e talked about the future of
Boston and of Congregational Christianity.

Interested as I was, a sudden feeling of pain seized me as I noticed
how sunken were his eyes. I am not a physician, but I have seen many
people die. I have looked upon many more as they approached their
mortal end, marked with signs which they saw not, nor often even their
friends observed, but which were as plain and readable as the
stencilled directions upon freight to be sent and delivered elsewhere.
After a handshake and an invitation from him to dine the next night at
his house, and to be at the golden wedding on Tuesday, we bade him
good afternoon. On returning with my host in front of the fire, I
said, "I feel sad, for our friend Mr. Coffin is marked for early
death; he will certainly not outlive this year."

Nevertheless, I could not but count Charles Carleton Coffin among the
number of those whom God made rich in the threefold life of body,
soul, and spirit.

The old Greeks, whose wonderfully rich experience of life, penetrating
insight, powers of analysis, and gift of literary expression enabled
them to coin the words to fitly represent their thoughts, knew how to
describe both love and life better than we, having a mintage of
thought for each in its threefold form. As they discriminated _eros_,
_phile_, and _agape_ in love, so also they put difference between
_psyche_, _bios_, and _zoe_ in life.

What other ranges of existence and developments of being there may be
for God's chosen ones in worlds to come, we dare not conjecture, but
this we know. Carleton had even then, as I saw him marked for an early
change of worlds, entered into threefold life.

1. The lusty boy and youth, the mature man with not a perfect, yet a
sound, physical organization, showed a good specimen of the human
animal, rich in the breath of life,--_psyche_.

2. The long and varied career of farmer, surveyor, citizen, Christian
interested in his fellows and their welfare, with varied work, travel,
and adventure, manifested the noble _bios_,--the career or course of
strenuous endeavor.

3. The spiritual attainments in character, the ever outflowing
benevolence, the kindly thought, the healing sunshine of his presence,
the calm faith, the firm trust in God, gave assurance of the _zoe_.

These three stages of existence revealed Carleton as one affluent with
what men call life, and of which the young ever crave more, and also
in that "life which is life indeed,