which made his bed a place of terrors. The thought of the Day of
Judgment and of the torments of the lost, often came as a dark cloud over
his mind in the midst of his boyish sports, and made him tremble. But
though these fevered visions embittered his enjoyment while they lasted,
they were but transient, and after a while they entirely ceased "as if
they had never been," and he gave himself up without restraint to the
youthful pleasures in which his ardent nature made him ever the
ringleader. The "thoughts of religion" became very grievous to him. He
could not endure even to see others read pious books; "it would be as a
prison to me." The awful realities of eternity which had once been so
crushing to his spirit were "both out of sight and mind." He said to
God, "depart from me." According to the later morbid estimate which
stigmatized as sinful what were little more than the wild acts of a
roystering dare-devil young fellow, full of animal spirits and with an
unusually active imagination, he "could sin with the greatest delight and
ease, and take pleasure in the vileness of his companions." But that the
sense of religion was not wholly dead in him even then, and that while
discarding its restraints he had an inward reverence for it, is shown by
the horror he experienced if those who had a reputation for godliness
dishonoured their profession. "Once," he says, "when I was at the height
of my vanity, hearing one to swear who was reckoned for a religious man,
it had so great a stroke upon my spirit that it made my heart to ache."

This undercurrent of religious feeling was deepened by providential
escapes from accidents which threatened his life--"judgments mixed with
mercy" he terms them,--which made him feel that he was not utterly
forsaken of God. Twice he narrowly escaped drowning; once in "Bedford
river"--the Ouse; once in "a creek of the sea," his tinkering rounds
having, perhaps, carried him as far northward as the tidal inlets of the
Wash in the neighbourhood of Spalding or Lynn, or to the estuaries of the