OBITUARY.
Our very dear and venerable friend and brother Elder Charles
Clapp passed to the better land on Sunday morning, January 21, at
15 minutes of 4 o'clock he received his discharge from the dread messenger
la grippe. He was 84 years 7 months and 22 days old at the time of his
decease, and "as a shock of corn coming in his season," so was
our dear brother fully ripe for the harvest and the heaven following it.
Being adorned with righteousness and true holiness as a shining "garment
of praise for the spirit of heaviness," which happy exchange he made
46 years ago at which time he united with the Church
of Believers at Union Village, of which he has been a faithful and
consistent member ever since and in the tenets of which he expressed the
most unshaken and unshakable confidence and faith, for salvation now and
here, which relieved him of all fear and apprehension for the hereafter.
As an example of zeal in the promulgation abroad of our peculiar tenets
of doctrine and practice he was far above the average and in course of
his experience and residence amongst us has sent hundreds and thousands
of our books, tracts and magazines, for gratuitous circulation, to all
parts of the United States, and even as far as Europe and Australia. His
genial manners, politeness to strangers as well as friends, and natural
affability, procured him hosts of friends, with whom he was in constant
correspondence to the day of his decease. His benevolence and charity
was not confined to any peculiar church or people, but reached forth in
its generous grasp to the whole world, to saint and sinner, while ignoring
the aristocratic shibboleth of church and creed. He could not be satisfied
with less than universal love and kind sympathy for all humanity an insisted
upon by our Savior, and so perfectly practiced as well as preached in
his holy evangel of long ago. His funeral was attended on the 25th by
the entire society and a few neighbors and was very solemn, elevating
and edifying, and was addressed severally by Elder Napoleon,
O. C. Hampton, brother Leopold Goepper,
Elder Watson, W. Andrews, Eldress Ellen
Ross, and sisters Susan C. Liddil, and Ellen
Meer, each of whose discourses were very interesting and comforting
to us all. It is written. “Mark the perfect man and behold the upright
for the end of that man is peace." Also, "To this man will I
look who is of a humble and contrite heart and trembleth at my Word, and
to him who ordereth his conversation aright will I show the salvation
of God.” If there ever was a man who left this world in possession
of these divine qualities of character it was our good elder, Charles
Clapp.