For nearly five years after he had given up to a great degree his work at the Royal Institution, he faced death, not with the equanimity of the stoic, but with the peaceful happiness of the believer in Providence and a hereafter. Even the loss of his memory, dear as it must have been to a man who had spent all his life in storing it with the great facts of science, does not seem seriously to have disturbed him. He realized the necessity for patience, and took the lesson of its necessity to heart, so that there was no difficulty in it. Once when calling on his friend, the distinguished scientist, Barlow, who had for a lifetime almost worked beside him at the Royal Institution, but who was now suffering from paralysis, he said: "Barlow, you and I are waiting; that is what we have to do now; and we must try to do it patiently." When the full realization that his powers were leaving him first came to him, he wrote to his niece what he thought ought to be the feelings of the believer in Providence toward death, and his letter shows how thoroughly he had imbibed the great lessons of Christianity, and how much of consolation his faith was to him in this darkest hour before the dawn of that other life, in which he had as implicit confidence as in any of the great scientific principles that he had demonstrated by experiment. He wrote: "I cannot think that death has, to the Christian, anything in it that should make it a rare, or other than a constant thought. Out of the thought of death comes the view of the life beyond the grave, as out of the view of sin (that true and real view which the Holy Spirit alone can give to man) comes the glorious Hope.... My worldly faculties are slipping away day by day. Happy is it for all of us, that the true good lies not in them. As they ebb, may they leave us as little children, trusting in the Father of Mercies and accepting His unspeakable gift." And when the dark shadow was creeping over him, he wrote to the Comte de Paris: "I bow before Him who is the Lord of all, and hope to be kept waiting patiently for His time and mode of releasing me, according to His divine word and the great and precious promises whereby His people are made partakers of the divine nature."