Chapter 23
Section 23 of From Life to Life or How Our Preachers Die. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. From Life to Life or How Our Preachers Die by William Marion Weakley Reverend Benjamin Patterson Reverend August Krause
Reverend E. N. Graves Reverend Benjamin Patterson One who was present during Mr. Patterson's last illness declared that the heavenly influence which pervaded his room could be felt by all who visited him.
After giving his family, one by one, an affectionate adieu, he said, tell all that I am sweetly going home. His last audible word was home. Above the waves of earthly strife, above the ills and cares of life, where all is peaceful, bright, and fair, my home is there, my home is there. Mr. Patterson's membership was in St. Joseph Conference.
Rev. August Kraus Though a member of the Ohio German Conference, Mr. Kraus was pastor of the Old Otterbein Church in Baltimore, Maryland, when he heard the final summons, Arise ye, and depart, for this is not your rest. Sabbath morning, April 26, 1885, he preached with unusual unction and effect.
From the text, and the very God of peace sanctify you wholly, and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved, blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. It was his last sermon and testimony. He called the congregation to prayer and went down on his knees to rise no more.
Becoming unconscious, he was carried to his room where he died in a few hours. In the bright, eternal city, death can never, never come. In his own good time he'll call us, from our toil to home, sweet home. Rev. E. N. Graves This faithful itinerant of Osage, now Kansas, conference
approached the end with an earnest prayer to God for grace for the last struggle. To Rev. D. Bauman, he said, I want you to take charge of the upper part of my circuit and keep up the appointments till conference and tell Brother Chambers to do the same with the lower part of the circuit.
But be sure to tell the brethren and sisters all over the work that there is not a cloud between me and God. There is no death. What seems so is transition. This life of mortal breath
is but a suburb of the life Elysian, whose portal we call death. End of Section 23
