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Olney, May 31, 1783.

We rather rejoice than mourn with you on the occasion of Mrs. C——'s death. In the case of believers, death has lost his sting, not only with respect to those he takes away, but with respect to survivors also. Nature indeed will always suggest some causes of sorrow, when an amiable and Christian friend departs, but the scripture so many more and so much more important reasons to rejoice, that, on such occasions, perhaps more remarkably than on any other, sorrow is turned into joy. The law of our land is affronted if we say the king dies, and insists on it that he only demises. This, which is a fiction where a monarch only is in question, in the case of a Christian is reality and truth. He only lays aside a body which it is his privilege to be encumbered with no longer; and, instead of dying, in that moment he begins to live. But this the world does not understand, therefore the kings of it must go on demising to the end of the chapter.

W. C.