or sin past.

But it is none of my talent to preach; these men were too wicked, even
for me. There was something horrid and absurd in their way of sinning,
for it was all a force even upon themselves; they did not only act
against conscience, but against nature; they put a rape upon their
temper to drown the reflections, which their circumstances continually
gave them; and nothing was more easy than to see how sighs would
interrupt their songs, and paleness and anguish sit upon their brows,
in spite of the forced smiles they put on; nay, sometimes it would
break out at their very mouths when they had parted with their money
for a lewd treat or a wicked embrace. I have heard them, turning
about, fetch a deep sigh, and cry, 'What a dog am I! Well, Betty, my
dear, I'll drink thy health, though'; meaning the honest wife, that
perhaps had not a half-crown for herself and three or four children.
The next morning they are at their penitentials again; and perhaps the
poor weeping wife comes over to him, either brings him some account of
what his creditors are doing, and how she and the children are turned
out of doors, or some other dreadful news; and this adds to his
self-reproaches; but when he has thought and pored on it till he is
almost mad, having no principles to support him, nothing within him or
above him to comfort him, but finding it all darkness on every side, he
flies to the same relief again, viz. to drink it away, debauch it away,
and falling into company of men in just the same condition with
himself, he repeats the crime, and thus he goes every day one step
onward of his way to destruction.

I was not wicked enough for such fellows as these yet. On the
contrary, I began to consider here very seriously what I had to do; how
things stood with me, and what course I ought to take. I knew I had no
friends, no, not one friend or relation in the world; and that little I
had left apparently wasted, which when it was gone, I saw nothing but
misery and starving was before me. Upon these considerations, I say,
and filled with horror at the place I was in, and the dreadful objects
which I had always before me, I resolved to be gone.

I had made an acquaintance with a very sober, good sort of a woman, who
was a widow too, like me, but in better circumstances. Her husband had
been a captain of a merchant ship, and having had the misfortune to be
cast away coming home on a voyage from the West Indies, which would
ha