with God and in communion with his boundless blessedness. How often do we see something of this, if not the full reality, in the old age of piety!

4. The old age of the Christian, as distinguished from that of the ungodly, is characterized by affection. There is ordinarily in extreme age a tendency to apathy, an unmoved lethargic state of the sensibilities, in which the affections, sharing in the common decay of nature, wither and dwindle away. The old man's sympathies with those around him are less easily awakened than they once were; and, as he grows older, he feels less and less interest in any of his friends, save those who happen to be essential to his comfort. Of course, the Christian in his old age is not exempted from this tendency. Extreme age has the same effect on his sensibilities as on the sensibilities of other men, and he, as the process of decay goes on, may lose the warmth of his interest in those around him, and even in the dearest of his friends. But in his case there is a counteracting power. His faith and hope, the habitual cheerfulness of his spirit, and the communion of his soul with the infinite love of God, are like a constant cordial to his nature, that keeps his mind elastic, and quickens all his better sympathies. His sense of having almost done with life does not diminish his interest in man, for he sees in man a partaker of eternity. He does not lose his interest in the Church of God, for that he cannot lose till faith and hope are dead. He does not lose his interest in those near to him by the ties of nature, for while mind and memory remain, and he knows the names of the faces of those that love him, he knows them in their relations to eternity and to the Savior. Thus, if his mental faculties are not utterly obscured, he lives on, believing, hoping, cheerful, and loving to the end.

5. Thus it comes to pass that the old age of the Christian is characterized to the last by usefulness. The old man, too old for activity and labor, what is he worth to his friends or to the world, if he is without godliness, and, consequently, without those effects of godliness upon the character of old age which we have been tracing out. Of what use is he, save as in God's providence, he is the passive instrument of admonishing others of their frailty and mortality, and of the guilt and danger of living and dying without God? But how many ways does God find to make his children, amid the infirmities of declining age, useful to others. They shall bring forth fruit in old age, to show that God is faithful to them. that trust in Him. How persuasive is the testimony which they give for God and for godliness, out of their long experience! How winning are their words of counsel and of invitation! How attractive is the sight of the faith and hope, the cheerfulness and love, with which they wait all the days of their appointed time till their change comes! How touching, and how valuable beyond its intrinsic efficacy, is every little act of duty or affection put forth by their enfeebled and decaying powers! To the last, they shine as lights in the world, holding forth the word of life. And when that light, glimmering no more below, has been transferred to shed a

clearer radiance from a higher sphere, how does their blessed memory linger upon earth to draw survivors after them.

It now remains for us to make some more direct application of the train of thought into which our contemplation of the text has led us.

1. The consideration of the beauty and happiness of piety in old age, is an argument to the young to remember their Creator in the days of their youth. There is no young person here so profane or so thoughtless as not to see that piety in old age is venerable, and beautiful, and happy. Why is it so? Why is the character of the aged believer any more to be respected, or his state any more to be desired, than the character and the state of the aged worldling? I can tell you. Piety, that is repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ; piety, that is the love and service of God with the whole heart; is a reasonable thing, a right thing, and therefore it is beautiful and happy. It is, in old or young, the very highest form of human character. It is the crown of human nature. Without it, man, whatever else he may have, is a degraded, blighted, wretched creature, shorn of his glory, and wandering into the blackness of darkness for ever. With it, man, though weary, and faint, and weeping, though compassed about with infirmity, and crushed with burthens, and soiled with the dust of labor and of conflict, and only in part delivered from the debasement of a fallen nature, is an angel of God, struggling upward and soon to be free in the purity and light of Heaven. It is this, and nothing else than this, that makes piety seem so venerable, so beautiful and so happy in old age. If you did not know this, you would see no reason, and feel none, why an old man on the verge of time, whose last sands of life are falling, might not as well be an ungodly worldling as a believer. Knowing this, you hope that your old age, if ever you live to be old, will be the old age of piety. Tell us, then, ought you not now remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come, when the vigor and the joyousness, the activity and the liveliness of life are over, and the years draw nigh-those years of decrepitude and weariness, of dimness and decay-in the which you will say I have no pleasure in them. O! how rarely can you find an aged Christian-one to whom the hoary head is indeed a crown of glory--who was not in his early days a believer, a penitent, a follower of Christ, a child of God. What madness is it on your part if you do not choose and seek that one thing, without which life is all vanity and guilt before God, and death is death eternal.

2. Our subject addresses itself powerfully to those who are old, or are growing old, without piety. Is there here one aged person, man or woman, that is living without God, living for this world alone, living without repentance, living without hope? O! what a night is that which is gathering around you! Let me entreat you, then, to think of these things before, in the progress of infirmity, it shall be too late for thought-nay, before death shall close the period of probation and seal your destiny! Let me entreat you to

ask yourself whether you may not now turn to God, and find, at this last hour, that the blood of Christ cleanseth from all sin!

3. The subject we have been considering should lead us all to a grateful acknowledgment of the grace of God in the examples, which we are permitted to see, of aged and venerable piety.

One such example has been, within the past week, removed from this church, we doubt not, to the General Assembly and Church of the First Born. To dwell for a moment on some notices of her long life, and on the remembrance of her humble and retiring but attractive piety, is only an imperfect acknowledgment of the grace of God in her, and may be profitable to us as a closing illustration of our subject.

The venerable widow, Mary Dwight, who died on the morning of the last Lord's day, was born at Dosoris, Long Island, on the 11th of April, 1754-a century ago, lacking only eight years and a half.* Sixty-eight years ago, at the age of 23, she was married, and entered upon domestic life as the wife of one who was devoted to the service of God in the ministry of the gospel. Her husband was, for the first year after their marriage, a chaplain in the army of the revolution-in consideration of which she received for a few of the last years of her life, a pension as the widow of a revolutionary officer. At the end of that year, her position in life was suddenly changed. Her husband was recalled from that public employment by the death of his father, and was made, in the providence of God, the temporary head of the bereaved family, his widowed mother and his brothers and sisters looking to him for protection and aid. Thus, for five years, they resided at Northampton, in his mother's family; he, meanwhile, burthened with secular cares and labors, preaching in vacant congregations, and employing his great and peculiar talents as a teacher, and she, in all this, his comfort, his joy, and his help. Then came another change, and for twelve years her husband was the pastor of the church at Greenfield, in this State, and, at the same time, the head of a private but large and flourishing institution for the education of youth. Thus, from a very early period of life, her position was continually one of great responsibility, at once conspicuous, and laborious, and requiring an uncommon combination of qualities in the mind and in the heart. In the year 1795, Dr. Dwight became as you all know, the President of Yale College, in which office he served for twenty-three years. What his labors and cares were in that station, and what share of them naturally and necessarily devolved upon her, I need not attempt to describe. In 1817, at the age of 63, after forty years of happy wedded life, she became a widow, and retired to be an inmate in the dwelling of her eldest son, where she continued till her death-more than twenty-eight years. That house to which she withdrew in her old age, to spend, as she supposed, the little evening of her life, has been her home

She was the daughter of Benjamin Woolsey, Esq.; between whom and the father of President Dwight there was an intimacy, begun when they were classmates and roommates at college, and continued to the close of life.

for a longer period than any other house that she ever called her home.

In attempting, not a delineation of her character, but a brief notice of some of its most interesting and instructive traits, it is most obvious to remark that she has been, through life, so far as any of the living generation are able to testify, a beautiful example of conscientious fidelity in all the duties that belonged to her sex, her relations and her station in society. The heart of her husband trusted in her. Her children rise up and call her blessed. Her children's children honor her, and, to the close of her life, they delighted to do her reverence. She contributed all that belonged to her part toward augmenting the attractiveness of that hospitality which made her husband's home the resort of friends and of strangers. She was the friend of the poor, and especially like a mother to the poor young man aspiring to the pursuit of knowledge and to the service of God in the ministry.* Her gentleness and kindness taught all to love her, her uniform and graceful dignity constrained all to regard her with the deference appropriate to her character and station. Her prudence and skill in the management of her household affairs, and her habits of economy and industry, relieved her husband of many cares that might otherwise have withdrawn him in part, at least, from those great public duties to which he was called of God.

It is equally to be remarked, for the remark is essential to a just conception of the symmetry and beauty of her character, that she was never found wandering from her proper sphere. Such was her instinctive feminine sense of propriety, that while she never withdrew from any responsibilities that belonged to her position and relations, she had no ambition, no uneasiness of disposition, no passion for conspicuity, leading her away from her appropriate duties to attempt those things which God had not given her to do. This is the more worthy to be noticed as it was manifestly no small part of the loveliness and dignity which adorned her, and by which she adorned her station.

Her meekness, her humble self-distrust, her jealousy against selfdeception was another noticeable trait of her character. She never thought of herself, in any respect, and least of all in respect to her own piety, more highly than she ought to think. Her religious experience being from first to last without any of those stronglymarked crises which sometimes give distinctness and assurance to the consciousness of reconciliation with God, she was never able to refer to any precise period as to the date of her renewal by the Holy Spirit. Thus under the influence of a timidity which was, no doubt, in this particular, excessive, she was prevented from making a public profession of her trust in the Savior till after the death of her husband, when, in the year 1819, she was received

*Many who are now eminently and widely useful in the Church, remember with grateful affection her maternal kindness as First Manager of the "Female Education Society," an association of ladies which has been for thirty years employed in helping on their way to usefulness pious and dependent young men in Yale College.

into covenant with this church on the profession of her faith. Since that period, not only has her religious character been more distinctly developed to her friends and to the world, but her decision and purpose to be on the Lord's side, and her affectionate though trembling confidence in Christ as her Redeemer, have been more clearly manifested to her own consciousness. Yet to the last she has had continually, as those who knew her could see without her taking pains to tell of it, a very low opinion of her own piety.

Yet we need not hesitate to say that her character was marked distinctly by faith as the apprehension of things not seen, and in particular by a trust in God's promises. I cannot doubt that it was by this, in part, that her characteristic cheerfulness and affectionateness were kept up so remarkably to the end of her long life. She had a strong and child-like belief in the efficacy of prayeroften asking her Christian friends with great simplicity to pray for her; and whenever her children, in the last years of her life, were brought together from their several distant homes, she was always unwilling that they should part without uniting in a family prayermeeting. How much she loved the Holy Scriptures; her own Bible, devoutly read day by day through a long series of years, is a witness. One of the special comforts of the last two or three years of her life, after her sight had grown very dim, was a beautiful English copy of the New Testament, with the book of Psalms, in an uncommonly large type, which was presented to her by a clerical friend, and which she read through again and again in her devotions, when other books had become quite illegible. There were favorite promises from the Holy Book which she loved to recall; and, in particular, that beautiful expression of God's care and love, "Even to your old age I am He, and even to hoar hairs will I carry you," was often upon her lips. In like manner, she had her favorite hymns, expressive of trust in God; and sweet hymns were always the dearer to her because her mind, by nature and by culture, from her childhood up, delighted in poetry. One of the latest utterances from her lips, when death was already coming upon her, was the repetition of that beautiful psalm which was sung before the commencement of this discourse. It was on Saturday, just at evening, about twelve hours before she breathed her last. Her daughter-in-law, at her bed-side, repeated to her the hymn:

"How firm a foundation ye saints of the Lord,"

for that was a favorite with her, and then began the psalm:

"Up to the hills I lift mine eyes;"

but she herself immediately caught the words from her daughter's lips, and repeated the psalm to the close. In such a filial faith toward God she died, gently and fearlessly falling asleep, though all her lifetime she had shrunk from the thought of death with a constitutional timidity. On the morning of the day preceding her dissolution, she said to her daughter-in-law: "I think I shall die to-day." "And are you not willing and ready to die?" was the answer. "Yes," she said, "I trust I am ready." Thus the grace