Excerpt from A Sermon Commemorative of the Rt. Rev. Thomas Frederick Davis, D. D: Late Bishop of the Diocese of South Carolina, Preached 10th of December, 1871, in Grace Church, Camden

"But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy and the ministry which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the Gospel of the grace of God." - Acts xx, 24.

Saint Paul, whose words these are, is taking leave of the Ephesian elders, on his way to Jerusalem, where bonds and imprisonment await him. At the seaport, ready to depart, he had sent for them, and now, as they assembled, every eye was fixed on him, every ear was open to catch and dwell upon his farewell charge. And when he had spoken it, we read: "He kneeled down and prayed with them all. And they all wept sore, and fell on Paul's neck and kissed him, sorrowing, most of all, for the words which he spake, that they should see his face no more."

But, in withdrawing himself, how great and precious a legacy he left with those Christians at Ephesus, and with the Church to the present day! If but the memory of the just is blessed, how much more so when it descends to us embalmed in living words of divine and eternal truth! Such are these of our text: for, although St. Paul, by his long ministry of zeal and endurance, has left us the example of one whom none of those things did ever move, and who refused, time and again, to hold his life dear unto himself - yet, what an invaluable motto, or rather what an expressive key to the man and to his ministry do these actual words from his own lips convey! The mere events of his eventful life might have been told with even more of fulnessand graphic description than now we possess: the externals of the great Apostle, his travels and adventures, might have been narrated to us by St. Luke with more precision and historic formality, but if it had been done at the cost of leaving out these words, revealing to us, as they do, at a glance, the inner life, the very secret-spring of the Apostolic spirit, little would have been the gain and great would have been the loss.

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