378 MEMOIR OF GEORGE WILSON. CHAP. IX. 



vation, and a big blister, soothed the volcano to its old condition 

 of mere muttering." 



" My work in London," he tells his kind hostess, Mrs. J. H. 

 Gladstone, " which I expected to be a mere whirl of business, 

 turned out not only a work of great pleasure, but a period of 

 religious refreshment such as I have not enjoyed for a very 

 long time, and the illness I have had has deepened this, for 

 though it was not severe, it was sufficient to remind me afresh 

 how feeble my hold upon life is, and how ready I should be for 

 the great "change. Blessed things, too, are taught us in illness, 

 such as health cannot teach, and I have risen from my sickbed 

 with a subdued and grateful heart, praying to be taught to serve 

 Christ more and better. ... I felt it a great privilege to get 

 back to church to-day ; to hear again my own dear minister's 

 pleasant voice ; to hear our own folks sing (and famously too) 

 our beautiful hymns, and to join in the commemoration of the 

 death of my blessed Lord and Saviour." "It is a comfort I 

 rarely enjoy," he adds to Dr. Cairns, "to meet Christian che- 

 mists, and the pleasure is great when those who spend much of 

 the day burning incense before the idola tribus et specus, are 

 found to devote their most sacred hours to burning incense of 

 another kind, on another altar, to another God. It was unex- 

 pectedly, and all the more delightfully, a time of great spiritual 

 refreshment, and I could have . said, when I contrasted my 

 expectation of a week of weary chemical hairsplitting, with the 

 actual week of profitable religious conversation and exercises, 

 ' God is here, and I knew it not.'" 



His visit to London in May was followed by two months of 

 work. At their close we find him saying, " I am now very 

 jaded, and thankful to do as little as possible. This is not the 

 season of the year when even I generally cough, but since April 

 I have been coughing and blistering my side ; and the stetho- 

 scopists talk ominously of some new quarter of my damaged 

 lungs where mischief is threatening or begun. I have been 

 running a race with Death since I reached my majority, and 

 he'll have the best of it before long, if I don't get further ahead 

 of him than I have been recently able to do. There is this 

 difference between contending with moral and physical disease, 



