Read Over Your Own Sermon

A selection from a letter by Andrew Fuller, to his friend John Ryland, consoling him in the loss of his wife, February 2, 1787:

I have often been in pain for you, since I saw you; but God is good, and will support you. I was thinking, whether it might not be of use to you, to read over the latter part of your own sermon, on God’s Experimental Probation of Intelligent Agents. God has long tried you, my Brother, by a series of trials; under which you have had one to feel with you, and for you. The Lord, it may be, has taken her away, that you may have a more direct recourse to him. It was much to me, when my child died, to think, ‘The Lord liveth, and blessed be my Rock!’ It is no small comfort, to think, you are not parted forever. Your dear departed might have adopted the words of her Lord, to you, ‘I shall see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, etc.’ O what a meeting shall we have at last!

The Work of Faith, the Labor of Love and the Patience of Hope: Illustrated in the Life and Death of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, by John Ryland, published by Button & Sons, Paternoster Row, London, 1818, pp. 224-25.