received no maternal greeting, no answer of the lips, no pressure of the
hand. God had taken her.

"In this overwhelming shock the patriarch stood confident, reciting the
promises and attesting the Divine goodness. O, sirs, that was faith,
faith, faith! 'Thanks be unto God who giveth us the victory!'

"Finally, I noticed that in my father's old age was to be seen the beauty
of Christian activity. He had not retired from the field. He had been
busy so long you could not expect him idle now. The faith I have described
was not an idle expectation that sits with its hands in its pockets idly
waiting, but a feeling which gathers up all the resources of the soul, and
hurls them upon one grand design. He was among the first who toiled in
Sabbath-schools, and never failed to speak the praise of these
institutions. No storm or darkness ever kept him away from prayer-meeting.
In the neighborhood where he lived for years held a devotional meeting.
Oftentimes the only praying man present, before a handful of attendants, he
would give out the hymn, read the lines, conduct the music, and pray. Then
read the Scriptures and pray again. Then lead forth in the Doxology with
an enthusiasm as if there were a thousand people present, and all the
church members had been doing their duty. He went forth visiting the sick,
burying the dead, collecting alms for the poor, inviting the ministers of
religion to his household, in which there was, as in the house of Shunem, a
little room over the wall, with bed and candlestick for any passing Elisha.
He never shuddered at the sight of a subscription paper, and not a single
great cause of benevolence has arisen within the last half century which he
did not bless with his beneficence. Oh, this was not a barren almond tree
that blossomed. His charity was not like the bursting of the bud of a
famous tree in the South that fills the whole forest with its racket; nor
was it a clumsy thing like the fruit, in some tropical clime, that crashes