"And a little while hence, you, my friend, will be an object of the same solemn meditations and wondering inquiries. It is most striking to consider--to realize the idea--that _you_, to whom I am writing these lines, who continue yet among mortals, who are on this side of the awful and mysterious veil--that you will be in the midst of these grand realities, beholding the marvellous manifestation, amazed and transported at your new and happy condition of existence, while your friends are feeling the pensiveness of your absolute and final absence, and thinking how, but just now as it were, you were with them. "But we must ourselves follow you to see what it is that the emancipated spirits, who have obtained their triumph over death and all evil through the blood of the Lamb, find awaiting them in that nobler and happier realm of the Great Master's empire; and I hope that your removal will be, to your other friends and to me; a strong additional excitement, under the influence of the Divine Spirit, to apply ourselves with more earnest zeal to the grand business of our high calling. "It is a delightful thing to be assured on the authority of revelation, of the perfect consciousness, the intensely awakened faculties, and all the capacities and causes of felicity of the faithful in that mysterious separate state and on the same evidence, together with every other rational probability, to be confident of the re-union of those who have loved one another and their Lord on earth. How gloomy, beyond all expression, were a contrary anticipation! "My friend feels, in this concluding day of his sojourn on earth, the infinite value of that blessed faith which confides alone in the great Sacrifice for all the sole medium of pardon and reconcilement, and the ground of immortal hope. This has always been to you the very vitality of the Christian religion: and it is so--it is emphatically so--to me also. "I trust you will be mercifully supported,--the heart serene, and, if it may be, the bodily pain mitigated, during the remaining hours, and the still sinking weakness of the mortal frame; and I would wish for you also, and in compassion to the feelings of your attendant relatives, that you may be favoured so far as to have a gentle dismission; but as to this, you will humbly say, 'Thy will be done.'