Mr. Webster then quotes, on the authority of another, the grounds of Mr. Mason's religious faith, thus:-- Mr. Mason was fully aware that his end was near; and in answer to the question, "Can you now rest with firm faith upon the merits of your Divine Redeemer?" he said, "I trust I do. Upon what else can I rest?" At another time, in reply to a similar question, he said, "_Of course_; I have no other ground of hope." Mr. Webster adds:-- Such, Mr. Chief-Justice, was the life and such the death of Jeremiah Mason. For one I could pour out my heart like water at the recollection of his virtues and his friendship, and in the feeling of his loss. I would embalm his memory in my best affections. Again, in the following extract from a letter to his teacher, Mr. James Tappan, about two years before Mr. Webster's death, he writes:-- You have, indeed, lived a checkered life. I hope you have been able to bear prosperity with meekness, and adversity with patience. These things are all ordered for us far better than we could order them for ourselves. We may pray for our daily bread; we may pray for forgiveness of sins; we may pray to be kept from temptation, and that the kingdom of God may come in us, and in all men, and His will everywhere be done. Beyond this we hardly know for what good to supplicate the Divine Mercy. Our Heavenly Father knoweth what we have need of better than we know ourselves, and we are assured that His eye and His loving kindness are upon us and around us every moment. How entirely in harmony are these religious views of Mr. Webster with similar utterances on several public occasions, to which allusion has already been made; and especially with that extraordinary dramatic scene so vividly described by his biographer, Mr. Harvey, who was an eye-witness and participator in it, when, in the solitary farm-house of John Colby,[D] in New Hampshire, Mr. Webster, at the request of Mr. Colby, led in prayer. Whatever else of unfriendly criticism has been made on the character of Mr. Webster, he has never been charged with hypocrisy, or of parading his religious opinions; least of all in that remote hamlet of John Colby, whither he had gone to visit him for the first time in twenty-five years, because he had heard of Mr. Colby's remarkable conversion late in life. Can there be the remotest suspicion that other than the most pure and noble of all motives could have governed him, as he then sought communion with God in prayer? And, as Mr. Harvey remarked to the writer, "It was indeed a prayer."