“April 10th. This day I am thirty-four. It was the night I heard of my mother’s death, February 1798, that I first remember my resolutions made to be religious. Till the summer of 1801, I went on sinning and repenting, as I thought; but quite ignorant of the author and finisher of salvation. In the latter end of that year, my views of scripture truth became more distinct; and, since then, I have gone on my way, ‘looking unto Jesus;’ but every year has brought me, it should seem, only experience of my own depravity. True, I have experience of ‘the Lord’s mercy,’ too, in that I am ‘not consumed;’ and the fulness, freeness, and efficacy of the ‘fountain opened’ to purify my guilty soul is so fully known to my soul, and my own hope in that ‘blood shed for the remission of sins,’ so stayed, that my own guilt does not dismay me, as it otherwise might well do: at the same time, one propensity after another to evil starts up so unavoidably, that doubtless, my soul is ‘full of wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores:’ to Thee, therefore, O divine Physician, do I turn my fainting eyes. I come to Thee for healing, that it would please Thee to cast the salt of Thy grace into this impure fountain, that the streams may be purified from the noxious qualities, which now render unfruitful the whole field of the soul. O Lord, I pray that the overflowings of sin may be restrained; teach me to watch and pray; quicken me to diligence in this work, and service; enable me to ‘give attendance to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine;’ to ‘give myself wholly to them, that my profiting may appear’ in the edification of thy people, through the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ!”