Rev. Horace A. Cleveland, the gifted pastor of Foundry Methodist Episcopal Church, Washington, D. C, was born in 1835, in the little town of Orwell, Bradford County, Pennsylvania. After passing through the curriculum of the village academy, he entered                upon the work of teaching for three years, during which time Rev. Joseph H. Wythes, D.D., LL.D., was his tutor in theology. He was registered for a university course, but without completing it, he entered the ministry of the M. E. Church in 1857. By the aid of private tutors, devotion to study, foreign travel, and familiarity with the best minds of the age, he has become one of the finest belles lettres scholars in the country.

            Mr. Cleveland has been interested with some of the most difficult, as well as most honorable and important stations in his denomination, and he has succeeded in all. Among his pastorates have been one of two years in Wilmington, Del., two of three years each in Christ and Trinity Churches, Philadelphia, and his present pastorate of three years of Foundry Church, Washington.

            Beside discharging his manifold duties as preacher and pastor, Mr. Cleveland has found time to cultivate his very decided tastes and talents for literature. He edited a newspaper for two years, and was for several years correspondent of the New York Methodist. His book, “Golden Sheaves,” has passed through seven or eight editions.

            He has considerable celebrity as a platform speaker and popular lecturer, and would have still greater, if he cared more for outside work of this sort. His addresses are characterized by a very high order of thought, clothed in the most appropriate language, and delivered with the intense earnestness of a man who believes what he says and has a purpose to accomplish in saying it. Last year he preached the ” baccalaureate sermon” for Dickinson Seminary, and this year he delivered the annual address before the literary societies of the North Western University. He was invited to succeed Dr. Talmage, when the latter left Philadelphia for Brooklyn, but, though the place was a tempting one, he decided to remain in the church of his early choice.

            In person, Mr. Cleveland is almost a model of manly beauty. Nature has been lavish of her gifts and bestowed on him her choicest treasures. His fine presence, rich, powerful, and melodious voice, generous culture, warm sympathies, quick perception, chastened yet brilliant imagination, ardent love of the true, the beautiful, and the good, combine to give him a power and influence over his hearers such as are wielded by but few men in the American pulpit.

            The best of all is, the Spirit of the Master makes his life beautiful and his utterances divinely electric. Christ is the central fact and figure of his ministry. He never forgets that Christ came that men might have life and have it more abundantly. He knows and honors the achievements of science, searches out the by-ways of modern thought, is at home in history and philosophy, literature and art ; but all these are but secondary and subservient to his crowning passion — the adoring love he bears toward Him who is the one perfect example — the Saviour of mankind.