Page:The Pilgrim's Progress, the Holy War, Grace Abounding Chunk3.djvu/128

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Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.

overtaken with excessive rains, coming to his lodging extremely wet, fell sick of a violent fever, which he bore with much constancy and patience, and expressed himself as if he desired nothing more then to be dissolved and be with Christ, in that case esteeming death as gain, and life only delaying felicity expected; and finding his vital strength decay, having settled his mind and affairs as well as the shortness of time and the violence of his disease would permit, with a constant and Christian patience he resigned it his soul into the hands of his most merciful Redeemer, following his Pilgrim from the City of Destruction to the New Jerusalem, his better part having been all along there, in holy contemplation, pantings, and breathings after the hidden manna and water of life, as by many holy and humble consolations expressed in his letters to several persons in prison too many to be inserted present. He died at the house of one Mr. Struddock,a grocer, at the Star, on Snow Hill, in the perish of St. Sepulchre, London, on the 12th August 1678, and in the sixtieth year of his age, after ten days' sickness; and was buried in the new burying-place, near, the Artillery ground, where he sleeps till the morning of the resurrection, in hopes of a glorious rising to an incorruptible immortality of joy and happiness, where no more trouble and sorrow shall afflict him, but all tears be wiped away; when the just shall be incorporated as members of Christ their head, and reign with him as kings and priests for ever.

THE END.