Here his last days were passed; Dr. Gibbons does not mention in what year the family left Theobalds to return to Stoke Newington, but it must have been about thirteen years before his death; and during this time, although his life was clouded by many pains and infirmities, he still continued the active operations of his pen, and, as we shall have occasion to see, the active operations of his mind, employing himself especially in attempting to solve what seems to many the insolvable question of the Trinity of Persons in the Godhead. But as he descended towards the closing years it seems that he suffered greatly from some members of his own family. In a letter from the Rev. John Barker to Dr. Doddridge, written nearly two years before Watts’ death, we read: “The behaviour of Dr. Watts and the wretch Buckston towards Dr. Isaac is a most marvellous, infamous, enormous wickedness; Lady Abney, with inimitable steadiness and prudence, keeps our friend in peaceful ignorance, and his enemies at a becoming distance, so that in the midst of the persecution of that righteous man he lives comfortably; and when a friend asks him how he does, answers, ‘Waiting God’s leave to die.’”[40] [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER XIII. The World to Come. “The World to Come” was for a long time one of those favourite pieces which occupied a place upon our forefathers’ book-shelves, and especially charmed the dwellers at home in those times and places when and where there were no Sabbath evening services; it belongs to that era when Christian people found their spiritual pleasure and refreshment in Baxter’s “Saint’s Everlasting Rest,” to which work it bears no inconsiderable resemblance. Southey, in his “Life of Watts,” in which, like Johnson, he lays aside all his acerbity against Watts and Dissenters, appears to dwell with much pleasure on this book. Probably most of our readers are now unacquainted with it; and, if so, they have to learn how much there is in these two volumes of suggestion and instruction. Watts was fond of dwelling in imagination upon, and dilating with his pen over, the conditions of the world to come. The work first appeared in two volumes, although the second was not published until the year 1745, when Watts was drawing near to the period of his own entrance into that kingdom, upon whose conditions he had speculated so largely and interestingly. Some portions of this work soon found their way into other languages; his piece on “The End of Time” was translated, as a tract, into most of the tongues of Europe; an edition is now circulating, or was a short time since, in modern Greek, on the shores of the Levant; and none of the prose works of Watts have perhaps obtained so large an acceptance, or produced, on the one hand, more serious impressions, and, on the other, more quieting and comfortable consolation.