Until my twenty-seventh year I resided in the small cathedral town of C----r in which I was born. My parents--especially my mother--were of a serious cast. She had been educated as a Quaker, but following her own notions as to religion, she in the latter part of her life became attached to the tenets of that sect known by the name of Moravians, and last of all to those which, when held in connection with the ritual of the Church of England, are termed "Evangelical;" or, in dissent from it, "Methodistical." She was warm and fanciful in her devotional practice; for which the belief as to the palpable and plenary influence of the Holy Spirit upon the human mind, in which she was bred, may help to account. Of these aspirations I, an ardent and sensitive boy, soon learned to partake. My mind was never naturally _prone_ to vice; and my imagination, though forward, was pure. I was brought up by my excellent parents in the practice of virtue; and I loved it. With an outward conduct thus guaranteeing inward persuasions--with professions borne out by an unquestioned and pure, if not altogether unostentatious piety of behaviour, what wonder that I soon became a distinguished votary of the peculiar principles to which I had attached myself. It is difficult for a young man to know himself looked up to--be the cause what it may--without his feelings and his conduct being affected by such homage. Nature had endowed me, if not with eloquence, at least with considerable fluency of speech; and as my natural diffidence--which at first was great--wore away, whether by extempore prayer or seasonable exhortation, the effects I produced exceeded those, the fruits of zeal, of those about me. I became admired as one more than usually gifted, and was gradually exalted into a leader. The occasional tendency to gloom and nervous irritability to which my temperament inclined me, was yet only marked enough to throw no unbecoming seriousness and gravity into the features of so young an apostle. It was strange to see persons of all ages and both sexes admiring at the innate seriousness of so early a preacher, and owning the sometimes really fervid earnestness of my appeals, my warnings, or my denunciations. I began more and more to feel myself in a station above that of my fellows, and that I had now a character to sustain before the eyes of men. Young as I was, could it well have been otherwise? Let me, however, speak the truth. Spiritual pride at last crept upon me. Devotion by insensible degrees became tainted with self, and the image of God was, I fear, sometimes forgotten for that of His frail and unworthy creature. True it was, I still, without slackening, spoke comfort to the ear of suffering or repentant sin--I still exhorted the weak and strengthened the strong. I still warned the besotted in corruption that the fruits of vice, blossom as she will, are but like those of the shores of the Dead Sea, seeming gay, but only emptiness and bitter ashes.