He was a man who believed in the necessity of regeneration by the Holy Spirit in order to begin a genuinely Christian life. This is one of those great convictions which he never questioned, and which strengthened as he increased in age. When he united with the church in his nineteenth year, he thereby publicly declared that he was sufficiently sure that this inward change had passed upon him to warrant him in enrolling himself among the avowed followers of Christ. But of any sudden outward religious conversion he was not conscious, and made no profession. In the brief autobiographical sketch previously quoted he says: I had a praying father and mother, and had been faithfully taught from my youth. I cannot tell when my religious impressions began. They grew up with me, but were very much deepened by the faithful preachings of Rev. I. N. Hays, pastor of the church of Hunterstown, especially in a series of meetings held in the winter of 1852-3. As to his external moral conduct there was no place for a visible “conversion”; he had no vicious habits to abandon, no evil companions from whom to separate himself. It was on the inner life that the transformation was wrought, but just when or where he could not himself tell,—an experience which as to this feature has often been duplicated in the children of godly households. The impression which I formed of him while associated with him in college was that he lived uprightly and neglected no duty that he regarded as obligatory on him. I knew that he went so far beyond this as to be present at some of the religious associations of the students, such as the Brainard Society, and a little circle for prayer; and that he walked a couple of miles into the country on Sabbath morning to teach a Bible class in the Chartiers church. If I had been questioned closely I probably would have made a mistake, not unlike that into which in later years those who did not penetrate beneath the surface of his life may easily have fallen. I would have said that the chief lack in his piety was as to the amount of feeling that entered into it. I would have said that he was an honest, upright Christian; but that he needed to have the depths of his soul stirred by the forces of religion in order that he might become what he was capable of, for himself and for others. Possibly such an expression concerning him at that time of life might not have been wholly without warrant; but in later years it certainly would have been a gross misjudgment, and while I was associated with him in college and seminary it was far less justified than I imagined. On October 13, 1856, he began the Journal which, with interruptions, he continued for twenty years. In the very first entry he gives his reasons for keeping this record, one of which he thus states: