He went abroad for a time, while pastor of the Hollis Street Church, and visited the Holy Land, in devout pilgrimage; and though he lost his first wife, the mother of all his children, and a most worthy gentlewoman, but the other day, and married another superior woman after a brief widowhood, his last days have been, I should say, most emphatically his best days; for he has lectured through the length and breadth of the land on Temperance, and, after enduring all sorts of persecution as one of the anti-slavery leaders, he lived to see the whole system against which they had been warring so long, and with so little apparent effect, utterly overthrown throughout the land, and the great God of heaven and earth acknowledged as the God of the black man.  Thousands and thousands of miles he travelled, not only after having passed the meridian of his life, but after he had reached the allotted term, when life begins to be a heaviness for most, as a laborer in the cause of truth,—­often of unacknowledged truth; and if mistaken, as a theologian, or as a Spiritualist, or as a man,—­being what he was,—­let us remember that he was never false to his convictions, never a hypocrite nor a deceiver, and that he died with his harness on, having been occupied for the last five years of his life in digesting the treasury decisions, often contradictory, and always inaccessible, for there was no index, until he took them in hand, going back thirty years, I believe, and reducing the whole to a system which need be no longer unintelligible to the Department.

One word more.  Among the scores of letters I had from him in the day of his bitterest trials and sorest temptations, there was one which he sent off in the midst of his first great triumph,—­with no date now, although I find a mark upon it which leads me to suppose it was written November 16, 1818, and from which I must venture to take a single paragraph.

“My God!” he says,—­“my God!  I do most devoutly thank Thee.  My prayer has reached Thee, and been accepted.  My dear friend, join with me in thanking Him in whom I put my trust,—­to whom alone I look, or to whom I have looked, for a smile.  He has blessed me.  I have been heard by man, and have not been forsaken by God.  Though I have not done perfectly, I have done as well as I could rationally wish, and better than my most sanguine hopes.  At Brattle Square this morning, and at the New South (late Mr. Thacher’s) this afternoon.  Lord! now let thy servant depart in peace; for thou hast lifted the cloud under which he has so long moved, and he may now die in thy light.”

Can such a temper as this be misunderstood?  Was he not a man fearing God in 1818,—­forty-eight years ago?—­or, rather, loving God with that perfect love which casteth out all fear?