The circumstances of Governor Washburn’s death were peculiar and startling to those about him, though not wholly unexpected to his family. It was known to them that he had a serious affection of the heart, but they were encouraged to hope that by care, and the avoidance of all undue excitement and exertion, he might have comfortable health for some years. The morning meeting of the Board found him a little late from the cars, and climbing the stairs to the hall, he had scarcely seated himself upon the platform and spoken to his friends about him, when he fell forward unconscious into their arms; and though a physician was immediately at his side, and his wife soon there also, there was no return of consciousness, and almost as quickly as the scene can be described, he had left us, and his spirit had gone home to God. A sudden departure, and a startling one to those of us who were trying to detain him; but his Lord called him, and he must have said: “I hear a voice ye cannot hear, That says I must not stay; I see a hand ye cannot see, That beckons me away.” As we saw the light of life fade out from that benignant face, as when the glory of the day becomes the gloom of the night, we heard it coming down out of Heaven: “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” Christ’s saints never perish. They only begin to live in the truest and highest sense when they seem to die; and with our Christian faith and immortal hopes, we love to think of him as having entered upon that higher life and commenced a nobler service. It was an unexpected summons, but we cannot think that he was ever unprepared for it. Like that Connecticut Puritan, who, when the “Dark Day” came and it was proposed that the Legislature should adjourn because the end of the world had come, replied that “this might be, but if it was, he chose to be found at his post, doing his duty.” “Blessed is that servant whom his Lord when he cometh shall find so doing. And if He shall come in the second watch or in the third watch and find them so, blessed are those servants.” * * * * * THE MISSIONARY INFLUENCE OF A LIFE, AND THE LIFE OF A MISSIONARY INFLUENCE. BY REV. A. F. BEARD, D.D. In the missionary influence of a Life it is my purpose to trace the life of a missionary influence. This special life is selected as a significant illustration of certain specific features and forms of the missionary work which we are called here to consider. It was a remote and inconspicuous consecration to certain radical ideas of human brotherhood, and to new and not popular methods of saving people who are low down in life by variations from the then accepted ideas.