tion, even the animals, trees, and plants.
She loved her God and Saviour with an angel's love, and died like a
saint."[A]
[Footnote A: Kennedy's Life of William Wirt--letter to Judge Carr.]
About the same time, he writes to his wife,--
"I want only my blessed Saviour's assurance of pardon and acceptance to
be at peace. I wish to find no rest short of rest in him,--Let us both
look up to that heaven--where our Saviour dwells, and from which he is
showing us the attractive face of our blessed and happy child, and
bidding us prepare to come to her, since she can no more visibly come to
us. I have no taste now for worldly business. I go to it reluctantly. I
would keep company only with my Saviour and his holy book. I dread the
world, the strife, and contention, and emulation of the bar; yet I will
do my duty--this is part of my religion."
In December, 1833, another daughter died; but he writes,--
"I look upon life as a drama, bearing the same sort, though not the
same degree, of relation to eternity, as an hour spent at the theatre,
and the fictions there exhibited ... do to the whole of real life. Nor
is there any thing in this passing pageant worth the sorrow that we
lavish on it. Now, when my children or friends leave me, or when I shall
be called to leave them, I consider it as merely parting for the present
visit, to meet under happier circumstances, when we shall part no
more."[B]
[Footnote B: Kennedy's Life of William Wirt--letter to Judge Cabell.]
* * * * *
"All my children," said the venerable John Eliot, of Roxbury, "are
either with Christ or in Christ." Happy, happy man! The little ones,
blighted soon by the touch of death, surely are with Christ; "for of
such is the kingdom of God." The cherub boy, and the blooming, broken
flower, the young daughter,--the young man in his strength, the young
maiden in her beauty,--are there. As we commune together, in the pages
which follow, on themes touching this subject, God grant that every one
who has not yet gladdened the heart of parent, and pastor, nay, of that
infinite Friend, our Saviour, by the surrender of the heart to God, and
every father and mother who is yet unprepared to join the growing circle
of the family in heaven,--('how grows in Paradise their store!')--may,
as we reach the last page, find that with cords of a man, with bands of
love, He who made Pleiades, and Arcturus and his sons, has united them
in eternal
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