Memoir of Bishop Elliott [pp. 390-402]

MEMOIR OF BISHOP ELLIOTT.
now we turn sadly away to think how many proud hopes and
glad anticipations which then swelled in his generons heart have
been crushed and buried under the power of the conqueror, in
ruin, grief, desolation and blood.
But it was for a comparatively brief period that he was permitted to fill the Professor's chair. The Church at whose altar
he served, and to whose ministry he had been ordained, summoned him to her work. She called him to a higher and larger
sphere of usefulness. He obeyed without a question. In the
summer of 1840 he was elected the first Bishop of Georgia. In
December of the same year, not without some natural regrets,
he took leave of the College, which he had loved and served so
well, and early in 1841 he was consecrated to his Bishopric.
It is not for us to speak of the manner in which the duties of
his holy office were discharged. The task of organizing and
building up a new Diocese was a trying one. Of the manner in
which it was performed his Church and Diocese must speak.
We know that his diocese loved him sincerely, and was heartily
proud of him. It has recently declared its sense of bereavement
at his death, "as too deep to find expression in the common
terms of grief and mourning;" and that they " desire to place on
record their high appreciation of his remarkable qualifications
for the Episcopal office, exercised for more than twenty-five
years; his profound acquaintance with human and divine learning; his pre-eminent power as a preacher of the Gospel of the
grace of God; his keen insight into the motives and instincts of
men; his tact and ability in administering his Diocese; his
watchfulness and tender sympathly for all the flock committed
to his care; his interest in the welfare of our colored population;
his careful avoidance of party issues and all extremes in doctrine,
discipline and worship, and his cautious endeavors to pursue the
quiet, conservative paths trodden by the wisest and most hlionored Fathers of the American Church." His Church will doubtless speak at another time.
As a pulpit orator, without aiming to be subtle or mnetaphysically profound, he was clear, vigorous, eloquent, and often strikingly original in the defence and illustration of accepted truth.
His style was passionate as well as exceedingly pure and graceful
-rather the rich, massive and commanding manner of Milton,
South, Ben Jonson and Jeremy Taylor, than that of the polished
wits and piquant essayists of Queen Anne's reign, with some
touch also of the quaintness of those earlier worthies. To his
students he always commended the first as the better models. It
was in the earlier days of his Episcopal administration that he
sacrificed his private fortune, and reduced himself to poverty
and want in his uncalculating efforts to establish an eminent
school for female education at Montpelier, in the State of Georgia; and it was at a later period that, in the same spirit of generous and untiring devotion to the cause of education, together
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