The peculiarities of Thomas Mason were his most noticeable characteristics.  As an orator, his eloquence was of the ore rotundo order; as a writer, his periods were singularly Johnsonian.  He closed his ministerial labors in Northfield, February 28, 1830, on which occasion he delivered a farewell discourse, taking for his text, the words of Paul to Timothy:  “The time of my departure is at hand.  I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith; henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness.”

As a specimen of his style of writing, the following passages are presented, taken from this discourse:—­“Time, which forms the scene of all human enterprise, solicitude, toil, and improvement, and which fixes the limitations of all human pleasures and sufferings, has at length conducted us to the termination of our long-protracted alliance.  An assignment of the reasons of this measure must open a field too extended and too diversified for our present survey.  Nor could a development of the whole be any way interesting to us, to whom alone this address is now submitted.  Suffice it to say, that in the lively exercise of mutual and unimpaired friendship and confidence, the contracting parties, after sober, continued, and unimpassioned deliberation, have yielded to existing circumstances, as a problematical expedient of social blessing.”

After commenting upon the declaration of Paul, he continued:  “The Apostle proceeds, ‘I have fought a good fight’ Would to God I could say the same!  Let me say, however, without the fear of contradiction, ‘I have fought a fight!’ How far it has been ‘good,’ I forbear to decide.”  His summing up was this:  “You see, my hearers, all I can say, in common with the Apostle in the text, is this:  ’The time of my departure is at hand,’—­and, ’I have finished my course.’”

Referring then to the situation which he had occupied, he said:  “The scene of our alliance and co-operation, my friends, has been one of no ordinary cast and character.  The last half-century has been pregnant with novelty, project, innovation, and extreme excitement.  The pillars of the social edifice have been shaken, and the whole social atmosphere has been decomposed by alchemical demagogues and revolutionary apes.  The sickly atmosphere has suffused a morbid humor over the whole frame, and left the social body little more than ’the empty and bloody skin of an immolated victim.’

“We pass by the ordinary incidents of alienation, which are too numerous, and too evanescent to admit of detail.  But seasons and circumstances of great alarm are not readily forgotten.  We have witnessed, and we have felt, my friends, a political convulsion, which seemed the harbinger of inevitable desolation.  But it has passed by with a harmless explosion, and returning friends have paused in wonder, at a moment’s suspension of friendship.  Mingled with the factitious mass, there was a large spice of sincerity which sanctified the whole composition, and restored the social body to sanity, health, and increased strength and vigor.