o
prevent her from ever appearing under the character of an unbeliever or a
sceptic.

This is only one specimen among many of the battles he was almost daily
called out to fight in the cause of religion and virtue; with relation to
which I find him expressing himself thus in a letter to Mrs. Gardiner,
his good mother, dated from Paris the 25th of January following, that
is 1719-20, in answer to one in which she had warned him to expect such
trials: "I have (says he) already met with them, and am obliged to fight,
and to dispute every inch of ground. But all thanks and praise to the
great Captain of my salvation. He fights for me, and then it is no wonder
that I come off more than conqueror:" by which last expression I suppose
he meant to insinuate that he was strengthened and established, rather
than overborne, by this opposition. Yet it was not immediately that he
gained such fortitude. He has often told me how much he felt in those
days of the emphasis of those well-chosen words of the apostle, in which
he ranks the trial of cruel mockings, with scourgings, and bonds, and
imprisonments. The continual railleries with which he was received, in
almost all companies where he had been most familiar before, did often
distress him beyond measure; so that he several times declared he would
much rather have marched up to a battery of the enemy's cannon, than have
been obliged, so continually as he was, to face such artillery as this.
But, like a brave soldier in the first action wherein he is engaged, he
continued resolute, though shuddering at the terror of the assault; and
quickly overcame those impressions which it is not perhaps in nature
wholly to avoid; and therefore I find him, in the letter above referred
to, which was written about half a year after his conversion, "quite
ashamed to think of the uneasiness which these things once gave him." In
a word, he went on, as every resolute Christian by divine grace may do,
till he turned ridicule and opposition into respect and veneration.

But this sensible triumph over these difficulties was not till his
Christian experience had been abundantly advanced by the blessing of God
on the sermons he heard, (particularly in the Swiss chapel,) and on the
many hours which he spent in devout retirement, pouring out his whole
soul before God in prayer. He began, within about two months after his
first memorable change, to perceive some secret dawnings of more cheerful
hope, that vile