Parting.; Words.
A DIS COURSE
DELIVERED IN THE
NORTH CHURCH, HARTFORD,
JULY 3, 1859.
BY HORACE BUSHNELL.
PUBLISHED BY REQUEST.
HARTFOR D:
PUBLISHED BY L. E. IE. HUNT.
1859.








SERM O N.
JER. 22: 10.-Weep not for the dead, neither bemoan him: but weep sore for
him that goeth away; for he shall return no m6re, nor see his native country.
WEEP not for the dead-this man is to be worse than
dead, alive without the chance to live; plucked from
his throne and carried away, as a prisoner of war, into
Egypt, never to return. Challenging sad condolence
for him, the tender-hearted prophet raises the figure
of a state funeral; the bemoaning cries of the women
continued for eight days, the barefoot procession and
the cloud of ashes in which it moves, the sad wail of
the musicians, and the loud plaint of the people"Alas! alas! the king!"  Not this, he says, but more.
Weep not for the dead, neither bemoan him; but weep
sore for him that goeth away; for he shall return no
more, nor see his native country. Were he only to die
and be buried, it would be a case to justify no such
bewailing for him, as the heavy years of exile he is to
see, his pinings and bitter regrets, his aching hopes and
longings never to be fulfilled, his remembrances of a
throne first vacant, then occupied by his brother, and
he himself a forgotten captive, lost to himself and his
country.  The sentiment, then, of the prophet is
this: —That the trial of being separated from the places




4
and friends grown dear by a customary love is greater,
in many respects, than to be separated by death.
He affirms it even of a bad man, though not that it
will be, of course, his sentiment. He is such a man as
may well enough be much afraid to die, and he may
naturally hope that he will somehow be restored to his
country and throne. It is only the prophet's own sentiment, knowing that he will not. Far more clear were
the truth of it, if he were a good man, consciously
ready to die. He could well enough go home to God;
but to be separated from the acquaintances, and scenes,
and works, in which he has lived, without going home,
is a very different matter. He loses the mortal state,
without gaining the immortal; goes away alive into
exile from his own life itself, the associations it has
constructed, the works it has done, the sympathies it
has attracted, the very seeds it has planted and fondly
hopes to see in their growth.'
In tracing briefly the truth of this sentiment, far be
it from us to speak lightly of death. To close one's
eyes on all that is earthly, to sunder all the ties of
mortal love, to wind up the grand affair of trial that
we call life, and enter on the fixed result of it, makes
the point of death a center where so many mountainlike thoughts crowd heavily in, that we may not think
of it as being otherwise than a most trying ordeal to
pass. We are only to see that there may be a separation more trying even than this.
And it occurs to us, first of all, that the state of prolonged separation from home, kindred, country, or any
place and work where our hearts have learned to find
their sphere of enjoyment, is itself a kind of prolonged
death. Life unsphered is about the heaviest load ever




5
put upon a mortal. Weariness in a good cause, sacrifice, conflict, are themselves a kind of joy, and, when
supported by hope, are often the highest, noblest kind
of joy. But to have no place, to have lost a field of
customary love and duty, is only to have died before
the time; to have died while yet alive; to have all
the longings and dear affinities of a living heart,
without the work to be done, and the co-operating love
and sympathy of such as a good work may attract.
Then, again, the real death itself is still to comeonly at a later point; that is, after the living death of
exile and a heart unsphered has worn out what remains
of the vital energy. And the death it will be, when it
comes, as of one cast away upon some desert islandthe death of a man out of place, and, as respects the
genuine associations and affinities of his position,
homeless. He dies touching nobody, and without the
sense of being touched by any that have learned to be
tenderly regardful of him, unless it be some nearest
family friends. If he dies in old age, it is death to
nobody but himself, and he drops into the dark river
in a kind of unheeded cessation, as a chip drops into
the sea.
Again, there is even something inspiing and bright
in the death of a faithful and true servant of God, who
dies in his place. It is the hour of his reward and
crown, and the smile of God's approbation is visibly on
him. A kind of halo rests upon the scene. The faces
of blessing that crowd about him, and the tender
words and ministries in which so many loving affections just now culminate, assure the departing man,
and help him in the confidence of victory. Hitherto
he has been fighting his cause with many, or, at least,
some misgivings. Now, assured by so many witnesses,




6
he dares to sing-"I have fought the good fight, I
have finished my course;" and so goes forth to take
the crown of glory laid up for him. Exactly contrary
is the feeling most natural, where one's roots are torn
up and he is driven away alive by the compulsion of
Providence. He questions why it is, doubts whether
he shall take it as the sentence of God on his defects
of duty, struggles heavily with dark accusations of
blame, loses the confidence of victory, and finally dies
out, coffined, as it were, before the time, in his own
seediness and the dullness of his by-gone life. In such
a death there may be a true crown, but it does not
appear.
Again, it is another kind of contrast, that when one
dies in place, in the society where he has lived and the
works that have engaged him, his faults are.soon forgotten, or quite smoothed away; for we do not like to
think ill of the dead, we prefer to cherish only what
we have loved or respected. But one who is parted
alive from the scenes and works of his life, commonly
fares differently. He is found to have been less necessary than many thought. It becomes a kind of surprise that he seemed to be necessary at all. His faults
and defects c~ge up to account for the discovery.
And, being stilfalive, he is obliged to know that he is
gone by —not forgotten, not disrespected, it may be,
but desired with less warmth and practically held in
terms of qualified estimation. Probably no one is to
be blamed on this account. It is simply human that it
should be so, arid it can not be otherwise.
There is yet another mode in which the living man,
separated from his work, is often made to suffer in
feeling more unjustly. Whatever miscarriages, failures, faultinesses may appear, after he is gone, will be




7
too easily set down as effects of his mistaken ways and
methods. Men are easily wise in tracing effects to
remote causes, and they sometimes quite as easily find
a subtle personal interest of self-excusing in it. And
this is the more likely to happen in the case of a
Christian teacher, benefactor, founder, reformer, that
the very fruits, all the fruits he leaves behind, being
such as pertain to human character, are themselves
unripe, imperfect, planted thick with all manner of bad
seeds ready to grow apace, when opportunity is given.
Had he remained, such growth might have been kept
under. But they sprout into rank luxuriance, it may
be, after he is gone, overgrowing the field with thorns
and briars. And then how easily is he shown to be
the responsible cause. And there is no defence to be
made. Were he dead and entered into rest with God,
such accusations, even if they were known to him,
would not trouble him. But he lives to hear of them
in his exile, having all his human weaknesses upon him,
and quite broken down, it may be, under them. Dead
while yet living, he is overtaken by a judgmentday
sentence on his works, from which there is no appeal,
though it be cruelly untrue. Heavy is the load that
many good men, fondly loved in their time, have been
called to bear, in the last days of life, under this very
common, always possible, injustice. Not to have some
rational forecast of it, would argue even dullness and
a short perception of mankind.
It is hardly necessaryin adjusting the contrast of death
and a living separation, to dwell on the two translations
themselves,-one to a condition of fulness, rest, divine
approbation, glorified society, brightness and peace
eternal; the other to a state of living exile and emptiness, where the roots strike down no more; where the




work is ended without being finished; where the mind
struggles vainly after what it has lost, and has little
hope of anything further to be gained; where friends
are gratuities and not rights, politely deferent or considerate, but as late comers, easily considerate of themselves; where, in short, the unsphered man is only put
in schooling, under a last lesson of loss and emptiness,
for the great release to come.
I will not dwell on the comparison longer. You will
only observe that all these considerations have a greatly
augmented force, when applied to the removal of a
Christian minister from his flock, after many years of
watch and service among them. He is knit to them
by the working habit of his life itself. I will not
assume that he is less selfish in his work than other
men are in theirs. Still it is much that the form of it
is such as to make them his object, and set all the forces
of his nature running after them and their personal
benefit. If he kindles in it, he kindles for them. If
he struggles heavily and wearily, they are the burden
he carries. If he succeeds, the success is in them. He
looks on them as having all his life-work in them, and
they become, in that manner, the native country of his
heart. And this will be true if he is only not more
selfish than other men. The formal aim of his work is
such as to concentrate even his mixed motives and
keep them generating a kind of love; which, if it
be doubtfully Christian, is yet intensely personal.
Thus, while other men are localized in their attachments by the accident of birth, or pleasant associations,
or by long residence, he is drilling even a flinty nature,
it may be, under the hammer of work, and setting
in clamps of attachment that fasten him to his flock




and sphere. Whatever genuinely Christian love, too,
there was in him is fanned to a flame by the whole
stress of his endeavor, made personal towards them
and fastened upon them, by a grasp that has eternity in
it; even as it is their perilous eternity that he has been
laboring to rescue and glorify by the grace of an eternal salvation. If, mean time, he is happy enough to
gain their personal love to himself, it is a most honest,
real kind of love; love that has grown up in a dealing
with their faults and a purging of their sins, love that
comes back, wafting heavenly flavors on him, out of
their new eternity in Christ already begun. His faults
they have gladly buried even before the time. They
have borne him up in his weaknesses, sheltered him, it
may be, in his storms, and have so become a kind of
complementary force to his life. He scarce knows how
to be himself, separated from them. The natural and
proper close of his connexion would be, just here, to
let him die, and sleep with their dead. "Weep sore"
for him, if it must be otherwise.
Otherwise alas! it is to be with me. The hand of
God is upon me and I must go. I have struggled long
with this dark necessity, and you on your part have
also detained me. Were I dislodged by you, I should
probably go with greater pains and fewer regrets.
It is even a part of my happiness that I can go with
these regrets upon me. They are heavy enough
indeed, to create a pain, but the pain were much
heavier without them. I perceive as distinctly beforehand, as I can at any future time, that when I am finally
separated from this dear flock, who have been the home
of my heart for so many years, I shall be sick, and
weary, and look back'with longings not to be suppress2




10
ed, on these pastorly works and cares, these answering
words and faces, left behind. It is the reward of a
christian minister, if successful, that he becomes the
object of a wide affection. The business man, the lawyer, and even the physician, commonly has his work as
work, and gets his affectional interest mostly in his
family and among his small circle of friends. But the
happy minister lives in a great family affection, and it
bye and bye becomes a kind of necessity. He grows
into it, feeds upon it, and the separation from it makes
a fearful desolation. I go in the definite understanding
that I am never to be so insphered again; for my life
is too far spent, and my constitution too much damaged, to allow the hope that I can ever take the
charge of another pulpit and people. And, if it were
otherwise, none but a young man ever can be thoroughly inserted into any people's love. One of the
great faults of my ministry among you has been, that
I have had too little consideration of what was due to
my own self-preservation, and so I have spent the
robustness of a naturally long lived force, before the
time. Acknowledging the wrong, I am ready also to
accept the penalty. You have kindly urged me to
stay with you, and you have generously offered to have
me as a burden, when you could not have me any
longer as an effective pastor and servant. You have
even claimed it as your right, to repay, in this manner,
what you have generously agreed to consider a debt,
fairly incurred. But the sense of being a burden and
living as a pensioner, you can readily see, might, to
persons of a certain temperament, be insupportable.
I acknowledge it is so to me; not because I distrust
your constancy in such pledges, but because it involves
the being consciously a drawback on your prosperity




as a congregation, which it has been the habitual study
of my life to advance. Your interest plainly requires
me to be gone, and obediently to that I go. Rational
convictions must, in such a matter, take the lead of
personal inclinations, and must rule down even the
protest of the mutinous affections. You must have a
minister who can actively serve you. To him you
must give your hearts, undivided, undetained, by recollections or regrets that look towards another who only
could, but cannot effectively, serve you, longer. Let
the field be his, as the work must be, and let all your
affections and prayers cluster faithfully and singly
round him.
I ought perhaps to say that it is not merely to gain
a lengthened lease of life that I am induced to make
this trying sacrifice. If I had nothing to live for, I
certainly would not wish to live a day longer. But I
am encouraged in the hope of being so far recovered
in health, that I may prosecute, in a careful way,
objects and themes of study that appear to me to have
no secondary importance. I hope to support a fractional ministry by the press, when I cannot the full
routine of the pastoral office. In this hope I consent
to go into exile,though to sever these ties and tear myself
away costs me a struggle which I will not trust myself
to describe; a struggle which I try to compose by indulging the further hope, that I may yet return to Hartford and here may close my days. My dear people I
cannot have again-they are mine no more-but it
will be something, if I may, to die among them, and be
finally lodged, as a resurrection guest, in the dust of a
city whose people I have loved the more, that I have
tried to serve them, and have experienced, at their




12
hands, so much of confidence, good will and forbearance.
I suppose I could speak here, if I would, of some
advances made and fruits gathered; for I certainly
think that my ministry has not been altogether useless.
But I am not in any mood of boasting, or even of selfgratulation. I am under the rod, where it much better
sorts with my feeling to be dumb. If any good has
been done, refer it wholly to God; if any loss suffered, who shall take tlhe blame if not I? Any smallest recollection of success is. just now an offence to me.
My heart runs not that way-let me hasten my escape
from the windy storm and tempest. If by some statistical review, or comparison, it might be shown that I
found you weak, and now leave you strong, what but
just this same increase ought the growth of your city
itself to have yielded, under the most indifferent kind
of ministry? Or if we make up the count of such as
have been born here, how often has that God whose
prerogative it is to. bring water out of rock, shown
a much longer train of converts, marching out heavenward, from under a secretly, and afterwards publicly,
apostate ministry! No! God forbid that in this lifetime funeral, I should think to while away the pains of
it by any pleasant computations of results. I see little
now but my personal faults and the faults of my
preaching. What! such a gospel as this! gospel of
salvation to lost men! gospel of the manifested love
of God in Christ's dear life and passion! such a gospel,
preached so feebly, with so little unction of love, and
with so many mixed motives present to mar the
effect-I have no heart to think of any pleasant con



13
gratulations in it!, Forgive it, O my God, and I ask
no more!
And yet I ought to thank God that the result has
not been worse. Nay, I ought to thank him for a kind
of paradoxical happiness continued to me in a ministry
so defective. I have generally had a great and sometimes even a superlative enjoyment, in just that which
now, in the review, appears to me to have been so far
below the real import of my work. Had I another
life to spend, with talents high enough to command
any highest post of honor in the world, I would hasten
straight into this ministry of Jesus, if it were only for
the sublime enjoyment of being unfolded in such
themes and such ranges of feeling and work. I would
only try to be faithful and single enough in the calling
to be allowed to die in it.
I would count it too as my happiness to be located
in this same church, in this same city of Hartford.
Not because you are any but a sinful people. But it
makes a great difference what kind of sinful people
one has given him to do his work upon. If they were
not in Ain, they would want no ministry; if they were
as ungeinerously and coarsely tempered in it as many
are, tbey would scarce be able to receive one. I found
you not homogeneous. You had many jealousies. I
encountered some of them. But if there were some
of you that were unreasonable for a time, there were
none that wished to hinder the truth, none that did not
so far honor the gospel as to want their benefit in it,
and moderate their manners by the gracious spirit of
it. No properly factious man have I ever'found
among you. And it has been my happiness to see you
gradually flowing towards a complete unity.  You
have allowed me to speak plainly, as I now think,




14
sometimes over-severely, of your sins. My preaching,
for a time, was too much in that vein. But my entire
freedom of utterance you have never restrained. You
have even supported me in it, in times of bitter
impeachment from without; standing with me, unable
to be moved or swerved in your confidence by public
combinations of protest and offended authority pressing
down upon you for years. And you were not blind in
this confidence. Only your convictions were different
from the convictions of those who had less opportunity,
and, it may be, less carefulness, to know; and you have
it for your reward that they are just now discovering
yours to have been right-right not simply as being
righteous, but doubly and nobly right that, as righteous
men, you were able to stand fast in them. Any three
of your number, shaken loose by these assaults, could
have instituted charges against me that would have
put me in the power of my adversaries at once; but
no first one of that three could be found.
Out of such an experience of you, my confidence
grew apace. And as confidence begets love, and love
begets returning love, we have grown together in a
kind of conjugal understanding and felt community of
life and character, such as seldom is known in the happiest of pastoral relations. With you thus for twentysix years, in all the tenderest issues and subtlest windings of your life; by you in your disasters and troubles,
and in your holidays of success; close enough to you
to feel the touch of your anxieties and tremblings for
your children, and the throb of your private thanksgivings on account of them; at your weddings, by you
in your sick chambers and your funerals, with you in
your struggles under, and with, and out of your sins,
sometimes crossing you a little, and sometimes a little




crossed by you-with no other effect than that pulling
the cord has tightened it-in this manner my ministry
among you has been a kind of course in trust and well
experimented affection, a good element for courage
and growth, an element, at once, of stimulus and rest
for the heart. No minister of Christ was ever more
happy in his people, and I hasten to acknowledge the
favor, not so much for your sakes, as because my consciousness of desert before God is just now humbled to
a point so far below the conditions of privilege allowed
me. I have never been willing, I most certainly know,
to swerve you, even by a hair's breadth, from the
truth. I have been religiously careful to correct myself into and by the truth; allowing no small fear of
man, or smaller pride of consistency, to detain me. I
know that I have loved the truth. But I ought to
have made the truth much greater, more nearly
indentical with God, closer to love; so, more savingly
powerful in you, more captivatingly, gloriously sovereign over you. Truth has her due honors, not when
she is thought or reasoned, but when she reigns.
Truth is the mother of salvation, and her word is fitly
preached, only when her saving motherhood is proved
in the spiritual birth and gathering of her children.
And here it is that I seem to have come short of my
privilege. I probably could not be satisfied here,
indeed I ought not to be satisfied, as long as any that
have heard me with approval are left unprofited by
me.
How many things crowd upon me now, at such an
hour as this, which I could wish to press upon you, for
your future benefit and growth. Pardon me, if then,




16
I proceed to name a few articles of advice suggested by
my deep concern for your welfare.
Have it then as a great point of duty, never to be
remitted, that you maintain a christian care of your
families. A christian Church and Sunday are not
enough; you must have a christian week, and house,
and home, a genuinely christian nurture for your children. What I have so often urged on this point has
been growing into a stronger and more fixed conviction even to this hour; that it is your privilege, and,
being your privilege, your most sacred duty, to see
your children grow up into Christ as children of grace,
and born of the Spirit, even before the time of their
definite recollection. But, in order to this, you must
make a christian element of the house. And what
can do more for you, as respects the godly keeping of
your lives, than to heartily accept and carefully cherish
this responsibility? What, again, more for the solid
prosperity of religion in your church, than to have
your character and that of your children grounded in
a mode of life so practically christian?
You are soon to have a minister, I trust, in my place.
Let it be his fault, not yours,' if he does not succeed.
Anticipate his wants, as you have anticipated mine.
Show him the same kindness and forbearance you have
shown to me. Gather round him in the same stedfast
affection. Guarantee his liberty by the same generous
confidence and support. As he is one and you are
many, understand that he is weak alone, and without
the hearty co-operation of your works and prayers.
Let his words have a warm place to fall in, and commend them to others by a faithful practice in yourselves.
Have it also as another point of duty, to provide all




17
the equipments necessary to success, and to make a
liberal expenditure for it. A christian spirit without
public spirit is simply absurd, and this, to you, is happily no discovery. You have undertaken-to build a
church, in a location better adapted to your present
places of residence. That church, as you well understand, must be built. It will never do for a thrifty
cause to faint, or recede; what is attempted must be
done; vigorously, triumphantly done. As nothing but
this same undertaking could before save you and make
your way to prosper, so, now that you have made a
beginning, a double necessity is on you. There is no
society weakness so weak, so impossible even to live, as
that which has the consciousness of breaking down.
You have not come to this, and I have a most assured
confidence that you never will. It has been well for
you to be deliberate and cautious; to be slack and faint
hearted has never been your manner, and you must be
greatly altered before it can be.
In the matter of christian truth and doctrine, understand that your responsibilities are as great as the
sacred interests of a gospel for the world's salvation
require them to be.. Hitherto you have been mainly
concerned to assert a larger liberty and a more generous, more comprehensive, doctrine. But the time may
come, as I may not have sufficiently warned you, when
you will be called to set yourselves, with as great firmness, against the encroachments of a destructive and
vapid liberalism. Offer no least allowance to any
real departure from truth. Standing for no one form
or formulary as a law by which to measure and condemn all others, have it as a point of honor, even,
squarely to reject as christian, whoever really rejects
3




18
the Christ in whom  you trust. Assert, above all, and
stand by-the assertion of, a supernatural gospel; for
there is, in fact, no other, and whoever scorns or only
disowns such a gospel, let him be to you as a heathen
man and a publican,-deist, pantheist, atheist, or pagan,
but no christian. Studying always breadth of doctrine,
which is the manner of God's word itself, make that
study safe, by presenting a front of rock to all the
prurient forms of error that human shallowness and
conceit may gender, under the pretext of liberty.
There is a kind of breadth that would make you a
superficies only and no substance-that is not for you.
It will be a great point with you also to maintain
unity among yourselves.  Truth  flies every place
where the noise of strife is heard. How can the body
prosper, when the members tear each other. In this
fact of unity, you have had your strength even from
the earliest day of my connexion with you. And you
are mortgaged to it now, as I believe, by a more felt
conviction than ever. Temporary jars and frictions of
disagreement will appear among brethren, as they did
among the apostles themselves; but they will never
grow to factions and fixed animosities. When society
breaks in this manner, it is even a low sign; showing
that irresponsible talkers, ready and rank haters,
fomentors of idle jealousies, and other such fire-brand
characters, are the coarse material of which it is made.
Society supposes a character of public reason, consideration for it, deference and concession to it, and a
capacity of many-sided care and generous allowance to
preserve it; and it, in turn, gives dignity to all the
members, because it trains them in a voluntary'moderation of their passions, caprices and asperities. Christian society, therefore, well maintained, bears the




19
highest character of dignity, because it is closest, comprehends things deepest in feeling and thought, and
requires the firmest self-moderation, the tenderest forbearance, the widest charity, and the noblest sacrifice
and devotion to a common cause. Here is your best
strength, in this only can you stand.
I will not multiply these points of advice; for there
are one or two matters of concern more tender than
these, where I must be allowed, in closing, to draw
myself closer to your feeling. I have spoken of your
great kindness and your unwonted fidelity to me, as a
pastor, in my whole ministry among you. But in
closing up this ministry, my heart turns with even the
greater sorrow, to many, who have given no evidence,
either to themselves or to me, that they have received
any saving profit in it. You are all my friends and
have heard me, these many years, in no unfriendly
manner. I readily admit that, having so great advantage, I ought to have left a much smaller number
behind me unreconciled to God; and yet I must believe
that a most serious charge of blame is resting with
you; for you certainly could have been thus reconciled.
Many times have you inwardly approved and deeply
felt the message I have brought you. I doubt not that
to yourselves even, you have seemed to be powerfully
drawn by the appeals of the great salvation, feebly
presented and blameably defective in urgency, as I
now see them to have been. You felt the argument,
your immortal convictions were deeply moved, the
sublime wants and longings of your spiritual nature
were set a hungering after God, Christ and the cross,
melted lovingly into your feeling; and yet you did not
come. You said with the Athenian judges addressed




20
by Paul, and strangely impressed by his words, " we will
hear thee again of this matter." And so you have
continued, some of you till your heads are silvering
with grey, baffling the gospel even by the play of your
sensibilities under it, and removing both it and your
salvation farther off, by your very approvals of the
truth; saying always, "We will hear thee again, the
word is good, the subject is great and true, we will hear
thee again of this matter." Hear thee again!. No,
the end is now come. This day's sermon is the last of
my ministry with you; the really sad thing to me is,
that my experiment with you is ended. I look back
on you now, as a ship looks back on the receding shore.
I am not permitted to think that my long ministry
with you has done you any good, and now it is close
upon just the last moment of it. No affectation is it,
when I say, that my heart aches with a double regret;
for myself that I have preached a gospel to you,power of God though it be-having still so little power;
for you that you have turned away from such as you
have had. Give me then the privilege of one more
appeal and that -the very last. You did not expect, I
know, when you came to hear this farewell sermon,
that it was to be anything more than a leave-taking.
But how can it be truly that, unless it closes up our
relation in some way fitting to the close? Shall it be
the silent, barren close of a final and fixed negation
of good, in all that I have sought, and taught, and
preached, and prayed, for you, in this ministry of so
many years? Have you entertained it so kindly,
waited on it so assentingly, to conclude in the discovery that you have wholly and finally rejected it,
and Christ himself commended to you by it? With
such an issue, has not this ministry been a most sad




21
experiment for you? Might you not well be startled
by the result of it? Is it vain to ask that you will
make this eleventh hour, last hour as it is, the hour of
your sealing? Pass it now as your fixed resolve, that
what you have so long approved shall close in benefit;
that here, to-day, you will begin a christian life; that
my testimony for Christ shall not be finished as a
rejected testimony. Remember the parable Christ has
so kindly given to encourage and assure you in this
late coming. Such a resolve, honestly taken, and followed by all due application to God for help, though
prepared by no previous agitations of thought, or
struggles of feeling, he will assuredly approve and will
issue it for you speedily in all the evidences you can
desire. Then the sad necessity is no more on me; I
can meet you then, as I shortly must, before my judge
and yours, not as rejecters, but as doers of the word,
and heirs of Christ, coming joyfully in, to remember the
grace of this last, eleventh hour call of my otherwise
profitless and guilt-increasing ministry.
In looking over my work and its results, I encounter also another and different kind of regret, which
relates, my dear brethren in Christ, to you. I name it
not that I may lay reproof upon you in this closing
hour, but that I may give you, in such plainness, a fit
proof of my enduring and faithfully christian regard.
I regret no special deficiencies in you, as compared
with other disciples of our time. My complaint
would rather be that, if you are somewhat raised, you
are yet too little raised above their pitch or standard.
For it is to me a fact most deplorable, that the christian
disciples of our time appear to know so little of Christ,
and rest in conceptions of the christian grace so re



22
stricted-serving legally, and calling it'service' to be
christian; conscientious, but not free; holding well
the observances, but not walking joyfully in them;
doing certain works and offering certain contributions
in the name of a benevolence, but not embarked and
floated in the bliss of love; looking mainly to condition still for happiness, to property, society, show, and
habitually running after these as the main reliances
and best goods of life; showing, in this manner, how
small is the Christ they believe in-small exactly as
the space he fills. I wanted, my brethren, to have
brought you on a great way farther, and it affects me
with deep sorrow, in just this view, that I have preached
Christ to you for so long a time, and yet have given to
so few, to really know the fullness and world-diminishing glory of Jesus in the heart-the close acquaintance,
the immediate manifestation, the liberty, the peace, the
riches, the lifted consciousness, the sublime equilibrium
of joy, the all-conquering bliss of endurance.
I should be still more oppressed in feeling, if I could
not believe that you have made advances, and some of
you great advances, on the average piety of the times.
When I see, as I just now am allowed to see, how
speedily the grace of Christ that is in you, hid for a
few days by the smoke of a disturbed feeling raised
inadvertently and by surprise, struggles up into clear
ascendancy, I thank God for the sign. It shows the
love-grace of Jesus to be powerful enough in you to
resume its sway, at once, just where commonly nothing
but a long run of time and a final wearing out of passion is able to restore equilibrium. But accepting this
gladly as a special evidence for you, I am yet partial
enough in my concern to be not wholly satisfied.




23
For a time has come when they that stand for Christ
must be either a great deal better in their life, or else
a great deal worse. All the fiery woes of persecution
that, in former ages, burnt in a saintly piety, are extinguished. The way to heaven is grown easy and safe,
under the guarantee of our modern liberties.  The
world, meantime, is in a tide of economic progressthe very soil of the world is being scientifically fattened for a more copious production. Wealth is
becoming, thus, a hope more nearly universal, and so,
luxury, show, fashion, are becoming a kind of general
ambition. A great and fearful problem is thus raised
for the gospel: how to let in riches into piety itself;
how to make a solid union- between power and humility; how to raise the tastes and manners, and keep the
simplicity of feeling; how to amplify conditions, without raising puffs and swells in the men; in one word,
how to bring in means, and not bring dissipations,
fumings of pride, vapors of conceit, shows of vanity,
apings of the great world of ungodliness. Such a fool
is man that, getting power, he loses sobriety; and it is
yet to be seen whether even the lowly-minded, selfrenouncing religion of Jesus can save a prospering age
from this folly. What is specially wanted therefore
now is christian men and churches who maintain the
open state with God; living joyfully above the world,
when the world's best gifts are theirs; godly, selfrenouncing, simple, responsible, using their great
means for great benefactions, and finding always, in
the riches of Christ, a heaven-full of consciously ennobled joy and peace, such as plainly no inferior good
can yield. What we want is christian men and families who can be saints without being persecuted or
poor; men who, having mastered all prosperity, can




24
master also themselves; who, having conquered all the
good of time, can conquer it again by being superior
to it; doing honor to God's.abounding fatherhood in
all most generous uses of his gifts, and yet in such a
way, all ascetic practices apart, that not his gifts but
He Himself will ever be the joy, and rest, and fullness
of their heart. The low, legal, anxious piety now
commonly prevalent is far too doubtfully blessed in
Christ-a kind of starvation, out of which the soul
hies herself eagerly to lay hold of almost any sort of
good. It is no argument.for unworldliness, but the
greatest temptation to it rather. Nothing answers now
but fullness in Christ, riches above all riches, glory
within above all glories without, to be imparadised in
faith, and God to faith revealed.
This high summit, my brethren, I have endeavored
to clear to you so that you could see it. I have shown
it to be not too high-to be in fact the real original
Christianity. The doctrine of low living and all the
underbrush of false sanctimony by which the truth is
hid, I have carefully cut away. This it is, I have
shown you, to be christian-this, and nothing less; to
be joyful in Christ and free; to know God consciously;
to live an inspired life, clean above the world and even
above yourself. Would that I could leave you in a
more certain confidence that you are all entered into
this path and walking in this grace. It would fill me
with unspeakable sorrow, if I thought you had fallen
away from it by any fault of mine. I shall long to
hear of your affairs and how you do in this very thing.
For it is a matter of comparatively trivial consequence
whether you get a small man for your minister, or a
great; whether your house is thinly attended or




25
crowded by eager multitudes.  The first and chief
matter is that your conversation is in heaven; that
you live unworldly lives and give an example to men
of the abounding fullness and joy to be found in
Christ Jesus your Lord. In this I shall ever long after
you and circumvent you with my continual prayers.
But I must desist. The dreaded hour has come, and
I must go. These scenes of duty that have been my
enjoyment, these familiar faces, responsive always to
my words, and works, and prayers —from these I must
tear myself away alive, as I was just now saying, and
take the separation, more trying than to die, for my
lot. I go not out, as I trust, from the presence of the
Lord, but my work with you is done, and from you I
must now be parted. Before God I thank you for
your patience with my defects, and the unwonted
kindness you have- shown me. I shall still be watching
for you in deep pastorly feeling, though pastor no
more. If it is laid upon me to die in parts remote, I
shall not go as one quite separated from you, but shall
go looking to a blessed reunion with your friends and
mine-dear, blessed names that I could not pronounce
without tears and a faltering voice —now bright and
spotless in glory before God, accepted of Jesus and
dear to him, in eternal companionship, as to us.
Thither too arriving, if by grace I am able, I shall also
be looking after you and waiting for your coming.
Pardon me also if I try to hope it may then be discovered that I have done you more good than I thought,
and have won a greater property in you than I feared.
Till that day I commit. you, one and all, to the
tender keeping of our common Lord and Saviour.
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you allin this, Farewell.
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