From that time to the present--twenty-two years--Thomas Cooper has devoted his great powers to the work of preaching and lecturing on the evidences of the Christian religion. The energy and ability displayed in this noble work by the veteran orator have been remarkable. For months together he has been known to travel long distances by rail, and lecture four or five times in the week, and preach three times on Sunday. After a two hours' lecture he was wont, during the first few years of this period, to recite the first two or three books of Milton's "Paradise Lost." Few, if any, that ever heard his preaching can forget its rich spirituality of tone and delightful purity and simplicity of style. The lectures it is hard to describe without seeming to exaggerate their rare merits. The best testimony to their worth has been given by the hundreds of thousands who have come together to listen to them as delivered in all the chief towns of England, Scotland, and Wales for more than twenty years, and by their rapid and extensive sale when published. Crowded with facts of history or science which are clearly arranged and pressed into the service of logical argument, delivered extemporaneously in language of the truest and homeliest Saxon type, and often marked by passages of great eloquence, these lectures may be taken as ideals of what popular lectures on religious evidences should be. Of his present employment, Thomas Cooper, writing in 1872, says, in his own simple fashion: "My work is indeed a happy work. Sunday is now a day of heaven to me. I feel that to preach 'the unsearchable riches of Christ' is the most exalted and ennobling work in which a human creature can be engaged. And believing that I am performing the work of duty--_that I am right_--my employment of lecturing on the 'Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion,' from week to week, fills me with the consoling reflection that my life is not being spent in vain, much less spent in evil." Happy close of a strangely eventful and checkered life! May the stalwart old laborer of _seventy-five_ be spared to scatter many a handful of the seeds of truth before he hears the summons which shall end his labors. We have spoken, in the title of this chapter, of Thomas Cooper as "The self-educated shoemaker who reared his own monument." This sketch cannot be closed more appropriately than by giving the titles of the works published during the last eight years--the stones which form the chief part of that monument: The Bridge of History over the Gulf of Time (1872), twentieth thousand. Plain Pulpit-Talk (1872), third edition. The Life of Thomas Cooper, written by Himself (1872), twelfth thousand. The Paradise of Martyrs, or Faith Rhyme (1873). God, the Soul, and a Future State (1873), eight thousand. Old-Fashioned Stories (1874), third edition. The Verity of Christ's Resurrection from the Dead (1875), fifth thousand.