_May 9._--My dearest, dearest wife still alive, and not apparently worse than yesterday. Oh! if it were the Lord's holy blessed will to spare her, it would indeed rejoice my poor foolish heart, but the Lord has enabled me to cast my wife, myself, and my dear dear children on his holy love, and to await the issue. Oh! what wrath there must be against these lands, if not only the inhabitants are swept away, but the Lord transplants also his own, who would teach them, to his own garden of peace. My soul has just been refreshed by these two verses of Psalm 116. "Return unto thy rest, O my soul, for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee. He has taken one of thy olive branches to glory, and is now perhaps about to take another, for precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints, for he only takes them from the evil to come." Oh, but for Jesus, the never setting star of our heavenly way, amidst the wilderness what would our situation now be. Jesus is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, and our heavenly Father's love we have too often proved to doubt it now. But, poor nature is bowed very very low, when I look at my dear boys and little babe, and see only poor little Kitto to be left for their care for hundreds of miles around; it needs all those consolations of God's spirit to keep the soul from sinking also with the body; but the Lord has said, "Leave your fatherless children unto me," and to him we desire to leave them.
We did feel assured that the Lord would spare our dear little united happy family; but his ways are not our ways, nor his thoughts our thoughts. Dear little Kitto, I feel for his situation also from my heart.
All the conversation of my dear dying wife, for these twelve months past, but especially as our difficulties and trials increased, was on the peace she enjoyed in the Lord. Often and often she has said to me, notwithstanding the disparity of every thing external, I never in England enjoyed that sweet sense of my Lord's loving care that I have enjoyed in Bagdad. And her assurance of her Lord's love never forsook her, even after she felt herself attacked by the plague. While contemplating the mysteriousness of the Providence, her mind was overwhelmed; but when she thought on her Lord's love, she was confident in his graciousness. From almost the first, her brain has been so oppressed, that with difficulty she opens her eyes, and though she can answer a question of two or three words, Yes, or No; yet, if it involves the slightest exercise of thought, she always replies, "I do not know what you say." When I consider all I and the dear children lose, should we survive her, it is almost more than my heart can contemplate. On any essential point, for some years, we have never had divided judgment on any material point; in every work of faith, or labour of love, her desire was to animate, not to hinder. Such simple truth of purpose, and unaffected love, and confidence in her Lord, as dwelt in her dear departing spirit, I have seldom seen, and those who knew her intimately will not think I say too much. She has been to me in the relation of Christian wife, and Missionary wife, just what I felt I so much, so very much needed. And yet the Lord sees fit to take her to himself, and add one more from my little family to the chosen, faithful, and true company that surrounds his throne. Lord, then, though it cuts nature to the quick, makes me feel its deepest suffering, and meets me under the most complicated forms of trial, yet if it be for thy glory, and her glory, do, dear Lord, thine Almighty will, and we know thou wilt to thy chosen, make light spring up out of darkness.