The time had come for the brilliant student to decide on his profession. The same ambition which had stimulated him to his college successes, had led him to resolve on studying the law, as the most lucrative. 'I could not consent to be poor for Christ's sake,' was his own language at a later period. But Christ himself had changed all that, as effectually as when the young lawyer Saul was stricken down after the martyr testimony of Stephen. The year 1801 was to him one of comparative solitude, both in Cornwall and at the University, where he cultivated the fruitful grace of meditation, learning to know and to master himself, as he came to know more and more intimately, and to submit himself to, Christ Jesus. He was admitted to the inner circle of Simeon's friends, and to unreserved intercourse with men of his own age who had come to Christ before him. Especially was he drawn to John Sargent, one year his senior, who was about to leave the university for the Temple, that he might by the study of law prepare himself to administer worthily the family estate to which he was to succeed. His son-in-law, the late Bishop S. Wilberforce, has left us a charming picture[5] of this saintly man, of whom Martyn wrote, even at college, 'Sargent seems to be outstripping us all.' While Simeon ever, by his counsels and his example, impressed on the choice youth whom he gathered around him the attractiveness of the Christian ministry,[6] Sargent bewailed that only a painful sense of duty to others kept him from it, and in a few years he succeeded in entering its consecrated ranks. Among such friends, and with his own heart growing in the experience of the power of the Holy Spirit, Henry Martyn was constrained, notwithstanding his new humbleness of mind, to hear and obey the divine call. He who had received such mercy must tell it abroad; he who had known such love must bring others to share the sweetness. Hence he writes to his sister: