Pure and thrilling a delight in visiting the Holy City

In his living he was frugal, in all his expenses strictly economical, and in his accounts very exact. The money he lived on was the Lord’s; he had no right to any of it but what was necessary to do the Lord’s work. On leaving home he was expecting to be stationed at Jerusalem; he arrived in Syria, and was there stopped on his way; he was disappointed; his soul would have felt as pure and thrilling a delight in visiting the Holy City as other men who go thousands of miles to visit it. A very few dollars would have enabled him to go there, and yet he lived five years in Syria and never went. He did not dare, he said, for his own pleasure, to spend so much of the Lord’s money. The Treasurer’s books will probably show that, at least during his residence in Syria, he never received for his own use the whole amount of his small nominal salary.

Dr. Goodell was celebrated for his promptness and punctuality. His domestic cares had their appointed hours, and, unless from some special preventive, were attended to in their time. He retired and rose early. His seasons of devotion had their appropriate place, and any material delay in his meals not only annoyed him as a violation of order, but sometimes unfitted him physically for his duties. At no business appointment had his friends to wait for him. He interrupted no worshipping assembly by a tardy entrance. His debts were paid; his reports to the Board, were uniformly ready, when due.

Very uniform

In his public performances, as well as in his general style of” writing, he was a pattern of simplicity. His language was chaste, his words common and well chosen, his sentences short, his aim evidently being first of all to be understood. In speaking, his utterance was very uniform, but prevented from being tediously monotonous by the frequent emphatic force with which he brought out many of his short phrases. He had in his delivery no excessive emotion, no transports of enthusiasm, but an appearance of sober, undoubted conviction of the truth of what he uttered, and the presumption that the truth would force its own way to the heart, without power of voice, or vehemence of gesture.