May He support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done! Then in His mercy may He give us safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last!

This prayerful passage is from John Henry Newman’s “Sermon 16: The Parting of Friends,” preached in the 1830s during his Anglican period (before his 1845 conversion to Roman Catholicism). Newman, then a leading figure in the Oxford Movement, often ended sermons with devotional collects that gathered the sermon’s themes into a final petition. Here, reflecting on separation, mortality, and the Christian hope of reunion, he turns from the immediate sorrow of parting to the larger “evening” of life and the believer’s final rest in God. The imagery of lengthening shadows and the “fever of life” situates ordinary human busyness within a spiritual horizon of death, judgment, and mercy.

Newman frames life as a day’s labor that moves inevitably toward evening: activity quiets, urgency fades, and work ends. The “fever of life” suggests the restlessness, ambition, and anxiety that can dominate worldly existence; against it he sets the hope of “safe lodging” and “holy rest,” evoking both a traveler’s shelter and the Christian promise of peace after death. The repeated “and” gives the prayer a cumulative, breathless tenderness, as if gathering every human fear into a single request for divine support. The quote’s power lies in its fusion of realism about life’s exhaustion with confidence in mercy, making it a consolatory text for bereavement and for contemplating one’s own end.