* * * Oh for that simple faith which thou speaks of as mastering mountains of difficulty, and that not by might or power, but by its intrinsically victorious nature!  I have sometimes been struck by the way in which this is asserted in the text, “This is the victory which overcometh the world, even our faith.”  It is taken for granted that there will be a contest and a victory; but if there is true faith the world will certainly be overcome:  I mean provided the faith is held fast.  It may be abandoned, or foes within may betray the citadel; but it will not otherwise yield to pressure from without.  May we, if possible, encourage one another not to let go that small, and, it may be, famishing and almost expiring confidence, which hath, not only is promised, great recompense of reward.  I little thought to come to any thing so encouraging when beginning a sort of lamentation over myself.  But really there is so much that is deceptive in the deceptive heart; so many things, even our humility, that we once thought of the right kind, turn out to have been some refined manifestation of spiritual pride, that we may daily find, at least I do, that the question “Who can cure it?” follows its judgment as “desperately wicked,” with emphasis full as great as that of “Who can know it?” is prompted by the discovery that it is “deceitful above all things.”

* * * Job Thomas’s death-bed has long been an interesting one to me; and I think his parting address, especially seeing it is a translation from Welsh, conveys remarkably the impression of a mind beginning to be shone upon from the other world.  On the other hand, death-beds of opposite characters, such as “Altamont” in Murray’s Power of Religion, carry a no less convincing evidence of the dark realities to come.  When my father was in America he was much interested with hearing from a friend, a female connection of whom had lived in the house with Tom Payne, some account of the last hours of that wretched man, who appears to have become so fully sensible of his fatal errors as to have written a recantation, which some of his infidel friends destroyed.  The account they gave to Cobbett was entirely false; as the friend related that he expressed to her the greatest sorrow for the harm that he had done, and, on hearing that she had burned some of his books, he expressed a wish that all had done the same.[2]

  [Footnote 2:  For a farther account see Life of Stephen Grellet,
  vol. i. p. 163, Amer. edit.]

* * * Total abstinence, as well as many other good Causes, and the good cause, have lost a noble advocate in our honored and lamented friend J.J.  Ghirney.  It is hard to reconcile one’s mind to so sudden a summons; so little time for his sorrowing friends to receive those ever valuable and precious legacies, “dying sayings.”  We have heard of nothing of that kind; and perhaps he was not conscious of the approach of death at