When he was at leisure from writing and teaching, he often came up to London, and there went among the congregations of the Nonconformists, and used his talent to the great good-liking of the hearers.  Thus he spent his latter years.  But let me come a little nearer to particulars of time.  After he was sensibly convicted of the wicked state of his life and converted, he was baptised into the congregation, and admitted a member thereof in the year 1655, and became speedily a very zealous professor.  But upon the return of King Charles II. to the Crown in 1660, he was on November 12 taken as he was edifying some good people, and confined in Bedford Gaol for the space of six years; till the Act of Indulgence to dissenters being allowed, he obtained his freedom by the intercession of some in power that took pity on his sufferings; but was again taken up, and was then confined for six years more.  He was chosen to the care of the congregation at Bedford on December 12, 1671.  In this charge he often had disputed with scholars that came to oppose him, as thinking him an ignorant person; but he confuted, and put to silence, one after another, all his method being to keep close to Scripture.

At length, worn out with sufferings, age, and often teaching, the day of his dissolution drew near.  Riding to Reading in order to plead with a young man’s father for reconciliation to him, he journeyed on his return by way of London, where, through being overtaken by excessive rains and coming to his lodgings extremely wet, he fell sick of a violent fever, which he bore with much constancy and patience.  Finding his vital strength decay, he resigned his soul into the hands of his most merciful Redeemer, following his Pilgrim from the City of Destruction to the New Jerusalem.  He died at the house of one Mr. Straddocks, a grocer, at the Star on Snow Hill, in the Parish of St. Sepulchre, London, in the sixtieth year of his age, after ten days’ sickness; and was buried in the new burying ground in Artillery Place.

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ALEXANDER CARLYLE

Autobiography

Alexander Carlyle, minister of the Church of Scotland and author of the celebrated “Autobiography,” was born at Cummmertrees Manse, Dumfriesshire, on January 26, 1722, and died at Inveresk on August 25, 1805.  His commanding appearance won for him the sobriquet of “Jupiter Carlyle,” and Sir Walter Scott spoke of him as “the grandest demi-god I ever saw.”  He was greatly respected in Scotland as a wise and tolerant man, where too many were narrow, bitter, and inquisitorial.  With regard to freedom in religious thought he was in advance of his time, and brought the clerical profession into greater respect by showing himself a cultured man of the world as well as a leader of his Church.  Carlyle, however, would hardly be remembered now but for the glimpses which his book gives of contemporary persons and manners.  The work was first edited in 1860 by John Hill Burton.

I.—­In the Days of Prince Charlie