MORGAN'S HISTORY OF THE NEW JERSEY CONFERENCE Page 212
Brethren of the New Jersey Conference and Rev. Bishop A. W. Wayman, presiding Bishop over the New Jersey Conference of the First Episcopal District, Sirs: -
In obedience to your request, and in behalf of the New Jersey Conference, in Annual Conference assembled at Trenton, N. J., I have come reverentially to bring a memorial garland wreath to lay upon the bier of the late Rev. Bishop R. H. Cain, your former colleague and distinguished predecessor, in the great and responsible office, as one of the late Bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church; and in doing so, I am fully sensible of the fact, that whilst the living, however great or small, is a dependent creature, the dead is independent of anything that the living can say - good or evil, for the spirit is free at last; it is with the God who gave it, hence we are not here as fawning sycophants, to please the living by fulsome praise, at the expense of the dead, without care or respect for the deceased; not the well rounded sentences nor the honeyed words of the average eulogist that appeal to passions, but we have come with stern, truthful lessons, drawn from every phase of a remarkable life, as a memorial, not a eulogy for the benefit of the living.
Richard Harvey Cain, clergyman, political reformer, Congressman, Bishop, was born in Greenbriar county, Va., in 1825; hence he was, at the time of his death, only about sixty-two years of age, barely beyond the meridian of life.
If not a slave himself, he evidently began life as a colored boy in a slave state, coming from the rank and file of the common people, the poorest of the poor, at the very bottom of society, yet, by nature, he was a lad richly endowed, not only with a precocious mentality, but with an improvable mind, quick to learn, ambitious and full of that spirit which characterized him in later years.
His progress from the time that his parents moved from Virginia to Portsmouth, Ohio, as if a child of destiny, was steadily onward and upward. As a man he was theoretical, speculative
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