"And when I'm to die,
Receive me, I'll cry,
For Jesus has loved me, I cannot tell why;
But this I can find,
We two are so joined,
That he'll not be in glory, and leave me behind."
"The last time he occupied my pulpit," writes his neighbor, the Rev. George Clayton, "when he preached excellently for an hour, in behalf of a charitable institution, he retired to the vestry after service under feelings of great and manifest exhaustion. Here he remained until every individual except the pew-openers, his servant, and myself had left the place. At length he seemed with some reluctance to summon energy enough to take his departure, intimating that it was in all probability the last time he should preach in Walworth. His servant went before to open the carriage-door, the pew-openers remaining in the vestry. I offered my arm, which he declined, and then followed him as he passed down the aisle of the chapel. The lights were nearly extinguished, the silence was profound, nothing indeed was heard but the slow majestic tread of his own footsteps, when, in an undertone, he thus soliloquized:
"'And when I'm to die,' etc.
To my heart this was a scene of unequalled solemnity, nor can I ever recur to it without a revival of that hallowed, sacred, shuddering sympathy which it originally awakened."
When the good old saint lay literally dying, and when apparently unconscious, a friend put his mouth close to his ear, and repeated slowly his favorite lines:
"And when I'm to die," etc.
The light came back to his fast-fading eye, a smile overspread his face, and his lips moved in the ineffectual attempt to articulate the words. This was the last sign of consciousness which he gave.
We could almost wish that every disciple of Christ would commit these lines, quaint as they are, to memory, and weave them into the web of his Christian experience. Confidence in Christ, and undeviating adherence to him, can alone enable us to triumph in life and death.
In November, 1766, Whitefield again visited Bath and Bristol, and then passed on to Gloucestershire and Oxford. Never did so many of the nobility attend his ministry as he now saw at Bath, and the results of his whole journey were such as to fill him with the most devout gratitude. He saw too the number of his clerical friends largely increasing, and especially rejoiced in the fact that the excellent Fletcher, of Madeley, preached in his pulpits in London. He writes of this event, "Dear Mr. Fletcher has become a scandalous Tottenham Court preacher.... Were we more scandalous, more good would be done.... Still, 'the shout of a king is yet heard' in the Methodist camp."