obser- 

 vation, the electric rapidity of his mental operations. The walk of a mathe- 

 matician of so high an order is peculiarly lonely: he roams among Alpine 

 heights which "vulgar feet have never trod," the paths that are "sacred to 

 thought and God." 



It would be impossible to translate into ordinary forms of language, even 

 the results, much more the processes, by which he attains certainty on ques- 

 tions which lie far beyond the reach of all usual methods of reasoning. 

 Peirce has rendered to the pure mathematics, to geometry, to astronomy, to 



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