he had made to his wife on her death bed to endeavor to become a Christian, and how anxious he had ever been to fulfill it. In our private intercourse, long before he was smitten down by disease, he had told me of this promise, and often dwelt upon his determination to fulfill it, with tears. Early in his confinement, in the latter part of last year, and frequently since, he informed me how much he had regretted through life, that when he was a youth in Kentucky, and after quitting school, he had read Pain's attacks on religion with great avidity, and many other similar works, and that his guardian, the late Judge Trimble, of Kentucky, was an avowed infidel and never discouraged him from such reading. Though he never became an infidel himself—never adopted deistical opinions—yet, he said his course of reading, and the unbounded faith he had in Trimble's judgment, made him ever ready to doubt, and ever ready to quote the opinions he had read, and such as he had heard Trimble advance in conversation against the truth of the Christian religion. Trimble was truly a man of splendid talents, and possessing an amiable and excellent character, and being a man universally esteemed, made his opinions more dangerous to young men. He said that reading the works of Paley, Dick and Lord Brougham on natural religion, in Illinois, had enabled him more nearly than anything else, to shake off those early imbibed prejudices. During the summer and fall of 1846, and winter of 1847, when he lived in my house with me, I bought and persuaded him to read with me, and talk over together, Bishop Butler's Analogy between natural and revealed religion. This work he confessed put to shame all the infidel books he had ever read. Still they had left the early impression of youth which had to be rooted out, but I had no doubt of his being an earnest seeker after the real truth during the last two years of his life, and I have no doubt of his having found it to his own satisfaction. It was in this that he was enabled to put away from him the very great fear of death which haunted him so much when I first met and lived in his company here.
