8th Mo. 10th.  First-day morning.  I was helped to cast away some of the weight of worldly thoughts last evening, and fervently to desire after the Lord.  It is a blessing to have his manifested presence and love with us; but this is not at all times the needful or the best thing for us.  To have the heart right with God, to commit my all to him, to live in the very spirit which breathes, “Thy will be done,” in and through me,—­oh, this is to be alive in Christ; this is indeed the work of the spirit; this is to lose my life, that I may keep it unto life eternal.

At the Yearly Meeting of 1845 occurred the appointment previously alluded to, under which John Allen became a member of the committee which visited Indiana Yearly Meeting.  As communication between Great Britain and America was not so easy and frequent in those days as at present, both he and his family very strongly felt the prospect of separation.  In allusion to the appointment, Eliza writes, “My father allowed the business [of the Yearly Meeting] to proceed, but at length said that he felt too much overwhelmed to speak sooner,—­that the subject touched his tenderest feelings, and that he felt very unfit for such an engagement, but that the sense which had been and was, while he was speaking, present with him, of that goodness and mercy which had followed him all his life long and blessed him, was such that he dared not refuse to do any little offices in his power for those dear friends with whom he should be associated.”  She then gives an account of the receipt at home of the unexpected intelligence of this long journey, and of the calmness which eventually followed the shock to the feelings which it occasioned.  After he had set out, she wrote an interesting account, too long to be given at full length, of what had passed in the intervening time,—­the hopes and fears, the preparations, her father’s parting with his friends and their words of encouragement to him, with his own counsel and exhortations to his children.  A few words of his last address to them may not be out of place:—­“I earnestly desire for us all that when we shall meet again we may all have made some progress in the heavenward journey and be enabled to rejoice together in the sense of it.  For you, my dear young people, especially, I earnestly desire that you may be preferring the best things, not setting your affections on trifling objects, but valuing an inheritance in the truth above all those things that perish with the using. * * * Be willing to be the Lord’s on his own terms, and prize above all things the sense that you are his; and you will be his, if you are willing to walk in the narrow way—­the way of self-denial.”

It does not pertain to this volume to give any further account of this journey or of the mission in which he was engaged.  The visit of the deputation is probably fresh in the remembrance of many Friends in the United States.