Memorials of the Independent Churches in Northamptonshire: with biographical notices of their pastors, and some account of the puritan ministers who laboured in the county.Coleman, Thomas
History
Memorials of the Independent Churches in Northamptonshire: with biographical notices of their pastors, and some account of the puritan ministers who laboured in the county.
Coleman, Thomas
Clergy -- England -- Northamptonshire; Independent churches -- England -- Northamptonshire; Puritans -- England -- Northamptonshire
He closed his days and his ministry together. Apoplectic seizures had
weakened his frame, and at length had rendered him incapable of
fulfilling all the duties of his office; while they indicated to him
that his end was drawing nigh. In a letter written to his people, he
intimated his wish to have an assistant. They invited the eldest son of
their pastor, then preaching at Wem, in Shropshire, to become assistant
to his father. This invitation he accepted; but before he entered on
this new sphere of duty, the earthly career of his beloved and venerated
father closed in death. "He preached on Lord's-day morning, February
25th, 1821, with much of his usual animation, from Isaiah lxiii. 7-13,
and remarked at the close of the discourse what encouragement this
passage affords the widow and the fatherless to put their trust in God,
finishing his last public discourse with these lines of Doddridge:
"To thee an infant race we leave,
Them may their father's God receive;
That ages yet unborn may raise
Successive hymns of humble praise."
He spent the evening surrounded by his family, and conversing with his
children in a strain of cheerful piety; and after a night of sound
repose arose as well as usual the next morning. About noon, leaving the
parlour, he was found a few minutes after in an apoplectic fit, or a
seizure resembling apoplexy. Several medical men repaired to the spot,
but life was extinct.
His remains were interred in the ground belonging to the Meeting House
on Thursday, the 8th of March. On that occasion Mr. Horsey, of
Northampton, read the Scriptures and prayed, and Mr. Edwards, of the
same place, delivered the funeral oration. Mr. Hall, of Leicester,
preached the funeral sermon on the same day from Heb. xiii. 7--a sermon
which presented a most impressive representation of the responsibility
attaching to a people that had been favoured with such a ministry, and
the tremendous consequences that must follow the misimprovement of such
advantages.
Mr. Toller only published during his life a sermon on the "faithful
saying," entitled "A Plain and Popular View of the Evidences of
Christianity"; a sermon occasioned by the death of the Rev. Samuel
Palmer, of Hackney, Mr. Toller's most intimate friend, from 2nd Timothy
i. 10--in which occurs this striking passage:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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