tisfied in
the Infinite, Unbounded Goodness and Tenderness of his Father," hoping
only that he might "learn that for which God sent the suffering,"[6]
and he died August 7, 1652, "after God had lent him to the world for
about five and thirty years."[7] "I was desirous," his friend Patrick
says at the opening of his funeral sermon, "that I might have stai'd
the wheels of that Triumphant Chariot wherein he seemed to be carried;
that we might have {307} kept him a little longer in this world, till
by his holy breathing into our souls, and the Grace of God, we had been
made meet to have some share in that inheritance of the saints in
light"; but now, he adds, "we are orphans, left without a father."[8]
Patrick adapts to his own departed teacher the beautiful words which
Gregory Thaumaturgus used of his great instructor, Origen: "He hath
entangled and bound up my soul in such fetters of love, he hath so tyed
and knit me to him, that if I would be disengaged, I cannot quit
myself. No, though I depart out of the world, our love cannot die, for
I love him even as my own soul, and so my affection must remain
forever."[9] The whole sermon throbs with intense love, and while it
is somewhat overweighted with quotations and learned allusions, it yet
expresses in an impressive way the sincere affection of a disciple for
a noble master who has "begot another shape in his scholar and has made
another man of him."[10] "Such men," he says, "God hath alwaies in the
world, men of greater height and stature than others, whom He sets up
as torches on an hill to give light to all the regions round
about."[11] Such men "are the guard and defense of the towns where
they reside, yea of the country whereof they are members; they are the
keepers and life-guards of the world; the walls and bulwarks of the
Nation,"[12] and when they leave the world everybody soon feels that a
glory has departed--"when Elijah goes away you shall have fifty men go
three days to seek him!"[13]

This disciple, who declared that whatever "heavenly life" there was in
himself had been "hatched" by the fostering care, the nurturing love
and the brave conduct of his teacher, has left a few very clear traits
for the creation of a true portrait of this saintly interpreter of the
Spirit: He was a Fountain running over, Worthington says, "an ever
bountifull and bubbling Fountain."[14] Love was bubbling and springing
up in his soul and flowing out to all. He would have empt