As a proof that Howe needed patience of an unusual kind, I may mention that he said to his wife: “Though he thought he loved her as well as it was fit for one creature to love another; yet if it were put to his choice, whether to die that moment, or to live that night, and the living that night would secure the continuance of his life for seven years to come, he would choose to die that moment.” In the same spirit he remarked to an attendant one morning, after being relieved from the intense sufferings of the previous night: “He was for _feeling_ that he was alive, though most willing to die, and lay the ‘clog of mortality aside.’” When his son, a physician, was lancing his leg to diminish his sufferings, Howe inquired what he was doing, and observed: “I am not afraid of dying, but I am afraid of pain.” Indeed, he had a peculiar sensitiveness with regard to physical agony, which seems to have been constitutional. All but joy soon afterwards terminated, for, on the 2nd of April, 1705, his spirit entered those regions of repose which he had long so fervently desired to reach. [Sidenote: NONCONFORMISTS.] The passing away of the old Puritans could not but produce a great effect. When the last of the Apostles left the world, those who remained in the line of succession--so far as Apostles could have any proper successors--would fail to reach the level of experience, character, and influence which their predecessors occupied. And when the last of the Protestant Reformers died, there would be a falling off in the ardour and force which marked the religious leaders of the next generation. And so, without equalizing Apostles, Reformers, and Puritans, we may say of the last, that when they were all gone--though their cause remained in the hands of men who had learned their lessons--the fire no longer burned with the glowing heat it had done before. There might be more breadth of view, there might be advancement in some respects, but there remained not the same force which had operated so mightily at an earlier period. Puritanism, as a creed, as a discipline, as a form of worship, as a religious sentiment, remained; but much of its original inspiration passed away. Another circumstance may be noticed. The Puritans of the Commonwealth had in early life mingled socially with Anglicans. They had sat on the same forms at school, had lived under the same college roof, had preached in the same places of worship. Owen, Baxter, and Howe had all shared more or less with Churchmen in the same modes of life before the severance of 1662. Those who followed them were for the most part wholly separated from the Establishment, from its universities, its pulpits, its society, its courtesies, its atmosphere. Hence arose a personal estrangement between two great parties, in some respects more mischievous in its results than any of the controversies previously waged. [Sidenote: 1688–1702.]