This hope, alas, was not permitted to be fulfilled. Mr. Barker died after a short illness on 15th Sept., 1875.

A few days before his death he made a final arrangement of his affairs, and calling his eldest son, Mr. Gilbert, his lawyer, and Mr. Kellom, one of his trustees, to his bedside, said:

"I feel that I am approaching my end, and desire that you should receive my last words and be witness to them. I wish you to witness that I am in my right mind, and fully understand what I have just been doing; and dying, that I die in the firm and full belief in Jesus Christ, and in the faith and love of His religion as revealed in His life and works as described in the New Testament; that I have an abiding faith in and love of God, as God is revealed to us by His Son, Jesus Christ; and I die trusting in God's infinite love and mercy, and in full faith of a future and better life. I am sorry for my past errors, but during the last years of my life I have striven to undo the harm that I did by doing all I was able to serve God by showing the beauty and the wisdom of the religion of His Son Jesus Christ. I wish you to write down this my last confession of faith, that there may be no doubt about it."

Whilst delivered in the presence of death, this confession was not extorted in terror or weakness, but was the solemn attestation of full ten years of active Christian advocacy. Many years ago when Barker had left Methodism for what is called freethinking, a Staffordshire Wesleyan, a working man, said with much fervour, "It is very sad, but I know Joseph Barker, and I know that he has known Jesus Christ, and, having known Him, that he will return to Him as a child to his mother." The prediction was not speedily fulfilled, but it was fulfilled; and though it is not difficult to talk lightly of one whose phases of faith were so numerous, yet one may balance such depreciation with the fact that he returned to Christ after full experience of His adversaries. Barker's mind was eminently sympathetic, and he was almost irresistibly drawn to identify himself with the persons and principles he admired. At the same time the very sympathies that made him a partisan, undid him in that character. With whatever party he associated he never

failed to let them hear of what he thought excellent beyond their borders; and thus he was ever felt to be an uncomfortable adherent. And let it not be forgotten that whatever were Barker's speculative errors, his contention was always for virtue, and for what he thought the true interests of mankind. Nothing immoral ever proceeded from his lips or pen. When in 1860 he returned from America a secularist, what more than aught else revolted him from his associates, and opened his eyes to the danger of life without God, was the licentious principles and practices which he found prevalent and unrebuked. He has often been compared to Cobbett, and if only he had chosen his part and stuck to it, he might have exercised as great an influence as Cobbett in either England or America. He was a lucid and powerful orator, and his writings are models of perspicuous ease. Like Cobbett he was apt to say more and worse than he meant when his aversion was excited, but no one that he ever pelted with hard words would have escaped his kindness, if for kindness there was any occasion. He was, in short, a typical Yorkshireman, rough outwardly, tender inwardly, ready and eager to fight to the death with those so disposed, but sensitive to love as a thermometer to heat.