What was to be done? To reform myself, certainly, and become obedient to the whole law. Accordingly I went to work, transcribed all the commands that I felt myself most in the habit of neglecting, and pinned up a dozen or two texts around my room. It required no small effort to enter this apartment and walk round it, reading my mementos. That active schoolmaster, the law, had got me fairly under his rod, and dreadful were the writhings of the convicted culprit, I soon, however, took down my texts, fearing lest some one else might see them, and not knowing they were for myself, be exasperated. I then made a little hook, wrote down a list of offences, and commenced making a dot over against each, whenever I detected myself in the commission of one. I had become very watchful over my thoughts, and was honest in recording all evil; so my book became a mass of black dots; and the reflection that occurred to me of omissions being sins too, completed the panic of my mind. I flung away my book into the fire, and myself into an abyss of gloomy despair. How long this miserable state of mind lasted, I do not exactly remember; I think about two weeks. I could not pray. I dared not read the Bible, it bore so very hard upon me. Outwardly, I was calm and even cheerful, but within reigned the very blackness of darkness. Death, with which I had so often sported, appeared in my eyes so terrible, that the slightest feeling of illness filled my soul with dismay. I saw no way of escape: I had God's perfect law before my eyes, and a full conviction of my own past sinfulness and present helplessness, leaving me wholly without hope. Hitherto I had never known a day's illness for years; one of God's rich mercies to me consisted in uninterrupted health, and a wonderful freedom from all nervous affections. I knew almost as little of the sensation of a headache as I did of that of tight-lacing; and now a violent cold, with sore throat, aggravated into fever by the state of my mind, completely prostrated me. I laid myself down on the sofa one morning and waited to see how my earthly miseries would terminate; too well knowing what must follow the close of a sinner's life.