s.
He began to drag his religious anchor, and at length, having read
Shaftesbury, left his theological moorings altogether, and drifted into
a wide sea of ungodliness, blasphemy, and recklessness of living. Such
at least is the picture drawn by the sinner saved of his own earlier
years. While still but a stripling he fell desperately in love with a
girl of thirteen; his affection for her was as constant as it was
romantic; through all his wanderings and sufferings he never ceased to
think of her, and after seven years she became his wife. His father
frowned on the engagement, and he became estranged from home. He was
impressed; narrowly escaped shipwreck, deserted, and was arrested and
flogged as a deserter. Released from the navy, he was taken into the
service of a slave-dealer on the coast of Africa, at whose hands, and
those of the man's negro mistress, he endured every sort of
ill-treatment and contumely, being so starved that he was fain
sometimes to devour raw roots to stay his hunger. His constitution
must have been of iron to carry him through all that he endured. In
the meantime his indomitable mind was engaged in attempts at
self-culture; he studied a Euclid which he had brought with him,
drawing his diagrams on the sand, and he afterwards managed to teach
himself Latin by means of a Horace and a Latin Bible, aided by some
slight vestiges of the education which he had received at a grammar
school. His conversion was brought about by the continued influences
of Thomas a Kempis, of a very narrow escape, after terrible sufferings,
from shipwreck, of the impression made by the sights of the mighty deep
on a soul which, in its weather-beaten casing, had retained its native
sensibility, and, we may safely add, of the disregarded but not
forgotten teachings of his pious mother. Providence was now kind to
him; he became captain of a slave ship, and made several voyages on the
business of the trade. That it was a wicked trade he seems to have had
no idea; he says he never knew sweeter or more frequent hours of divine
communion than on his two last voyages to Guinea. Afterwards it
occurred to him that though his employment was genteel and profitable,
it made him a sort of gaoler, unpleasantly conversant with both chains
and shackles; and he besought Providence to fix him in a more humane
calling,

In answer to his prayer came a fit of apoplexy, which made it dangerous
for him to go to sea again. He obtained