That heroic contempt of death which had often discovered itself in the midst of former dangers, was manifested now in his discourse with several of his most intimate friends.  I have reserved for this place one genuine expression of it many years before, which I thought might be mentioned with some advantage here.  In July, 1725, he had been sent to some place not far from Hamilton to quell a mutiny among some of our troops.  I know not the particular occasion; but I remember to have heard him mention it as so fierce a one, that he scarcely ever apprehended himself in more hazardous circumstances.  Yet he quelled it by his presence alone, and the expostulations he used—­evidently putting his life into his hand to do it.  The particulars of the story struck me much; but I do not so exactly remember them as to venture to relate them here.  I only observe, that in a letter dated July 16, that year, which I have now before me, and which evidently refers to this event, he writes thus:  “I have been very busy, hurried about from place to place; but, blessed be God, all is over without bloodshed.  And pray let me ask what made you show so much concern for me in your last?  Were you afraid I should get to heaven before you? or can any evil befall those who are followers of that which is good?"[*]

[Note:  I doubt not but this will remind some of my readers of that noble speech of Zwinglius, when (according to the usage of that country,) attending his flock to a battle in which their religion and liberties were all at stake, on his receiving a mortal wound by a bullet, of which he was expired, while his friends were in all the first astonishment of grief, he bravely said, as he was dying, “_Ecquid hoc infortunii_?  Is this to be reckoned a misfortune?” How many of our Deists would have celebrated such a sentence, if it had come from the lips of an ancient Roman!  Strange that the name of Christ should be so odious, that the brightest virtues of his followers should be despised for his sake!  But so it is, and so our Master told us it would be; and our faith is, in this connection, confirmed by those who strive most to overthrow it.]

As these were his sentiments in the vigour of his days, so neither did declining years and the infirmities of a broken constitution on the one hand, nor any desire of enjoying the honours and profits of so high a station, or (what was much more to him,) the converse of the most affectionate of wives and so many amiable children and friends on the other, in the least enervate his spirits; but as he had in former years often expressed it, to me and several others, as his desire, “that if it were the will of God, he might have some honourable call to sacrifice his life in defence of religion and the liberties of his country;” so, when it appeared to him most probable that he might be called to it immediately, he met the summons with the greatest readiness.  This appears in part from a letter which he wrote to the Rev. Mr. Adams, of Falkirk,