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.

"Thrice happy must be our reflections could we stop here, and
contemplate the ascending prosperity and increasing vigor of this
religious community. But the one half has not yet been told,--the
beginning has hardly been begun. Could I borrow the language of
the spirits of wrath,--was my pen transmuted to a viper's tooth
dipped in gore,--was my paper transformed to a vellum which no
light could illume, and which only darkness could render legible,
I could, and I would, record a tale of blood, of which the foulest
miscreant must burn in ceaseless anguish only once to have been
suspected. But I refer to imagination what description can never
reach."

What the author referred to in this last paragraph no one knew,
nor did he ever advance any explanation of these strange words.

Near the close of his discourse, he said: "Standing in the place
of a Christian minister among you, through the whole course of my
ministrations, it has been my great and leading aim ever to
maintain and exhib