Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/661

Rh confesseth and begs pardon for our sins, and exercises our grace according to the design of the man, and the manner of the prayer. In praying we imitate the employment of angels and beatified spirits, by which we ascend to God in spirit while we remain on earth. We speak to God in prayer: when the tongue is stiffened with the approachings of death, prayer can dwell in the heart or the eye, by a thought or groan; prayer, of all actions of religion, is the last alive, and it serves God without circumstances and exercises material to the last breath." Nor were her discourses on other religious subjects less sensible and affecting. She would say, "The quintessence of all wisdom is to prepare for death; it is the business we should learn all our lives to exercise; the faults therein committed are irreparable, and the loss without recovery; we should no more confide in the prosperity of the world than to a still sea, which in a great calm oft-times presageth the approaching tempest; to declare, that in good we should live in distrust of ill; and in evil in hope of good; but in both the one and the other ever in equality." She married secondly Colonel Norton, and thirdly Mr. Jones, and was living in 1720. .

had by him two children, a boy and a girl, before his