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OUR TRANSLATED FRIENDS.

REV. LABAN CLARK, D.D.-Among the number now "gathered in to God" is Laban Clark, known on earth, among the aged and the young, as Rev. Laban Clark, D.D. Affectionate mention of him is due from the Missionary Society, for he it was who offered the first "resolution," in 1819, in favor of forming the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. That resolution was at that time "adopted ;" and Brother Clark, Nathan Bangs, and Freeborn Garrettson were appointed a committee to prepare a constitution to be submitted at a subsequent meeting. Of the nine preachers present at the meeting in which Brother Clark offered the resolution referred to he was the last to depart. Rev. BISHOP SOULE, one of the nine, departed only a little in advance of him. All are, we doubt not, "forever with the Lord." The time of the departure of Brother Clark was November 28, 1868, in the ninety-first year of his mortal life and in the sixty-seventh year of his ministry. He lived through a marvelous period in the history of our Church. The first year of his connection with the Missionary Society the income was but $823 04: it has since reached $671,090 66. The membership of the Church in 1801, at the time he entered her ministry, was 64,894, with 287 Preachers. We now have 1,264,958 members and 8,481 Preachers.

MRS. MARY W. MASON, who departed this life in January, 1868, was one of those elect ladies who, in the month of July, 1819, assembled to form the first auxiliary to the Parent Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. It pleased the heavenly Father to satisfy her with long life, in which to see "the good of his chosen." She was for many years, if not from the beginning, the first directress of the Female Missionary Society, and with respect to its best interests "was clad with zeal as a cloak." The indebtedness of this cause to her zeal is known to all who know her children and her children's children. She will be no stranger among the immortals whose society she has gained.

GABRIEL P. DISOSWAY.-We should be unjust to ourselves and to the whole Church were we to omit an expression of the profound sense of loss we feel at the departure of Gabriel P. Disosway. Commencing his public missionary efforts so early as 1816 in our Sunday-schools, he was still more prominently before the Church in organizing, with his now regained companion, John Summerfield, in the month of August, 1819, the Young Men's Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, auxiliary to the Parent Society just then formed.

We believe it to be susceptible of proof that he was the first layman in our Church who conferred with Dr. Bangs, of precious memory, on the

necessity of extending our mission work into foreign lands among the heathen. He also was one of a deputation of the young men who went to Philadelphia to confer with the venerable Bishop M'Kendree on the appointment of a missionary to Africa. This led, shortly afterward, to the commencement of a mission to Liberia, and the appointment of the immortal Melville B. Cox as the first foreign missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church. For many years Brother Disosway was a member of our Board of Managers; and always, from youth to gray hairs, he was on hand in the Churches as an advocate for every advance step proposed by the Society. No obloquy-and he lived in the time of it—which Methodism passed through ever moved him in any other way than to strengthen and settle him in his devotion. His education, his social position, his ready utterance, the fitness of his speech, utterly devoid of either cant or unkindness, made his presence an acquisition on all occasions of general interest to our Church. No citizen of our Zion more thoroughly comprehended the forces for good existing among us, or gave them a more cheerful support. Few, if any, among us have been more extensively known within our gates, and few upon entering paradise will meet with a larger acquaintance.

SCHUREMAN HALSTED, in Christ about fifty years, departed to be with Christ on Monday, October 5, 1868. Our recollection of this brother runs back to the time when the dew of his youth was upon him. He was ruddy and fair to look upon: he was then a clerk in a mercantile establishment and warm in his first love. Through all the forty-six years of personal knowledge that have followed we have not known his "hope decline or love grow cold." Brother Halsted was one of the managers of the Missionary Society as early as 1828, and has been steady in his devotion and service through the long period of forty years. Of the officers and managers elected with him, forty-two in number, but two survive, both of whom still sustain the relation of Managers. We attribute his unusual zeal, love, and persistence in the cause of Christ to his Huguenotic extraction, his connection with the same by early marriage into the family of the blessed Gilbert Coutant, and his association with that rare body of men, with Elias Boudinot at their head, who originated the American Bible Society, of which he was also a manager at the time of his departure. Rev. THOMAS FULLER, of our mission field in Africa, departed this life April 2.

Rev. H. B. MATTHEWS, of the same field, departed June 16. And

Rev. PETER COKER, an old disciple and minister of Jesus Christ, formerly and for years of Baltimore, Maryland, fell asleep in the beginning of July, after sixteen years of severe and successful toil in Africa.

Rev. J. B. BENHAM, formerly a superintendent of our missions in Liberia, left the shores of time in Western New York May 1, 1868. "Thus God buries his workmen, but carries on his work."

RECEIPTS BY T. CARLTON, TREASURER, FOR 1868.

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