It is my duty to endeavour to render my experience profitable to you,
to show you the path by which it has pleased God to lead me to truth,
and to the fountain of living waters; and, above all, to labour in
prayer for you, that you may be partakers of the peace and joy with
which my spirit is filled under the influence of his blessed word.

May this paper, my dear children, by the blessing of God, contribute
to the triumph of the Gospel, and to the glory of our great God and
Saviour Jesus Christ, by filling your hearts with the love of truth,
and by leading you in the way of true religion.

It was in the thirty-third year of my age, in the present year,
(1826,) that I openly embraced and professed the Protestant religion,
after having given it the most serious and attentive examination,
and being convinced that it was indeed the true religion of Christ,
agreeable, in every respect, to the revelations of his Gospel.

Like you, my dear children, I was born in the Romish church; but birth
has, in fact, very little to do with religion; the utmost that it can
effect is to predispose the mind, or to serve as a pretext to timid,
interested, or indifferent persons, to justify their external
adherence to a form of worship in which their hearts do not unite.

As our Saviour declares to his disciple Peter, it is not flesh or
blood that can make known to us the true God, the Creator, Preserver,
and Saviour of men. Faith, through which alone we can become children
of God, and true members of the church of Christ, is a gift of the
Holy Spirit, and by no means transmitted to us with our existence
by our parents. St. John teaches us this when he says, "As many as