thought him dead. But he revived, and, raising his eyes, said,

"My dear children, do not grieve for me. It is true, I am going to leave you. I am well aware of my situation. I have suffered much bodily pain; but my sufferings are but as nothing compared with that which our blessed Saviour endured upon that accursed cross, that we might all be saved who put our trust in him.'

"He then took an affectionate leave of each one of his family, taking them one by one by the hand and addressing to each a few words of counsel. 'He then,' writes Dr. Efselman, who was present, delivered one of the most impressive lectures upon the subject of religion that I have ever heard. He spoke for nearly half an hour, and apparently with the power of inspiration; for he spoke with calmness, with strength, and even with animation. In conclusion, he said, "My dear children and friends and servants, I hope and trust to meet you in heaven, both white and black.” The last sentence he repeated,-"both white and black."'

"All present were in tears. 'Oh, do not cry,' said the general: 'be good children, and we will all meet in heaven.' These were his last words. He ceased to breathe, and died without a struggle or a pang. 'Major Lewis,' writes the biographer, 'removed the pillows, drew down the body upon the bed, and closed the eyes. Upon looking again upon the face, he observed that the expression of pain which it had worn so long had passed away. Death had restored it to naturalness and serenity. The aged warrior slept."

During his last illness, to a friend he pointed to the family Bible on the stand, and said,

"That book, sir, is the rock on which our republic rests. It is the bulwark of our free institutions."

HENRY CLAY,

As an American statesman and a leading politician, wielded a masterly and moulding influence in shaping the legislative and political policy of his country. "His public life," says Dr. Robert C. Breckenridge, in an oration on the occasion of laying the corner-stone of a monument to Mr. Clay, "from the commencement of the practice of the law till his death, lasted about fifty-five years, a public life hardly matched in its duration and splendor

by any other in our annals. He lived over seventy-five years: three-quarters of a century more fruitful in events or more decisive in their influence upon society had hardly ever occurred in the history of mankind. It was about eight months after the Continental Congress had issued from the city of Philadelphia the immortal Declaration of Independence, in the name of the people of the United States, that the pious wife of a faithful and laborious Baptist minister, far off in Virginia, gave birth to Henry Clay. The language which he learned to speak was replenished with the divine truth which pervades a Christian household. The first words which he understood were words which sunk into his heart forever,-COUNTRY, LIBERTY, INDEPENDENCE. The first names he heard beyond his father's household were names that will live forever,-the name of his neighbor HENRY, the prince of orators and patriots, the name of his fellow-Virginian, WASHINGTON, the first of mortals.

"God had bestowed on him a personal presence and bearing as impressive as any mortal ever possessed. The basis of his moral character was akin to that which lies at the foundation of supreme moral excellence,-integrity and love of truth. His was a high, fair, brave, upright nature. His intellectual character, by which he will be chiefly known to posterity, was, as all men acknowledge, of the highest order, clear, powerful, and comprehensive: no subject seemed to be difficult under its steady insight, and it embraced with equal readiness every department of human knowledge to which it became his duty to attend. No genius was ever capable of a wider diversity of use than his. And the vast and searching common sense which was the most striking characteristic of his mind revealed the purity, the truth, and the force with which the ultimate elements of our rational nature dwelt and acted in his noble understanding.

"Mr. Clay was the child of Christian parents, all the more likely to be jealous of the heritage of God's love to their boy, as they had little else to bestow upon him. His own repeated declarations, made in the most public and solemn manner at every period of his life, that he cherished the highest veneration for the Christian religion, and the most profound conviction of the divine mission of the Saviour of sinners, fully justify the importance which I have attached to this element of his

destiny, even if he had not attested in his latter years the sincerity of his life-long convictions, by openly professing his faith in the Son of God and uniting himself with his professed followers. He lived some years, and closed his days, in the communion of the Protestant Episcopal Church, to which his venerable wife had long been attached. It was my fortune to have personal knowledge, under circumstances which do not admit of any doubt in my own mind, that, according to the measure of the light he had, he was during a few years immediately preceding his death a penitent and believing follower of the divine Redeemer. It may be well allowed that the frank and habitual avowal even of speculative faith in the Christian religion, by a man of his character and position, was not without its value, and was not free from reproach, during that terrible season of unbelief which marked the close of the last century and stretched forward upon the first quarter of the present. And that the crowning efforts of his life were sustained by a sense of Christian duty, and its last sufferings assuaged by the consolations of Christian hope, are facts too important, as they relate to him, and too significant in their own nature, to be omitted in any estimate of him. It is not, however, on account of such considerations as these that I reiterate with so much emphasis the undeniable fact that Mr. Clay never was an infidel, that he was always an avowed believer in true religion. But it is because such is my sense of the shallowness, the emptiness, and the baseness of that state of the human soul in which it can deny the God who created it and the Saviour who redeemed it, and can empty itself of its own highest impulses and disallow its own sublimest necessities, that I have no conception how such a soul could be what this man was, or do what he did. It is because I do understand with perfect distinctness that belief in God, and belief in a mission given to us by him, and to be executed with success only by means of his blessing upon our efforts, must be a conviction, at once profound and enduring, in every soul that is great in itself, or that can accomplish any thing great. Wonderful as Mr. Clay's career was, it would be a hundredfold more wonderful to suppose that such a career was possible to a scoffer and a skeptic."

Mr. Clay died in the city of Washington, on the 29th of June, 1852. Rev. Dr. Butler, chaplain of the Senate, delivered, in

the Senate-Chamber, a funeral sermon in the presence of the President and Congress of the United States, in which he gave the following just views of the character and principles of an American statesman, and the views of Mr. Clay on the subject of the Christian religion:

"A great mind, a great heart, a great orator, a great career, have been consigned to history. I feel, as a man, the grandeur of this career. But as an immortal, with this broken wreck of mortality before me, with this scene as the 'end-all' of human glory, I feel that no career is truly great but that of him who, whether he be illustrious or obscure, lives to the future in the present, and, linking himself to the spiritual world, draws from God the life, the rule, the motive, and the reward of all his labor. So would that great spirit which has departed say to us, could he address us now. So did he realize, in the calm and meditative close of life. I feel that I but utter the lessons which, living, were his last and best convictions, and which, dead, would be, could he speak to us, his solemn admonitions, when I say that statesmanship is then only glorious when it is Christian, and that man is then only safe and true to his duty and his soul, when the life which he lives in the flesh is the life of faith in the Son of God. Great, indeed, is the privilege, and most honorable and useful is the career, of a Christian American statesman. He perceives that civil liberty came from the freedom wherewith Christ made its early martyrs and defenders free. He recognizes it as one of the twelve manner of fruits on the tree of life, which, while its lower branches furnish the best nutriment of earth, hangs on its topmost boughs, which wave in heaven, fruits that exhilarate the immortals. Recognizing the state as God's institution, he will perceive that his own ministry is divine. Living consciously under the eye and in the love and fear of God, 'redeemed by the blood of Jesus,' sanctified by his Spirit, 'loving his law,' he will give himself, in private and in public, to the service of his Saviour. He will not admit that he may act on less lofty principles in public than in private life, and that he must be careful of his moral influence in the small sphere of home and neighborhood, but need take no heed of it when it stretches over continents and crosses seas. He will know that his moral responsibility cannot be divided and distributed among others. When he is told that adherence to the strictest moral and religious principles is,

incompatible with a successful and eminent career, he will denounce the assertion as a libel on the venerated fathers of the republic, a libel on the honored living and the illustrious dead, a libel against a, great and Christian nation,-a libel against God himself, who has declared and made 'godliness profitable for the life that now is.' He will strive to make laws the transcripts of the character, and institutions illustrations of the providence, of God. He will scan with admiration and awe the purposes of God in the future history of the world, in throwing open this continent, from sea to sea, as the abode of freedom, intelligence, plenty, prosperity, and peace, and feel that in giving his energies with a patriot's love to the welfare of his country he is consecrating himself, with a Christian zeal, to the extension and establishment of the Redeemer's kingdom. Compared with a career like this, which is equally open to those whose public sphere is large or small, how paltry are the trades in patriotism, the tricks of statesmanship, the rewards of successful baseness! This hour, this scene, the venerated dead, the country, the world, the present, the future, God, duty, heaven, hell, speak trumpet-tongued to all in the service of their country, to beware how they lay polluted or unhallowed hands

'upon the ark

Of her magnificent and awful cause.'

"Such is the character of that statesmanship which alone would have met the full approval of the venerated dead. For the religion which always had a place in the convictions of his mind had also, within a recent period, entered into his experience and seated itself in his heart. Twenty years since, he wrote, 'I am a member of no religious sect, and I am not a professor of religion. I regret that I am not. I wish that I was, and trust that I shall be. I have, and always have had, a profound regard for Christianity, the religion of my fathers, and for its rites, its usages and observances.' That feeling proved that the seed sown by pious parents was not dead, though stifled. A few years since, its dormant life was reawakened. He was baptized in the communion of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and during his sojourn in this city he was in full communion with Trinity Parish. He avowed his full faith in the great leading doctrines of the gospel, the fall and sinfulness of man, the divinity of Christ, the reality and necessity of the