s not yet fifty-seven, was both by her age and
strength fully equal to the strain thus put upon her.

CHAPTER XIX

AT EVENING-TIME--LIGHT

THE closing scene of this beautiful and eventful life-history has an
interest not altogether pathetic. Mr. Muller seems like an elevated
mountain, on whose summit the evening sun shines in lingering splendour,
and whose golden peak rises far above the ordinary level and belongs to
heaven more than earth, in the clear, cloudless calm of God.

From May, 1892, when the last mission tour closed; he devoted himself
mainly to the work of the Scriptural Knowledge Institution, and to
preaching at Bethesda and elsewhere as God seemed to appoint. His health
was marvelous, especially considering how, when yet a young man,
frequent and serious illnesses and general debility had apparently
disqualified him from all military duty, and to many prophesied early
death or hopeless succumbing to disease. He had been in tropic heat and
arctic cold, in gales and typhoons at sea, and on journeys by rail,
sometimes as continuously long as a sea-voyage. He had borne the pest of
fleas, mosquitoes, and even rats. He had endured changes of climate,
diet, habits of life, and the strain of almost daily services, and come
out of all unscathed. This man, whose health was never robust, had gone
through labours that would try the mettle of an iron constitution; this
man, who had many times been laid aside by illness and sometimes for
months and who in 1837 had feared that a persistent head trouble might
unhinge his mind, could say, in his ninety-second year: "I have been
able, every day and all the day, to work, and that with ease, as seventy
years since." When the writer was holding meetings in Bristol in 1896,
on an anniversary very sacred to himself, he asked his beloved father
Muller to speak at the closing meeting of the series, in the Y.M.C.A.
Hall; and he did so, delivering a powerful address of forty-five
minutes, on Prayer in connection with Missions, and giving his own
life-story in part, with a vigour of voice and manner that seemed a
denial of his advanced age.*

* Appendix K.

The marvelous preservation of such a man at such an age reminds one of
Caleb, who at eighty-five could boast in God that he was as strong even
for war as in the day that he was sent into the land as one of the
spies; and Mr. Muller himself attributed this preservation to three
causes: first, the exercising of himself to h