‘My heart feels more with you, my Laura, in that still sick-room than here. Perhaps many angels are about you and your boy, though you see them not.
‘Like your dear invalid, I am especially fond of St. Luke’s account of the dying thief. There is something so touching in his looking at such a moment to the Saviour, whose Blood, shed for his salvation, was at that moment trickling down in his view; and there is something so sublime in our Lord’s conferring Eternal Life,—such a gift,—at the time when He was Himself undergoing the terrible sentence of death! We may envy your dear suffering child, my Laura, when we think how soon, in human expectation, his eyes will behold the King in His beauty.
‘O darling, you could hardly wish to keep him back, when the Master calls him,—calls him to His Home—His Arms!
‘I feel for your dear husband; this is a time of sore trial for him; but you suffer together. May God give you both “songs in the night.” Those songs are perhaps sweeter to Him than the Hallelujahs of the Angels.’
TO THE SAME.
‘Nov. 21, 1867.
‘How well I know that feeling which you describe,—the feeling of being unable to pray fervently,—of being scarcely able to pray at all! This is probably caused ... by fatigue of body, and overstraining of mind and nerves. Perhaps God permits it, that we should just sink in complete helplessness at our Saviour’s Feet, and ask Him to pray for us, since we cannot pray for ourselves.... You may be like a very little child, that can’t even ask for what it needs, but yet trusts and fears not.’
TO MISS LEILA HAMILTON.
‘Dec. 11, 1867.
‘Your very very sad account of dear Otho received this morning makes one think that, even before this reaches you, the sufferer may have been called home! Oh what a blessing it is that it is indeed Home.... Dear Otho has had a sorely trying journey, wintry and wearisome indeed; but there is no shadow, never can be a shadow, on the Home to which he is bound. He will never have to leave it again, to learn the lesson of patience in pain. He will, through his Lord’s merits, be ready there to welcome the dear ones whom he is now leaving behind,—when they too may quit their school, and go to their Father in Heaven....