The work is very various, very interesting, and full of the call for "long patience," while full, too, of blessed encouragements and surprises. But "the time would fail me." Ah, let me not close without saying to my younger Brother how deeply humbling to me are the memories of those pastoral days, and humbling above all as I look back and wish now, in vain for ever, that I had _visited more_, among both the sick and the whole. "Enter not into judgment with Thy servant, O Lord"; "To Thee only it appertaineth to forgive sins."
My dear younger Brother, resolve that by the grace of God you will be a visitor, whatever else you are, or are not. And be a visitor who respects his neighbours, who feels with them, whose heart lives with them, and who on the other hand watches over his call to instruct them, to clear up and deepen their thoughts of self, and God, and life, and death, and salvation, and duty, and eternity.
"Go, labour on; spend and be spent." There is a sure reward, seen or not seen as yet; and often the most unlikely quarter shall prove the quarter of blessing, and the last shall be first. One recollection, drawn out of my earliest childhood, shall close this wandering talk. It is of dear old Mrs E., then aged quite eighty-six. She must have been born under the rule of King George the Second. A farmer's widow, she had been absolutely and perfectly respectable all her life, and was entirely satisfied with her state and her prospects for the next world. My dear Father, and his devoted Curate of those days, the Rev. W.D., not seldom saw her, but without leaving any apparent impression on her conscience. At last that conscience woke. The Curate read a chapter, in her hearing, to her pious invalid daughter, who had sought her mother's conversion for years in prayer, and had _lived_ true Christianity all the while in her mother's home. And on a sudden, something in that chapter (it was the third of Romans) said to the old lady, "You have lived eighty years in the world, and never done a single thing for the love of God." The conviction was tremendous in its depth and quality, and it lasted long. But a very bright light followed, and shone with holy fulness through what proved to be several remaining years of beautiful old age. She rejoiced in her adorable Saviour with joy unspeakable, a joy meanwhile perfectly sober and full of the good fruits of loving righteousness. She died at last, singing, or rather musically murmuring, _Rock of Ages_.[25] And my recollection, across seven-and-forty years, is of that dear old lady of the past, sitting upright in her parlour, as my Mother led me in to see her, and wearing a look upon her face which I can only now describe as a remembered ray of light.
[25] My dear Father, many years ago, published a full narrative of Mrs E.'s last days, in a little volume of pastoral recollections, _Pardon and Peace_.
"_I love, I love my Master; I will not go out free; For He is my Redeemer, He paid the price for me._
"_I would not leave His service, It is so sweet and blest, And in the weariest moments He gives the truest rest._"