prayer and closed with two or three short oral prayers.  The subject this afternoon was the last verse of the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel according to John:  And ye also shall bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning.  Witnessing for Christ, this was her theme.  She began by giving a variety of Scripture references illustrative of the nature and different forms of Christian witness-bearing.  It was her custom always to unfold the topic of the reading, and to verify her own views of it, by copious and carefully prepared citations from the Word of God.  A Bible-reading, as she conducted it, was not merely a study of a text, or passage of Scripture, by itself, but study of it in its vital relations to the whole teaching of the Bible on the subject in hand.  In the present instance her references were all written out and were so numerous and so skilfully arranged that they must have cost her no little labor.  Feeling, apparently, too feeble to read them herself, she turned to her daughter, who sat by her mother’s side, and requested her to do it.

After the references had been given and the passages read, she went on to express her own thoughts on the subject.  And, surely, had she been fully conscious that this was the last opportunity she would ever have of thus bearing witness for Christ, her words could not have been more happily chosen.  Would that they could be recalled just as they issued from her own lips!  But it is not possible so to recall them.  One might as well try to reproduce the sunset scene on the evening of her burial.  For even if the exact words could be repeated, who could bring back again her tender, loving accents, or that strange earnestness and “unction from the Holy One” with which they were uttered?  Or who could bring back again the awe-struck, responsive emotions that thrilled our hearts?  The simplest outline of this farewell talk is all that is now practicable.  Had we known what was coming, our memories would, no doubt, have been rendered thereby sevenfold more retentive, and little that fell from her lips would have been lost.

Her first point was the great variety of ways in which we can bear witness for Christ.  We can do it in private as well as in public; and it is in the private spheres and familiar daily intercourse of life that most of us are called to give this testimony, and to give it by manifesting in this intercourse and in these retired spheres the spirit of our Master.  What an opportunity does the family, for example, afford for constant and most effective witness-bearing!  How a mother may honor Christ in what she says to her children about Him and especially by the manner in which she fulfils her every-day home duties!  How a wife may thus testify of Christ to her worldly, unconverted husband!  And here she spoke of one form of public testimony which everybody might and ought to give.  “I can not (she said) see all the faces in this room but there may be those here who have never confessed Christ before men by uniting with His visible church.  Let me tell any such who may be present that they are grieving their Saviour by refusing to give Him this testimony of their love and devotion.”