press my happiness. I seem to be swimming in a river of pleasure, which is carrying me on to the Great Fountain."

Sept. 23, he said, "Last night I had a full, clear view of death as the king of terrors; how he comes and crowds the poor sinner to the very verge of the precipice of destruction, and then pushes him down headlong. But I felt that I had nothing to do with this; and I loved to sit like an infant at the feet of Christ, who saved me from this fate. I felt that death was disarmed of all its terrors: all he could do would be to touch me, and let my soul loose to go to my Saviour."

"Christians are like passengers setting out together in a ship for some distant country. Very frequently one drops overboard, but his companions know that he has only gone a shorter way to the same port; and that, when they arrive there, they shall find him; so that all they lose is his company during the rest of the voyage."

"I long to measure out a full cup of happiness to every body; but Christ wisely keeps that prerogative to his own hands."

"I am more and more convinced that the happiness of heaven is a benevolent happiness. In proportion as my joy has increased, I have been filled with intense love to all creatures, and a strong desire that they might partake of my happiness."

"If God had told me some time ago that he was about to make me as happy as I could be in this world, and then had told me that he should begin by crippling me in all my limbs, and removing me from all my usual sources of enjoyment; I should have thought it a very strange mode of accomplishing his purpose. And yet, how is his wisdom manifest even in this! for if you should see a man shut up in a close room, idolizing a set of lamps, and rejoicing in their light, and you wished to make him truly happy, you would begin by blowing out all his lamps, and then throw open the shutters to let in the light of heaven."

After it had become certain that he would never again leave his chamber till he was carried out, yet being unceasingly desirous to benefit his people, he sent a request, which was announced from the pulpit, that they would repair to his chamber. Once, it is believed, they came indiscriminately; at other times in specified classes, including as many as the chamber could contain. When he had addressed to them collectively his last most solemn and affectionate counsel, till compelled to desist by the failure of his strength, he took them individually by the hand, and with a heavenly smile bade them farewell!

:

What he attested on these occasions was most appropriate and affecting; but he felt that all he could express was little compared with what he felt. -"I am always sorry," he remarked, "when I say any thing to any one who comes in it seems so inadequate to what I wish to express. The words sink down under the weight of the meaning I wish to convey." On another occasion; "I find no satisfaction in looking at any thing I have done; I want to leave all this behind-it is nothing and fly to Christ to be clothed in his righteousness."-Again; "I have done nothing myself. I have not fought, but Christ has fought for me; I have not run, but Christ has carried me; I have not worked, but Christ has wrought in me: Christ has done all."

The perfections and promises of God were to him a well-spring of joy, whence his soul drew his comfort and his spiritual aliment. "Oh!" exclaimed he," the loving-kindness of God!—his loving kindness! This afternoon, while I was meditating on it, the Lord seemed to pass by and proclaim himself, The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious!" Oh! how gracious! Try to conceive of that, his loving-kindness, as if it were not enough to say kindness, but-loving kindness. What must be the loving-kindness of God, who is himself infinite love!"

"It seemed this afternoon as if Christ said to me, 'You have often wondered and been impatient at the way by which I have led you; but what do you think of it now?' And I was cut to the heart, when I looked back and saw the wisdom and goodness by which I had been guided, that I could ever for a moment distrust his love."

Speaking of the temper requisite to the right discharge of ministerial duty, he said, "I never was fit to say a word to a sinner, except when I had a broken heart myself; when I was subdued and melted into penitence, and felt as though I had just received pardon to my own soul; and when my heart was full of tenderness and pity;-no anger, no anger." He expressed himself with great eagerness respecting the grace of God as exercised in saving lost men, and seemed particularly affected that it should be bestowed on one so ill deserving as himself. "Oh how sovereign! Oh how sovereign! Grace is the only thing that can make us like God. I might be dragged through heaven, earth, and hell, and I should be still the same sinful polluted wretch, unless God himself should renew and cleanse me."

Having delivered his dying messages to all classes among his own flock, he commissioned a brother minister to bear one to the Association of Ministers, who were to meet in a few days. The purport of it was, a hearty assurance of the ardent love with which he remembered them even in death; an exhortation to love one another with a pure heart fervently; to love their work; to be diligent in it; to expect success; to bear up under their discouragements; to be faithful unto death, and look for their reward in heaven.

While speaking of the rapturous views he had of the heavenly world, he said: "It is too much for the poor eyes of my soul to bear; they are almost blinded with the excessive brightness. All I want is to be a mirror, to reflect some of those rays to those around me." Again: "My soul, instead of growing weaker and more languishing as my body does, seems to be endued with an angel's energies, and to be ready to break from the body, and join those around the throne."

A friend, with whom he had been conversing on his extreme bodily sufferings, and his high spiritual joys, remarked, "I presume it is no longer incredible to you, if ever it was, that martyrs should rejoice and praise God in the flames and on the rack." "No," he said, "I can easily believe it I have suffered twenty times-yes, to speak within bounds, twenty times as much as I could in being burnt at the stake; while my joy in God so abounded as to render my sufferings not only tolerable, but welcome. The sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed." At another time: God is literally now my all in all; while he is present with me, no event can in the least diminish my happiness; and were the whole world at my feet, trying to minister to my comfort, they could not add one drop to the cup. It seems as if the promise, God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes,' was already fulfilled to me, as it respects tears of sorrow: I have no tears to shed now, but those of love, and joy, and thankfulness.”

Among his many tender and interesting remarks to his beloved partner, one was: "After I am gone, you will find many little streams of beneficence pouring in upon you; and you will perhaps say, 'I wish my dear husband were here to know this.' My dear, you may think that I do know it by anticipation, and praise God for it now." He said: "Hitherto

I have viewed God as a fixed star-bright indeed, but often intercepted by clouds ;-but now he is coming nearer and nearer, and spreads into a sun, so vast and glorious, that the sight is too dazzling for flesh and blood to sustain." This was not a blind adoration of an imaginary Deity; for,

added he, "I see clearly that all these same glorious and dazzling perfections, which now only serve to kindle my affections into a flame, and to melt down my soul into the same blessed image, would burn and scorch me like a consuming fire, if I were an impenitent sinner."

He said he felt no solicitude respecting his family; he could trust them all in the hands of Christ: to feel any undue solicitude on their account, or to be unwilling to leave them with God, would be "like a child who was reluctant to go to school, lest his father should burn up his toys and playthings while he was absent."

power

On Sunday, October 21, his last agony commenced, with a difficulty of respiration, though in an aggravated degree, which had caused him great distress at intervals during his sickness. Several of the church were soon collected at his bedside: he smiled on them all, but said little, as his of utterance had nearly failed. Once he exclaimed, Peace! peace! Victory! victory!" He looked on his wife and children, and said, almost in the words of dying Joseph to his brethren, "I am going, but God will surely be with you.' His friends watched him, expecting every moment to see him expire, till near noon; when his distress partially left him, and he said to the physician, who was feeling his pulse, that he found he was not to be released yet; and though he had suffered the pangs of death, and arrived almost within the gates of paradise, yet, if it was God's will that he should come back and suffer still more, he was resigned. He passed through a similar scene in the afternoon, and, to the surprise of every one, was again relieved: the night following he suffered less than he had done the two preceding. On Monday morning his agonies returned in all their extremity: for three hours every breath was a groan. He said that the greatest temporal blessing of which he could conceive would be one breath of air. Mrs. Payson, fearing from the expression of suffering in his countenance, that he was in mental as well as bodily anguish, questioned him on the subject. With extreme difficulty he was enabled to articulate the words, "Faith and patience hold out." About mid-day the pain of respiration abated, and a partial stupor succeeded. Still, however, he continued intelligent, and evidently able to recognise all who were present. His eyes spoke after his tongue became motionless. He looked on Mrs. Payson; and then his eye, glancing over the others who surrounded his bed, rested on his eldest son, with an expression which said, and which was interpreted by all present to say, as plainly as if he had uttered the words to the beloved disciple, "Behold thy mother!" There was no visible indication of the return of his sufferings; he gradually sank away, till about the going down of the sun, when his happy spirit was set at liberty. Before his death he had directed a label to be attached to his breast, with the words, Remember the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet present with you; that they might be read by all who came to look at his corpse, and by which he, being dead, still spake. The same words, at the request of his people, were engraven on the plate of the coffin, and were read by thousands on the day of interment.

MEMORIALS OF PIOUS NEGROES: SOLOMON BAYLEY.

(Continued from page 285.)

THE following particulars of Solomon Bayley's life were written and communicated to Mr. Hurnard by himself, but without the most remote idea that they would ever be printed. We left him in our last Number

legally free, and availing himself of his right, by escaping from his master, who had kidnapped him, and returning to Delaware to have his right to freedom legally decided. He proceeds :

"7th Mo. 24, 1799*, I got to Camden. I will yet go on to shew the reader my uneasiness of mind after I got to Camden. I then thought I wanted a preparation to adore the goodness of God that had begun with me in the back countries, and had brought me through so many difficulties; but with shame I must confess, I sang his praise, but soon forgot his works: yet the great God pitied me, and exercised a careful, constant mind towards me, for my good. Oh! how deceitful is the heart of man! "But not long after I got to Camden, my master came from the state of Virginia to Camden, Kent county, state of Delaware, where he found me; whereas he had not seen me since he put me aboard of the back country waggon, which, as I suppose, is near three or four hundred miles from Camden. Upon first sight he asked me what I was going to do. I said, How, master? He asked me, how did I think I was a going to get free, by running and dodging about in that manner. I said, Why, master, I have suffered a great deal, and seen a great deal of trouble: I think you might let me go for little or nothing. He said, I will not do that, but I will give you the same chance I gave you before I sent you away; give me forty pounds' bond and security, and you may be free. But I replied, I work hard at nights to get a little money to fee my lawyers; and if it was right for me to be free, I ought to have been free without so much trouble. He asked me whom I blamed for my trouble: I answered, I did not consider that I was to blame. Ah! said he, you can see other people's faults, but cannot see your own. I said, Master, you can't blame me for a thing I never did. Ah! said he, my wrongs do not make yours right: and that word put me to silence; but I thought where the laws of the land made liberty the right of any man, he could not be wrong in trying to recover it: but finally he sold me my time for eighty dollars, and I dropped the law-suit. I went to work, and worked it out in a shorter time than he gave me, and then I was free from man."

We need not point out the base injustice of his master's conduct, in thus exacting a ransom for a man who was already free; but Bayley probably knew too well by experience the little dependence to be placed upon magistrates, juries, or lawyers in slave colonies, where the master is rich and the slave poor, and where the prejudices are in favour of slavery, to risk a decision, if he could work out his freedom on reasonable terms. Instead, however, of repining at this injustice, he adores the mercy of God in his deliverance. "And when I came to think that the yoke was off my neck, and how it was taken off, I was made to wonder, and to admire, and to adore the order of kind Providence, which assisted me in all the way. But I found in me a disposition to wander from the path of life, and forget the favour bestowed upon me, and went astray too shameful to be mentioned. "But in this lost condition there came a reasoning to me, to consider where I was going, and where I should end; and to consider on the shortness of time, and the length of eternity: and a thought came into my mind, assuring me that my life was in the hand God, and that he was looking for better behaviour from me; and that he was angry with me every day; and that he had whetted his sword, and made ready his arrows to shoot at me. Then my understanding began to be enlightened, to see my dreadful state by nature; and the more I considered on the nature and

• Bayley was not a member of the Society of Friends, but a Wesleyan Methodist; but he seems to have picked up some peculiar phrases.

heinousness of my sin, both in thought, word, and deed, the more I was distressed in mind: but I found the sentence of death was passed against me, and it pressed on my mind, if I kept on going against light, I should soon feel the heat of the burning lake, or the misery of those that are driven to darkness at death. And when I considered the power of God, and for that power to be poured out upon me to all eternity, I began then to examine into my state and condition, and I found I had a falling spirit, prone to evil as the sparks fly upward; then I set myself to think how I could escape the misery that was coming on me. I considered my punishment would be as bad as those that went to darkness in old time: then I began to consider what God had done to save mankind from that fearful condition; and while I thought on the many ways he had taken to shew his earnest mind to save sinners, this consideration moderated my distress; but when I remembered my own ways that were not good, I felt ashamed even to lift my eyes to heaven to ask pardon for my sins; but the shortness of time, and the length of awful eternity, so arrested my mind, that I was made to realize eternal misery, and to cry like Jonah, as out of the belly of hell, for mercy, and for pardon for all my sins. Oh! the thought of being amongst that black crew, when the Lord rains down snares, fire, and brimstone, and horribleness, terrified me much.

"And now, reader, I will here record that God is rich in mercy, towards sinners of the deepest die; for when every other method failed, to shew his stedfast mind to save me, he sent a little boy to me with his finger at a text in a sermon book, 'The wicked is driven away in his wickedness, but the righteous hath hope in his death;' the same text I had heard a Methodist preacher take on a funeral occasion; then that little boy coming to me with his finger pointing at the same in the sermon book; it was about noon, the people nearly all gone to meeting, and I reading very earnest in the Testament: I took the book and began to read, and it pleased Infinite Goodness to look on me from the throne of his highness, and being unwilling that I should perish eternally, he sent down his awakening power, and I was made to quake and tremble; and an impression abode on my mind, that God was a true, and a just, and a holy God, and that no unclean thing could rest in his holy habitation. I saw I was a sinner condemned to die; but a call reached my soul, 'Take heed that you entertain no hopes of heaven, but what are built on a solid foundation :' a question arose in my mind, what foundation I had to hope for heaven. I examined and found I had none but what was built on the sand, and at death I must fall into hell; which caused a cry to be started from my heart to my Maker, what I should do. A thought passed through my mind to make a resolution to amend my way, and turn and be good; but a second thought came powerfully into my mind, if I made another resolution, and broke it as I had done, the door of mercy would be for ever shut against me. Then the good Spirit brought to my mind the dangers and deaths from which I had been delivered, through the mercy of an indulgent God, and how I had called on him in trouble and he delivered me, and had answered me in the secret place of thunder; and it was pressed on my mind, that it was too dangerous to make another fool's start: then I seemed to be in the wilderness, not knowing what to do. A thought arose in my mind, You have got into a pretty fix now, afraid even to make a resolution of amendment; then an inquiry again arose in my heart, from that depth of thought, what I should do: at the same time the handwriting of God appeared against me, and that Power that once shook the earth shook my soul and body: it pressed on my mind, that it was the great power of God: and that word came into my mind, They that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.' At the same time, the Spirit of truth brought all things to my re