will be my brightest and best. The providential cloud under which I have long walked, has been a heavy one; but I now expect soon to comprehend its meaning. Give courage, oh my Captain !-give fortitude and firmness in the last conflict ! and, for the glory of thy name, and the encouragement of thy tried followers, grant a triumphant conquest over my latest foe. But, shouldst thou see proper not to answer this petition, still, oh still, secretly support a soul that rests wholly on thee for strength in time of need.

'Because thou didst for sinners die,
Jesus, in death remember me.""

The "fear of suffering," alluded to above, arose from appre hensions of what might be felt in nature's final hour, while enduring the agonies of death. The thoughts of this often excited painful ideas. At one time she expressed herself thus: "This earthly tabernacle seems as though ready to crumble into its parent dust; but, blessed be God, who hath in a measure brightened the prospect, and assured me that he will be with me through the valley and shadow of death. I feel unspeakably thankful for the restoration of my confidence, but still cannot triumph without trembling. Nature starts at the thought of the last, last agonies, which shall dislodge the timid spirit from its clay tenement. But is not this fear a reflection on thy faithfulness, O my God and Friend!Thou hast been with me in six troubles, thou wilt not forsake me in the seventh, and last; thou hast not followed me through life with mercy in order to enhance the misery of my dying moments! This be far from thee, whose name is love. Thou also canst make the separating pang much easier to be borne than what I have already endured. Pardon my distrust, and give courage to my hesitating mind, and bring me to triumph in thy goodness, and sing of thy faithfulness, with the ten thousands of thy Israel, already safely conducted by thee to glory."

But, although Satan was permitted to excite fear of bodily suffering, yet Divine grace prevented fear of a more momentous nature, viz. of sufferings due to sin in the eternal state. Her views of the atonement by the Lord Jesus were clear, and her faith in that atonement was maintained with great steadiness. Her scriptural knowledge of Christ, as her Intercessor, and the embracing him as her lawful Sovereign, empowered her to triumph in him, and frequently to look at those things" which are not seen," with solemn joy, and realize by faith the saints eternal rest.—Yes, the fears of death, as it respects the extinction of animal life, or casting off the robe of mortality, appeared quite vanished, for she conversed concerning her funeral, &c. with great composure, and even ordered, (though unknown to me till after her decease,) that her shroud might be made in her presence, and by her direction, expressing pleasure at the sight;

and when finished said, "when you are wrapping my body with that, the immortal part will be clothed with the white linen of the saints!"

Perceiving that her end drew near, and that a separation would soon take place, we mutually endeavoured to become resigned to the Divine dispensation, and were cheered with the pleasing thought of meeting in heaven to part no more.-We read respecting the Christian, that

"His God sustains him in his final hour!

His final hour brings glory to his God!"

This was indeed the case respecting my beloved wife; for after all her dread of that hour, God was her support above all that she had feared; his strength was perfected in weakness, and sovereign power displayed in her behalf. The struggle was evidently sharp at last, but evidently supportable. He, whose skill is infinite, was nigh at hand. The Strength of Israel was her support! "Jesus, moved with compassion, put forth his hand," gently loosed the "silver cord," and communicated his love to cheer her fainting heart; and as though the port was in full prospect, and the bark about to enter the haven, she exclaimed aloud, in a way that thrilled through our hearts-" Glory!"-and soon afterwards, while beholding her sister Mary, with a look that conveyed the idea, that a world of wonders was opening on her view, expired, and entered the joy of her Lord. Thus lived, and thus died, my best earthly friend, on June 8th, 1816, in the 34th year of her age. Dursley.

JOSEPH ROBINSON.

MISCELLANEOUS.

To the Editor of the Methodist Magazine.

Pale Death, with equal foot, strikes wide the door,
Of Royal Halls, and hovels of the poor.

HORACE.

You have, doubtless, ere this, received something from your numerous contributors, upon the late unexpected, and universally lamented death of her Royal Highness the Princess Charlotte of Wales. Under this impression, I shall not pretend to lay before your readers any panegyrical effusion of mine respecting her character; nor shall I offer any observations or reflections on the great and peculiar national calamity, occasioned by her sudden and premature transition from life to death-from time to eternity! That the demise of "the des◄ tined Queen of Britain's Isles," is a national calamity, none, I apprehend, will have the effrontery to deny. The calamity, from its being so completely unexpected, is, indeed, the more appalling, the shock was felt the more as coming unexpected; it came, says one, like the charged shell, exploding amongst us with a horrible crush, destroying, 66 at one fell sweep," the hopes of a nation! Nor was it

a single stroke, for the mother and the offspring fell together; they now press one silent bed; and death lies upon them like an untimely frost on the fairest flowers of the field!-But I am diverging from the point towards which I first set out. My design, in addressing you on this lamentable occasion, is to draw your readers' attention to the following extract from the pen of the pathetic Montgomery, as also to some anecdotes which I have taken from respectable sources, and which form several pleasing traits in the character of the Princess.

Your's, &c.

Deal, 15th Dec. 1817.

HENRY BASDEN.

"A few days ago," says the sympathizing Montgomery, "if there was one woman, not in England only, but on the face of the earth itself, so happily circumstanced, that a majority of those who delight in the glories, and riches, and pleasures of this world, might be tempted to think they would gladly change places and persons with her, it was the Princess Charlotte of Wales; and when we say it was, the word looks so strange on our paper, that we scarcely yet believe that it is so. There are truths, awful and sudden, which come upon us like those wounds in battle that sever a limb in a moment, with a stroke so exquisite that the nerves still quiver with a natural sympathy, and the loss for a while is only to the eye of the sufferer, but the an guish and bereavement are the most excruciating when they come in all their poignancy of reality; we say, there are truths resembling these wounds, so awful and sudden, that our understanding, like the eye, is convinced of the fact, while the heart is incredulous, and the feelings are benumbed with comparative insensibility. Such was the elec trifying intelligence of the assassination of Mr. Percival,-and such is yet the disheartening intelligence of the demise of the Princess Charlotte of Wales;-in either case the sufferer seemed rather to have disappeared than to have gone the way of all flesh; they were, and they were not, so instantaneously, that they seemed to be and not to be at once; the moment of expiration, that moment which commences in time and issues in eternity, seemed prolonged to survivors, after death had grown cold in the veins of the departed :

Even in their ashes lived their wonted fires.'

"The Princess, it will be remembered, was born in the highest place of polished society; she had arrived at the gayest period of human life; she was heiress to the most illustrious throne of Europe; beautiful and affectionate, accomplished and intelligent; esteemed, admired, courted, and revered by her family, her associates, her dependents, and her future subjects; above all, loving and beloved, (a bliss so rare in palaces,) the spouse of the man whom she had chosen for herself, and about to become the mother of a line of Princes, who might reign for ages over the greatest, freest, happiest people in the world. This, and more, yea all that youth, and health, and love, and rank, and power, could make her, she was, but a week ago, in the sight of those who looked upon her from below. What is she now? In the brief phrase of the poet of Laura, she is "nudo spirito e poca polve,"—" pure spirit, and a little dust."

"We are touched with the death of our fellow creatures, precisely in proportion as we are related to them, by consanguinity, attachment, neighbourhood, dependence, or obligation. To the Royal Family, therefore, of the realm, all other families of the same, from the loftiest to the lowest, being affianced by the bonds of allegiance, whenever a member of the former, in the course of nature, is cut off, all the members of the latter are more or less affected by the removal; not with the grief of kindred, or the sympathy of friendship, perhaps not with the patriotic pang of loyalty, but yet with a congenial sorrow allied to selfishness, because all are made to feel their personal mortality by the repercussion of a blow at so noble a part of the body politic, that the meanest is sensible of the shock. The Princess, whom we commemorate and deplore, was a personage so interesting, from sex and age, and circumstances peculiar to herself, that on not one of the Royal House could the hand of death have fallen with a force that would have been more appalling; inflicted a wound that would have seemed more impossible to be healed,-for the unborn of a nation's hopes, which were expected to proceed from her, can be no more called into existence, than the dead can be summoned back from their graves to re-occupy the throne, which they had left in succession for her and her posterity.

"But from this glimpse into the wilderness of futurity, where all is as barren and dreary as an African waste, we turn to the present, yet even here we must not expatiate. Of the mother of the deceased Princess, an exile, if not au outcast, from the land which had adopted that mother as its future queen;-of her father, the Prince Regent, surrounded as he is by all that can render existence on earth enjoyment, except domestic happiness, the affection of a wife, and the endearments of a daughter;—of her husband, exalted by her preference from a pominal German princedom, to reign in her heart, if not upon her future throne, and hereafter to hold the hand that held the sceptre of her hereditary realm, now widowed both of his love and his hopes, and cast back into society from an elevation, to which, in early life, even his ambition could not have dared to aspire;-of those elder branches of royalty, to whom her sudden transition to the invisible world has opened a vista of gradual succession to their father's crown; -of her who shares that crown, and who had, at the crisis of this calamity, just removed to Bath, for the restoration of her health, full as she is of years, and rich in honours ;-Of these, and their feelings, were we able to disclose the recesses of their bosoms, and shew how much like other mortals princes are, when touched by the hand of God in his providence, it would ill become us to speak at large, and much less to speculate. Sacred be their sorrows, and hallowed to their present and eternal interests, the death of their lovely and lamented relative! But there is one, who once was the glory of that illustrious family, who is not dead, and yet who partakes not of the joys or the afflictions of his kindred or his people. Withdrawn from all eyes but those that watch to supply his necessities, in silence and in darkness, to him there is neither sun, nor moon, nor kingdom, nor wife, nor children, nor subjects! He is alone in the midst of the

living, and almost as far removed from them as from the dead. The little world in which he dwells is a solitude, peopled only by imagination; but the inhabitants of it are not those that haunt the guilty mind, even when reason is overthrown. It is said, but who can tell whether truly or not, for nothing concerning his mysterious insulation can be affirmed, except the meagre fact of his perpetual existence in a general state of forlorn tranquillity, and occasional perturbation, attested in the monthly bulletins,-it is, however, said, that ministering angels are the companions of his thoughts in the loneliness of that circle, by which he is cut off from rational intercourse either with this world or the next. Yet he is not forsaken in his hoary hairs, nor in his deep humiliation, by Him, whose loving-kindness is better than life, and all its pleasures, if all its pleasures could be enjoyed for ever. A creature, an intelligent creature, may be debarred from communion with every thing and every being in the universe, except the Creator. The venerable father of the British people, we have reason to believe, is happily conscious of that presence which is the hope of earth, and the joy of heaven. The hand of mercy may have shut him up from the sight of evils that would have grieved his eyes and wrung his heart, had reason been preserved to him to the end of his lengthened days. The Lord is his keeper.""

The anecdotes referred to, p. 142, are inserted in the Youth's Instructor for this month.

ON THE RELAPSED STATE OF THE CHURCH OF

GENEVA.

Copied from the Christian Observer for November, 1817.

It is a melancholy circumstance, connected with the revolutions of ages and empires, that many countries, on which the light of true religion once shone, are now covered again with their original darkness, or with a feeble twilight that is scarcely better. The tendency to deterioration in every thing human is so well known and acknowledged, that the Christian world, especially, ought ever to be on their guard against the very first innovations, either in purity and sobriety of doctrine, or correctness of discipline and conduct. The case of modern Geneva relapsing into a cold heterodox creed, furnishes an awful and conspicuous warning on the subject. The following facts have been just communicated to the Public, and may be relied upon as

authentic.

The church of Geneva, as every person knows, was almost the cradle of the Reformation; and, whatever may be thought of the peculiar and exclusive parts, either of the doctrines or the discipline of its illustrious founder, was certainly long distinguished for its orthodxy on all the great subjects in which pious Protestants are agreed. How mournful a reverse has now begun to take place, may be inferred from the following circumstances:

The ancient catechism of Geneva taught expressly the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus Christ. This catechism was withdrawn from the church some years ago, and its place has recently been supplied by another