“I HAVE taken much pains,” says the learned Selden, “to know everything that was esteemed worth knowing amongst men; but with all my disquisitions and reading, nothing now remains with me to comfort me, at the close of life, but this passage of St. Paul: ‘It is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.’ To this I cleave, and herein I find rest.”
GREAT was the cry in Egypt when the first-born in each family was dead; but are there not many families where all are dead together?—Boston.
BETTER men reproach thee for thy conversion than conscience reproach you for thy obstinacy. The reproaches of an awakened and wounded conscience will be very terrible—not to be denied, not to be answered, not to be endured. As long as Job’s heart did not reproach him but witnessed his integrity, he could bear his unfriendly friends’ censures and reproaches the better.
PROVIDENCE permitted the great Dr. John Owen to live until the object which lay nearest to his heart was accomplished, and then arranged his departure from the world in the following happy manner:—On the day when he died, Mr. Payne, his friend, who was instructed to put his last work to press, entered his apartment, and said, “Doctor, I have just been putting your book on the ‘Glory of Christ’ to the press.” The Doctor said, “I am glad to hear that that performance is put to press.” And then lifting up both his hands and his eyes as in a kind of rapture, he said, “But O, brother Payne, the long-looked-for day is come at last, in which I shall see that glory in another manner than ever I have done yet, or was capable of doing in this world.”