f
a wealthy West India planter, and born in the West Indies. Her
father died when she was quite young. She was married to a Captain
in the British army, in one of the regiments stationed in the
Island of Jamaica, but singular to say, not long after her
marriage, was wonderfully converted, and towards the close of his
life, was the means of saving her affectionate and devoted husband,
who was a nephew of the once Governor of the Colony of
Massachusetts. He was very wealthy, besides his West India
estate--owning a large estate in England. The wonderful piety of
this devoted saint, during the long years of her widowhood, ought
to humble pigmy Christians, like me, in the dust. Oh, can I ever be
saved, if such men and women are only saved?

I am now reading the life and labours of Rev. Dr. Shrewsbury, a
Wesleyan missionary to the West Indies and South Africa--then late
in life back to England, where he died in 1866, aged seventy-three
years. He was a man of ability, much industry and zeal, and of more
than the medium piety of Methodist preachers generally.

In reply to this letter, Dr. Ryerson wrote to his brother on the 21st of
February and said:--

You speak of the want of joy in your religious experience. I do not
pray for joy, I simply pray for the indwelling of Christ, for the
stamp of His image upon my soul, and for the harmony of every
desire, and thought, and feeling, with His holy will, and divine
glory; and there comes a "peace that passeth all understanding," a
rest of the soul from fear, and anxiety--a sinking into God,--and
now and then greater or less ecstacies of joy. I think we mistake
when we make what is usually termed joy, the end of prayer, or of
desire. I believe that even heaviness, and especially when
superinduced by bodily disease, is not only consistent with a high
state of grace, but even instrumental in its increase--especially
of faith; the faith which realizes things invisible, as visible,
and things to come, as things present.

I should like to read the biographies of which you speak,
especially that of Rev. Dr. Marsh, but my time is insufficient to
read what I have to read for my historical purposes. After all,
biographies are very much what the biographers choose to make of
their heroes. The writings of the Holy Apost