by secret and immediate impressions on the mind. After preceding
illustrations, there are the following words, on which the colonel's
conversion will throw the justest light. "Yea, I have known those of
distinguished genius, polite manners, and great experience in human
affairs, who, after having out-grown all the impressions of a religious
education--after having been hardened, rather than subdued by the most
singular mercies, even various, repeated, and astonishing deliverances,
which have appeared to themselves as no less than miraculous--after
having lived for years without God in the world, notoriously corrupt
themselves, and labouring to the utmost to corrupt others, have been
stopped on a sudden in the full career of their sin, and have felt such
rays of the divine presence, and of redeeming love, darting in upon
their minds, almost like lightning from heaven, as have at once roused,
overpowered, and transformed them; so that they have come out of their
secret chambers with an irreconcilable enmity to those vices to which,
when they entered them, they were the tamest and most abandoned slaves;
and have appeared from that very hour the votaries, the patrons, the
champions of religion; and after a course of the most resolute
attachment to it, in spite of all the reasonings or the railleries, the
importunities or the reproaches of its enemies, they have continued to
this day some of its brightest ornaments; a change which I behold with
equal wonder and delight, and which, if a nation should join in deriding
it, I would adore as the finger of God."

The mind of Major Gardiner continued from this remarkable time, till
towards the end of October, (that is rather more than three months, but
especially the first two of them,) in as extraordinary a situation as one
can well imagine. He knew nothing of the joys arising from a sense of
pardon; but, on the contrary, for the greater part of that time, and with
very short intervals of hope towards the end of it, took it for granted