ind, and all works revealing the workings of the human
mind and the laws of human nature, seemed to me to bear important
relations to religion and the Bible; and the writings of the great
philosophers, lawyers, and historians, appeared to be almost as much in
my line as Baxter's Christian Directory, or Wesley's Notes on the New
Testament.

Tales of wars and intrigues, and of royal and aristocratic vices and
follies I hated. Yet I was interested in accounts of religious
controversies, and read with eagerness, though with pain and horror, the
tragic and soul-harrowing stories of the deadly conflicts between
Christian piety and anti-Christian intolerance. Above all I loved
well-written books on the beneficial influence of Christianity on the
temporal interests and the general happiness of mankind. I liked good
biographies, especially of celebrated students, great philosophers, and
remarkable Christian philanthropists. Of works of fiction I read very
few, and evermore still fewer as I got older, until at length I came to
view them generally as a great nuisance. There are few, I suppose, that
can say they read the whole, not only of Wesley's works, but of his
Christian Library, in fifty volumes; yet I went through the whole,
though one of the books was so profound, or else so silly, that I could
not find one sentence in it that I could properly understand. I read the
greater part of the books of my friends. I went through nearly the whole
library of a village about two miles distant from my native place. My
native place itself could not boast a library in those days. I read
scores, if not hundreds of books that taught me nothing but the
ignorance and self-conceit of the writers, and the various forms of
literary and religious insanity to which poor weak humanity is liable.

There was a large old Free Library at Newcastle-on-Tyne, left to the
city by a celebrated clergyman, which contained all the Fathers, all the
Greek and Roman Classics, all the more celebrated of the old Infidels,
all the old leading skeptical and lawless writers of Italy, and France,
and Holland, all the great old Church of England writers, and all the
leading writers of the Nonconformists, Dissenters, and Heretics of all
kinds. To this library I used to go, day after day, and stay from
morning to night, reading some of the great authors through, and
examining almost all of them sufficiently to enable me to see what there
was _in_ each, that I had not me