pstairs
during her serious illness. The physician told him that the heart might
possibly adapt itself to a new condition, but that the chances were
greatly in favour of a fatal end to the illness. He was forced to retire
for two years from work, while his wife's illness developed into a
consumption. She died March 21, 1840. Venn's closest relations used to
speak with a kind of awe of the extraordinary strength of his conjugal
devotion. He was entreated to absent himself from some of the painful
ceremonials at her funeral, but declined. 'As if anything,' he said,
'could make any difference to me now.' His own health, however,
recovered contrary to expectation; and he resolutely took up his duties
in life. On October 5, 1841 he was appointed honorary secretary to the
Church Missionary Society, having been on the Committee since 1819, and
he devoted the rest of his life to its service with unflagging zeal. He
gave up his living of 700_l._ a year and refused to take any
remuneration for his work. He was appointed by Bishop Blomfield to a
prebend at St. Paul's, but received and desired no other preferment. He
gradually became infirm, and a few months before his death, January 12,
1873, was compelled to resign his post. Henry Venn laboured through life
in the interests of a cause which seemed to him among the highest, and
which even those who hold entirely different opinions must admit to be a
worthy one, the elevation that is, moral and spiritual, of the lower
races of mankind. He received no rewards except the approval of his
conscience and the sympathy of his fellows; and he worked with an energy
rarely paralleled by the most energetic public servant. His labours are
described in a rather shapeless book[30] to which I may refer for full
details. But I must add a few words upon his character. Venn was not an
eloquent man either in the pulpit or on paper; nor can I ascribe him any
power of speculative thought. He had been from youth steeped in the
evangelical doctrine, and was absolutely satisfied with it to the last.
'I knew,' he once said, 'as a young man all that could be said against
Christianity, and I put the thoughts aside as temptations of the devil.
They have never troubled me since.' Nor was he more troubled by the
speculative tendencies of other parties in the Church. His most obvious
mental characteristic was a shrewd common sense, which one of his
admirers suggests may have been caught by contagion in his Yorkshir