John Howe survived his friend about five years. It appears from his allusion to “the great lights of the National Church,” how his affections lingered around those who were its ornaments, and passages occurring in his answer to De Foe, indicate Howe’s increasing tenderness towards the Church of England in his last days. He had always been a moderate Dissenter, but his moderation assumes broader dimensions than ever in that publication--the effect, I apprehend, partly of natural tenderness and partly of unpleasant circumstances. He had, from the very constitution of his mind, what many great and good men have not--a burning thirst for union, for a large fellowship of souls on earth preparatory to the final gathering of the purified and perfected. This passion increased in Howe the nearer he approached the world of light and love. He longed, as his days ebbed away, to embrace within his fellowship the good and wise of all parties; consequently lines of distinction between church and church, between sect and sect, became in his eyes paler and paler. And I cannot help seeing that the disputes amongst Nonconformist ministers in London--the unhappy divisions arising out of the Crisp controversy--vexed him exceedingly, and loosened a little the bonds which had bound him to the Independent body. A moderate Congregationalist in earlier life, he appears latterly to have sympathized most with Presbyterians. The church in Silver Street, of which he took the pastoral charge, was Presbyterian. The Salters’ Hall Lecture, with which he identified himself, was Presbyterian. Presbyterians were less opposed to the Established Church than were Independents; the latter felt no wish for comprehension, the former did; and in that wish, which the impossibility of its gratification could not quench, John Howe to the last deeply shared. [Sidenote: NONCONFORMISTS.]