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LONDON:

PRINTED BY JOSEPH MASTERS AND CO.,

ALDERSGATE STREET.

INUS!

ΤΟ

MY FATHER AND MOTHER,

THIS MEMORIAL

OF

THEIR BELOVED CHILD

IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED,

WITH THE PRAYER

THAT HE WHO SAID

"THE MAID IS NOT DEAD, BUT SLEEPETH,

MAY COMFORT THEM

WITH THE HOPE OF SOON MEETING AGAIN

HER

WHO, IN THESE PAGES,

"BEING DEAD, YET SPEAKETH."

PREFACE.

ANY one who presumes to add to the already too voluminous pile of religious biography, may well be asked to give his reasons for so doing. The cause of the publication of the present memoir was simply this. The author was requested to publish the sermon which he preached on occasion of his sister's death, and conceived that a short account of the Life and Death of that sister would be valued by those who knew her. After he had commenced this account, materials came in upon him of a nature he little expected, in the shape of a very interesting correspondence. He had often felt the difficulty of recommending books containing the experience of devout women; for many of them indirectly inculcate unsound principles when they refer to the Church and the Sacraments, which mar their usefulness; and those which are derived fro foreign sources however valuable to members of another Communion, can hardly be recommended without a caution which somewhat destroys the

confidence of the reader. It appeared to him that the letters in this memoir were free from these objections, and with a few remarks to connect them together, might be safely placed in the hands of any child of the English Church.

He therefore ventures to submit them to the Christian public, not without a considerable misgiving lest those who knew not his beloved sister personally, may through his negligence form an erroneous estimate of her character, still he trusts that as she was by the grace of God the means of winning several of her companions to the sweet and pleasant paths of heavenly wisdom, so now being dead she may yet speak to some who never came within her influence when she was on earth.

The Author is painfully conscious of his liability to err, and therefore desires humbly to submit his own judgment on any controverted questions to the Divine authority of Holy Scripture as interpreted by the Catholic Church, and held by that portion of it in which it has pleased GOD to place him.

Christmas, 1857.

W. R. B.

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