His decease had been mercifully preceded by a long life of health and labour, and more than sixty-six years had elapsed from his birth to his departure. Some of the former of those years were connected with occasional attacks of sickness, which sometimes led him to expect an early grave; so that at the time of his ordination, upwards of forty years ago, he said to his father, “you are come to ordain a dying man”—and subsequently to that period, he was once visited with a severe and alarming illness. Nor is it improbable that these occasional admonitions of his mortality were the means, under the blessing of God, of producing much of that seriousness of spirit by which his mind was pervaded. Still, his was a life of comparative health, and when I visited him during the week in which he died, he told me that, till then, he had not been kept out of his pulpit by illness for a single sabbath, during a period of twenty-eight years. His last illness, as you are aware, was confined to one short week. It commenced on the evening of Saturday, August 25th, and concluded in his death, on the evening of the Saturday following—yet it is probable that the fever which at last consumed him, had, for some time previously, been accumulating its exhausting fires. His illness was so short, and of such a nature, as to afford scarcely any opportunities of conversation with him in order to ascertain the state of his mind—indeed those around him little expected that death was so near at hand. This, however, is a circumstance on which we reflect with no feelings of anxiety. His soul, and all its eternal interests, had long been committed to the Saviour. For him to live had been Christ; for him to die was gain. During nearly twelve hours before his departure, he was apparently inattentive to every surrounding object. His body and his mind seemed to be in a state of perfect peace. Not a word was spoken—not a limb stirred—not a symptom of pain appeared. The tide of life gently and silently ebbed away, till at length his breathing ceased, and his countenance faded into the paleness of death, Calm and unruffled as a summer’s sea, When not a breath of wind flies o’er its surface.