"My recollections of the five or six first years of my life are very vague,--more so by far than in the case of other persons; and whether I had any notions of religion before my six-year-old birthday, I cannot tell. But it was on that day, if I am not mistaken, that I was taken aside, as for a serious conversation, by my sister's governess, who was a Swiss lady, under whose care I passed the years between leaving the nursery and being sent to school, and instructed by her, for the first time, concerning the existence of God and some other great truths of religion. It seems strange now that I should have lived so long without acquiring any ideas on the subject: my memory may deceive me, but I have a most clear recollection of the very room at Althorp where I sat with her while she declared to me, as a new piece of instruction, for which till then I had not been judged old enough, that there was an Almighty Being, dwelling in heaven, who had created me and all things, and whom I was bound to fear. Till then, I believe, I had not the least apprehension of the existence of anything beyond the sensible world around me. This declaration, made to me as it was with tender seriousness, was, I believe, accompanied with gracious expressions, which have never been, in all my errors and wanderings, obliterated. To what but the grace of God can I ascribe it, that I firmly believed from the first moment this truth, of which I was not capable of understanding a proof, and that I never since have entertained a doubt of it, nor been led, like so many more, to universal scepticism; that my faith in the truth of God should have been preserved while for so long a time I lived, as I afterwards did, wholly without its influence? {4}