The persecutions to which the Nonconformists through this period were exposed of course affected society in Southampton; the avenues to prosperity and peace seemed to lie only in conformity to the Church of England. It was then that, in consequence of his great and promising attainments, his diligence and high character, an offer was made to Watts by Dr. John Speed, a physician of the town, on the behalf of several others, to send him to one of the universities, and very handsomely defray all his expenses there. He did not hesitate for a second, but respectfully and firmly replied that he was determined to take up his lot amongst the Dissenters. Two of his early friends, in every way incomparably his inferiors, conformed, and attained to archiepiscopal dignities. Yet, in spite of all that he afterwards wrote on the relation of the civil magistrate to religion, there would seem to have been little in his faith, feeling, or practice which might not easily have found a home in the Establishment but for the persecuting spirit of the time. It was the same year that in his slight, curious autobiographical memoranda,[4] he mentions concisely how he “fell under considerable convictions of sin;” in the year following, his entry runs on, “and was led to trust in Christ, I hope.” In the same year, 1689, he mentions that he had a great and dangerous sickness; and all these events of his life, which look so brief and cold to us as we put them down on paper, were great and crucial events to him, settling the foundations of his character, probably leading him away from the pursuits of scholarship as a mere charm and recreation of cultivated taste, to regard it as the important means by which an entrance might be obtained to everlasting truths. These events would add to those motives which had determined him to renounce the idea of university training, and to seek an entrance into the ministry through the humbler portal of a Dissenting academy. [Illustration] CHAPTER II. In the Academy at Stoke Newington.