Dying
These men believed in the reality of prayer, and Sprague has given us enough information on the way their lives ended for us to judge that they died as they had lived. At Richard Furman’s death, says a friend, as he was making his way “through the dark valley”, he told those beside him,"I am a dying man but my trust is in the Redeemer: I preach Christ to you dying, as I have attempted to while living.” he asked that the twenty third psalm should be read ‘and before the reading of it was concluded his heart had ceased to beat. One of the sayings of Samuel Stillman in his advancing years was, “Heaven is not far off when we feel right”, and his final words as he left this world were, “God’s government is infinitely perfect.” The dying Samuel Jones confided in a friend, “When alone, I tune like a nightingale at the prospect of death.” Observing the serenity of William Elliot as he approached death, a visitor commented “You enjoy yourself very well, don’t you?” “Oh no,” Elliot replied, “I don’t enjoy myself at all, but I never enjoyed the Lord so well in all my life” On being asked how he was at the end, Andrew Broaddus said, “Calmly relying on Christ”, and the last words he was heard to whisper were “Happy! Happy! Happy!” Oliver Hart, another of this same company of men, called on all who were with him to help him praise God and on being told that he would soon be in the company of the saints and angels he ended his course with the exclamation, ‘Enough, Enough!’ Of Morgan Rhees, who died ‘in the triumphs of faith’ at the age of forty-four, it was said, ‘his departure seemed rather a translation than a death. The aged Andrew Marshall, when approaching death, asked a friend to carry this message to relatives in New England: ‘Tell them that I am yet in the land of the dying, but am bound to the land of the living.’