"It is exceedingly striking to observe how the contracted, rigid soul
seems to soften, and grow warm, and expand, and quiver with life. With
the new energy infused, it painfully struggles to work itself into
freedom from the wretched contortion in which it has been so long
fixed, as by the impressed spell of infernal magic."

This change in the moral and religious man, has been often observed;
and Mr. Foster, therefore, tells us nothing very new, however striking
it may be. But now for the secondary effect which is produced on the
intellect, and, indeed, on the whole character:

"It (the soul) has been seen filled with a painful and indignant
emotion at its own ignorance; actuated with a restless desire to be
informed; acquiring an unwonted applicableness of its faculties to
thought; attaining a perception combined of intelligence and moral
sensibility, to which numerous things are becoming discernible and
affecting, that were as non-existent before. We have known instances in
which the change--the intellectual change--has been so conspicuous,
within a brief space of time, that even an infidel observer must have
forfeited all claim to a man of sense, if he would not make the
acknowledgment--This that you call divine grace, whatever it may really
be, is the strangest awakener of faculties, after all."

I have made this quotation, chiefly to confirm the sentiment I have
advanced, that the love of the Bible and the religion of the Bible,
actuates the soul with "a restless desire to be informed," and
stimulates its faculties to thought, and fills it with pain and
indignation at its own ignorance. This is the state of mind and heart
which I would gladly encourage in the reader. It is the truest and best
foundation of all progress, not only in self-knowledge, but in every