passed his: ah! had we but a little faith, what repose could we take out of the cross!'" I will conclude his sayings with his dying blessing to his surviving children. "I pray God bless you, and may it please Him to bless you, and to preserve you by his grace from the evil of the world, that you may have no part therein: and, above all, my children, that you may live in the fear and love of God, and yield due obedience to your mother." Expressions of that weight and moment to the immortal good of man, that they abundantly prove to all sensible readers, that the author was a man of an enlightened mind, and of a soul mortified to the world, and quickened to some tastes of a supernatural life: let his youth, let his quality, adorned with so much zeal and piety, so much self-denial and constancy, become exemplary to those of worldly quality, who may be the readers of this book. Some perhaps will hear that truth from the several authors I have reported, whose names, death, and time have recovered from the envy of mess that would hardly endure it from me, if at all from the living. Be it as it will, I shall abundantly rejoice, if God shall please to make any part of this discourse effectual to persuade any into the love of holiness, without which, certain it is, no man shall see the Lord: but the pure in heart shall behold Him for ever. To conclude, I cannot pass this reflection upon what is observed of the sayings of dying men, and which to me seems to have great instruction in it, viz.: All men agree, when they come to die, it is best to be religious; to live a holy, humble, strict, and self-denying life; retired, solitary, temperate, and disencumbered of the world. Then loving God above all, and our neighbours as ourselves, forgiving our enemies, and praying for them, are solid things, and the essential part of religion, as the true ground of man's happiness. Then all sin is exceeding sinful, and yields no more pleasure: but every inordinate desire is burthensome, and severely reproved. Then the world, with all the lawful comforts in it, weighs light against that sense and judgment, which such men have between the temporal and the eternal. And since it is thus with dying men, what instruction is it to the living, whose pretence for the most part is a perpetual contradiction? O that men would learn to number their days, that they might apply their hearts to wisdom! of which, the fear of the Lord is the true and only beginning. And blessed are they that fear always, for their feet shall be preserved from the snares of death. CHAPTER XXII.