She owed much of her religious feeling to the influence of the Rev. John Clowes. “It was in the winter of 1788 that I met, at the house of the Misses Hutton (two excellent maiden ladies) at Tadcaster, the Rev. John Clowes, rector of St. John’s Church, in Manchester. The bond between these pious and primitive old ladies and Mr. Clowes was, I believe, their mutual admiration of the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. Although I could not participate in their enthusiasm for that visionary writer, I think it was from Mr. Clowes’s conversation and writings that I first became interested in the spiritual sense of true religion, or, in other words, felt its experimental truth; and I wish here to preserve the following transcript of the conversation which I made from memory after passing the evening with Mr. Clowes at Miss Hutton’s. Several ladies, some of the Methodist persuasion, were present. His views have always appeared to me to contain much of the true spirit of Christianity. Being asked his opinion of Mr. Law’s works, Mr. Clowes said, ‘I read them, madam, with great diligence and much affection, and I found that they tended to produce a pure, holy, and peaceable frame of mind, but I found likewise that they disqualified a man for the duty of his calling. I could not even go to perform my duty in the church without finding something to disturb me. This made me conjecture that all was not right in Mr. Law’s doctrine, and I conceive it to be this: that it is admirably suited for the contemplative but not for the active life of man, inasmuch as it does not bring the outward man into entire subjection to the inner man, for man has two lives, or two beings, in his very best state while on earth.’... When asked what he conceived to be the state of the blessed, he replied in a calm, but animated tone of voice, ‘I conceive the state of the blessed to be a total forgetfulness or absence of _self_, and to consist in beholding the good and happiness of others, so that every individual will enjoy the whole happiness of heaven.’... Every man is according to his own desire, for assuredly the Lord wills the good and happiness of all His creatures. If a man says he desires to be better, and that he is unhappy because his desire is not fulfilled, let not that man be impatient; he has begun to bear his cross, and if he bears it patiently, humbly waiting for a better state, he will certainly obtain his desire. The good he did, because he saw it was commanded, will soon be his delight; and to delight in good is the temper and disposition of angels.”