home duties, or her private charities and visits to the afflicted, but
all these offices were performed from one especial motive and with the
same end in view to avert from herself the wrath of her Maker. This one
thought filled all her mind. All else was as nothing. Family and
friends, home and humanity, were of importance only as they furthered
this object. It is in this spirit that she mentioned her father's
illness and death, and the heroic, self-sacrificing death, by
shipwreck, of her brother Benjamin, to which she could resign herself
from a conviction that the stroke was sent as a chastisement to her,
and was a merciful dispensation to draw his young wife nearer to God.
We read not one word of solicitude for mother, or brothers, or sisters,
not a single prayer for their conversion. She was too busy watching and
weeping over her own short-comings to concern herself about their doom.
The long diary is filled with the reiteration of her fears, her
sorrows, and her prayers. Many years afterwards she thus referred to
this condition of her mind:--

"I cannot without shuddering look back to that period. How dreadful did
the state of my mind become! Nothing interested me; I fulfilled my
duties without any feeling of satisfaction, in gloomy silence. My lips
moved in prayer, my feet carried me to the holy sanctuary, but my heart
was estranged from piety. I felt as if my doom was irrevocably fixed,
and I was destined to that fire which is never quenched. I have never
experienced any feeling so terrific as the despair of salvation. My
soul still remembers the wormwood and the gall, still remembers how
awful the conviction that every door of hope was closed, and that I was
given over unto death."

Naturally, such a strain at last impaired her health, and, her mother
becoming alarmed, she was sent in the autumn of 1820 to North Carolina,