* * * * * Your account of dear Mr. —’s increasing infirmities, and their necessary effect on yourself and Mr. G. W., has given rise to many a pensive, perhaps I ought to say, melancholy, feeling. Indeed, I hardly dare think of the breaking up of connexions, comforts, health, and so on. My foolish heart too frequently deceives itself with delusive hopes. I say, too generally, “I shall die in my nest”—the soft downy nest of easy pleasant dissolution. But when anything reminds me of the thorn, the sharp-pointed, piercing thorn, which is mostly found there, then I start, and my spirit almost sinks within me; and I have little either of manly fortitude, or of Christian magnanimity; at least, the subject is so unwelcome, that I rather turn from it, than submissively await it. At times, indeed, I feel willing that the taking down, the unpinning of the tabernacle, and the loosening of all its cords, should take place under any circumstances which my gracious God shall appoint, and I feel a persuasion that his faithful love will so adjust everything, that he will in nowise “suffer me to be tempted above what I shall be able” to bear; and it is to this point that I have of late so frequently directed my prayers, that all the preparatory circumstances of death, the undoing of that which has been inexpediently or criminally pursued, the pulling down of vain and worldly hopes, the detaching of the soul from even the last of its too-much-clinged-to objects, the patient endurance of the bodily evils which, as the precursors of death, in some shape or other await me; that all these may be so met, and so peacefully and cheerfully borne, that, instead of grieving the Spirit of my God by any unhallowed feelings, I may surrender everything with cheerfulness, and endure all in his blessed order. For the melancholy fact must not be withheld from you, that, after all I have known, and felt, and preached, I shrink from very many of the circumstances attendant on dissolution: and what, perhaps, will surprise you more, and what I am still more ashamed to be obliged to acknowledge, is, that I am frequently conscious of a kind of latent infidelity, as to the reality of the coming world. I do not absolutely disbelieve; for revelation assures, and all my reasoning confirms, and yet it is one of those points on which I am constrained to say,—“Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.” But how I have ventured to touch upon these topics I hardly know; for I carefully keep them from my own self, hardly daring to acknowledge their existence; and I am so ashamed of them, that I keep them still more carefully from others. And yet it has produced a strange relief to me, thus explicitly to advert to them; it has given to them more precision of shape and locality; I see with more distinctness what my enemies really are, and I seem encouraged to hope that, by the grace of God, even these may be overcome: and I trust also, that, by thus unfolding these weaknesses of my nature, I