1844-54. DEATH OF A SISTER. 361 



I feel as lame in spirit as I am in body. Pray for me, my dear 

 friend, and her dear friend. Pray for me ; I need your prayers. 

 It seems but a black dream, and yet it is a reality to make dark 

 a lifetime. I will not be long of joining her." 



Three months later, in a " hasty laboratory note " to the same 

 friend, he says, " I have enjoyed more, latterly, I think, of the 

 sense of the Holy Spirit's help than I have ever known before. 

 Mary's memory is full of blessed associations. The succeeding 

 two months will, I trust, yield me still more leisure for sacred 

 things." 



" December 1847. 



" Pray for me much, my dearest friend. I see few, very few, 

 devout people. From the public services of the sanctuary I 

 am cut off. I never hear a prayer. When I look into my heart 

 I see so much sin there ; I give way so often to unchristian 

 passions and gratifications, that I tremble at the thought that 

 God's grace, so little improved, will by and by be taken away. 

 Counsel me ; I have no Mary now, with her gentle, impressive 

 words, and the utterings of lengthened Christian experience, to 

 reprove my sins and follies, and keep me from evil. She was 

 my mother in Christ, and you my father." 



" March 31, 1850. 



" Your letter was to me unspeakably dear, and again reminds 

 me of what I never can or will forget, that you are bound to me 

 by ties such as connect none other of my friends to me. The 

 dark past, which was long to me the very blackness of darkness, 

 has now stars above its horizon, and the shadow, not of the 

 grave, but of the world to come, over it. I begin to think 

 abidingly of Mary, not as one of the dead, but as one of the 

 glorified living, though at no time do I realize it less than at 

 this mournful season of the year, which has witnessed the death 

 of so many of my dearest ones. The last lecture-night at the 

 School of Arts remains as the ineffaceable remembrancer of the 

 latest great sorrow, and inevitably links other griefs of a kindred 

 sort with it ; -and the whole of April is to me a month of physi- 



