Feb. 3.-Psalm xxxiv. 4: "I sought the Lord and He heard me, and delivered me from all my fears." Feb. 4.-Psalm xix. 11: "More are they to be desired than gold, yea, than much fine gold; sweeter than honey or the honeycomb." Feb. 5.-Psalm xxiii. 6: "Surely mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for ever." Feb. 6.-Psalm cxxvi. 6: "He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him." SAMUEL'S LAST ILLNESS AND DEPARTURE. About three weeks before his death he was seized with a severe headache, with feverishness. The surgeon who attended him directed that leeches should be applied to his head, and other remedies to be used. The relief he received from these was but temporary. Leeches were again applied to his head, after which he was put to bed, where he remained in general till his happy spirit left this world of sin, to abide in the land "where the inhabitant shall no more say, I am sick.” Before he was confined to his bed he begged earnestly to have a map of the Holy Land, which appeared to afford him pleasure for an evening; but after he was put to bed, he was scarcely capable of attending to anything. The Thursday night before his departure (which was the following Monday) he prayed, "Come, Lord Jesus, come!" And on the following night he seemed.very anxious to depart. He repeatedly lifted up his right arm, then put out both his arms, and said, "Here I amhere! O Jesus, come! Do make haste!" On Monday, the 30th November, a little after eight o'clock, a.m., I went into his room. I thought he was asleep. I touched his cheek, which was warm. The nurse told me that he just breathed his last a few moments previous to my entering the room. And thus my beloved Samuel fell asleep in Jesus. Thus did the Good Shepherd gather the lamb with His arms, and carry him in His bosom to eternal bliss. To Him be the glory for ever. Amen. THE RETURNED ONE GIVING GLORY TO GOD. (Continued from page 493.) FINDING, at the end of a fortnight, that my dear young friend became weaker, and fearing she would not be able to bear the journey home, if she tarried longer, therefore we arranged for her departure. The day before she left Clifton, she said, "I shall never see your dear father again in this world. But how strange it is that I should have seen that minister, who said, 'that I was the poor stranger who had returned to give glory unto God.' Something tells me I am going home to die. I shall never forget your visiting us in London, and the conversation we had there upon the best things. And when you left us, you looked upon me and my mother with so much tenderness, and said, 'May the Lord bless you both.' Oh, how I felt those words, and thought, Oh that I was good, that the Lord might bless me. How glad I should have been to have spoken to and shaken hands with that dear minister, but I could not." I shall not soon forget the last day and night that she was with me. She would walk from room to room, wishing everything farewell; and the last thing she visited and wept over was the easy chair, where she had spent so many hours. Indeed, everything in the house was endeared to her, because she had tasted that the Lord was gracious. On our road to Bath, I said, "I hope neither you nor I shall ever have any cause to regret this, your visit to Clifton.” She answered, "No, never, no, never, shall I regret it, but rather be glad. Oh, what that dear minister said! it is sweeter to me now than it was while I was hearing him. Oh, it must be of the Lord, to put it into his heart to think, and say, 'Who can tell but that there might be a stranger present this night, who has come some miles, to whom these words belong: "There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger." Ah, I thought, I am that poor stranger. I do hope the Lord will teach me what and whose I am, the same as He has taught you. Oh, I will try to be and to do better." I said, "My dear, if you are a saved sinner, you will, in your feelings and discoveries of what you are by nature, and in your nature; instead of getting better, you will get worse, because sure I am that dear Hart's statement is a verity-'Not the righteous, sinners Jesus came to call.' But this is a mystery the Holy Ghost alone can make you to understand." When I had spoken these words she embraced me, and said, with great earnestness and childlike simplicity, "I have it! I have it! although it is only like a little gleam. I feel I want salvation, and is it not for those who feel this want that Jesus came to save? Oh," she said, "do pray for me; I do hope I am a chosen woman; and, if so, then the Lord is sure to teach me to love Him as I wish and want to love Him." Oh, I do long to be like that Holy One, and to be with Him. Her dear mother wrote me to say, that her daughter arrived home in safety, and, for the first week, expected every day would be her last. Fainting fits came upon her, but after a little time these fits left her; and then her cough increased, and she would say to her, "Ah, mother, you have no idea how ill I am; but I must not complain when I remember what my dear Saviour suffered for me-to die my cursed death on the cross. He had no kind mother, as I have, to smooth His pillow in His dying moments; and His Father hid His face from Him, and forsook Him.' Then she would pray to be strengthened to bear her pains without repining, and that the Lord would be with her, to make the valley of death a lightsome vale. "One day I left the room for a little time, and, when I returned, she said, 'Oh, I have had such a lovely vision or dream; for I cannot tell whether I was awake or asleep. I thought I was raised up upon the bed, and I was clothed in white, and my hair that hung round my shoulders was the colour of gold; and, oh, how beautiful I looked! And I thought I called you all round me, and I said to you, "Look at the glorious Lord Jesus, there He is, look unto Him, and be ye saved." Then two angels came and raised me very high above all the impediments of this lower world.' "Generally, from seven until twelve o'clock in the night, her sufferings were great; then she would say, 'I feel and wish my Heavenly Father would be pleased to take me home to Himself; but hold: the cup which He hath given me, shall I not drink it? yea, I will, even to the dregs, if it is His will.' "The last week of her life was mostly spent in close and silent communion with her God and Saviour; and at times she would pray aloud, and with such sweetness and power, that she has filled me with astonishment. On the Saturday night before her death her breath became very short, S S but I could hear her whisper and say, 'O merciful Jesus, I come, I come to Thee!' When her breathing improved, she said to me and her two brothers, 'Oh, how kind you have been; you have waited upon me night and day; the Lord reward you. And I charge you, if it is His will, that you meet me in that holy land, where there will be no more sickness, no more sin, therefore no more parting.' "The night before she died she slept very soundly, and awoke about seven o'clock, and I gave her a little wine; and she said, 'I feel I must go to sleep again; give me your hand, mother; don't leave me; you will not, will you, mother? She then closed her eyes, and, I thought, was gone to sleep; but, in a few minutes, I found it was the sleep of death.” DAUGHTER OF THE OLD PILGRIM. SOPHY TANDY. "AT Clifton, August 30, deeply regretted, SOPHY TANDY, aged 44." Such was the first and only intimation of the departure of one of my very highly-esteemed correspondents. She had been in delicate health for some time; yea, for years she had been among the weak and the suffering of the Lord's beloved ones. Of how many of the redeemed, as appertaining to their wilderness condition, may it be said, "Lord, he whom Thou lovest is sick." Disease and decay very commonly fall to the earthly portion of multitudes whom the Lord Jehovah has loved with an everlasting love; and some of the sweetest lessons they learn of the sympathy and tenderness of Jesus are learnt under a weak and trembling and almost-exhausted frame. "Don't you feel the days tedious, and the nights long?" said I one day, to a well-taught but sorely-afflicted parishioner. "Oh, no," was her reply. "I love to be alone; and the night my poor husband would make me have a light, I was not nearly so comfortable." Here is indeed a marvellous instance of sustaining power and all-sufficient grace. For years has she been on the bed of languishing; her body is literally more than half-dead, inasmuch as she is perfectly paralyzed from her feet to her waist. Her poor husband, broken-hearted through his wife's long illness, was taken away to a lunatic asylum and there died; but not the shadow of a murmur escapes her lips. Her calm countenance does of itself bespeak her perfect acquiescence in the mind of Him who "worketh all things after the counsel of His own will." Dear reader, when I want a lesson of contentment, when I would have a practical rebuke to my too-oft rebellious heart, I love to drop in upon this intense sufferer, and there I sit in admiring wonder of the Lord's faithfulness and divine goodness and all-sufficiency, at the same time in the very dust of self-abasement and creature-loathing, as I contemplate my forgetfulness and ingratitude for His unnumbered mercies, in contrast to this most suffering one, a dependant, moreover, upon parish-pay for the daily sustenance of her so weak and enfeebled frame. But dear SOPHY TANDY was the loved one about whom I was going to write a word or two. Who that knew her can forget her bright countenance, animated smile, and sweet spirit-enlivening words? Those words, spoken in her own silvery tones, seem to fall upon my ear at the moment of writing. And yet, talented as she was, who had humbler views of herself and her own abilities than SоPHY TANDY? Who, at the same time, was more willing to spend and be spent in her loved and loving Lord's service? How glad was she to be of the least use to the very meanest and obscurest of the Lord's children, or of any poor fellow-sinners. The last time I met her she was returning with a dear mutual friend who had just called at my house, and I shall not easily forget her gratitude and joy at my mention of having just seen one of her precious little books advertised in an American journal; so anxious was she that the glad tidings of a Saviour's love and mercy should be spread far and wide-yea, to the very ends of the earth-that the information I was thus enabled to give, afforded her such real pleasure. Some of my readers will remember the account given last year of our old parishioners' tea-meeting. That account was written by dear Miss TANDY, she having taken the deepest possible interest in the engagements of that evening. The forenoon on which the precious remains of this now glorified one were committed to the silent grave was beautiful in the extreme. Those who are acquainted with the picturesque Arnot's Vale Cemetery need no words of mine to set forth its loveliness. Forming as it does an amphitheatre, and planted throughout with considerable taste and ingenuity, such spot could scarcely be exceeded for the quiet reposing of the mortal remains of those who sleep in Jesus. Contiguous to the grave of SOPHY TANDY are the mouldering but sacred relics of several I personally knew and loved in the Lord. Two in particular, my interviews with whom on their sick and dying beds I shall never forget, for their testimonies for Jesus were rich and full and blessed. With the few who followed the remains of Miss TANDY were those who attended her mothers' meeting in a neighbouring parish. Among these I believe there was not a dry eye. Nay, it was with greatest difficulty the chaplain could read the impressive burial service. Again and again was he almost choked for utterance. As I learned from one of the mournful group who followed the deceased to her last resting-place, Miss TANDY said but little in her last illness. It was more the quiet reposing in and waiting for her Lord, than anything of ecstatic joy or triumph. My informant saw her but two days before she died; all that her prostrate frame was then equal to was a simple pressure of the hand. Not a word could she speak. I thought that simple pressure of the hand was significant, considering the terms upon which she and her friend were, and the Christian fellowship which they had been wont to enjoy. I thought that simple pressure of the hand seemed to say, "He hath done all things well;""I have waited for Thy salvation, O Lord." It was most touching to witness, at the close of the service, each of her loved class come forward, in order to take a last look upon the coffin that contained all that remained of one they loved so well. My heart was full before, but, when I witnessed this, and the deep-yea, intense-emotion of one of the few relatives who followed their loved one to the grave, I was glad to turn away, that I might, in the retirement of that sweet sequestered spot, weep also. As I walked homeward through those winding and shady paths, I came unexpectedly upon the graves of some I had personally known one, in particular, to whom I had been introduced when I first visited Bristol, and who was the personal friend of the never-to-be-forgotten M. A. WAY. They had joined each other in the better and brighter world, although their mortal frames were mouldering beneath the clods of earth. I said to myself, "Precious dust! sleep on beneath your Saviour's watchful eye until He shall bid it rise again in His own image;" and, with some faint hope that one day I should be brought off more than conqueror, too, through Him who hath loved us, I mentally sang "My flesh shall slumber in the ground, Farewell, dear SOPHY TANDY, until we meet "where the inhabitant never says, I am sick, and where the people who dwell therein are forgiven their iniquity." The Protestant Beacon. TEN REASONS WHY ENGLISH CHRISTIANS SHOULD SUPPORT THE IRISH CHURCH. THE Remembrancer for September contains the following: 1. Because the doctrines of the Church of Rome, being anti-scriptural and idolatrous, Irish Roman Catholics are perishing for lack of knowledge. 2. Because God has blessed the efforts recently put forth by the Irish branch of the United Church for the conversion of Roman Catholics with the most marked success. 3. Because the Roman Catholics of Ireland are manifesting a remarkable spirit of inquiry, and a very general desire to possess the Holy Scriptures, which, by means of the Established clergy, have been largely circulated amongst them. 4. Because the Roman Catholic authorities themselves acknowledge the success of the National Church, and deplore the consequent spread of Protestant principles. 5. Because the assumption of Romish priests can only be effectually kept in check by the legal status of the Established clergy. 6. Because the blessings of the Reformation enjoyed in Ireland were partially eclipsed by English Protestants granting Catholic emancipation. 7. Because the Irish Church is thoroughly awake to its responsibility as a Christian church-its bishops and clergy, as a body, preaching only Scriptural truths. 8. Because the successful struggle which the Church of Ireland has begun to wage with Popery cannot fail to exercise an important influence on the Protestant creed throughout the world. 9. Because in Ireland converts from the Roman Catholic faith to the truth as it is in Jesus are severely persecuted; and the dis-establishment of the Church will be a powerful check to the further spread of the truth among the people. 10. Because a blessing will descend on all English Christians who, in a prayerful spirit, will assist to build up and maintain a Church which has for her sole object the glory of God in the conversion of immortal souls. Kingston, August 13th, 1868. P. HENRY GOOD, M.A. |