Dr. Ryerson went up to Simcoe to preach the anniversary sermons there, in December, 1874, and hoped to have gone to Brantford to see his brother John, but was prevented. He therefore wrote to him a New Year's letter, on the 3rd January, 1875: I have often prayed for you, thinking sometimes that I was even praying with you. We have spoken of you more than once during the recent holiday salutations and good wishes, and have wished you happy returns of this season of kindly greetings and renewed friendships.
I feel to bless God that during the last several weeks I have experienced, in a deeper and brighter degree than I ever experienced before, "the love of Christ which passeth all knowledge." The pages of God's book seem to shine with a brighter lustre and a more luminous, comprehensive and penetrating power than I ever beheld in them. Without care, without fear, without a shadow of doubt, I can now, through God's wonderful grace, and by His Holy Spirit, rest my all upon Christ—lay my all upon His altar, and say, "For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain."
On Sunday afternoon we had the renewal of the Covenant Service, in the Metropolitan, and the Communion. It was a good time. I think there were more than five hundred at the Communion—the largest number I ever witnessed in America, even at a camp-meeting. It took Rev. Dr. Potts and I more than an hour to distribute the elements.
I am anxious to go up to my cottage for change and retirement, so as to be quite alone for a few weeks with my books and papers.
I am at work, as hard as I can, upon my history. On New Year's Day I worked at it for fifteen hours—writing upwards of twenty pages of foolscap, besides researches, comparing authorities, etc. I am anxious to complete the two volumes of the New England Loyalists, before I go to England in May.
In reply to Dr. Ryerson's letter of 3rd January, his brother John wrote:—
My health is still precarious.... My attention to religious duties (reading the Scriptures, private and meditative self-examination, etc.,) I unremittingly persevere in, but my religious enjoyment is low and my faith weak.... This winter I have read the Life of Dr. Bradshaw, an eminent clergyman of the Church of England, some time Rector of Colchester, then of Birmingham, and then of a Rectory in the suburbs of London, where he died in 1865, at the age of eighty-nine. His ministry extended over more than sixty years. He was one of the most devoted, and singularly pious ministers whose memoirs I ever read. O! into what dwarfishness the morality, and the spiritual and elevated attainments of most Christians sink in the presence of such men! Dr. Bradshaw's life was written by Miss Marsh, the authoress of the Life of Captain Vicars, and other excellent books. I have also read the Life of Miss M. Graham, a most eminently pious and devoted lady, also a member of the Church of England. She died at the early age of twenty-eight. Another memoir—of Mrs. Winslow, from the reading of which I ought to have derived much profit, one of the holiest women of whom I ever read, was a devoted member of the English Church. She was the daughter of a wealthy West India planter, and born in the West Indies. Her father died when she was quite young. She was married to a Captain in the British army, in one of the regiments stationed in the Island of Jamaica, but singular to say, not long after her marriage, was wonderfully converted, and towards the close of his life, was the means of saving her affectionate and devoted husband, who was a nephew of the once Governor of the Colony of Massachusetts. He was very wealthy, besides his West India estate—owning a large estate in England. The wonderful piety of this devoted saint, during the long years of her widowhood, ought to humble pigmy Christians, like me, in the dust. Oh, can I ever be saved, if such men and women are only saved?
I am now reading the life and labours of Rev. Dr. Shrewsbury, a Wesleyan missionary to the West Indies and South Africa—then late in life back to England, where he died in 1866, aged seventy-three years. He was a man of ability, much industry and zeal, and of more than the medium piety of Methodist preachers generally.
In reply to this letter, Dr. Ryerson wrote to his brother on the 21st of February and said:—
You speak of the want of joy in your religious experience. I do not pray for joy, I simply pray for the indwelling of Christ, for the stamp of His image upon my soul, and for the harmony of every desire, and thought, and feeling, with His holy will, and divine glory; and there comes a "peace that passeth all understanding," a rest of the soul from fear, and anxiety—a sinking into God,—and now and then greater or less ecstacies of joy. I think we mistake when we make what is usually termed joy, the end of prayer, or of desire. I believe that even heaviness, and especially when superinduced by bodily disease, is not only consistent with a high state of grace, but even instrumental in its increase—especially of faith; the faith which realizes things invisible, as visible, and things to come, as things present.