Under conviction, no man who appeared upon other occasions to have so much courage, ever showed so little. He had constantly declined ever coming to chapel, under pretence of lameness and indisposition; when clergymen took the pains to visit him and instruct him in those duties which it became a dying man to practice, though he heard them without interruption, yet he heard them coldly. Instead of desiring to be instructed on that head, he was continually suggesting scruples and doubts about a future state, asking impertinent questions as to the state of souls departed, and putting frequent cases of the reasonableness and lawfulness of suicide, where an ignominious death was inevitable, and the thing was perpetrated only to avoid shame. He was more especially swayed to such notions he pretended, from the examples of the famous heroes of antiquity, who to avoid dishonourable treatment, had given themselves a speedy death. As such discourses were what took up most of the time between his sentence and death, so that occasioned some very useful lectures upon this head from the charitable divines who visited him; but though they would have been of great use in all such cases for the future, yet being pronounced by word of mouth only, they are now totally lost. One letter indeed was written to him by a learned person on this head, of which a copy has been preserved, and it is with great pleasure that I give it to my readers, it runs thus: A letter from the Reverend Dr. ---- to Mr. Wild in Newgate. I am very sorry that after a life so spent as yours is notoriously known to have been, you should yet, instead of repenting of your former offences, continue to swell their number even with greater. I pray God that it be not the greatest of all sins, affecting doubts as to a future state, and whether you shall ever be brought to answer for your actions in this life, before a tribunal in that which is to come. The heathens, it must be owned, could have no certainty as to the immortality of the soul, because they had no immediate revelation; for though the reasons which incline us to the belief of those two points of future existence and future tribulation be as strong as any of the motives are to other points in natural religion, yet as none return from that land of darkness, or escape from the shadow of death to bring news of what passeth in those regions whither all men go, so without a direct revelation from the Almighty no positive knowledge could be had of life in the world to come, which is therefore properly said to be derived to us through Christ Jesus, who in plain terms, and with that authority which confounded his enemies, the Scribes and Pharisees, taught the doctrine of a final judgment, and by affording us the means of grace, raised in us at the same time the hopes of glory.