The _religious experience_ of the writer, I consider as especially instructive.--It sets before us, I believe, in honest simplicity, the workings of a sensible and thoughtful mind, and of a conscience, which had never entirely lost its early impressions;--the convictions, and distresses, and reasonings,--the self-righteous and self confident resolutions, and the necessary failures and inconsistencies, of an awakened but unrenewed state;--the natural reluctance of man to part with _self_, to plead guilty, and to depend on grace; and yet the entire inefficacy of every thing but this grace either to impart satisfactory and steadfast peace to the conscience, or to produce in the heart a principle of vigorous and cheerful, consistent and persevering obedience. Of this grace, although, like every other good thing, it has been too often perverted and abused by the self-deceiver and the hypocrite, the native tendency is, to "teach" all who receive it, to "deny ungodliness, and worldly desires, and to live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world,"--I feel the delicacy of saying any thing in praise of one, whose living eye the commendation is to meet, and who is still, like all others, the subject of remaining corruption, and in danger of injury from its evil propensities; yet, as it is not _himself_ I commend, but the _grace_ that has made him what he is, and to which he owns himself an entire and humble debtor, I feel at liberty to say, that the subject of the following Narrative, since he was led to embrace the doctrine of the cross, has been enabled,--amidst imperfections and failures no doubt, of which he himself has been much more sensible than others have been observant,--to "walk in newness of life," and to show, that "the gospel of the grace of God" has been "the power of God unto salvation," when every thing else had failed, and had led only to despair. With the exception of occasional corrections in the use of words and in the structure of sentences, unavoidable in revising for the press the manuscript of one unaccustomed to composition, the _style_ is the writer's own; the work, throughout, having been printed from his autograph, without transcription:--and I pledge my word to the reader, that a single additional _sentiment_ has not been introduced. I commend the little volume to the candour of the reader, and to the blessing of God;--not without a pleasing hope, that while it may benefit, in a temporal view, the family of one, whose wound received in the service of his country, confined him again, even very recently, from his daily occupation, for nearly four months; it may, at the same time, produce higher and more valuable effects, in the instruction, admonition, and salvation, of those who peruse it. RALPH WARDLAW. _GLASGOW, June 14th, 1819._ ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SECOND EDITION.