this fashion will not last long, methinks I see it passing away."

Sometimes he had such with him as had gone through their course of University learning at private academies, and desired to spend some time in his family, before their entrance upon the ministry; that they might have the benefit, not only of his public and family instructions, but of his learned pious converse, in which, as he was thoroughly furnished, for every good word and work, so he was very free and communicative. The great thing which he used to press upon those who intended the ministry, was to study the Scriptures, and make them familiar. Bonus textuarius est bonus theologus, was a maxim he often reminded them of. For this purpose he recommended to them the study of the Hebrew, that they might be able to search. the Scriptures in the original. He also advised them to the use of an interleaved Bible, wherein to insert such expositions and observations as occur occasionally in sermons or other books; which, he would say, are more happy and considerable sometimes, than those that are found in the professed commentators. When some young men de

sired the happiness of coming into his family, he would tell them, "You come to me as Naaman did to Elisha, expecting that I should do this and the other for you; and alas, I can but say as he did, Go wash in Jordan;-Go, study the Scriptures. I profess to teach no other learning but Scripture learning." It was but a little before he died, that in reading Isa. 1. he observed from ver. 4, "The Lord hath given me the tongue of the learned," &c. That the true learning of a gospel minister consists not in being able to talk Latin fluently, and to dispute in philosophy, but in being able to speak a word in season to weary souls. He that knows how to do that well, is a learned minister.

CHAPTER IX.

His Sickness, Death, and Burial.

In the time of his health, he made death very familiar to himself by frequent and pleasing thoughts and meditations of it; and endeavoured to make it so to his friends, by speak

ing often of it. His letters and discourses had still something or other which spoke his constant expectations of death; thus did he learn to die daily; and it is hard to say, whether it was more easy to him to speak, or uneasy to his friends to hear him speak of leaving the world. This minds me of a passage I was told by a worthy Scotch minister, Mr. Patrick Adair, that visiting the famous Mr. Durham of Glasgow, in his last sickness, which was long and lingering; he said to him, "Sir, I hope you have so set all in order, that you have nothing else to do but to die." "I bless God (said Mr. Durham) I have not had that to do either these many years." Such is the comfort of dying daily, when we come to die indeed.

Mr. Henry's constitution was but tender, and yet by the blessing of God upon his great temperance and care of his diet, and moderate exercise by walking in the air, he did for many years enjoy a good measure of health, which he used to call, “The sugar that sweetens all temporal mercies," for which therefore we ought to be very thankful, and of which we ought to be very careful. He had sometimes violent fits of the cholic,

which would be very afflictive for the time. Towards his latter end he was distressed sometimes with a pain, which his doctor thought might arise from a stone in his kidneys. Being once upon the recovery from an ill fit of that pain, he said to one of his friends that asked him how he did, "he hoped, by the grace of God, he should now be able to give one blow more to the devil's kingdom;" and often professed, "he did not desire to live a day longer than he might do God some service." He said to another, when he perceived himself recovering, "Well, I thought I had been putting into the harbour, but find I must to sea again."

He was sometimes suddenly taken with. fainting fits, which, when he recovered from, he would say," Dying is but a little more."

When he was in the sixty-third year of his age, which is commonly called the Grand climacteric, and hath been to many the dying year, and was so to his father, he numbered the days of it, from August 24, 1693, to August 25, 1694, when he finished it; and when he concluded it, he thus wrote in his diary: "This day finisheth my commonly dying year, which I have numbered the

days of; and should now apply my heart more than ever to heavenly wisdom." He was much pleased with that expression of the English liturgy in the office of burial, and frequently used it: "In the midst of life we are in death."

The infirmities of age, when they grew upon him, did very little abate his vigour and liveliness in preaching, but he seemed even to renew his youth as the eagles; as those that are planted in the house of the Lord, who still bring forth fruit in old age; not so much to show that they are upright, as to show that the Lord is upright, Psal. xcii. 14, 15. But in his latter years, travelling was very troublesome to him; and he would say, as Mr. Dod used to do, that when he thought to shake himself as at other times, he found his hair was cut; his sense of this led him to preach an occasional sermon not long before he died, on John xxi. 18, "When thou wast young, thou girdest thyself," &c. Another occasional sermon he preached when he was old, for his own comfort, and the comfort of his aged friends, on Psal. lxxi. 17, 18. "O God, thou hast taught me from my youth," &c. He observed there, that it is a blessed

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