better studies. Yet the turn of my mind was devotional in the extreme;
so much so, that had the Lord permitted me at that time to come in
contact with the wily fascinations of popery, I am sure I should have
fallen, for a season at least, into the snare. God was really in all my
thoughts; not as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ--not as a
being of purer eyes than to behold iniquity--not as He whom I was
required to glorify in my body and in my spirit, being bought with a
price, to be no longer my own but his; no, my religion was a very
attractive sort of Deism, which recognized the Creator of all those
things wherein I delighted, and thought to render him great honor by
such recognition. Thomson's "Hymn on the Seasons" was my body of
divinity; and Pope's atrocious "Universal Prayer" would have become my
manual of devotion, had not my father denounced it as a most blasphemous
outrage upon revelation, and charged me never to repeat what he deeply
regretted that I had committed to memory. I hated profanity, and would
not have omitted the private repetition of a form of prayer, morning or
evening, on any account, nor absented myself from public worship. A
slighting expression applied to the Bible would kindle me into glowing
resentment, expressed with no less sincerity than earnestness, and as a
matter of duty I devoted some time every Sabbath-day to the perusal of
God's word, with which I had become more extensively acquainted by
reading it during sermon-time at church. I well know that even then, and
at a much earlier period too, conviction of my own sinfulness was
working very deeply, though not permanently, in my mind: it was not an
abiding impression, but a thing of fits and starts, overwhelming me
while it lasted, but soon shaken off by diverting my thoughts to
something else. These convictions were unquestionably the result of my
occasional readings in God's book: they always occurred during or
immediately after such perusal, or when some passage was suddenly
brought to my recollection.