Said Mr. Streeter to a friend, one Monday morning:--
"I had something tender to put into my sermon yesterday morning. As I was going to church, a poor woman came to me to borrow a dollar to get bread for her children, and, as I handed it to her, she offered me a small locket containing a braid of hair from the head of a little child she had buried a week ago. 'Take back the locket,' said I; 'it is too sacred for my hands; but keep the dollar, you are welcome to that. It does me more good to give it than you to receive it, and you can have more if you need.' Then she wept, and said she was a poor widow, living in such a street near by, and her poor children had not had a mouthful since yesterday noon, and she had nothing to buy them bread. I knew by her looks that she told me the truth, but to satisfy her I went and saw where she lived, and saw her children, and gave her more money, and told her I would look to her wants again to-morrow. Then I went into the pulpit, and put the incident into a sermon, and I haven't preached so well, nor enjoyed the service so much, for many a day."
His heart was often overflowing with such charities as this, through all his ministry.
He was the life of a conference meeting, and his Friday evening conferences in the Hanover Street vestry were never forgotten by those who attended them. As a pastor, he was always welcomed in the homes of his parishioners, sharing as he did their joys and sorrows with the sympathy of a brother and friend. As an officiating attendant at weddings, he was exceedingly popular, and his yearly marriage list, for a long time, exceeded in numbers that of any other clergyman in Boston. On funeral occasions, he was eminently a "son of consolation." There was such an unction in his usual manner of preaching--a manner so peculiarly adapted to the services of the Sabbath--that a brother minister who highly respected him, quaintly suggested that _Sabbathstrain_, rather than Sebastian, might properly be used as his name. As another has written of him: "He was an intensely magnetic man. It was not simply what he said, but the spiritual unction with which he uttered the truth, that won and held you."[41]
Mr. Streeter lived to the age of eighty-four. In his last days he suffered intensely from asthma, which had long afflicted him. He has left the example of a true and noble life to the churches.