ce. These things are all ordered for us far better than
we could order them for ourselves. We may pray for our daily
bread; we may pray for forgiveness of sins; we may pray to be
kept from temptation, and that the kingdom of God may come in
us, and in all men, and His will everywhere be done. Beyond
this we hardly know for what good to supplicate the Divine
Mercy. Our Heavenly Father knoweth what we have need of better
than we know ourselves, and we are assured that His eye and His
loving kindness are upon us and around us every moment.

How entirely in harmony are these religious views of Mr. Webster with
similar utterances on several public occasions, to which allusion has
already been made; and especially with that extraordinary dramatic
scene so vividly described by his biographer, Mr. Harvey, who was an
eye-witness and participator in it, when, in the solitary farm-house of
John Colby,[D] in New Hampshire, Mr. Webster, at the request of Mr.
Colby, led in prayer. Whatever else of unfriendly criticism has been
made on the character of Mr. Webster, he has never been charged with
hypocrisy, or of parading his religious opinions; least of all in that
remote hamlet of John Colby, whither he had gone to visit him for the
first time in twenty-five years, because he had heard of Mr. Colby's
remarkable conversion late in life. Can there be the remotest suspicion
that other than the most pure and noble of all motives could have
governed him, as he then sought communion with God in prayer? And, as
Mr. Harvey remarked to the writer, "It was indeed a prayer."

About one year before the death of Mr. Webster I casually met Professor
Stuart, of Andover, on his return from a visit to Mr. Webster, at
Marshfield, when, in the course of conversation relating to his
religious habits, the professor remarked, "Mr. Webster has arrived at
that period in life when he feels more than ever his moral
accountability;" and added, "He has resumed family worship." I inquired,
"What evidence have you of this?" He answered, "Clergymen who have
recently visited in his family have so informed me." This, of course,
implied that family worship had once been his custom, but that it had
been temporarily suspended,--perhaps attributable to unusual pressure on
his time by reason of his always arduous public duties.

I am glad to have the opportunity, in these columns, of repeating such
testimony as I am able to offer