success he labored in this place. At the beginning of his labors here, he found himself the object of much jealousy and hatred on the part of the ignorant rabble of the town. Some instances of their malice he records; the same idle ridicule, the same perverse misrepresentations, the same lying reports, with which drunkards. and scorners are wont to assail serious and faithful ministers in these days, were employed against him. He lived, however, to see the party of the tippling and profane, very much diminished under his influence.

In connection with the commencement of his labors at Kidderminister, he adverts again to those bodily infirmities under which he had all along been suffering. These, he says, "were so great as made me live and preach in some continual expectation of death, supposing still that I had not long to live; and this I found through all my life to be an invaluable mercy to me: For,

"1. It greatly weakened temptations.

"2. It kept me in a great contempt of the world.

"3. It taught me highly to esteem of time; so that if any of it passsed away in idleness or unprofitableness, it was so long a pain and burden to my mind. So that I must say to the praise of my most wise conductor, that time hath still seemed to me much more precious than gold or any earthly gain, and its minutes have not been despised, nor have I been much tempted to any of the sins which usually go by the name of pastime, since I understood my work.

"4. It made me study and preach things necessary, and a little stirred up my sluggish heart, to speak to sinners with some compassion, as a dying man to dying men.

"These, with the rest which I mentioned before when I spake of my infirmities, were the blessings which God afforded me by affliction. I humbly bless his gracious providence, who gave me his treasure in an earthen vessel, and trained me up in the school of affliction, and taught me the cross of Christ so soon."*

Amid these distresses of the body, the blessed effects of which, he acknowledged in his old age so gratefully, his mind was not

*Narrative, Part I. p. 21:

always free from even severe and painful conflicts. The trials of such a believer, and the processes by which his faith advanced toward perfection, are always instructive. The following record will not be read without interest. It was by such inward struggles, probably, that he acquired those clear and discriminating views of christian character, as well as christian truth, by which his writings are distinguished.

"At one time above all the rest, being under a new and unusual distemper, which put me upon the present expectations of my change, and going for comfort to the promises as I was used, the tempter strongly assaulted my faith, and would have drawn me towards infidelity itself. Till I was ready to enter into the ministry, all my troubles had been raised, by the hardness of my heart, and the doubtings of my own sincerity; but now all these began to vanish, and never much returned to this day; and instead of these, I was now assaulted by more pernicious temptations; especially to question the truth of the sacred scriptures, and also the life to come and immortality of the soul. And these temptations assaulted me not as they do the melancholy, with horrid vexing importunity; but by pretence of sober reason, they would have drawn me to a settled doubting of christianity.

"And here I found my own miscarriage and the great mercy of God. My miscarriage, in that I had so long neglected the well settling of my foundations, while I had bestowed so much time in the superstructures and the applicatory part. For having taken it for an intolerable evil, once to question the truth of the scriptures and the life to come, I had either taken it for a certainty upon trust, or taken up with common reasons of it, which I had never well considered, digested, or made mine own. Insomuch as when this temptation came, it seemed at first to answer and enervate all the former reasons of my feeble faith, which made me to take the scriptures for the word of God; and it set before me such mountains of difficulty in the incarnation, the person of Christ, his undertaking and performance, with the scripture chronology, histories and style, etc. which had stalled and overwhelmed me, if God had not been my strength. And here I saw much of the mercy of God, that he let not out these terrible temptations upon me,

while I was weak and in the infancy of my faith; for then I had never been able to withstand them. But faith is like a tree, whose top is small while the root is young and shallow and therefore, as then it hath but small rooting, so is it not liable to the shaking winds and tempests, as the big and high-grown trees are: but as the top groweth higher, so the root at once grows greater, and deeper fixed, to cause it to endure its greater assault.

"Though formerly I was wont when any such temptation came, to cast it aside, as fitter to be abhorred than considered of, yet now this would not give me satisfaction; but I was fain to dig to the very foundations, and seriously to examine the reasons of christianity, and to give a hearing to all that could be said against it, that so my faith might be indeed my own. And at last I found that, Nil tam certum quam quod ex dubio certum; nothing is so firmly belie ved as that which hath been sometime doubted of.

"In the storm of this temptation, I questioned a while whether I were indeed a christian or an infidel, and whether faith could consist with such doubts as I was conscious of: for I had read in many papists and protestants, that faith had certainty and was more than an opinion; and that if a man should live a godly life, from the bare apprehensions of the probability of the truth of scripture, and the life to come, it would not save him, as being no true godliness or fiath. But my judgment closed with the reason of Dr. Jackson's determination of this case, which supported me much, that as in the very assenting act of faith there may be such weakness, as may make us cry, "Lord increase our faith; we believe, Lord, help our unbelief;" so when faith and unbelief are in their conflict, it is the effects which must show us which of them is victorious. And that he that hath so much faith, as will cause him to deny himself, take up his cross, and forsake all the profits, honors, and pleasures of this world, for the sake of Christ, the love of God, and the hope of glory, hath a saving faith, how weak soever; for God cannot condemn the soul that truly loveth and seeketh him and those that Christ bringeth to persevere in the love of God, he bringeth to salvation. And there were diverse things, that in this assault proved great assistance to my faith.

"1. That the being and attributes of God were so clear to me,

that he was to my intellect what the sun is to my eye, by which 1 see itself and all things. And he seemed mad to me, who questioned whether there were a God." "All the suppositions of the atheists, have ever since been so visibly foolish and shameful to my apprehension, that I scarce find a capacity in myself of doubting of them; and whenever the tempter hath joined any thing of these with the rest of his temptations, the rest have been the easier overcome, because of the overwhelming evidences of a Deity which are always before the eyes of my soul.

"2. And it helped me much to discover that this God must needs be related to us as our owner, our governor, and our benefactor, in that he is related to us as our creator; and that therefore we are related to him as his own, his subjects, and his benificiaries; which as they all proceed by undeniable resultancy from our creation and nature, so thence do our duties arise which belong to us in those relations, by as undeniable resultancy; and that no show of reason can be brought by any infidel in the world to excuse the rational creature from loving his Maker, with all his heart and soul and might, and devoting himself and all his faculties to him from whom he did receive them, and making him his ultimate end who is his first efficient cause. So that godliness is a duty so undeniably required in the law of nature, and so discernible by reason itself, that nothing but unreasonableness can contradict it.

"3. And then it seemed utterly improbable to me that this God should see us to be losers by our love and duty to him, and that our duty should be made our snare, or make us the more miserable by how much the more faithfully we perform it. And I saw that the very possibility of a life to come would make it the duty of a reasonable creature to seek it though with the loss of all below.

"4. And I saw by undeniable experience, a strange universal enmity between the heavenly and the earthly mind, the godly and the wicked." "And I saw that the wicked and haters of godliness are so commonly the greatest and most powerful and numerous, as well as cruel, that ordinarily there is no living according to the precepts of nature and undeniable reason, without being made the derision and contempt of men."

"5. And then I saw that there is no other religion in the world,

which can stand in competition with christianity. Heathenism and Mohametanism are kept up by tyranny, and blush to stand at the bar of reason; and Judaism is but christianity in the egg or bud; and mere Deism, which is the most plausible competitor, is so turned out of almost the whole world, as if nature made its own confession, that without a Mediator it cannot come to God.

"6. And I perceived that all other religions leave the people in their worldly, sensual, and ungodly state." "And the nations where christianity is not, are drowned in ignorance and earthly mindedness, so as to be the shame of nature.

"7. And I saw that Christ did bring up all his serious and sincere disciples to real holiness and to heavenly mindedness, and made them new creatures, and set their hearts and designs and hopes on another life, and brought their senses into subjection to their reason, and taught them to resign themselves to God, and to love him above all the world. And it is not like that God will make use of a deceiver for this real visible recovery and reformation of the nature of man; or that any thing but his own zeal can imprint his image.

"8. And here I saw an admirable suitableness in the office and design of Christ, to the ends of God, and the felicity of man; and how excellently these supernatural revelations do fall in, and take their place in subserviency to natural verities; and how wonderfully faith is fitted to bring men to the love of God, when it is nothing else but the beholding of his amiable attractive love and goodness in the face of Christ, and the promises of heaven, as in a glass, till we see his glory.

"9. And I had felt much of the power of his word and spirit on myself, doing that which reason now telleth me must be done. And shall I question my physician when he hath done so much of the cure, and recovered my depraved soul to God?

"10. And as I saw these assistances to my faith, so I perceived that whatever the tempter had to say against it, was grounded on the advantages which he took from my ignorance, and my distance from the times and places of the matters of the sacred history, and such like things which every novice meeteth with in almost all other sciences at the first, and which wise, well-studied men can see through. VOL. I.

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