In April, 1882, Dr. Ryder resigned his position as pastor in Chicago, and has since, with his companion, made a voyage to Europe. It is not his intention to take upon him the duties of another pastorate, but he will doubtless be always in readiness to aid as he may the interests of the church to whose prosperity his life thus far has been so constantly devoted.
In concluding the accounts of ministers here given, it seems appropriate to add a brief reference to an event of recent occurrence, to which the attention of the Universalist public had been specially called. We refer to the meetings held under the direction of the "Cheshire Association," on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, the 18th, 19th, and 20th of August, 1882, in Richmond, N. H., the birthplace of Rev. Hosea Ballou, and in honor of this distinguished and venerated man. During these days, discourses were preached by Rev. Quincy Whitney, Rev. S. S. Fletcher, Rev. Dr. S. H. McCollester, Rev. Dr. A. A. Miner, and Rev. Dr. G. H. Emerson. Multitudes were in attendance, and the occasion was deeply impressive, and is significantly historical. Appended to a special account of the great gathering, Dr. Emerson, editor of the "Christian Leader," presents the following description of the birthplace of Mr. Ballou. We are glad to give it a place in this volume:--
"Stratford-upon-Avon has its one interest for the great world in the happy fortune of giving to every age the Bard who, in the faculty for putting an almost inspired wisdom into verse that is not simply matchless, but at a vast altitude above that of every other poet who has spoken the Saxon tongue,--William Shakespeare. The little town of Ayr would be nothing but a Scottish post-village but for the circumstance that Robert Burns first breathed within its borders. But first Stratford and then Ayr, for the English-speaking world, rise to an importance simply unique, above every hamlet upon the British Isles, London and Edinburgh hardly excepted.
"Those who with us fully believe that the future is to honor Hosea Ballou with a niche in the temple of fame, as the peer of the elder Edwards, and as hardly the second of Franklin, who find in the 'Treatise on the Atonement' the quarry where Bushnell has polished a few boulders, will further agree with us that the gazetteer of the coming century will put into conspicuous type, and honor with some detail of description, the New Hampshire farming town where Hosea Ballou was born. The compiler of Lippincott's did not know its claim to distinction, when he summarily disposed of Richmond, N. H., as 'a post-township in Cheshire Co., 53 miles S. W. of Concord.'