vation, and delight with which
he heard them, were very apparent, and the pleasure which the observation
of it gave me, continues to this moment.

Let me be permitted to digress so far as to add, that this is indeed the
great support of a Christian minister under the many discouragements
and disappointments which he meets with in his attempts to fix upon the
profligate or the thoughtless part of mankind a deep sense of religious
truth; that there is another important part of his work in which he may
hope to be more generally successful; as, by plain, artless, but serious
discourses, the great principles of Christian duty and hope may be
nourished and invigorated in good men, their graces watered as at
the root, and their souls animated, both to persevere and improve in
holiness. When we are effectually performing such benevolent offices, so
well suiting our immortal natures, to persons whose hearts are cemented
with ours in the hands of the most endearing and sacred friendship, it is
too little to say that it overpays the fatigue of our Labours; it even
swallows up all sense of it in the most rational and sublime pleasure.

An incident occurred that evening, which, at least for the oddness of
it, may deserve a place in these memoirs. I had then with me one Thomas
Porter, a poor but very honest and religious man, (now living at Hatfield
Broad-Oak in Essex,) who is quite unacquainted with letters, so as not to
be able to distinguish one from another, yet is master of the contents
of the Bible in so extraordinary a degree, that he has not only fixed an
immense number of texts in his memory, but, merely by hearing them quoted
in sermons, has registered there the chapter and verse in which these
passages are to be found. This is attended with a marvellous facility in
directing readers to turn to them, and a most unaccountable talent of
fixing on such as suit almost every imaginable variety of circumstances
in common life. There are in this case two considerations that make it
the more wonderful; the one, that he is a person of very low genius,
having, besides a stammering which makes his speech almost unintelligible
to strangers, so wild and awkward a manner of behaviour, that he is
frequently taken for an idiot, and seems in many things to be indeed
so;--the other, that he grew up to manhood in a very licentious course of
living, and an entire ignorance of divine things, so that all these exact
impressions on his memory hav