of self-discipline' during his
inner conflict. The struggle so absorbed his energies that his early
life was passed almost wholly free from the special trials to which that
period is liable. He speaks of his youth as in that respect 'almost
temptationless.'" This state of mind seemed to last about five years and
then he writes in a letter:

"I have felt myself for some months gradually passing into a new state
of mind and heart which I can hardly describe, but which I trust is the
last stage of mental progress, in which I hope I may much improve, but
out of which I trust I may never pass. I could hardly express the calm
mild frame of mind in which I have lived; company and society I have
almost entirely shunned, or have moved through it as a stranger; hardly
a disturbing thought, hardly a grating sensation has crossed my being,
of which a great feeling of love seems to have been the principle.
Whither, I am inclined to ask myself, does all this tend? Whence does it
proceed? I think I could make an interesting history of my mind's
religious progress, if I may use a word shockingly perverted by modern
fanatics, from the hard dry struggles I used to have when first I
commenced to study on my own account, to the settling down into a state
of stern conviction, and so after some years to the nobler and more
soothing evidences furnished by the grand harmonies and beautiful
features of religion, whether considered in contact with lower objects
or viewed in her own crystal mirror. I find it curious, too, and
interesting to trace the workings of those varied feelings upon my
relations to the outward world. I remember how for years I lost all
relish for the glorious ceremonies of the Church. I heeded not its
venerable monuments and sacred records scattered over the city; or I
studied them all with the dry eye of an antiquarian, looking in them for
proofs, not for sensations, being ever actively alive to the collection
of evidences and demonstrations of religious truth. But now that the
time of my probation as I hope it was, is past, I feel as though the
freshness of childhood's thoughts had once more returned to me, my
heart expands with renewed delight and delicious feelings every time I
see the holy objects and practices around me, and I might almost say
that I am leading a life of spiritual epicureanism, opening all my
senses to a rich draught of religious sensations."

From these glimpses it would appear that Wiseman was a mu