David Stoner's Last Illness and Death
The following is a sample from the book: Memoirs of David Stoner.
At this period, too, he diligently maintained a practice which he had generally pursued in his other stations, and particularly, it would appear, at York—that of spending a part of every Sunday evening, after the public services of the day were concluded, with Mrs. Stoner and their servant, who was a pious young woman, in special prayer and intercession for the prosperity of the word which had been spoken that day—for the revival and extension of religion within the sphere of his personal exertions—and for a larger communication of divine grace to the church in all its denominations and the world in all its tribes. These were often seasons of peculiar profit, sealing the labours of the day with fresh exercises of piety and more lively apprehensions of the divine benignity.
In general he was about this time unusually copious and fervent in his family devotions, often dwelling with peculiar emphasis on the solemnities of death and eternity. For some weeks indeed previous to his death, all his Christian graces seemed fast ripening into their full maturity. His abstraction from the world, his union and fellowship with God, his ardent breathings after spiritual and heavenly enjoyments, particularly engaged the attention of his most intimate friends. They could not refrain from thinking that he was preparing for some great event, though they little supposed it would be that which they were soon called to mourn.
Shortly after his arrival at Liverpool, Mrs. Slack, the wife of his late excellent superintendent, died. He wrote to Dr. McAllum on the 20th of September and was then in vigorous health. By the same post he also addressed a letter of affectionate condolence to Mr. Slack, from which the following is an extract:
“I have just heard the melancholy news of the afflictive dispensation with which the Lord of all has been pleased to visit you. Great indeed is your loss, and great is the loss to your family. I sympathize with you and can mourn with them that mourn. It brings afresh to my mind recollections of sorrowful days through which I was called to pass, and in which you kindly sympathized with me. May God be your comforter and stay! The loss to you is irreparable, but what a mercy to know that to the departed it is unutterable gain! It is the best of all blessings to die well and get safely home to heaven. This blessing she has attained. Danger is over. Her race is happily concluded. She has won the victory. She has received the crown. But how little we know of heaven!
O speak, ye happy spirits! Ye alone can tell
The wonders of the beatific sight!
When from the bright unclouded face of God
Ye drink full draughts of bliss and endless joy,
And plunge yourselves in life’s immortal fount.
“I doubt not but your departed wife and mine have before now renewed their acquaintance in heaven and talked over many of the affairs connected with the friends they have left behind. O that we may be found ready to join their blessed society whenever the arbiter of life and death shall summon us from the concerns of time! I know it is quite needless for me to point out to you sources of consolation. With these you are far better acquainted than I am. And with that comfort with which you have comforted others, may the great head of the church now abundantly replenish your own mind! Nature will feel, but it is our exalted privilege to have all the feelings of nature sanctified and blessed to our increase in holiness. By this means every drop of natural sorrow will be mingled with drops of spiritual comfort and sanctifying grace; and we, by hallowed affliction, shall thus be made more meet to be useful in the church on earth and glorious in the church above.”
Ten days afterwards he wrote to his sister and, adverting to the sudden departure of Mrs. Slack, subjoined the simple and touching remark, “Little did I think when I shook hands with her that that hand was so soon to be cold in the grave!”
We are now arrived at the last month of Mr Stoner’s earthly pilgrimage. On Sunday, the 8th of October, he preached at herculaneum Pottery and Seacombe, after which he re-passed the river Mersey. The evening was very cold and stormy; and not being accustomed to exposure in such a situation, perhaps he was not sufficiently apprehensive of his danger from the chilling air when inactive and not very warmly clothed. He appears to have had a constitutional tendency to disorder in the alimentary canal; and from this circumstance, as well as from the nature of his subsequent sufferings, it is not improbable that the disease which terminated his valuable life was produced on that occasion. For a few days, however, he made no complaint, but pursued his usual labours with unabated zeal.
On the evening of the 13th he preached in a private dwelling-house in Naylor Street from Luke 11:32: “The men of Nineveh shall rise up in the judgment with this generation and shall condemn it: for they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here.” This was his last sermon. A copious outline of it has been found among his manuscripts, and as it affords a just specimen of the plainness and fidelity with which he exercised his ministry among the unawakened, and is connected so closely with his lamented death, it may not be amiss to insert a general view of its scope, with one or two extracts from its more pointed and impressive sections.
He opens his discourse with a forcible description of the divine benevolence of Jesus—a benevolence which extended to the bodies and especially to the souls of the people, and which admirably disclosed itself in his public instructions. Sometimes he endeavoured to alarm his hearers out of their sins by solemnly announcing the consequences of transgression; sometimes to allure them out of their sins by the most affectionate appeals to their hearts; sometimes by the most convincing arguments and powerful expostulations to reason them out of their sins; and sometimes, as in the text, to shame them out of their sins by comparing their evil conduct with the good conduct of others who enjoyed inferior privileges. He then argues that the words of the text, which were applied originally to the unrepenting Jews, may, on the ground of our superior advantages, be applied to the impenitent sinners of the present generation with increased force and accumulated energy. He proceeds to institute a comparison between the men of Nineveh and the impenitent sinners of his congregation, first, in their sins; where he particularly instances idolatry, the principle of which he explains as consisting in the love and pursuit of any object, visible or invisible, rather than God: pride, drunkenness, luxury, and obscenity. He infers from the prophecies of Jonah and Nahum that such evils prevailed among the Ninevites, and forcibly states to what an alarming degree they prevail among us. He pursues the comparison, secondly, in their warnings. Here he remarks that the warnings of the Ninevites were delivered by a fallible man, and he not one of the best of men; but ours are delivered by the Son of God.
Jonah was a stranger to the Ninevites and of a strange religion,but Jesus is he whose name we bear and whose religion we profess. Jonah wrought no miracles and possessed no supernatural evidences to prove the truth of his mission; but the authority of Jesus is sustained by his miracles, by the matchless purity of his life, by the supreme excellence of his doctrines, and by the exact accomplishment, in his person and work, of a long succession of prophecies; that Jonah gave the Ninevites but one short warning and then marched on; but Jesus gives us Sabbath after Sabbath, ordinance after ordinance, messenger after messenger, expostulation after expostulation, warning upon warning—He does everything but force us; that Jonah placed the danger of the Ninevites at a distance, the distance of forty days; but to us not a moment is promised beyond the present one; that Jonah predicted only a temporal calamity, but Jesus denounces eternal destruction; and that Jonah foretold the overthrow of Nineveh without any express injunction to repent; but Jesus commands, promises, threatens, does everything, in a word, with the merciful and professed design of softening our hearts into penitential feeling and humble acknowledgment.
He closes the comparison, thirdly, by tracing their subsequent conduct. The Ninevites believed God, but you practically disbelieve him. They delayed not, but you delay. They repented, but you remain impenitent. They “cried mightily to God,” but to this many of you are strangers. He applies the whole subject as one which teaches the importance of believing God, which affords the highest possible encouragement to mourning penitents, and which presents an aspect the most awful to such as persevere in impenitence and sin. All these topics are accompanied by apposite citations of Scripture clothed with striking illustrations, supported by powerful arguments, and pointed, in the most direct and faithful manner, to the consciences of his hearers.
“God,” says he, in one part of his discourse, “has not given you so much as forty days. How much then has he given you? Has he given you twenty days? No. Before the end of twenty days your soul may be shrieking in hell, ‘The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved!’ Has he given you ten days? No. Before the close of ten days you may be ‘weeping and wailing and gnashing your teeth.’ Has he given you one day? No. Before the conclusion of twenty-four hours your body may be a breathless corpse and your spirit excluded from the presence and favour and smile of God and shut up in darkness and despair, endless and hopeless. Has he given you one hour? No. Before the termination of this hour demons may drag your soul into the regions of torment. Has he given you a single minute? No. Before the expiration of another minute the frail machine may cease to move and your spirit be summoned to appear before God. You have no security of life. You are but tenants-at-will who may be cast out without the formality of a discharge. And yet, strange to tell! you are living in impenitence. Suppose, at the solemn hour of twelve this night, an angel were to appear to you and inform you from the God of heaven that at the end of forty days you must appear at his bar, what would be your conduct? Would you not immediately rise from your couch and cry for mercy? Would you rest day or night until you had obtained the ‘knowledge of salvation by the remission of sins?’ If this would be your conduct though you were sure of living forty days, what ought to be your conduct when you are not sure of living one day? By what sort of reasons can you prove that there is less need of repenting when you have no fixed time than there would be if you had forty days promised? If you were sure of living forty days, you would repent; but because you are not sure of living one day, you will not repent. Strange absurdity this! When the Ninevites had forty days set before them, they immediately repented; but you refuse to repent though you are not certain of an hour.”
“Against you,” he observes again, addressing the impenitent, and adverting to the temporal calamity which Jonah predicted to the Ninevites, “against you is denounced an eternal punishment—the punishment of hell. There will be the loss of heaven, the loss of happiness and hope; there will be the wrath of God, the lashes of a guilty conscience, the gnawings of unsubdued passions, the company of the miserable, the torturings of devils, the suffering of penal fire, and an assurance that these pains will be eternal. If the men of Nineveh repented to avoid a few hours’ pain, what ought your conduct to be with regard to eternal misery? Are the arguments drawn from eternity less powerful than those drawn from time?
“Time is momentary duration; eternity is duration without end. Time is fleeting; eternity is stationary. Eternity! Reason staggers; calculation reclines her weary head; imagination is paralyzed. The minds of angels are infinitely too contracted to grasp the mighty idea of eternity. Yet you will not repent, though urged to it by the solemn warnings which threaten an eternity of woe.”
In that part of his sermon where he dwells on the immediate and undelayed repentance of the Ninevites, he introduces one of those tremendous and overwhelming passages for which his ministry was sometimes remarkable. “If any inquire why we so often return with the same topics in our mouths, here they meet with an answer: it is because we have not such hearers as Jonah had. It is because you delay your repentance. We preach the necessity of repentance, the danger of the sinner, the nearness of death, the torments of eternal death, because there is need of it. If you will all repent, then like Jonah we can comparatively lay such topics aside; but until that time, these things we do preach, these things we must preach, these things we will preach, and these things we dare not do otherwise than preach. Cease to sin and we will cease to tell you that Satan is your master, that hell is your home, and eternal torment your portion. But if you still delay while our ‘three days’ journey’ is continued, we must exclaim, Yet a few moments and you will be eternally overthrown! Yet a few moments and devils will be your tormentors! Yet a few moments and you will be enveloped in the curling, sulphurous flames of hell! Yet a few moments and your leaky, shattered bark will be launched into the stormy ocean of eternity! Hurricanes of fire and brimstone shall sweep across the infernal deep, and every blast shall howl, Eternity! Every demon you meet will shriek, Eternity! A monster shall gnaw your vitals, a monster with ten thousand tongues; and every tongue shall hiss, Eternity! Upon the gates of hell shall be written in flaming characters, ‘To be opened no more through Eternity!’ And will you delay your salvation any longer? Perhaps the thirty-ninth day is passing; nay, perhaps you have entered upon the fortieth. Death is whetting his scythe; nay, perhaps his dart is now entering your body! And are you still impenitent? O, like the Ninevites, delay no longer!”
During the course of this sermon, and most probably at the time that he was uttering one of the powerful paragraphs cited above, he reiterated, “Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown! Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown! Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” and then added, after a solemn and portentous pause, “Yet ten days and perhaps your preacher may be a lifeless corpse!” His hearers were deeply impressed; and when this faithful servant of Christ expired precisely at the end of ten days, it is not surprising if many thought that a ray of prophetic light had descended at that moment on his serious spirit and warned him of his early tomb.
In the former part of the next day, the 14th, he does not appear to have been much worse than usual. He addressed a letter to Mr. Jennings, probably the last he wrote, in which he speaks of his numerous engagements and purposes. He laments the spiritual dearth which reigned around him, but adds, “We are breaking up fresh ground. I trust we shall see good done. I feel determined, by the grace of God, to do what I can. Pray for me, that the Spirit of the Lord may descend upon the barren wilderness. Since I began this letter I have been at the children’s meeting. Have you a children’s meeting? If you have not, begin one. Call together the children of your congregation every Saturday afternoon to catechise them. You will find it extremely useful. I hope you are ‘growing in grace’ and ‘knowledge.’ Labour in prayer, in reading, in preaching; but do not kill yourself nor hurt yourself. You see I take the liberty of a senior to give you good advice. Good advice, if not practised to the utmost extent, is yet often useful. If it stimulate a man only to make another effort to do that which is best, it is not given in vain.”
While he was at the children’s meeting, mentioned in the preceding extract, he felt himself much indisposed, and shortened the service. He does not appear, however, to have been apprehensive of any immediate danger, but attended the prayer-meeting as usual in the evening. Here the malady which had secretly operated in his system for some days began to discover itself in an alarming manner. He became exceedingly ill and speedily returned home. The disease was dysentery, accompanied with strong typhoid symptoms. A surgeon’s attendance was requested; and after the ordinary remedies had been tried in vain, at his suggestion a physician was called in. But all medical assistance was unavailing. The mortal hour of this exemplary minister approached, and his attendants could only mark the progress and ravages of a disease which it was not in their power to arrest.
His affliction was extremely severe. It seized him in the full vigour of manhood, at a time when his health seemed more established than it had ever been before, and it was probably irritated and increased by the vital energy with which it was opposed. His pain was deep, agonizing, and almost insupportable; but no hasty expression of murmuring or complaint ever escaped his lips. “Patience had her perfect work.” By this excruciating process he was more entirely prepared for the presence of the Lord. Long had he been a “living sacrifice,” sealed by the impress of the divine Spirit and consecrated on the holy altar of practical obedience; and when offered in death, he was found to be “perfect and entire, wanting nothing.”
From the commencement of his illness he entertained no hope of recovery, but invariably expressed a submissive desire to “depart and be with Christ.” At one time his medical attendants held a consultation on his case. After the consultation, Mrs. Stoner entered his room. “Well, Mary Ann,” said he, “what is the opinion of the doctors concerning me?”
“They give but little hope concerning you,” was her reply.
“What,” he rejoined with evident pleasure, “then there is a chance of my getting to heaven this time.”
On the 19th, upon being visited by the Rev. Messrs. Newton and Martin, he requested them not to pray for his recovery. “If,” said Mr. Newton, “the Lord has work for you to do, he will raise you up.”
“Mr. Newton,” he replied, “my work is done!”
To Mr. Usher, who visited him with kind assiduity, he made the same request, repeating, with affecting emphasis, “My work is done!”
During the whole affliction he maintained unshaken confidence in God. To Messrs. Newton and Martin, in the interview mentioned above, he said, “I have no overflowing of joy, but peace and a strong confidence in the blood of Christ.”
“The blood of Christ! the blood of Christ!” he would exclaim at intervals. “That blood has washed away your sins,” said Mrs. Stoner. He replied, “I trust it has.”
To Mr. Usher, who inquired if he now experienced the consolations of that religion which he had recommended to others, he said, “O yes, I do. Praise the Lord! Christ is precious. I have no ecstatic joy, but I have settled peace and strong confidence.”
Amid his severe bodily sufferings it seems that he was not wholly exempted from the harassing assaults of his spiritual enemies. To these he adverted at one time when he said, “Satan tells me I shall be a castaway.” These assaults, however, failed to shake his faith or impair his peace. He was also subject to occasional delirium; but, in his greatest mental wanderings, was never heard to utter an improper word—a circumstance this which affords a pleasing proof of the spirituality of his mind and the purity of his heart.
The former part of the night before he died he was in great agony. About eleven o’clock he seemed to be engaged in prayer but could not be distinctly understood. At length he was heard to say, “Praise the Lord!” and shortly afterwards, “Lord, help me! Lord, help me! Lord, undertake for me!” repeating the petitions several times; then, “Jesus, thou art my hope and confidence for ever and for ever!” After a short slumber, he awoke in extreme pain; and when it subsided, he exclaimed, “Thy blood was shed for sinners! to save sinners! ‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.’” After a few minutes’ pause he repeated the following lines:
There I shall see his face,
And never, never sin;
There, from the rivers of his grace
Drink endless pleasures in.
He slumbered again, and on awaking desired to be removed from his bed. Soon after, he said, “I cannot see!” he then sank into a state of insensibility, from which he revived and asked to be replaced in bed. On being moved, he said, “I can see again!” and added, in a tender and affectionate tone, “Is she gone? Is she gone without me?” The laws of the invisible world are to us inscrutable; but it seems not irrational to suppose that, while the senses of this excellent man were closing on earthly objects, he had a mysterious perception of the presence of some departed friend—a mother perhaps, or a wife, whom he longed to accompany. He subjoined, “I fear you have brought me back to the light of this world again,” and repeated,
I nothing have, I nothing am;
My glory’s swallow’d up in shame:
but Jesus hath bled, hath died for me. ‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.’ Jesus, thou art my hope and confidence for ever and ever!” These were expressions which he loved to use, and they satisfactorily evince his entire reliance on the merits and mercy of his crucified Saviour.
Immediately after this, he lay for some time as if his spirit had already taken its departure. At length, however, he was perceived to breathe, but very softly, and evidently in much pain. About three o’clock in the morning he asked what was the day of the month. He was told it was Monday, October 23rd. “It will be a happy Monday for me,” he replied. “I hope it will be a glorious Monday to me. I shall soon be in heaven.” He again desired to rise, and experienced a recurrence of his former languor and exhaustion, attended with the convulsive efforts of expiring nature.
During the morning he had three convulsive fits in rapid succession. All around him thought that the last struggle was over. He revived, however, and called for Mrs. Stoner and his children. To Mrs. S. He said, “I have been in heaven—how is it that I have got back again hither?”
“What kind of a place is heaven?” said she.
“O, heaven is a beautiful place,” was his reply.
She asked with trembling solicitude if he thought the Lord would raise him now.
“O no,” said he. “It is all over!”
“What is to become of me when you are gone?”
He calmly answered, “Thy Maker is thine husband; the Lord of Hosts is his name.”
He was now frequently delirious, but when recollected, his mind dwelt on divine things. “Godliness,” he remarked, “is profitable unto all things.”
To Mr. Usher, who took leave of him about eleven o’clock at night, he said, “Do call again. Do not leave me. Farewell! I shall meet you again at the judgment day.”
The time was now come when this faithful servant of the Lord must die, and his death affords a sublime example of Christian virtue. It admirably corresponds with the tenor of his useful life. For the salvation of sinners he had lived and laboured. Solicitude for souls was the ceaseless spring of his zeal, activity, and wasting exertions. He felt the “ruling passion strong in death.” He appeared to forget himself, though on the solemn verge of eternity; to forget his wife, though soon to become a disconsolate widow; to forget his two lovely boys, then passing into the sad destitution of an orphan state; but he remembered sinners. He had slumbered for some time; the silver cord seemed quite loosed and nature sinking in its last decay when, to the astonishment of every one present, he looked up and summoning all his strength to one last effort, cried aloud, “Lord! save sinners! Save them by thousands, Lord! Subdue them, Lord! Conquer them, Lord!” He reiterated these petitions nearly twenty times, then sank down, reposed his head on the pillow, and expired without a struggle or a groan, a little before twelve o’clock, aged thirty-two years, six months, and seventeen days. True soldier of the cross! “Thy years were few but full; the victim of virtue has reached the utmost goal and purpose of mortality.”
The sensation which was produced by the intelligence of his death cannot easily be described. His new connexions and acquaintance in Liverpool had testified their affectionate regard during his illness by numberless calls of anxious inquiry and by fervent prayers for his recovery; but when certified of his departure, they deeply felt the loss which they had sustained, and mourned over him as a friend and brother. The feeling excited in Yorkshire was strongly marked—it was a feeling of sudden consternation, of poignant grief, and of sharp though submissive regret. In the evening of the day on which the melancholy information was conveyed to his father’s house, the compilers of these pages met each other there; and though painfully familiar with the sad devastations of death, they could not but enter with peculiar emotion into the circumstances of this touching case. It was not, however, a case utterly disconsolate. The bereaved family acknowledged the hand of God, and the cheering light of pious resignation mingled itself with the dark gloom of grief. The writers found it sorrowful yet good to be there; and amid the scene which surrounded them experienced the truth of the wise man’s declaration, “It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting. Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better.”
It was intended at first to deposit his mortal remains at Barwick, where so many of his departed connexions repose. Arrangements were accordingly made to accomplish this object, but it was found to be totally impracticable. He was therefore interred on the Friday following his death in the burying ground connected with the Brunswick chapel at Liverpool. Great numbers of people attended. An appropriate and impressive address was delivered by the Rev. Robert Newton, and the funeral service was read in a very solemn and moving manner by the Rev. Robert Martin. The whole assembly was sensibly touched and softened into tears. One of the most affecting objects in the group of mourners, next to Mr. Stoner’s widow and children, was his venerable father bending over the grave which enclosed the glory of his family. He indulged the feelings of a parent and of a Christian. He sorrowed, but his sorrow was relieved and cheered by hope. If a pagan philosopher, during one of those intervals in which truth shed a brighter ray on his expanding mind, could introduce the elder Cato hailing the glorious day when he should depart from this scene of tumult and confusion and repair to the divine concourse and assembly of souls; when, in particular, he should go to his beloved son, whom he had prematurely consigned to the ravages of mortality but whose parting spirit, in its flight to the happy regions, had looked back upon him with the tender intimation that their real union was unbroken; while he could, in the meantime, console himself with the reflection that their separation would not be long—with how much greater, because more enlightened, confidence, might this Christian father cherish similar anticipations and, amid his bereavement, triumph in the thought that heaven was become the richer for his loss and the more his proper home than it had been before!
Funeral sermons were preached in each of the Methodist chapels at Liverpool and in all the other stations which Mr. Stoner had occupied. Vast crowds attended in every place to express their respect for his memory and to receive another testimony of the hallowing direction which religion gives to life, and of the powerful support which it ministers in death.
Judging according to the measurements and calculations of days and years, Mr. Stoner’s life was short; but in assiduous labour and beneficial effects, it was long. He performed much in the limited space which was allotted to him. From the time of his early conversion he crowded the different periods of his earthly existence with exercises corresponding to their requirements. After commencing his pulpit efforts, he preached four thousand and forty-three times; not to mention an almost countless number of exhortations, advices, and prayers. How he passed through these duties the preceding pages testify. It may be safely said of him that, like Enoch, the youthful patriarch of the antediluvian world, “he, being made perfect in a short time, fulfilled a long time;” and that many Christian ministers, whose life has been lengthened to old age, have, in vigorous endeavour and extensive success, accomplished far less than he.
