eap as he sows.

Thus it was that my father's illness was not so much a disease as a long
death; life ebbing away, consciousness left entire, the certain issue
never out of sight. This, to a man of my father's organization--with a
keen relish for life, and its highest pleasures and energies, sensitive
to impatience, and then over-sensitive of his own impatience; cut to the
heart with the long watching and suffering of those he loved, who, after
all, could do so little for him; with a nervous system easily sunk, and
by its strong play upon his mind darkening and saddening his most
central beliefs, shaking his most solid principles, tearing and
terrifying his tenderest affections: his mind free and clear, ready for
action if it had the power, eager to be in its place in the work of the
world and of its Master, to have to spend two long years in this
ever-descending road--here was a combination of positive and negative
suffering not to be thought of even now, when it is all sunk under that
"far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory."

He often spoke to me freely about his health, went into it with the
fearlessness, exactness, and persistency of his nature; and I never
witnessed, or hope to witness, anything more affecting than when, after
it had been dawning upon him, he apprehended the true secret of his
death. He was deeply humbled, felt that he had done wrong to himself, to
his people, to us all, to his faithful and long-suffering Master; and he
often said, with a dying energy lighting up his eye, and nerving his
voice and gesture, that if it pleased God to let him again speak in his
old place, he would not only proclaim again, and, he hoped, more simply
and more fully, the everlasting gospel to lost man, but proclaim also
the gospel of God to the body, the religious and Christian duty and
privilege of living in obedience to the divine laws of health. He was
delighted when I read to him, and turned to this purpose that wonderful
passage of St. Paul--"For the body is not one member, but many. If the
whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? if the whole were
hearing, where were the smelling? But now hath God set the members every
one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him. And the eye cannot say
unto the hand, I have no need of thee; nor again the head to the feet, I
have no need of you. Nay, much more those members of the body, which
seem to be more feeble, are necessary;" summing it all up in words with