hung down his
head in silent shame, wishing himself a little child again that he might
unlearn the wicked habit of which he thought it impossible to break
himself. Hopeless as the effort seemed to him, it proved effectual. He
did "leave off his swearing" to his own "great wonder," and found that he
"could speak better and with more pleasantness" than when he "put an oath
before and another behind, to give his words authority." Thus was one
step in his reformation taken, and never retraced; but, he adds
sorrowfully, "all this while I knew not Jesus Christ, neither did I leave
my sports and plays." We might be inclined to ask, why should he leave
them? But indifferent and innocent in themselves, an overstrained
spirituality had taught him to regard them as sinful. To indulge in them
wounded his morbidly sensitive conscience, and so they were sin to him.

The next step onward in this religious progress was the study of the
Bible, to which he was led by the conversation of a poor godly neighbour.
Naturally he first betook himself to the historical books, which, he
tells us, he read "with great pleasure;" but, like Baxter who, beginning
his Bible reading in the same course, writes, "I neither understood nor
relished much the doctrinal part," he frankly confesses, "Paul's Epistles
and such like Scriptures I could not away with." His Bible reading
helped forward the outward reformation he had begun. He set the keeping
the Ten Commandments before him as his "way to Heaven"; much comforted
"sometimes" when, as he thought, "he kept them pretty well," but humbled
in conscience when "now and then he broke one." "But then," he says, "I
should repent and say I was sorry for it, and promise God to do better
next time, and then get help again; for then I thought I pleased God as
well as any man in England." His progress was slow, for each step
involved a battle, but it was steadily onwards. He had a very hard
struggle in relinquishing his favourite amusements. But though he had
much yet to learn, his feet were set on the upward way, and he had no
mind to go back, great as the temptation often was. He had once
delighted in bell-ringing, but "his conscience beginning to be
tender"--morbid we should rather say--"he thought such practise to be
vain, and therefore forced himself to leave it." But "hankering after it
still," he continued to go while his old companions rang, and look on at
what he "durst not" join in, until the f